Wednesday, December 03, 2008

An Inconvenient Truth About the Japanese Diet



The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) put together a simple, easy to understand video that shows what's happening in the Japanese food (farming) industry and how, as a result of radical resource changes, Japanese diets are becoming quite unhealthy.

My takeaway: We should consider exporting cheap, high quality nutritional food items to Japan!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is the saddest blog post I have ever read on your blog. Possibly chabging the name to gsBS might be appropriate. It is purely a propaganda piece from the Ministry of Forestry and Fisheries (Agriculture) to buy Japanese grown food.

The problems are not is an 'unhealthy' diet. In the first place it is absurd to call the diets of the world unhealthy compared to a diet of fish rice and miso soup. Rice is full of carbs, eating too much will make you just as fat as a super sized value meal. Fried tempura???

Japanese agriculture is the root of the problem here. It is at below subsistence levels. Most agricultural farming in Africa is more productive. When I say that. I mean that the amount of rice produced by 95% of rice farmers in 1 year is less than they could survive on in that 1 year. They can't support their own needs ad a farmer, let alone have a prosperous farm. I don't even need to mention the non-tariff barriers to entry of foreign rice. Japanese rice strains grown in California, for example.

Not an inconvenient truth, it is a big re-direction from the causes of the problem of poor managment by the ministry of Forestry and Fisheries.

Anonymous said...

Dear Anonymous,

We are sorry you did not like our post. We are only human which means we cannot possibly please all the people all the time.

However, we do strive for exactly what you gave us ... your healthy opinion or perspective on our post. Thank you for that!

Perhaps we should have titled our post: An Inconvenient Falsehood About the Japanese Diet.

Best,
Laurel