world food day

the un says 870 million people are starving and chronically undernourished "green revolution" non-withstanding...i go to a supermarket crammed with "food" on a regular basis and wonder why, with all this "food" sitting on shelves people anywhere are hungry...then i have to stop and wonder just how much of the stuff on the shelves is actual food and how much is industrially processed "food product"...my conclusions are not reassuring...if you distributed this "food" to the starving around the world you may indeed provide them with enough calories to sustain their lives...you would also probably provide them with an epidemic of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity...( look what it has done here at home )...they would be better served by steps to preserve the traditional diet their cultures have developed...of course this doesn't do monsanto any good and it might get in the way of some other globalitarian projects because it would probably entail preserving the local ecology the supports a traditional diet and that might be inconvenient for timber harvesting or oil extraction...all more important than mere ecosystems...so on world food day i will ponder which photo represents real food and which an industrial product and try to think of ways to preserve cultures rather than globalize them...the plant in my back yard is maize...i opened the ear and found multiple rows of kernels so it must just have been a seed that germinated really late in the season and tried its best...dna is tenacious stuff.