Sorry to spoil your lunch, but there are 200 million children in the world suffering from chronic malnutrition. Two hundred million. It's a figure I find impossible to get my head around, and the more I try, the more I end up feeling angry and helpless. What makes me most angry is not so much those Crimplene-clad fatties queuing at KFC for their lunch-in-a-bucket, but the fact that such a situation can still exist in the 21st century.
Despite the billions of pounds and even more man-hours that have been thrown at reducing worldwide infant and childhood malnutrition the problem never seems to go away. Frankly, looking at the skewed priorities of some of the world's leaders I seriously doubt it ever will.
Alex Renton is worried that the high-profile Feed The World campaign hasn't worked. In this month's OFM he compares the daily meal of children in Zambia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Haiti and Nigeria and highlights the nutritional inadequacies of so many children's diets. His thought-provoking piece starts on page 22.
Meanwhile the Fairtrade campaign continues to grow. Many of the products are of exceptionally good quality and are much more widely available than they were even 12 months ago. In most cases the raw product is bought at a fair price and is then shipped elsewhere to be processed and packed.
But those who pick and produce could make so much more money if they had the chance to fi nish the product themselves. In many cases this isn't practical, but Andrew Purvis has been checking out the new Equitrade system, and in particular the Madagascan farmers who are making chocolate with their own beans and supplying the fi nished product to no lesser a purveyor than Fortnum & Mason in London. Equitrade seems a natural step on from the success that is Fairtrade, but can it really work?
Looking at my shelves I notice a disparate mixture of stuff that hardly seems comfortable rubbing shoulders. Wasabi, white miso paste and sushi rice share space with tins of golden syrup (for treacle tart) and packets of Smarties. There is a healthy supply of organically grown salad in the fridge, not to mention a couple of rigidly fresh mackerel but there is also a whacking great slice of New York cheese cake topped with a thick layer of soured cream. In many ways, it is not untypical of the wide-ranging way we eat today. In this issue, Mimi Spencer highlights the extremes of the modern diet.
We also have Sol Campbell at the River Cafe, Annabelle Bond at Zuma, Boris Becker at San Lorenzo (Wimbledon branch of course) and Lynn Barber in Champagne. Eat up! (And you can't get down till you have cleared your plate.)
· Nigel Slater is The Observer's cookery writer
