{"id":4965,"date":"2011-01-23T23:43:01","date_gmt":"2011-01-23T22:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/?p=4965"},"modified":"2011-01-24T12:41:24","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T11:41:24","slug":"nachtraegliche-silvestergedanken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/2011\/01\/23\/nachtraegliche-silvestergedanken\/","title":{"rendered":"Late New Year’s thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hungry<\/a>
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n

Some time ago I saw on the Internet a few pictures from the book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. They traveled around the world and had a look at the dining tables of people in various countries. In each country they visited a family and photographed their entire week’s ration of food. They also quote the value of the purchases.
\r\nWith \u20ac 375.39 Germany is miles ahead of even the USA – it’s \u20ac 256.01 there. (However, at this point I must criticize that the two authors have apparently chosen some kind of bio-eco-freak family. You can definitely feed a family of four with \u20ac 50 per week in a delicious and healthy way.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Anyway – as I watched the rockets ascend to heaven in their thousands on New Year’s Eve, I kept having to think of one picture from said book. It shows the weekly amount of food of a family of six in Chad:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\"Nutrition
Nutrition in Chad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n

The costs of the food for these six persons were quoted as 685 CFA francs. That’s about \u20ac 1.04. So a single person there eats for an average of \u20ac 0.17 per week. For comparison: The German family averages \u20ac 93.85 per person and week. A person in Chad thus consumes food worth of \u20ac 9.04 in a whole year. For a German it would be \u20ac 4,893.48 correspondingly.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

These different dimensions alone are incomprehensible enough. But at the turn of the year I was struck by yet another thought: According to various sources Germany spent an estimated 100-110 million Euros for fireworks. So by Chadian standards you could have used that money to<\/p>\r\n\r\n

    \r\n
  • feed over 600 million people for one week<\/li>\r\n
  • or feed approximately 11,600,000 people for one year<\/li>\r\n
  • or feed about 230,000 people for 50 years<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n

    So many people could live off the money that we blow up in smoke in a single night. For the fleeting pleasure of colorful lights in the sky. Not even for one night. For a measly half-hour.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some time ago I saw on the Internet a few pictures from the book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. They traveled around the world and had a look at the dining tables of people in various countries. In each country they visited a family and photographed their entire week’s ration […]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[514],"tags":[517,519,518,509,508],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4965"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4965"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5217,"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4965\/revisions\/5217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.ginchen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}