English Unlimited HAK/HUM 4/5, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM (mit Handelskorrespondenz)

24 Global issues 02 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE EXTRAS Imagine a photo of your family’s food for one week. Make notes about what it might show. Describe your ‘photo’ to other students. Which photo in 11 does it resemble more? a SPEAKINg 14 b You will read an article which accompanied the photos in 11, describing how eating habits have changed in the world. What do you think it will say about these topics?   new technologies  seasonal food  malnutrition   convenience food  processed food  obesity Read the article and check. a READINg 15 b Nutrition transition Nutrition transition Everyone eats. People around the world differ in many ways, but dinner unites us all. Throughout history, we humans have always found nourishing ways to use whatever food we could lay our hands on. The earliest diets were hunted and gathered from the foods that were available as a result of geography and climate. But as soon as people figured out how to trade foods, they did. The current diets of most world populations have moved well beyond hunting and gathering. They have (1) evolved in response to changes in food production that began with the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago. New means of preservation allow foods to be eaten long after they are grown and harvested (hence ketchup). New means of transportation – railroads, trucks and airplanes (as well as technologies such as refrigeration) – mean that foods grown in one place can be consumed ‘fresh’ many thousands of miles away. Thus, even in some place as remote as Bhutan, people eat oranges, surely grown well beyond the Himalayas. New processing technologies allow companies to make shelf-stable food products that can be transported and consumed much later (like pasta). New technologies have permitted the development of previously unknown food products like instant coffee and Cheese Whiz. New marketing methods can create worldwide demand for such products (chief among them, the almost ubiquitous Coca-Cola). But the photographs have even more to tell us. As conflicts resolve and people in developing countries become better off, they acquire more stable resources and (2) change the way they eat. They inevitably (3) replace the grains and beans in their diets with foods obtained from animal sources. They buy more meat, more sweet foods and more processed foods: they eat more meals prepared by others. Soon they eat more food in general. They start gaining weight, become overweight, then (4) develop heart disease, diabetes, and the other chronic diseases so common in industrialised societies. Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese. Today, except in the very poorest countries, more people are overweight than underweight. Some socially conscious governments struggling to feed their hungry populations must also contend with the health problems of people who eat too much food. The phenomenon of going from not having enough food to overeating is now so common that it has been given its own name: the nutrition transition. To see nutrition transition in action, you need only compare the diets of families from Mali, Mongolia and the Philippines with those from France, Australia and the United States. Rates of obesity are (5) rising rapidly in all countries, but are highest in the most industrialised countries. Match developments 1–5 with examples a–e. How are they connected? 1 preservation a Coca-Cola 2 transportation b instant coffee 3 processing technologies c oranges 4 manufacturing technologies d pasta 5 marketing methods e ketchup What is ‘nutrition transition’? c d Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv