Precarious finances: 38% of Europeans no longer eat three meals a day
More than half of Europeans say their budget has tightened over the past three years, according to a recent study.
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If true, which it's basically not, this is dumb distraction and click-bait.
So what is this "third meal" that so many people are supposedly giving up? Kebab? Big Mac and fries? Well surely that's a win for everyone? Duh.
Sorry, but the reality is that poor people are not literally going hungry anywhere in Europe. Anyone who opens their eyes can see that. In almost every country in the world today, i.e. except the very poorest, poor people are fatter than rich people.
Completely inane and irrelevant and insulting to intelligence.
Addendum. To clarify, my point is that the problem with food today is the quality, the calories, the correlation with social inequality. It's not the quantity and it's certainly not the number of meals taken. Idiotic.
If only there was some way to confirm, short of only reading the headline, if theres more to this.
Oh, apparently theres further text in the article, for example 29% said their financial situation is precarious. 11% say they regularly dont eat enough, so they have enough food for their kids, 24% say theyre very concerned with coping with the increase in food prices. Oh and 12%, within the past 6 months, have skipped meals while hungry.
So the article sources survey data, you're basing your claims on better primary data I take it? Or maybe secondary public health database datasets? Something else?
Yes, exactly.** Reading the article disproves the headline. **
When I hear 'not eating three meals a day' I do not think 'has skipped one meal in the last two years.' (which is how the headline get's it's 38% statistic.)
It's not that deprivation does not exist in the EU, it's that the scale of that deprivation is of an entirely different order than implied by the headline.
I don't get this. My problem is being taken to be a fool.
How do you, personally, square these two observations:
Sorry, but something has to give. Which is it?
Addendum. Downvoting just proves you have no answer to the question.
Just because people can consume pure lard, and gain a tonne of weight, it doesnt mean theyre not malnutritioned. It also doesnt mean they dont experience hunger.
If you take a step back and consider the primary question that needs to be answered is it
a) What weight is a measure of hunger/poverty - people must be over x weight irrespective if health and were good. b) What food availability us a measure of hunger/poverty - people must have reasonable acess to a basic set of nutritional inputs and were good.
You seem to be following a - people are fat, so hunger doesnt exist
When it would be equally truthful, with a different conclusion to say - people are feeling hunger and experiencing malnutrition. When they can eat, what they can afford causes increased body mass without fulfilling their nutritional requirements. They also continue to feel hungry.
Treat food similar to medicine, the good benefit is the target, but there are also side effects. Cheaper food has a worse profile - fewer (not none) benefits, and higher side-effects.
Theres also more complexity to this - poverty isnt just $. Education, transportation, time, exhaustion, health. Many intersections and impacts that paint a persons life.
You are tying yourself in knots to pretend that that fat people are "hungry". Why bother? Why not just use appropriate language, instead of mangling English like this?
I do not deny that there is a problem. I just hate being manipulated with language. It is dishonest, disingenuous, insulting. Fat people are not going hungry. Find another word.
Routine addendum. Downvoting does not make you right. It just proves you to be intolerant of other people's opinions.
Downvoting just proves you have no answer to the question.
The answer is simple: Humans are neither omniscient nor perfectly rational.
Obviously, humans who always make the perfect choice to optimize their long term health won't get obese just because empty calories are cheap. But if a typical human had such superhuman willpower and intellect, poverty wouldn't exist anyway and humanity would be occupied with putting up a dyson sphere around Vega or whatever.
In reality however humans are flawed and practically all will make stupid choices if the right ones are harder. Hence we need to create systems that make it easier to chose wisely. Because as individuals that's not something we're capable of.
Sure. I agree with all that.
I don't agree with labelling something "hunger" which is not hunger in the way ordinary folks understand it. You are talking about addiction. Hunger is the thin end of the wedge for starvation and famine. That is a thing in the world, still. It has all but nothing to do with the West's inequality-fuelled addiction problems, or at least is something very, very different.
I just wish we would use language more correctly.
I think that’s a sophisticated re-rendering, and that most ordinary folks do associate the word “hunger” with famine, with starving, with terrible deprivation.
