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We're going to spend some time talking
about issues around global nutrition.
Some of the vocabulary in this chapter
might be familiar to you.
But I'm looking for you to have some precise definitions.
One of the ones that might be a little bit
twist on what we've learned is hunger.
So we learned that hunger is this physical need for food.
And that's very, very true.
There's also a secondary definition.
So when we talk about hunger on a social or a global scale,
we're talking about people who don't have enough food to eat.
And the scope of this problem is enormous worldwide.
We see that thousands of people are starving every single day.
And this is about one person every two seconds.
And when we're talking about children, it's about one
every five seconds or somewhere in there.
And in these countries where children
are facing issues of hunger, and their families as well,
they're living in countries where
there's plenty of being produced.
So it's not about how much we're growing or harvesting
or producing, it's other issues that
contribute to issues of hunger.
So these factors might include transportation, political will,
issues of access, money.
It goes on and on and on.
So we're going to unpack that a little bit
and look at some of these problems.
So another definition that could be really helpful for you
is this idea of undernutrition.
And when people are undernourished
they're going to have physical manifestations of that
as well as emotional, social, cognitive issues.
So it can be harder for them to fight off an infection,
they're going to be more susceptible,
it's much harder to learn, all of these things
that come from not getting enough energy.
And the foods that these children facing hunger
tend to consume are highly refined grains,
things like white bread and fat sources,
crackers, things like this, are readily available.
It can even be things like white rice, corn, millet,
things like this.
Other kinds of foods, naturally available whole foods,
tend to be more expensive in a lot of these locations we're
talking about.
And this is true in the world.
One of the things that Michael Pollan, who
wrote the Omnivore's Dilemma, talks about
is that if you want to eat well in our world,
you either have to be very, very poor, because you're
going to be eating more fruits and vegetables generally
if your poor than meats and things like this,
or you have to be very wealthy, in the case
of Western societies.
So I believe that to some extent.
I think that we do need to have greater access to some
of these foods.
Because we understand the consequences
when children don't have enough.
And this is true of adults as well.
So when they're facing hunger they're
less likely to be productive, they're
more likely to face disease risk,
and overall quality of life dramatically suffers.
Hunger is not always easy to recognize,
and this is important.
If we look at pictures of starving children,
yes, we can recognize that.
But in the US, it's a little bit more closeted.
So when you go to the supermarket
and you look around at all of the people,
you may not know who's facing food insecurity or hunger.
And we know that in Massachusetts it's about one
in five people say that they're facing insecurity
or uncertainty around food access every month.
So that's a pretty daunting statistic.
I've used this word food insecurity,
and here I'm talking about not knowing
where you're going to get your next meal.
So it may be that you have enough for dinner,
but you're not sure what's going to happen tomorrow.
Or that you're purposely cutting down on the amount
that you're eating because you know that there's
going to be lean times ahead.
So there are lots and lots of children, 13 million US
children.
And this figure is a little bit outdated.
With the recession, we know that this number has gone up.
And already about one in four children
lives in a home where there's poverty.
So food insecurity, just to bring you
kind of the textbook definition, so it's
a condition of limited or uncertain access
to food of sufficient quality or quantity.
So again, I want you key in on a couple of words here quality,
quantity, and then also to sustain a healthy, active life.
So it's not good enough that we're
feeding our kids highly refined grain products.
They need to have fruits and vegetables.
And they need to have lean meats and all
of these other kinds of things.
Another word that I want you to know
is this idea of food poverty.
So this is where there's food in an area,
but for some reason people cannot access it,
so they're suffering from hunger.
This happens for all different kinds of reasons.
So maybe someone is abusing alcohol or other kinds of drugs
or facing addiction.
And we see a lot of malnutrition in that population.
Also physical or mental illness.
So if someone is home bound because of a disability,
they're not able to actually go out to the supermarket.
That's also true if there's not enough transportation.
If you look at the case of Vermont,
it's actually considered the most rural state
in the US, which means that more residents in Vermont
are living outside of major city centers
than in any other state.
