Through the Deepening Shadows

If You Read This Book for Three Hours, Forty Jumbo Jets Will Have Crashed in That Time

One night recently I couldn't sleep and on the well-supplied television set of my rented Berlin apartment I found a strange channel where usually there was blackout. Its news reported that three hundred jumbo jets, mainly carrying women and children, had crashed that day with total loss of life. And to horrify me further, it commented that its researchers had found out this has happened every day for the last twenty years or so, and yet has never been reported on the other sixty-plus channels on the wonderful satellite web. Of course I assumed that this was a hoax akin to Poe's newspaper ones or Orson Welles's radio hoax where The War of the Worlds Martians came a-landing in the USA. But one look into the most trustworthy international sources showed me that my phantom channel was in all that matters (number of deaths) right, though the deaths were not by most advanced technology but only by its most ancient effect when used for class and other domination: hunger. These sources estimated in the mid-1980s that some forty million people die from hunger each year (make your own division to get to my jumbo crashes); and—I don't know which is worse— that in 1996 ‘Nearly 800 million people do not get enough food, and about 500 million are chronically malnourished’.