Innovation in a time of great disparity: Check your privilege

Food innovations, nutrition, health outcomes, and privilege; four concepts that are completely related but often addressed in isolation of each other. Privilege has always been a key factor in whether you survive, eat, develop malnutrition, or can afford healthcare.

During the pre-electricity era, food innovations largely focused on preservation techniques that anyone, regardless of wealth status, could undertake, mainly drying, smoking, and salting.

With the discovery of electricity in the 1700s, new technologies to improve food safety, like pasteurisation and refrigeration, became possible, along with mass production. While it bridged a gap between no food and easily accessible food, these easily accessible, relatively cheap, energy dense foods also contributed to the rise in chronic health conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and obesity.

Recently I spent time in South Africa, a land of extreme wealth and poverty, strong cultures, complex histories, and the place of my birth.

It was the first time I had spent time in the place of my ethnic history: the Indian township called Chatsworth, Durban. It was created by the historical government in the late 1950s for the indentured Indians brought to South Africa in the 1800s to work in the sugar cane plantations.

The abolishment of apartheid in the 1990s may have brought political freedom, but the legacy of oppression goes beyond housing and voting, affecting culture, food choices and inadvertently health.

I visited folks living in shacks. I handed out cups of tea and curry and rice in a feeding program, one of many that operate across the country. Not nutritionally complete, but itfills an empty belly and is culturally recognised.

I spent a day with a medical specialist trying to address widespread vitamin B12, iron, and calcium deficiencies in the elderly and children, which cause frailty and stunted growth respectively.

While individuals may be eating, if their diet is nutritionally incomplete, malnutrition is still a risk. Doctors recommend lean red meat twice a week, fish twice a week, a glass of milk or Maas (a curdled milk beverage) twice a day, fresh vegetables, and maize.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Doctors recommending more animal derived foods to counter malnutrition and its associated medical costs in low-middle income countries (LMIC), while high income countries (HIC) with more privilege and food innovations – like Australia, Europe, and the US – are focusing on plant alternatives and environmental sustainability without considering affordability or nutritional consequences.

The role of food to provide essential energy and nutrients for us to function cannot be understated, yet micronutrient deficiencies (which have long-term effects on health and quality of life) are still widespread in many LMIC as well as HIC.

Priority nutrients that are commonly deficient around the world, irrespective of socioeconomic status, include iron, zinc, folate, vitamin A, calcium, and vitamin B12.

It is also becoming apparent that CO2 emissions associated with deforestation and fossil fuel use are decreasing the iron and zinc content in crops, further exacerbating nutritional inadequacies for LMIC communities that heavily rely on these foods.

While excessive animal protein intake has higher risks of chronic health conditions, not much is needed to have a beneficial impact on health.

Research advisor, Knowledge Leadership for the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Ty Beal, said: “Modern food systems have contributed to extensive environmental degradation, resulting in calls for a planetary health diet that dramatically reduces the consumption of animal-source foods.

“However, animal-source foods provide key micronutrients vital to healthy diets. Planetary boundaries and local contexts must be considered to facilitate regenerative and sustainable livestock production.”

Farming practices are one thing, but nutritional equity is also fundamental to food innovations and product development from large corporations to start-ups.

Technological processing, food innovations, and fortification are all tools that the food industry can use to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply, making good food better.

Repurposing low cuts of meat or offal as nutritionally dense ingredients or processing sugar cane pulp as a phytonutrient rich fibrous ingredient for use in bread flour can go a long way to balance health equity globally.

It is not appropriate to undermine nutrition and health for all from a place of social privilege for some.

Likewise environmental sustainability is not more important than nutritional quality and health longevity.

Privilege has historically been a defining factor between those that thrive and those that dive.

Let’s learn from history and use our privilege for everyone’s betterment. 

This article first appeared in the February-March 2023 edition of Food & Drink Business magazine.