It’s Not a “Western Diet”

Chris Weller’s article at Business Insider on the changes in the way some of the Chinese eat illustrates a number of my pet peeves. Here’s the kernel of his thesis, the meat of it so to speak:

Over the past two decades, China’s prevailing diet has shifted away from grains like rice and wheat in favor of richer animal proteins and a wider variety of exotic vegetables. As Bloomberg reports, this change has left the country short of land on which to grow produce and raise livestock.

While the Western diet typically demands about one acre per person, China has only 0.2 acres to devote to feeding each citizen. Meanwhile, the country consumes 50% of the world’s total pork supply.

“The rapid rate of industrialization in China is really chewing up crop land at an alarming rate,” Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Institute, told Reuters. “China is now losing cropland.

He goes on to assert that from a global standpoint the only way to “ease the global burden” is to eat less meat.

Now I’ll air some of my pet peeves:

1. Investigation of human settlements over the period of the last more than 10,000 years has demonstrated conclusively that human beings always and everywhere seek out the food source with the highest level of available fat in the environment. I don’t know whether characterizing that as the “Western diet” is simple lack of information, stupidity, or self-hate but there you have it. The notion that we will change what we have evolved to prefer through force of will is not well-founded.
2. There is no such thing as a “Western diet”. For a pictorial illustration of that see this article. Thinking there is such a thing as a Western diet is either solipsism, ignorance, or agenda-driven.
3. There isn’t even such a thing as the American diet. Over the period of the last 60 years there have been drastic changes in what Americans eat and those changes haven’t been in the direction of eating more meat. We consume much, much more sugar than we did 60 years ago, much more processed food, and much more hydrogenated fat.
4. The changes in what the Chinese eat is being driven a lot more by what a relative handful of well-heeled city dwellers eat than what all of the Chinese eat. A little more than half of the Chinese for the first time in history are now urban.

There is such a thing as mass-produced and mass-marketed food. That’s what’s being turned to all over the world, not just here and in China.

I do think it’s a problem, not just for the “global burden” but for our health. I can think of any number of solutions but I can’t imagine any of their being adopted.