The Politics of Home-Cooking(!)

Across the Western world, in the post-Reagan/Thatcher era, public infrastructure has been deliberately run down, as neo-liberal economics insinuated itself into governance. Health services, schools, water supplies, roads have all deteriorated, failed, cracked or collapsed as a result. From the dead victims of Hurricane Katrina, to the dead victims of a scandalous Irish health service, populations across the Western world are suffering the consequences of pervasive public squalor.

Sooner or later, when you run down an infrastructure, it cracks. You can get a way with it for a while, perhaps even a generation, but then something happens and everything falls apart. The centre cannot hold. This is the public squalor which we have allowed to creep up on us, on our watch. We don't yet realise it and we haven't yet coined the phrases to describe this phenomenon, but we are now at the beginning phase of the running down of our social and familial infrastructure in the very same way that our public infrastructure was run down in recent years. The end result of running down infrastructure is squalor, in this case, social and familial squalor. If we think there will not be repercussions from what I call domestic squalor, as far-reaching in their own sphere, as the catastrophes of public squalor, we are either very foolish, or very blinded by the short-term lure of our little grab for private opulence, regardless of the consequences.

If we are interested in what those consequences might be, we can find some clues in the World Health Organisation study (see previous posts). Not surprisingly, it found that the effect of hunger on the children was deep and far-reaching. Those children who were not being properly fed, reported psychological and emotional, as well as physical problems. When they did get to eat they were, in the main, eating processed food, with little nutritional value and were unlikely to eat fresh fruit and vegetables on a regular basis. One of the saddest findings of the study was the large proportion of the children in food poverty, who said they wished they had a different life and did not feel happy.


Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com