More Important Than Food

QOTD: “In the decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased.”

We ended last time with the idea that poor people just want tasty food, and they choose their foods not just based on the cheap prices and nutritional values. Apart from food, the poor perceive many other important things, such as weddings and funerals. In South Africa, social norms on how much to spend on funerals were set. The elders would have very elaborate funerals which require money to be accumulated over a lifetime. 

Spending a lot of money on funeral parties would mean the poor have less to spend on food. 

Aside from social pressure, many just want to lead a more fulfilling life and purchase cheap luxuries such as a television and DVD in their homes. Indeed, life can be quite boring in a village, which makes a lot of the poor want to prioritize making their life less boring

The basic human need for a pleasant life might explain why food spending has been declining.

The poor don’t reduce their standards by cutting out luxury goods and concentrating on necessities — it is the other way around. The consumption of all cheap luxuries have increased.

We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don’t try to save up, put their purchases on hold and make their lives better, but the truth is the poor may be skeptical about these opportunities and whether their lives can actually change. Therefore, they want to live in the moment and focus on the here and now, and live their lives as pleasantly as possible.

Back to the question we discussed a few days ago: is there really a nutrition-based poverty trap?

Though most adults are actually outside the nutrition poverty trap zone, nutrition is still a problem for the poor, less about the quantity but quality of food.

The solution is not to simply supply more food grains because giving them more does barely enough work to persuade them to eat better, since the main problem is not the calories but the other nutrients. Food technology should prioritize developing ways to pack foods that people like to eat with additional nutrients, and coming up with new strains of nutritions and tasty crops that can be grown in a wider range of environments. Nonetheless, food policy remains hung up on the idea that all the poor need is cheap grain.

Next time, I will be reading and discussing about health. Stay tuned!