Nutrition and Diet. Forced Diets

Owners of land can require farm labor or other services and by monopolizing scarce resources can set the values of exchange, usually in their favor. As recently as the twentieth century, for example, sharecroppers in the United States were forced to give labor in exchange for a provided diet consisting almost totally of American corn (maize).

Corn is deficient in vitamins, niacin, and the amino acid tryptophan and has unhealthy ratios of other amino acids—and failure to supplement the diet resulted in widespread pellagra. Other dietary diseases such as scurvy, beriberi, night blindness, kwashiorkor, and marasmus have resulted from enforced diets that had few calories, lacked meat, and relied too heavily on other vitamin-deficient staple crops.

Two problems underlie almost all of the nutritional problems of civilization. First, prior to the advent of civilization, increasing population meant increasing demand for food, and the increasing population seemed quite capable of stretching technology and supply to meet its needs. With the appearance of class stratification, the poor, who may have nothing to offer, exert no demand for food (which involves not only need but also something to offer in exchange), and therefore have no effect on supply.

The Malthusian (referring to the theories of the English economist Thomas Malthus) vision of the world in which technology is independent of demand and ultimately cannot keep up is a product of civilization. It results actually from a lack of demand or incentive to economic growth. Poor nations and poor individuals simply cannot buy food even if it is available (something that would have been unheard of prior to the advent of civilization).

Second, civilization involves a major change in "entitlements" or rights to food. In pre- or nonstate societies, members of a group are entitled to share available food simply as a function of being living members of a group. No one goes hungry when food is available. However, in modern stratified societies with private property, people do not automatically have a right to share—in fact, the principle of preserving property commonly takes precedence over the right to eat. Entitlement becomes far more tenuous, limited to family or small group sharing, political or religious clout, items to trade, and possession of money.

Entitlements to food have often failed for reasons totally unrelated to food supply. The causes of hunger and famine now are tied not to natural disasters but rather to failures of entitlement. It is not at all clear that civilization has reduced the risk of famine.

The world problem is not a lack of food supplies nor of various nutrients, but rather a lack of demand for food. Demand implies not only need but also ability to pay. If the poor could pay for food, people would discover that the world has plenty.