“The other day Thiago saw the advertisement for milk with vitamins on TV and asked me if we were poor because we didn’t ‘snack’ like those kids”says Romina, she is a single mother and worked cleaning housesbut with the recession, their employers—those that the Government called “heroes”—they told him that They couldn’t afford it.
To my son, I answered no, that we are “free”as it says the president. Free from not having calcium, free from your teeth falling out prematurely because there are no nutrients. He makes me angry that burns me inside; I feel like they are stealing the future of the kids from our faces and asking us to say thank you.”
The collapse of the most basic food
According to the Argentine Dairy Chain Observatory (OCLA), the consumption dairy remains in free fall: in January sales they collapsed and 5.6% year-on-year. But the fact that truly chills the blood is that of liquid and powdered milk, the essential fuel for the bones of Thiago and millions of kids grow up straight: per capita consumption reached the historic floor of 168 liters per year, levels that were not seen since the hyperinflation of 1990.Meanwhile, since the official officesthey explain to us that “the market is healing”.
It must be that famous one “price freedom” that they proclaim so much: the freedom of gondolas to display sachets that cost the same as a pittance salary, and the freedom of families to choose between paying for electricity or having their children drink a glass of milk every day.
“At home, yogurt became a memory from another life, something that children see in advertisements as if it were an expensive toy,” Estela says while taking her three children to school. “Sometimes they ask me when we are going to buy those strawberry ones again.”concludes.
From milk to “dairy food”
Walking through a supermarket today is to do a food archeology exercise. They disappeared top brands of the popular tables. In its place have proliferated those confusingly labeled concoctions called “milk-based food”. Colored water with a little serum, the consolation of those who no longer even reach the second mark.
It is the freedom to be nutritionally scammed. mercy and his followers repeat like a mantra that “there is no money”but what is really missing is humanity. Because while they celebrate the financial surplus with gala dinners, the severe food insecurity already affects more than 1.5 million children and adolescents. A generation is being created with less cognitive capacity, with more fragile bodies, with a future mortgaged by the dogma of an Excel that always closes with people outside.
The trickle that stops: When consumption hits rock bottom, dignity rises
The drop of those 168 liters per year per inhabitant is not just a red arrow on a consulting firm’s graph; It is the trickle of a life that is becoming precarious to the core. It is the calcium that is missing Thiago because their mother was “released” from her job without looking back. This historic drop in dairy consumption It is the most obscene symptom of a model that boasts of “cleaning up” the economy while malnourishing the future.
They tell us that the Labor Reform brought “dynamism”, but the only thing that was dynamic was the speed with which families went from the middle class to mate cooked with water. It is the cynicism of a power that takes away your job, makes your money more expensive, and on top of that asks you to celebrate the “freedom” of dying of hunger in a country surrounded by cows. But the hunger of kids like Thiago stopped being a cold data in an Excel to become the driving force of an indignation that no longer fits in homes. The “freedom” of having an empty refrigerator begins to collide head-on with reality.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
