A “poor” person was defined, by a lot of medias, as someone without enough to eat. It is no surprise that large part of governments effort to help the poor is posited on the idea that the poor desperately need food, and that quantity is what matters. The delivery of food aid on massive scale is a logistics nightmare. In India, it is estimated that more than one-half of the wheat and over one-third of the rice gets “lost” along the way, including a good fraction that get eaten by rats. If governs insist on such policy despite the waste, it is not only because hunger and poverty are assumed to go hand in hand. The inability of the poor to feed themselves properly is also one of the most frequently cited root causes of a poverty trap. The intuition is powerful: the poor cannot afford to eat enough; this makes them less productive and keeps them poor.
The idea is simple. The human body needs a certain number of calories just to survive. So when someone is very poor, all the food he or she can afford is barely enough to allow for going through the motions of living and perhaps earning the meager income that the individual originally used to but that food. As people get richer they can buy more food. Once the basic metabolic need of the body taken care of, all the extra food goes into building strength, allowing people to produce much more than they need to eat merely to stay alive.
Most people living under 99 cents a day do not seem to act as if they are starving. If they were, surely they would put every available penny into buying more calories. But they do not. It is not because all the rest is spent on other necessities. The poor seem to have many choices, and they don’t elect to spend as much as they can on food. Although they clearly have some unavoidable expenses (clothes, medicines, etc.) to take care first, if their livelihoods depended on getting extra calories, one would imagine that when a little bit more spendable money is available, it would all go into food. Remarkable, even the money that people spend on food is not spent to maximize the intake of calories or micronutrients. When very poor people get a chance to spend a little bit more on food, they don’t put everything into getting more calories. Instead they buy better tasting more expensive food. If the consumption of the staple is associated with being poor (say, because it is cheap but not particularly tasty), feeling richer might actually have made them consume less of it. Getting more calories is not a priority, getting better tasting ones is.
Starvation exists in today´s world, but only as a result of the way the food gets shared among us. There is no absolute scarcity. Even the most poor people, earn enough money to be able to afford an adequate diet, simply because calories tend to be cheap except on extreme situations.
Babies who lacked good nutrition do not the same cognitive capacity than someone who does. Height is a way to measure good nutrition. People who eat well are taller and smarter according to the study of Anne Case and Chris Paxson. The impact of under nutrition on future life chances starts before birth.
The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. This is one of the running themes in the book. Another explanation for their eating habits is that other things are more important in the lives of the poor than food. It has been documented that poor people in developing worlds spend large amounts on wedding, dowries and christenings (weddings in India, funerals in Africa HIV, and television because they wait for the crops and they are bored, cellphones). These “indulgences” are not the impulsive purchases of people who are not thinking hard about what they are doing. They are carefully thought out, and reflect strong compulsions, whether internally driven or externally impose (the example of the book bought the television without credit). Poor people save for those special occasions.
Most adults, even the very poor, are outside of the nutrition poverty trap zone: they can easily eat as much as they need to be physically productive. The benefits of good nutrition may be particularly strong for two sets of people who do not decide what they eat: unborn babies and young children. S-shape relationship between their parent´s income and the eventual income of the children, cause by childhood nutrition. That is because a child who got the proper nutrients in utero or during early childhood will earn more money every year of his or her life.
Investment on mother´s and child´s nutrition is more benefic for the community. Food that people like to eat with more nutrients, tastier food.