Slowly but surely, the main problem with food is changing from "starvation" to "obesity".

Which is arguably just a different form of malnutrition, somewhat less deadly, but more of a chronic burden on the patient and the society.

This is true, but it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve, and yet people still starve. A quarter of food produced ends up in landfills (Europe estimates 20% food waste, as high as 30-40% in US).

I love how this comment thread perfectly echoes what the article is talking about.

From a sibling comment by imtrigued:

> Almost a billion are still going hungry.

"The world is awful"

And then from your parent comment:

> Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare

"The world is better"

And finally your comment:

> it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve

"The world can be much better"

These three are all true, and I suspect each person already knew all three. It's just that each person chose to focus on a separate aspect.

It seems to me that the first two are statements, and the final one is a conclusion, which is the only one that's productive to focus on.

I think they all achieve different purposes.

"The world is awful" highlights a problem that needs solving, a concrete goal

"The world is better" tells you that something is working, which you can build on top of or improve

"The world can be better" gives a proposal for a course of action

While the 3rd might seem like the most useful, the 1st is extremely important too, because if the proposal fails then you need to fall back to thinking about the problem. The 2nd is important for both motivation, and also for promoting incremental progress

It's a nice narrative but the accuracy of it is questionable, there isn't really some grand historical march away from famine. We've just had a great run from 1980-2020. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/03/Famine-victims-si...

The situation in 2022 is not good, it will take time to see exactly how bad.

Famine correlates very closely with war -- if our recent period of relative global peace comes to an end it will probably return with a vengeance.

Some food should be wasted. If 100% of food were consumed, that would mean that any slight disruption would result in not enough food, or that we were already in a state where there is not enough food. Wasting some food is better than having food shortages. Much better.

We've built a society that's so litigious that companies are incentivized to recommend throwing away food even if there's less than a 0.01% chance of food-borne illness. Our waste is in part out of fear of getting sued or sick, but I'm not convinced the waste is the lesser of two evils. Food poisoning sucks, but it's survivable. Unlike starvation.

A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.

I think the point missing is that food that get wasted could not arrive where it is needed before getting rot. Letting aside the expenses to do that. The problem is not that we waste food, as it would not solve starvation, the problem is that in those places where people has no food, there is no production.

In 2017 when that article was last updated, yeah sure. Not sure you can make that declaration in 2022. The combination of record poverty caused by Covid lockdowns and food supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine has put millions of people worldwide in famine conditions: https://www.reuters.com/world/world-faces-unprecedented-glob...

Exactly how bad it will get remains to be seen. But the causes of famine are generally political and in terms of total body counts the worst ones are basically "big country X really screws up" (e.g. China and the Soviet Union in the 20th century) and/or wars and I don't think we have any guarantee that those things won't happen again.

FWIW, China has a very long history of famines. Twentieth century wasn't an outlier - although in the West it's been heavily publicised for propaganda reasons.

My impression from[0] is most places have long histories of fammines, without practical contraceptives, we're all moties and one or two bad harvesta from a Having a Bad Time.

[0]https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

It was the worst famine - and, arguably, period - in the history of the world:

- tens of millions died due to starvation from central planning issues (variously causing: a plague of locusts; Mao wanting to save face so refused foreign aid and maintained being a net exporter of food while people were starving; diverting people away from agriculture to metal production to meet the five year plan)

- millions died from government beatings/torturings to death, and suicide due to hopelessness and government destruction of cultural traditions in the name of centrally planned progress

Now one might say that there may have been even more harmful centrally planned economies, i.e. the USSR and Nazi Germany, but at best any of the candidates is competing to be only the third worst disaster in the history of the world.

It was the worst, but some of the ones before it weren't far behind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China.

Also I find it curious that among the possible causes you forgot to mention World War 2. What would you say if someone omitted that when explaining fifties in Europe?

I would think that's normal, because WW2 was 1939-1945, and even though it was waged there it didn't include events that would be considered a direct cause of millions starving in Europe. Which is why they didn't.

If you think WW2 was a major contributor to the Great Leap Forward deaths then just explain, rather than making oblique comments about how it's strange I didn't mention the thing that you're thinking of (but not mentioning).

Almost a billion are still going hungry.