We think about Montana or Wyoming as being rural,
but a lot of those people are clustered
around population centers.
So transportation could be a significant issue.
Depression other kinds of mental illness
issues, and then lack of awareness around government
programs or even acceptance of these government programs.
Sometimes people will say well, I
don't want to get SNAP or WIC or transitional assistance
or any of these programs, because I
don't want to be taking.
Well, there are in place to protect people, especially
young children in vulnerable populations.
So we want to encourage people to use
these programs if they need them.
There are lots of reasons why hunger occurs
or food insecurity occurs.
We talked about a few in the US, but I also
want to just highlight a few on the global scale.
So population growth is a significant problem.
The more children that are born in a family, the fewer
resources there are for each child.
And we look at the rate of fertility and population
growth, and it really in some places
is outstripping resources.
So it's a little bit controversial here.
We get into issues around family planning and fertility control.
And when you look at populations, for instance,
in India or parts of Africa, I truly
believe that women do not want to have 10 children to have
only two survive to adulthood.
There are many, many reasons why women
have lots of children and families are large.
It can be economic power, it can be tradition,
it can be the fact that she doesn't have access
to family planning, it can be issues of women's empowerment.
So I really invite you to think about some
of these issues in a very nonjudgmental way.
Because sometimes students will say to me, well, in the US,
we don't want people to have a child
if they can't care for them.
Well, that's true everywhere.
But there are some kinds of societal barriers
that exist in certain populations which we really
don't fully appreciate how they're
going to impact her ability to control fertility.
We also know that poverty causes hunger.
And this should make a lot of sense.
This is common sense, right?
If people don't have money, they're
going to be less able to buy nutritious food.
But we often forget that this is cyclical.
So that if people are suffering from poverty
can't afford good nutritious food,
it actually furthers their poverty in a lot of ways,
because they can't work.
Because if you're not well nourished,
you can't go out and work in the fields or hold down a job.
You're more likely to get sick, you're
more likely to have some kind of an injury.
So again, when we look at developing nations
and their ability to actually further develop
in positive ways, poverty is a huge issue.
And this is one of the Millennium Development
Goals from the United Nations.
And they talk about poverty reduction programs.
I'd like to think about them as more
like wealth increasing programs.
There's plenty of money in the world,
it's more about how it's allocated,
and the political pressure, and the choices
that are being made.
North Korea is a very, very good example of that.
People are facing imminent starvation there,
yet the government is choosing weapons and other kinds
of things that don't actually further
the health of the people.
So think about that, that sometimes it's
political power that is impacting this.
Loss of food producing land, and if you've
lived in Central Mass or Western Mass for very long,
you might have noticed this trend that we're
growing less crops on lovely farmland,
and we're growing more houses, right?
You see that the landscape has dramatically changed
and this lovely, fertile soil is now
where people plant their house.
And this is true worldwide.
In, for instance, Brazil, I was just
watching a program about this, the rain forest
is being chipped down and people are grazing cattle there.
So we're having a lot of environmental degradation
and we're losing this land in a lot of different ways.
It's not just houses.
It's pasture land for animals, it's very, very complicated.
We're paving over a lot of this land
as well, putting up supermarkets or whatever it is.
We can also look at environmental damage.
And this is about fossil fuels.
So we know there's climate change.
I mean, there are people who can deny that, and that's OK.
Most scientists agree with this.
Also air pollution is going to kind of alter the opportunity
to produce certain kinds of crops.
When you think about ozone and the ability of the sun
to make its way to the earth and how strong the sun's rays are,
it's really very, very complicated.
But it's still points to this idea of hunger and food
insecurity.
As we talked a little bit about environmental change,
so I just add one more quick slide
about that about carbon dioxide.
And we see these dramatic changes
in natural disasters, so droughts.
And there are some parts of Africa, especially
eastern Africa around Ethiopia and maybe Tanzania
and some of these countries where they've
had cycles of drought and flood for eons,
but we're starting to see drought and flood
in other places beyond cyclical norms.
And then we also see certain diseases taking root
in areas where they never had them.
