Before l came to the US, a friend told me God never gave us food and (good) weather. For the decade I have been here, I have found that she was right. American food is just for filling the stomach and keeping one from starving, but I wouldn’t prioritise it on a global menu. In Africa, you eat a delicacy and feel it seep into your soul. In Africa, there is variety and freshness, with foods sometimes sprouting naturally without someone farming them. In America, it’s as if the crops wait for “commands” from human beings—farmers—so as to grow, and tend to them with undivided attention for them to grow. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni often says that “even a fool can survive in Uganda” because nature is kind on the land.
In terms of weather, America has extreme conditions like winter, which don’t occur in most parts of Africa except in South Africa. Temperate weather conditions make Africa an ideal place for agriculture, as a bonus to the fertile soils in the tropics. Africa is a food basket, and from my assessment, Africans can produce all the food they need, rear animals for domestic consumption, and have excess for the market. All they have to do is adopt modern methods of agriculture with the understanding that natural conditions alone cannot permit optimum agricultural production.
In her article titled: “In Poorer Countries, Obesity Can Signal Financial Security” in the New York Times of June 26, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/business/economy/obesity-wealth-uganda.html, Patricia Cohen broaches a contentious subject based on her American experience. She also relies on research reportedly conducted by Elisa Macchi, an assistant professor of economics at Brown University. She quotes Macchi as saying:
“Given the scarcity of readily available hard information in poor countries, wealth signals, including obesity, play a crucial role in economic interactions where individuals seek to evaluate someone’s wealth.”
Cohen says Ms. Macchi conducted tests with 238 loan officers at 146 financial institutions in the capital city, Kampala, and asked them to “review applications from fictionalized potential borrowers whose accompanying photographs were manipulated so they appeared thin or fat.”
“She discovered that loan officers were more likely to rate the applicants as more creditworthy and more financially sound when the obese version of the photograph was attached,” Cohen reported.
Although I have my reservations about this “research project,” I will dwell more on the logic of why a loan officer would consider someone more plump or “full” than a lean one for a loan.
Of course, in Africa, not just Uganda, or even in general, for anyone to be considered well-fed and healthy, they must have a certain body mass, known as the Body Mass Index (BMI). Someone who is malnourished will have a lower BMI, while someone who is well fed will have a higher one. One way of telling someone who has not had a meal in a long time or who is malnourished is how thin or how much “meat” they have on their bones. And because in Africa people have easier access to organic food, being overweight does not necessarily mean being obese. For many, it’s in the genes, whether they eat much or little. For others, it’s healthy weight, unlike that acquired after eating junk food, as is the case in the US.
I want to argue that what Ms. Macci saw on the files of the loan officers she talked to were not obese but well-fed loan applicants. Incidents of obesity as a result of eating junk food in Uganda and Africa are minimal. They manifest in those who have lived in Western capitals or who have adopted the eating habits of Americans they have interacted with in one way or another. Moreover, in Uganda, junk food is very expensive compared to organic foods, which grow abundantly.
Moreover, why would the well-to-do even need loans, and why would one prejudge them by their body size when, likely, they are already in the money economy and their creditworthiness can be checked readily?
I am uncomfortable with the claim that information is hard to come by in Uganda. The banking system is IT-compliant all the way to village SACCOs, which also employ computer-networked systems. It’s quite easy for a loan officer to cross-check these records. Even then, I don’t see how applicants can withhold information when they want to be helped. Also, the practise is such that before a financial institution issues a loan, it conducts due diligence on the applicant, checks for collateral, visits the place where the security asset is located to determine its true nature and status, referees are conducted, and so on. There is also the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) which has a database of all borrowers and their habits.
The whole idea of using body mass as a measure of suitability for loan acquisition assumes a “conversational dimension” as opposed to a standard used on any formal scale. If at all any bank uses that measure, then they are in for a rude shock because I know of lean people with loads of cash who, no matter how much or well they eat, can never put on weight. I won’t name names, but Ugandans know these light-weight money bags.
Obesity is more of a problem in the US. This article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-in-four-americans-food-insecure states that nearly a quarter of U.S. adults sometimes don’t get enough to eat. It says: “Almost 25% of American adults are food insecure, a jump of about five percentage points from a year earlier as the double whammy of high inflation and the end of pandemic benefits squeezes more household budgets, according to a new study.
Being food insecure relegates one to junk food as the only affordable option, which is usually extremely high in added sugars. The food is easier to prepare (to cut energy costs) and more accessible than healthy options, like fruits and vegetables. Unless subsidies are placed on organic, healthier foods, more Americans will suffer from obesity as the economic downturn threatens to spiral. In Uganda, someone may not have a coin in their pocket but live by eating directly on the farm.
The Writer is a Ugandan-American who lives in Ohio / US
