this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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If true, which it's basically not, this is dumb distraction and click-bait.
So what is this "third meal" that so many people are supposedly giving up? Kebab? Big Mac and fries? Well surely that's a win for everyone? Duh.
Sorry, but the reality is that poor people are not literally going hungry anywhere in Europe. Anyone who opens their eyes can see that. In almost every country in the world today, i.e. except the very poorest, poor people are fatter than rich people.
Completely inane and irrelevant and insulting to intelligence.
Addendum. To clarify, my point is that the problem with food today is the quality, the calories, the correlation with social inequality. It's not the quantity and it's certainly not the number of meals taken. Idiotic.
If only there was some way to confirm, short of only reading the headline, if theres more to this.
Oh, apparently theres further text in the article, for example 29% said their financial situation is precarious. 11% say they regularly dont eat enough, so they have enough food for their kids, 24% say theyre very concerned with coping with the increase in food prices. Oh and 12%, within the past 6 months, have skipped meals while hungry.
So the article sources survey data, you're basing your claims on better primary data I take it? Or maybe secondary public health database datasets? Something else?
I don't get this. My problem is being taken to be a fool.
How do you, personally, square these two observations:
Sorry, but something has to give. Which is it?
Addendum. Downvoting just proves you have no answer to the question.
The two things are actually often related: junk food is faster, more accessible, stores longer, and is cheaper per calorie. So you can be hungry, skip a salad meal (that would need to be bought fresh and prepared) while having βmcdonaldsβ/microwave meal/high calorie meal for your leftover meal. Third has been the pattern, following US, where it is very common for the poor to eat more calories than the rich, while eating less healthy meals.
Yes sure, I know all that. There is a real problem. Fundamentally it's about economic inequality, like so many other social problems.
So people should stop using the damn word "hunger".
This has nothing to do with hunger. it's dishonest and manipulative to talk about hunger when the problem has nothing to do with being hungry.
Personally I'm fed up of being taken to be an idiot like this.
It's not a famine and fortunately no one is calling it that here. What it is, is "food insecurity".
Eating healthy is already something that most humans don't manage to do. Even those with money. After all humans are wired to love sugar and avoid work and cooking is work. If I had a penny for every time thought to myself "fuck being healthy" and then ate something, I could solve food insecurity. And I'm not even overweight, so probably mere average in that sort of irrationality.
Adding monetary constraints makes good food choices even less likely. And to make maters there's also a bunch of other issues that arise people who have to worry about getting enough food. That type of stress is very much not healthy.
With your attitude, you could just go into a drug den and tell everyone there that all they have to do is "say no". Sure, technically it's correct, but reality doesn't work that way.
Reality is that feeding people is fairly cheap option to curb social programs.
Yes, your point is that "hunger" should be interpreted very loosely, meaning in a sort of addiction-psychology way.
I think that's a sophisticated re-rendering, and that most ordinary folks do associate the word "hunger" with famine, with starving, with terrible deprivation. Which is a real situation in a handful of desperate places in the world. I don't think we should be conflating these two problems. One of them is far more urgent than the other.
I see this as just another instance of disingenuously sensationalist language and I would prefer people used the correct terms for what they are in fact talking about.
For the underlying substance, I agree with you and all the other censorious downvoters. I am just concerned about vocabulary and manipulation.
I'm saying that it simply isn't well defined. There's a reason we have terms like "malnurished" or "undernourished". Your definition is only as narrow in certain contexts, e.g. "world hunger". I personally wouldn't use the word in the context of first-world issues either, but that's because it's ambiguous, not because it's wrong.
So if "malnourished" is better, as you imply, let's use that instead. The issue is not hunger by any non-academic definition of the word.
You've made your case. Mine is that this is a clear example of sensationalist lexical inflation. Like calling everyone right of center a Nazi, it is intended to provoke engagement and emotion rather than to describe a fact.
I agree with you on the fact that this inflation is a problem. I just think that we need to avoid inflation in terms of complaining about it as well. As it stands now anything that's at least not contradicting the dictionary is tolerable in my opinion. Well, at least on social media. In academia your approach is obviously best.