For instance, the Maldives are a really great example of this.
It's an island nation in the Indian Ocean.
And they're very, very close to sea level.
And with sea levels rising, people
are losing their way of life, their normal way
of creating foods.
All of these things are going to have
a dramatic impact on food and insecurity.
A couple of other things.
There's no good news here on my slides, unfortunately.
So I talked about ozone, I just want
to mention water shortages.
Water is going to be a pivotal issue, if it's not already
in your mind, within probably the next 10 years
not only in the US, but also worldwide.
About 2/3 of people in the world do not
have access to clean water.
So that's two people out of every three.
That contributes to a lot of disease,
a lot of suffering and death.
So what we do have in terms of fresh water
is really being used at a very, very high rate.
And then we're also polluting it at an exceptionally high rate.
If you think about things like bottled water,
the commodification of water, no human
can exist without air or water, and yet we're
starting to sell water.
Maybe air is next, I'm not sure.
I don't want to implant that idea in anybody's mind.
I talked about Brazil and what was
happening there, also the deforestation
and desertification.
So we're turning some of these fertile grounds
into inhospitable farmland.
If you watch the series on the Dust Bowl from Ken Burns,
you saw this happening.
That how we manage crops and our agricultural kind of process
becomes very, very important.
In the US, we raise really predominately three crops,
so soybeans and corn and wheat.
And because of those crops really
we have to add so many more fertilizers to the soil.
So take a look at that.
I invite you, there's plenty of stuff online
that you can read about it as well as in the text.
Also ocean pollution, we're killing fish.
These natural habitats for fishermen
are really, really disappearing.
And we over fish certain species,
which brings me to this astounding statistic
that 140 species of animals and plants
are becoming extinct each day.
And you might say, oh, Lisa, that's not true.
So I actually looked that up.
And most people think it's more like 160.
That's pretty dramatic.
And these are things we haven't even discovered necessarily.
We tend to focus, like take for instance bananas.
There are about 100 and some different varieties of bananas,
but you probably know three of them.
And the traditional banana we have in the US
is the Cavendish banana.
Now if that is susceptible to some kind of plight or a pest
or a fungus or something like that,
it's going to wipe out world banana production.
Because we've focused on this one particular banana.
So we need to actually encourage a lot of biodiversity
in our agriculture.
And that's really going to be an important mechanism
for stemming some of these problems around poverty.
I told you earlier that it can be
very difficult to understand or recognize hunger.
So I like this little table from your text.
And it's questions that we might ask someone
to see what level of food insecurity
they might be experiencing, if they're experiencing any.
Now, there was a very bright woman from Cornell
and she asked women one question.
She dispensed to all of this.
She said, we can be much more attuned to women's needs
by asking one question.
I thought this was brilliant.
She said to women, how much do you worry about food?
How much do you worry?
And that was an indicator of how much food insecurity
that family was suffering.
We know that women are worriers, and we
know that they're the providers of nutrition in the home.
So if we go into any community and we say,
how much are you worried about this?
They will tell us, and we know then
how it corresponds to their nutritional needs.
In the US, have lots of programs really targeting
some of this hunger.
And I want you to take a look at this statistic
here that one in every six Americas
is receiving some kind of food assistance.
That's dramatic, right?
That's higher than any other developed nation.
And still these programs at a cost of $33, $35 billion a year
are not preventing hunger.
So there's still a lot of room for us to improve.
We have age specific programs.
We also have life stage specific.
So this could be for pregnant women, lactating women,
we have children's programs.
You can think about all kinds of benefits through WIC.
We're really targeting vulnerable populations
when we look at these.
We also school programs.
So you're probably familiar with school lunch where
kids can get free or reduced lunch.
We also have school breakfast.
There's after school feeding or snack programs.
We also have a school milk program
in a lot of places where kids might not
be getting enough calcium and vitamin D.
So there are a lot of different targets
we have for these programs.
And it really comes from understanding
their nutritional needs at different points in life.
I want to spend a little bit of time looking
at one that is near and dear to my heart, WIC.
