| THE FUTURIST (excerpt), May-June 2004 Cooking Globally, Eating Whenever:
The Future of Dining
A noted food-trend specialist shows what the world's chefs will be
dishing up in the coming years. One item on the menu: battling global obesity.
by Art Simering
The World Health Organization
(WHO) is credited with coining the term globesity in answer to its own statistics,
which show the number of obese adults worldwide jumped from 200 million to 300 million
between 1995 and 2000.
- Adult obesity rates average 30% in the United States, 24% in Mexico, and
22% in Great Britain. The rate is still a mere 11.3% in France, but that figure has risen
from 9.6% during the short span since 2000.
- In Greece, home of the highly touted Mediterranean diet, more than 70% of
adults "are above their ideal size," reports the New York Times, which
concludes, "The problem of excess (food) consumption has spread to every corner of
the globe, except for pockets of Africa."
- The growth rate of obesity among adolescents worldwide is outpacing that
of the middle-aged, many of whom were not overweight in their youth. WHO estimates that
more than 17.5 million children around the world under the age of five are overweight even
as so many others are starving.
- According to the U.K. Food Commission, food advertising in industrialized
countries accounts for about half of all ads broadcast during children's TV viewing times;
75% of those ads promote high-calorie, low-nutrient foods.
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| Among the remedies WHO proposes are to stop the
worldwide trend toward cheap, mass-market processed foods and to encourage the food
industry to voluntarily alter advertising, pricing, labeling, and marketing of junk food
on a global scale. Anyone producing food with even a trace of
nutritional value resents being designated as junk, but they had better beware. In July
2003, David Byrne, European Union health commissioner, proposed new regulations that would
prevent companies from marketing food as having any health or nutrition benefit if it is
also high in salt, sugar, or fat. These new rules, if passed by the European Parliament,
would go into effect in 2005.
Regardless of how many court cases are won or dismissed by the courts,
food-service chains had better be prepared to bleed some money for the part they play in
our own bad eating decisions. The chains are most vulnerable to legal action on several
fronts: They play on people's weaknesses through flashy marketing and in-your-face
temptations, encouraging eating and drinking things that are bad in terms of quantity,
nutritional quality, or both. Furthermore, they fail to intercede when customers choose to
harm their health, such as allowing a customer to walk out the door sucking on 44-ounce
containers of flavored sugar water—the beverage equivalent of falling to one's knees
and gobbling out of a trough.
About the Author
Art Siemering is editor-in-chief of the Internet Food Channel
(www.foodchannel.com) and The Food Channel Trendwire, a food-trends newsletter published
weekly by Noble World Communications.
Excerpted from THE FUTURIST, May-June 2004. Click to order.)
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