The Netherlands ranked as the world's best place for plentiful, affordable and nutritious food, followed by France and Switzerland, according to a report by Oxfam on Tuesday.
The anti-poverty nonprofit organization's criteria for the best and worst place for cheap and healthy food include first the availability and affordability of food. The next standard to look at is the food's quality- whether the foods are fresh or offering various options. Finally the group examines the rate of obesity and diabetes.
United States, known as place of abundant food, surprisingly falls out of top 20 despite the fact that food is cheapest here. The reason is that there are not enough affordable fresh vegetables to create a balanced diet. Therefore, most of U.S food is processed and high-fat, which results in high rate of obesity and diabetes. It is not surprising to see the U.S ranked 120th out of 125 on how diet influence health. The United State, overall, ranks 21st, together with Japan.
While several European countries occupied the top, the United Kingdom ends up ranking 13th because of the unstable food price. The bottom of the ranking includes Chad, Ethiopia and Angola due to high malnutrition rates and expensive food.
Oxfam's Max Lawson told NPR the food system we have on Earth is probably the worst one in the whole universe. The problem lies not on the fact that we don't have enough food for people in the world but that we don't have an equal distribution of food. The result is about 900 million people still go starving every day. "It's a crazy situation."
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