It's Women Infants and Children.
I will say that this is one of the most successful nutrition
assistance programs if not our gold standard.
One of the reasons for that is that it's constantly
on the chopping block in front of Congress.
They're constantly wanting to cut the funding.
So the people that administer WIC on the state level and even
locally are very, very good at keeping records
and understanding the impact it has on the clients
that they're serving.
This program is targeted at women who are pregnant
or nursing and then also young children under the age of five.
The reason that this program really evolved
is because we looked at those particular populations
and we said, we need to make sure
that pregnant women have enough iron, they have enough zinc,
they have all of the nutrients they need.
And then also young children as they're growing.
So we're supporting those people at a very, very critical time.
And we know that there are just vast benefits.
It can be around iron especially,
because we provide fortified cereals,
iron fortified cereals, and also iron fortified formulas.
Although breastfeeding is strongly encouraged by WIC,
still formula is available and folate and B6.
And we know that those benefits tend to be much greater
in families who are receiving WIC than folks who aren't.
So it's a great program.
It's available in all the different states.
And each state ministers it according to their own rules.
So it's an opportunity to meet the needs of their population
within the framework of this program.
For instance, in Vermont I think they
do the most wonderful thing.
They actually deliver a cooler to the woman's house
and put the milk and all of the products in the cooler
so it stays cold.
So if she doesn't have transportation,
they will bring the food to her, which is terrific.
There's also vouchers for a farmer's market
and fresh fruits and vegetables.
And within about the past two years,
they expanded WIC to include things
like ready to feed infant cereals and canned baby
food and other kinds of foods that parents need.
So WIC is great.
Now, there's a lot of criticism of the SNAP program.
We used to call this food stamps,
now it's been renamed as the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program.
And you might ask well, why did they do that?
So why did they do it?
Because of stigma.
There's a lot of stigma around families
who are receiving these nutrition assistance benefits.
That they're on the dole, or that they aren't working,
or that they're lazy, or that they just
want to take and take and take.
That's not the case.
I actually personally believe that it
takes a lot of fortitude to go and apply for these programs,
and say, I need this for my family.
And we want families to do this, because it really
is going to provide a leg up for that the child
or the pregnant woman or the elderly adult
to make sure that they're getting their needs met.
Now, this is the centerpiece we say of our nutrition assistance
program.
It's administered by the USDA.
But they are a lot of quirks to this program.
And I'll say that if you look at the history of food stamps,
it's not about feeding poor people.
It actually started as a way that kind of
create markets for agricultural products.
So yes, you can buy soda on this.
Yes, you can buy candy, you can buy Doritos,
you can buy ice cream, sirloin, shrimp,
you can buy all of these things that
maybe aren't good nutritious choices
or tend to be kind of expensive.
By and large, people do not abuse this system.
You will find people who do that,
but most people are using it responsibly.
You can still use coupons with it
and shop for sales and all these kinds of things.
One of the things most states are doing
is called SNAP Ed where they have people getting
SNAP benefits go through a nutrition education program
to learn how to use their resources really wisely.
And I think that's great.
But I think it shouldn't just be people on nutrition assistance,
everyone should have a nutrition course.
I'm kind of bias there.
I also want to just quick talk about a couple
of other US programs really targeting children.
And you see this absolutely adorable little girl,
and she's got her school lunch here.
So that's one we're probably very familiar with.
And we talked about after school snacks and things like that.
I want to highlight the summer meal program.
This is one for communities.
So anyone from the age of about two
up until their 19th birthday, they
don't have to show individual eligibility.
Instead it's for the whole community, which is great.
And I know that this is available in parts
of our local community as well.
Most communities in Massachusetts
have something like this.
It's often served at a school or maybe even a church
or something like that.
Now, those are government programs.
I just highlighted two of them.
There's also commodity programs, there's
aid to Native Americans on Indian reservations,
there's other kinds of programs targeting
aging adults or the elderly.
But I wanted to talk about a couple of other ways
that we meet people's nutritional needs.
