International junk food

Why kids on aid still get malnutrition

By Culinate staff

February 26, 2009

There’s a lotta international food aid circulating out there. But as a recent article on Gourmet.com pointed out, much of it isn’t nutritionally appropriate for children:

While the traditional food aid is useful for filling adult stomachs in emergency situations, helping kids is a different story. In children, malnutrition is the result of a lack of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals present in the body at the crucial stages of development (birth to 24 months), and is far more an issue of the quality of food than of quantity.

Sure enough, the corn-soy blend standard in most food aid doesn’t cut it. There are other nonperishable foods that do — but they’re more costly to produce, package, and put into the field.