The “Food Aid Is Food Eaten” Perspective: Government Administrator

The first approach to marketing nutrition or encouraging a change in eating behavior assumes that desperate people resort to desperate measures. This is akin to assuming that if people are starving, dumping a bargeload of grain in front of them will guarantee that they will eat it. Perhaps this is true under such extreme circumstances.

Yet for developed countries, most work in nutrition is less an issue of solving starvation and more an issue of solving nutritional deficiencies. It’s less an issue of enough calories and more an issue of the right calories. The majority of the U.S. population is above the starvation line. Some have argued that obesity has a disproportionate effect on Americans who are living closest to the poverty line. Clearly, their lack of income does not result in starvation—quite the opposite. These people are making choices about the food they eat, yet they are not making good choices. The “food aid is food eaten” assumption is not relevant to people who can elect to consume food that tastes better but is less nutritious.