So we have the food bank system.
And this is more of like a warehouse system.
So it tends to be this central location
and then food is distributed more on the community level.
So you can think about the Western Mass Food Bank.
If you haven't been down to Hatfield to see that, go.
You can arrange for a tour.
It's absolutely amazing what they're doing there.
And they feed a tremendous number
of people in our community.
Then we also have food pantries.
And this could even be like at a church level or a community.
And this is really kind of grass roots.
So people are collecting food, they'll have a food drive,
and then we'll distribute things.
It could be canned foods or cereals or things
like that, that are going to be prepared in the person's home
and eaten in the home.
It's not a congregate meal site.
Then we have emergency kitchens.
And I put here they're often called soup kitchens.
I kind of want to get away from that,
because I think it's a stigma, right?
So I like to refer to them as congregate meal sites.
Because I love that word congregation
that people are coming together.
And I spent quite a few years volunteering at one
over in North Adams Mass and they often
refer to it as a helping hand.
And so when people would come for social reasons,
maybe they felt a little isolated or lonely,
they would come to just talk and be around folks.
Also to get a meal, also just to get out of the house
if they were a little bit shut in.
So these are meals provided on site to be eaten there,
not to be taken away necessarily.
So we kind of think about that environment
and who may be using those.
We see more and more families going
to those kinds of resources than ever before, which kind of
highlights the need that people are having.
In the US, we tend to waste an awful lot of food.
So we want to talk about some food recovery programs.
And these are collecting food that normally would be waste.
And so it might be discarded in landfills or something
like that.
I just wanted to mention this one Second Harvest.
And they're really collecting a lot of food for food banks
and different kinds of congregate meals
sites or homeless shelters.
So if you look at this here, the amount of food
that they're providing, a billion pounds of food,
is tremendous.
And they're feeding 23 million people a year.
So obviously there's a huge need that
isn't being satisfied by these government programs.
So if you look at how we're meeting our need,
the government maybe isn't doing as much as it could.
And a lot of these private agencies
have to come forth and participate.
I said that we waste a lot of food in the US.
I don't know if it would surprise you
that it's 20% of our food supply that's wasted.
I think that's pretty unacceptable.
And it comes from a variety of sources of waste.
So in fields, if you think about after the harvest.
Maybe you go pick apples, there's
always a few apples up on the tree that don't got harvested,
that kind of thing.
Also commercial kitchens, there's a lot of waste there.
Grocery stores, maybe the can gets dented or the package
gets ripped a little bit.
And in restaurants, so ready to eat
food that isn't being served that
can't be saved over for the next day.
Enough food to feed about 50 million people is being wasted.
That's tremendous.
So there are different kinds of programs
that we can look at that are meant
to recover some of this food.
And a lot of the reason, or one of the significant reasons,
that a lot of these organizations
will donate the food is for a tax write off.
So I think that's great.
It's absolutely fine that that happens.
We have some different recovery methods to kind of claim back
that one fifth of the food that's being wasted.
So field gleaning, this is after the harvest
when people can go in and they can
pick those apples or the potatoes
or whatever it is grapes after the harvest in France.
And I should say in France they have this wonderful gleaning
law, which means that after the harvest has been done,
anyone can go into the field without asking
special permission and collect the food that's
going to be wasted.
There's also just a wonderful film called The Gleaners.
It's like three hours long and it's in French,
but definitely check it out.
Because you get this sense of how the community comes
together rather than wasting food.
We can also have this perishable food rescue.
So this can be from markets, this could be from wholesalers.
So if you go to the supermarket, sometimes you'll
see there's a special coupon on the yogurt, which
is about to go past its sell by date.
You can still eat it for a couple weeks after that,
but they can't sell it.
So we want to claim that food.
We also have prepared food rescue.
So this is coming from some kind of a kitchen.
A few years ago, I was walking up Second Avenue in New York.
And it was kind of late and all the delis were closing.
And it was really just a heart warming sight.
The deli people would come out and put down
a piece of newspaper and then all these
wrapped up sandwiches they had.
