My mom bought this chocolate cake from Safeway on July 4th for my sister and a couple other friends' graduation. It was made up of two layers of chocolate cake with something like strawberry jam in the middle, smothered all around in rich, thick, overwhelmingly sweet chocolate frosting. I ate from this cake for a week before I decided I was probably cutting my life short. I eventually threw it out because it was better to get rid of all the temptation than to keep it and maybe be tempted to over-consume again. However, there was some guilt in throwing it out since I knew I had extra food to indulge in while people elsewhere probably didn't even have the luxury of eating dessert, let alone a full meal. Bodley's book states that "The most dramatic assessments of the global food system suggested that by the year 2000 three billion people, half the world's population, were malnourished, either from calorie and protein deficiency or vitamin and mineral deficiency or from over-consumption" (p145). Eating this cake was probably deteriorating my health and contributing to these statistics, not nourishing or benefiting me in any way. However, I feel like it is in a commercialized food system that high sugar and high calorie foods could be processed and successfully sold to people, causing over-consumption. Why are these kinds of cakes so often the main desserts at celebrations anyway? Why can't it be a fruit salad?
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