I don't think the definition is that narrow. There's definitions like this:
a compelling need or desire for food. the painful sensation or state of weakness caused by the need of food: to collapse from hunger. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hunger
- a craving or urgent need for food or a specific nutrient
- an uneasy sensation occasioned by the lack of food weakened condition brought about by prolonged lack of food
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hunger
It's indeed often used to describe more dire situations around a lack of food, but it's not exclusively used for those situations. Hunger is also the corresponding noun to "feeling hungry". Hungriness isn't used that often.
The two things are actually often related: junk food is faster, more accessible, stores longer, and is cheaper per calorie. So you can be hungry, skip a salad meal (that would need to be bought fresh and prepared) while having “mcdonalds”/microwave meal/high calorie meal for your leftover meal. Third has been the pattern, following US, where it is very common for the poor to eat more calories than the rich, while eating less healthy meals.
Yes sure, I know all that. There is a real problem. Fundamentally it's about economic inequality, like so many other social problems.
So people should stop using the damn word "hunger".
This has nothing to do with hunger. it's dishonest and manipulative to talk about hunger when the problem has nothing to do with being hungry.
Personally I'm fed up of being taken to be an idiot like this.
It's not a famine and fortunately no one is calling it that here. What it is, is "food insecurity".
Eating healthy is already something that most humans don't manage to do. Even those with money. After all humans are wired to love sugar and avoid work and cooking is work. If I had a penny for every time thought to myself "fuck being healthy" and then ate something, I could solve food insecurity. And I'm not even overweight, so probably mere average in that sort of irrationality.
Adding monetary constraints makes good food choices even less likely. And to make maters there's also a bunch of other issues that arise people who have to worry about getting enough food. That type of stress is very much not healthy.
With your attitude, you could just go into a drug den and tell everyone there that all they have to do is "say no". Sure, technically it's correct, but reality doesn't work that way.
Reality is that feeding people is fairly cheap option to curb social programs.
Yes, your point is that "hunger" should be interpreted very loosely, meaning in a sort of addiction-psychology way.
I think that's a sophisticated re-rendering, and that most ordinary folks do associate the word "hunger" with famine, with starving, with terrible deprivation. Which is a real situation in a handful of desperate places in the world. I don't think we should be conflating these two problems. One of them is far more urgent than the other.
I see this as just another instance of disingenuously sensationalist language and I would prefer people used the correct terms for what they are in fact talking about.
For the underlying substance, I agree with you and all the other censorious downvoters. I am just concerned about vocabulary and manipulation.
Yes, your point is that “hunger” should be interpreted very loosely, meaning in a sort of addiction-psychology way.
I'm saying that it simply isn't well defined. There's a reason we have terms like "malnurished" or "undernourished". Your definition is only as narrow in certain contexts, e.g. "world hunger". I personally wouldn't use the word in the context of first-world issues either, but that's because it's ambiguous, not because it's wrong.
So if "malnourished" is better, as you imply, let's use that instead. The issue is not hunger by any non-academic definition of the word.
You've made your case. Mine is that this is a clear example of sensationalist lexical inflation. Like calling everyone right of center a Nazi, it is intended to provoke engagement and emotion rather than to describe a fact.
I agree with you on the fact that this inflation is a problem. I just think that we need to avoid inflation in terms of complaining about it as well. As it stands now anything that's at least not contradicting the dictionary is tolerable in my opinion. Well, at least on social media. In academia your approach is obviously best.
While I think that you've got a valid broader point about misrepresentation -- my pet peeve is the use of "relative poverty" in poverty infographics, which has got nothing to do with being poor, but rather is a sort of metric of inequality -- I'm not sure that describes what is going on here. They highlight Moldova as having a particularly high rate of going without meals. Moldova is not, by European standards, wealthy, but also has a low obesity rate by European standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate
You wouldn't expect to see that if the poorer == more obese effect dominated in that case.
Finally, a decent rebuttal to my argument!
I agree about the conflation of absolute and relative poverty.
How fucking dare you. Pick up your pitchfork and put your blindfold back on right this instant.
