Although “the best is yet to come”, in terms of food and nutrition, in our country it could be said that “every time in the past was better.” In recent decades, the food gap in terms of the nutritional quality of the food that Argentines consume does not stop growing.
Patricia Aguirre is a doctor in anthropology, a teacher and researcher at the Collective Health Institute – of the University of Lanús – and a member of the Right to Food Observatory. She is the author of numerous books, including “Rich skinny and fat poor: food in crisis”, in which she analyzes why and since when a nutritional gap began to exist between the sectors with fewer resources and the wealthiest.
–In Argentina, can the most vulnerable sectors access the same nutritional quality in food? What differentiates your type of diet from that of wealthier sectors? What is that due to?
–No, poverty is measured precisely through food (the cost of a basic basket), so it is clear that the poor and the rich eat differently, very differently; The poor skew their food consumption towards the most profitable foods in the price structure (bread, potatoes, noodles, flour) and those who do not have economic problems can, on the other hand, access everything else: fruits, vegetables, dairy products and meats. This, which allows the poor to eat every day at the lowest possible cost, is not nutritionally adequate, so, given that these consumptions have been maintained for decades, they have left marks on the bodies in forms of deficiency diseases (such as anemia ) and excess (such as being overweight). Obesity in poverty superimposes all the problems of excess (of carbohydrates, fats and sugars) on all the problems of scarcity (lack of iron, vitamins).
–If you had to mark a time in recent history in which this began to change, what would it be?
–We have the “photos” of food consumption from a 1965 Conade survey; There, similar consumption is shown between the poor and the rich (and poverty was 5%). When we see that the same diet cut across the social structure, we do not see the diet but the society of diners: a country much less unequal than today. The big change occurs in the “photo” taken by the 1996 Indec survey where it is clearly seen that this unified pattern was broken. We must remember the hyperinflations of ’89 and ’90 and the hyper-unemployment (from 5 to 13% of the EAP) that privatizations and convertibility brought. In a market society where food depends on purchasing power – the relationship between prices and income – if society becomes polarized, the dietary pattern has to be broken and food for the poor and food for the rich appear, which do not It existed in Argentina and was common in other Latin American countries.
The advancement of the food industry
Aside from the effects of the economic crises that systematically hit the Argentine population, the anthropologist also analyzes the type of product we can access and its nutritional quality. In an essay recently published in the magazine Anfibia he states that “in 1950, 43 varieties of corn were grown, today only five. The reduction of species and intraspecific varieties contributes to the precariousness of what Argentines eat. In 1965, fruit and vegetable production surrounded the cities with a green belt of small-scale family farms, and it also generated employment because it is labor intensive. Today that food autonomy was lost. If all Argentines wanted to comply with the recommendation of five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, the production of the entire country would not be enough.”.
–Does homemade food have the same value as it did before? Is this only due to the incorporation of women into the workforce? What is homemade food?
–For me it is controlled food, which is done with a plan, with an objective: to feed the members of the household according to the values, knowledge and possibilities. From the raw materials to the disposal of the leftovers. But this is not today’s homemade food that you think is homemade because you order delivery and eat it at home or mix it using three cans of industrialized products. If homemade food is on the way out, it is because we eat as we live and if we live on the run, we will eat quickly. They are not the women but the lives that those women, those men, those children lead, in those jobs, in those schools, with those criteria of health and pleasure and upbringing and the future of those families in those countries. All this that makes up social life is what pushes the consumption of packaged, colored, flavored, cheap – or not –, fast, products full of carbohydrates, fats, sugars. It changed social life, the practices and values that gave meaning to eating in a certain way changed. The problem is that today that meaning is given by industry advertising; whose logic is profit, not health.
Medical coverage and unemployment: 65% of those affected lost their insurance due to lack of work
The risk in childhood
According to a report From the Argentine Social Debt Observatory of the UCA published in June of this year, since 2020 poverty has affected more than 60 percent of minors and that percentage has never decreased since then. This means that children and adolescents are the segments of the population that suffer the most, not only from the food crisis, but also from the impact on their nutritional quality.
In their conclusions, they affirm that a large part of the deprivation occurs in food and access to water. But they assure that “the direct and indirect protection systems reach high levels of coverage of the child population in the country. It is estimated that almost four out of every 10 children and adolescents receive income transfers through the Universal Child Allowance (AUH-Tarjeta Alimentar), and in a similar proportion direct aid in the school space through food, glass of milk and foods such as breakfast or lunch. To a lesser extent, this population uses non-school community soup kitchens (11%). The direct protection systems in the school space and indirect through transfers are focused on the most vulnerable social sectors and school-age children, while the transfers also achieve broad coverage in early childhood, being adolescent population the most unprotected.”
