> To be fair, starvation was a much more pressing problem than obesity for most of human history, so cheap and efficient delivery of calories is a pretty monume

> To be fair, starvation was a much more pressing problem than obesity for most of human history, so cheap and efficient delivery of calories is a pretty monumental achievement of industrialized agriculture. I have to agree that this really is a monumental achievement. Calorie-dense food is no longer scarce but in abundance. We are not hearing much about starvations at least in the "developed world". But on the flip side many people now have some kind of metabolic disease. Nearly everybody in my family is suffering from at least one metabolic disease mainly caused by a compromised sugar metabolism which in turn is caused by processed foods. And this is really causing a great suffering. So the solution to the original problem begot a new kind of problem. Is the new problem better than the original one? Debatable. Now we can support a much larger population much more easily (which is just what we need). But a population that is a lot less healthy than the previous generations. Quality is in decline. Anyway it's still "progress", and yeah, a monumental one. If only they knew where to stop. They never do...