Controversial Views on the Geography of Nutrition

Abstract

T F oHIS article deals with certain of the views expressed in J. De Castro's Geography of Hunger, 1952; M. K. Bennett's The World's Food, 1954; and the FAO Second World Food Survey, 1952. The effects of nutrition, or food intake, on the body may be divided between two aspects, its energy-yielding aspect, as measured by calories, and its health-protecting aspects, such as measured by vitamins and minerals. When the former aspect is deficient the condition may be called undernourishment; when the latter aspect is deficient the appropriate term is malnourishment. In place of such drab terms the emotion-quickening term, hunger, which combines, or confuses, both undernourishment and malnourishment, has come to be used in some recent literature in this field. Thus when De Castro speaks of the geography of hunger he is not always, in fact he is not usually, referring to starvation in the sense of people with empty bellies. If he were, then perhaps his self-avowed revolutionary boldness, ranking himself with Freud, in bringing taboos out in the open, would be deserved. What De Castro calls hunger may in fact either be undernourishment, inadequate intake of calories, or malnourishment, which may be the absence of any of about forty food constituents needed to maintain health. Others connected with FAO, as is De Castro, also use the term hunger in this manner. Bennett on the other hand reserves the use of the term hunger for the sensation which most people associate with it, and defines it, as it had been used in the League of Nations, as a condition in which calorie food intake is less than that required to maintain normal body weight when activity is normal. This is a critical concept which would appear to merit a distinct term to describe it, whether it be undernourishment or hunger. The consequences of deficient levels of nutritional intake are far-reaching in their implications. Here De Castro's interpretations are at least interesting for their suggestiveness. It would seem, however, that at least some of the broad claims he makes for social consequences of dietary deficiencies are inextricably bound up with a variety of other forces so that proof may not be possible. Is malnourishment really the reason why the starving LatinAmerican allows his fields to be idle while he goes hungry? Is sex-play really the national sport of India, and is it because hunger-induced lack of energy, and scanty resources, have left them no alternative? Is the Chinese peasant hungry because he lacks the energy to make his fields more productive, rather than because of overpopulation? Other supposedly significant aspects