Rather than go to waste, they put them out for people.
And people were coming and taking these.
And I just thought it was wonderful
that they were doing this.
That's not always the case.
I'll say that about some restaurants.
And then we have nonperishable.
And this can be collecting processed foods, maybe
the scratch and dent foods, things like this.
You see those in the market, you know
the bin where it's reduced.
Some of that stuff is going to just
be destined for the landfill.
And that's one place that sometimes the Western Mass Food
Bank will get their donations.
Maybe there's a case of something that maybe is extra
or somehow the packaging isn't quite right.
And they can still use that, the food is absolutely fine.
So those are some other ways that we
can recover some of that food.
I want to talk just a quick minute or two about
global hunger.
And I know in chapter six when we looked at protein,
we talked about kwashiorkor and marasmus malnutrition.
But I want to look at this from a slightly different angle.
So if we want communities and populations
to be able to develop and actually grow their society,
it comes down to poverty reduction
and making sure that people have enough food to eat.
And it's not just me that says this.
I mean this is what economists say, this is what the UN says,
this is what the World Health Organization says.
And we know that when we look at populations of hungry people,
that they're living with poverty.
There's population growth that's out of control.
They're dealing very often with political structures that
are kind of unhealthy or there's armed conflict.
And if you look at a map of conflict zones, they overlap.
There's malnutrition in those areas without a doubt.
And then natural disaster that should make a lot of sense
in places where there's environmental damage.
And environmental damage and poverty and hunger they
all tend to worsen each other.
So you see this kind of coming together
of all of these factors.
If we look at a map of hunger.
So you can see here in this blue that we're really
talking about Asia and the Pacific
and then we also have sub-Saharan Africa.
If we look at it on a traditional map instead
of the pie chart, you can see that even
in kind of the Western hemisphere,
we're dealing with some pockets of potential malnutrition
and hunger.
So some here in Central America and then down here
in South America also Africa.
So we have this big swathe here of Africa and Southeast
Asia and such.
There's plenty of room for improvement
in these populations.
So when we look at some of the problems people are facing,
we really think about famine.
And this is where we often hear about it.
And Americans are very, very caring people
but we tend to have a short attention span.
So we hear about the disaster in Haiti, well,
people are still recovering from that.
There's still a lot of work to be done.
Famine is a very, very common issue in the developing world.
And it occurs for a lot of different reasons.
I mentioned already droughts and floods but also pests,
things like locusts.
Like even a few years ago, now it wasn't a famine,
but I was thinking the tomato crops in Western Massachusetts.
We had some kind of a blight and all the tomatoes died.
You can even think about potatoes and the potato famine
with the Irish.
Politics and armed conflict, this
means food doesn't get to people as easily
or that there's preferential allocation of resources.
So the party in power is more likely to have access to food.
There's social causes and discrimination.
For sure, you definitely see this
in places like Afghanistan and anywhere
where there's conflict.
And then limited access.
Sometimes there's simply not enough food to go around.
And so we see famine where there's
widespread hunger kind of based on geography.
And it's really there's not enough food
to go around in a lot of these cases.
And so that's where you start to see a pecking order.
I mentioned hunger as this kind of social definition
and trying to reconcile that with our earlier
definition of a physical need for food.
They kind of go together.
I just want to mention this term you often
hear called chronic hunger.
And we have certain populations that are really
suffering many, many generations with chronic hunger.
And this occurs in places in Africa.
You can look at Sierra Leone, you
could look at Haiti, which is, of course,
in the Western hemisphere in Hispaniola.
You can also look at parts of India and Southeast Asia, Laos
and Cambodia.
There are plenty of places where this occurs.
And when we look at the number of people facing
chronic hunger, we're really talking
about women and children.
And there are specific micronutrients of concern,
and these are the ones we talked about all along.
So I'm not going to spend a lot of time there.
But the reason that this becomes just critically important
is that they become much more susceptible
to illnesses and diseases.
And it's much harder for them to bounce back from this.
Now, I want to spend a few minutes just talking
about women's health issues and hunger.
