Unfortunately, Things are Looking Up…
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- April
- 25
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on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 10:13 am by Matt Davies.
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Nice irony. Responding to the fake crisis of global warming by pushing biofuels results in the real crisis of millions starving because so much crop production is switching from food to ethanol.
But who cares about them, as long as we can feel good about ourselves as we pump ethanol into our hybrids.
Haha! Love it!
Matt,
Absolutely inventive cartoon linking so many different issues. I had a great laugh. Needed that. I read about the obesity of Americans in the papers all the time but the severity didn’t reach me until I took several trips outside the US. It’s a weird experience to look around in another developed nation and realize that no one is overweight, not to mention morbidly obese. The tourists who visit America must be in shock. Keep up the great work. You have an amazing mind, not to mention hand.
Thanks all!
Notsofrosty, you’ll be amused to hear I received a bunch of complaints via email about this cartoon (one which cleverly told me to “go back to England.”) Apart from the fact I haven’t lived in England for 25 years, I have been reading that they too have adopted a US style obesity problem, complete with soaring diabetes rates. If I lived there, I’d have done the same cartoon…
BTW – Have you seen gas prices there? $11 a gallon in London!!
You are mistaken Matt – we still don’t accept dollars in payment over here – euros, maybe…
Anyway, we don’t have as far to drive, and have always had to pay far more than in America for gas (and food – but more of that in a moment). Hell, I’m 30, and I have never felt the fact that I can’t drive has ever impinged on my lifestyle – although personal chauffeurs are certainly nice, especially if female and also share your bed…
It is true however that there has been an increasing trend towards high fat, low nutrition diets promoted by a poorly regulated, highly industrialised food production industry in the UK, and all the corresponding problems – luckily not as extreme as those reported in the US, and somewhat tempered by our higher basic prices for food, but this is also being tempered by an increaing drive to promote healthier, non-industrialised food and diet. One of the major pushes that helped to start changing public attitudes happened in 2006, when a TV chef started a major campaign to improve school meals, which were pretty awful when I left school a few years ago; chips, pizza and burgers every day, with healthy options so bad you wouldn’t want to touch them.
Good food helped to promote attention, thus learning, and reduced disruptive behaviour.
Read a bit about that here if you care to do so:
http://www.channel4.com/life/microsites/J/jamies_school_dinners/
Since then there have been a variety of campaigns to improve the quality of our diets, which have forced the big four supermarkets over here to at least attempt (or appear) to acquiesce to customer demand.
Recent increases in food prices are, I suspect, making it harder to keep up the momentum, as shoppers seek to squeeze their budgets, but it is important to avoid false economies in my opinion.
As for other countries, in my experience, you certainly do see fat, and occaisionally obese people, but they are usually older people who have had a lifetime to build up their layers of insulation – it is in the youth that the worrying trends are to be spotted, and the sad truth is it is the US, followed by the UK that lead the world in childhood obesity, diabetes etc. As other countries see the problem beginning to emerge, it is often linked to globalised corporate capitalism and the lack of availability of local, seasonal foodstuffs.
It doesn’t take much to realise that vegetables grown 50 miles away, purchased a couple of days later should be cheaper and healthier than vegetables grown 50 miles away, transported hundreds of miles away, processed, packaged and returned a couple of weeks later. And let’s not even get into the wasted energy and pollution in all that transportation, or the vastly increased return to hard-pressed farmers…
Not sure why I felt driven to say all that, and there is much more to say too, but there ya go. Thankee mister interwebnetmcguffin.
And on a completely unrelated note, I thought the cartoon was brilliant.