Chronicle of capitalism in its terminal phase
Scurvy is this frightening disease which causes teeth to bleed and fall out, which causes extreme fatigue, pain and bruising or even healing disorders and which can lead to death.
It reminds us of a bygone time: it was the illness of sailors who went to sea for several months without fresh produce. It was also the evil that struck the most miserable workers during the industrial revolution. A period of exploitation almost unequaled in the history of humanity, which consisted of making proletarians toil twelve hours a day for pitiful pay, crowded into large unsanitary and malnourished urban centers.
This disease is caused by the prolonged absence of consumption of Vitamin C, therefore fresh fruits and vegetables. It is an alarming sign of malnutrition, which had disappeared since the middle of the 20th century in Western countries. In recent years, however, scurvy has made a comeback in so-called “developed” countries.
This is the case in France. A Parisian pediatrician, Professor Ulrich Meinzer, noted a sharp increase in cases among children even though the disease had “completely disappeared” from France. “Our study reveals an increase in hospitalizations after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic,” he explains on RTL. The study identified a total of 888 patients with scurvy hospitalized between January 1, 2015 and November 31, 2023, increasing sharply since 2020, and with an average patient age of 11 years.
This very symbolic return of a disease almost forgotten for a century is not specific to France. In November 2021, the English press already announced the return of scurvy across the Channel. The Guardian, a major British daily, pointed out the responsibility of the Conservatives in power for almost fifteen years, who have carried out budget cuts in social assistance and health, while the cost of living has increased.
In the Times, health professionals warned of the return of “diseases of the Victorian era”, such as rickets which affects the development of bones and which also indicates severe malnutrition, or even scabies. 10,000 British people were hospitalized for malnutrition in 2021, a figure four times higher than that measured 12 years earlier. According to the newspaper, one in six people in the UK were “in relative poverty” in 2021-22.
As is often the case, the USA is a pioneer in terms of precariousness. As early as 2018, doctors declared to the press that the first case of scurvy had been measured in them five or six years earlier. “This initial case […] was impressive to say the least,” recalled Doctor Eric Churchill to a scientific magazine. “The person ate only cheese and bread. Since then, we have diagnosed between 20 and 30 cases” in his hospital alone, he said.
Last February, in the United States, the CEO of Kellogg’s advised American families on television to eat “cereal for dinner” if they want to eat cheaply, in a context of food inflation. The brand’s communicators had launched a campaign encouraging consumers to eat “cereals for dinner”, capitalizing on the impossibility of eating healthily for an increasingly large part of the population. Kellogg’s therefore advised replacing a balanced meal with ultra-processed cereals, full of sugars and pesticides.
To avoid scurvy, you must ingest less than 10 mg of vitamin C per day for one to three months. An orange contains 80 to 100. The sailors had also understood that it was enough to take citrus fruits on board, possibly mixed with alcohol – which gave birth to punch – to avoid this “sea plague “. Vitamin C is also found in potatoes, citrus fruits, spinach, etc. Finding scurvy in the 21st century is therefore a historical anomaly, and the signal that a diet has become profoundly toxic for the most precarious people, who no longer have access to fresh produce. In reality, who can afford the famous “5 daily fruits and vegetables” recommended by nutritionists?
In the USA, the authorities estimate the proportion of the population facing food insecurity at 10%. In France in 2023, more than one in two inhabitants skipped at least one meal per day and 9.3 million lived below the poverty line. Food aid in France concerns 7 million people and the Restos du Cœur announced that they were in serious difficulty faced with the influx of people in need a few months ago.
While humanity has never produced so much wealth and the number of billionaires is exploding, it turns out that, even in rich countries, a growing share of the population does not have access to sufficient quantity and quality. enough food to live properly.
Another parameter of this collapse: fruits and vegetables themselves are less and less healthy. In addition to pesticides and GMOs, it has been proven that an apple or tomato selected by the agroindustry and cultivated intensively contains far fewer nutrients than the varieties that were consumed 50 or 100 years ago. You would have to eat two or three times as much to get the same amount of vitamins. Paradoxically, our food is both more and more caloric while being empty of nutrients.
To maintain themselves, capitalists have sold the myth of endless “progress”, which would be guaranteed by economic growth. However, our era is indeed one of generalized decline. In the USA life expectancy is already decreasing, as in England. In France, healthy life expectancy is falling. Nothing indicates that the generations born since the 1980s will live longer than that of the baby boom, who ate “organic” throughout their youth – pesticides were still used very little – who benefited from the maximum of the social state and which therefore lives longer than the previous ones.
