Today we wrap up the unholy trinity of Sex, Bombs and Burgers - American division, in honour of the book’s U.S. launch - with a look at the food part of the equation. Realistically, I probably should have started with this aspect as it’s the one that makes everything else possible. Food technology is, after all, the foundation of any country’s prosperity.
The United States is, not coincidentally, the most prosperous country in the world as well as the biggest food producer there is. Today, it’s the biggest per-capita exporter of food by nearly double - the next country on the list, France, produces only about half as much. The American food system has in fact created so much abundance that it literally wastes more food than many countries produce. Americans actually throw away about half the food that is harvested for them.
By the numbers, American consumers spend a trillion dollars a year on food, which is roughly split between supermarkets and restaurants. About half of that restaurant amount - a quarter of a trillion dollars - is spent on fast food. It should be no surprise that Americans have some of the highest caloric intake on the planet, as this map illustrates.
It should similarly not be a surprise that many of the world’s biggest companies are American food producers. Pepsi, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Tyson Foods and McDonald’s are Fortune 500 companies that form the backbone of an industry that is worth nearly $5 trillion dollars, or around 10% of global economic output.
With so much money at stake and the competition between producers so fierce, there is constant pressure to innovate. Whether it’s creating new and better food products or distributing, transporting, packaging and selling them more efficiently, technology is at the heart of everything we eat. It indeed manifests itself in ways we hardly notice thanks to the passage of time. Consider that in 1965 it took around an hour to prepare a meal. By the mid-nineties, thanks to processing, packaging and new cooking technology such as the microwave and better ovens, that preparation time was shaved in half. That means more time to get on with being prosperous.
Some would point out that all of this excess has resulted in an obesity epidemic in the United States, but that’s only partially true. The World Health Organization identifies a sedentary lifestyle - also known as lack of exercise - as a major cause of obesity, so it’s not all the burgers’ fault. Even still, as with all technologies, food advances have solved many problems and introduced new ones.
One final aspect of food technology that is explored in the book is its use by the United States as a weapon, figuratively speaking. The biggest driver of war, terrorism and conflict is poverty, which is usually found in places that don’t have enough food or where it isn’t distributed properly. By eliminating hunger, countries also eliminate the main motivating factor for why people enlist in conflicts. A happy and well-fed populace is a largely peaceful populace.
As such, the United States has tremendous motivation to better distribute the tremendous amount of food it wastes, as well as encourage the proliferation of its food technology producers. American guns may not stop global terrorism, but American burgers just might.
Marc Venot
January 5, 2012 at 1:32 am
The price of food have increased a lot in recent years in part because it’s transformed in ethanol, with the help of mandatory government programs.
Diabet is now a huge problem, in particular in the ethnic population, whose numbers have exploded because of mandatory government subsidies.
Maybe you should indicate that one of the few improvement have been about saturated fat.