The future is now

[andrewducker]

Fantastic article at Wired about the progress we've made in the last 100 years in standard of living.

A smart shopper can buy a 5-pound bag of Gold Medal flour for 69 cents. That's enough to feed three people for a day - 7,500 easy-to-digest, relatively nutritious, and potentially tasty calories. All for less than 0.7 percent of an average American's income.

The 7,500 calories in today's bag of flour would equal the diet of a four-person peasant family for a whole day; the difference is that it would take three days of medieval work to afford.

From 300 percent to 0.7 percent: By the bags-of-flour standard, we are some 430 times wealthier than our typical rural ancestors of half a millennium ago. Today - at least for the average American - getting enough calories to stay healthy has dropped off the radar screen. Quite the contrary: The surgeon general has warned that obesity is a literal threat to national security.