This is kind of a place near and dear to my heart.
And when we look at malnourished women,
they're going to bear sickly infants who
are much more likely to die.
And we know that in Sierra Leone one out of every eight women
dies in childbirth, one out of eight.
And so it's not just affecting the infant,
but it's affecting her.
And we can look at issues of malnutrition prenatal care,
lack of access to hospital facilities,
very, very complicated.
But we know nutrition plays a big part of this.
One thing that we can do to offset some of that nutrition
injury is breastfeeding and promoting breastfeeding.
Keep in mind that when the woman's diet is suboptimal,
the quality of the breast milk is still high,
it's the quantity that's going to suffer.
So still we want her to breastfeed.
And very often when that child is weaned from the breast milk,
the child is going to be put on like a corn porridge or a rice
porridge or something that is non-nutritive.
And because 66% even 70% of people
don't have access to clean water,
it's not going to be a good situation at all.
So in a population when a crop fails or there's
some kind of a change, so it could be violence,
it could be political unrest, something like this,
women are the first ones to suffer.
And I find this statistic just mind boggling, these two
pieces.
So 70% of the world's hungry people are women and girls.
But they are only receiving about 50% percent
of the nutrition aid or the food or assistance.
So that might be an opportunity for us
to actually look at how food is allocated.
And this isn't just at the societal level,
this is also at the household level.
So in many parts of the developing
world if you look at the way food is distributed at a meal,
it's the head of household, which is the man first,
then male sons, the boys, and then it's
going to be young girls and then women.
So they're really last.
And especially elderly women, they're
even further down the list.
So we really need to look at this as a cultural phenomenon
as well, that there is something going
on here that is needing our attention.
And we need to have some education around this.
The kind of world governments have really
talked about this a lot and I just
wanted to mention about the World Food Program.
And what they've done is they've actually said,
you know what, we're going to start
targeting women with our food supplies.
And so they deliver food aid to women.
And they're much, much more likely to make sure
that women get this than make sure that men get it.
And I'm not down on men at all, I like men.
But the thing is that they tend to when
there are food resources, and the literature
supports this, that men are going to use that food aid very
differently than women.
They might sell it on the black market.
They may not even take it home to their family.
So we want to make sure that women get this.
Because they make sure that their children get it,
and they're also going to benefit as well.
So what can we do to kind of advance the role of women?
And there's a lot of discussion around this.
And I think it's probably within the past 10 or 15 years
that we've made incredible changes.
So if we want to advance women, low interest loans that's
a great way to do this, buy them a sewing machine,
buy them a goat, whatever it is, something
that's actually a means of making money.
Women who have their own income actually
spend it very differently than men.
And again, this is borne out in the literature
it's not something I'm making up.
That men might be likely to spend money
on drugs, alcohol, gambling, and women, not
their wife other women.
And then, we see that they can start to support themselves.
And these women actually spend the money
on food for their family also an education.
And for young girls that's critically important.
We want to make sure that they stay involved in school.
So universal primary education is a high priority
in the world the body.
But we also want to make sure that they
have access to advanced education beyond that.
Because the more educated a woman is, the more likely
she is to delay marriage and childbearing
and actually be able to support herself in a family.
So you might wonder what does this have to do with nutrition?
But she's going to make very different nutrition
choices and very different health choices
if she's well educated.
We've talked about overpopulation a little bit.
So again, this fits into that whole discussion
about empowering women.
And I also mentioned that these families
tend to have a lot of children.
When I was working in India in one of the slums,
I would meet families that had 10, 12, 14 children.
And the resources get spread very, very thin.
The girls are involved very often
in hauling water, in collecting fuel,
in agriculture, things like this,
also caring for younger children instead of going to school.
So we need to have a little change around that.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I just
wanted to spend some time bringing up
these issues for you.
I think that when we talk about issues of food insecurity
there's a lot of blame.
We look at individual blame rather than
these overarching institutional policies or the way
that society is set up.
So it's cultural, it's political, it's economic,
and it's complicated.