Wednesday morning roundup

My body has yet to get the "back to work" memo, i.e., waking hours are 5am-10pm, not 8am-midnight. Anyway, your roundup:

China's famine survivors don't know what to do with the era of obesity, nor does the government:

And the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention makes vague references to “health promotion” and providing “scientific guidance for healthy diets,” but nationwide campaigns about eating healthfully and exercising are not evident.

In fact, pushing the population to lose weight, exercise and cut back on unhealthful foods seems to strike a discordant note to some inside the government, French says. “When I talked to government officials, their argument was: Right now we’re trying to tell them to do and not do a lot of things,” such as not spitting on the street, not dropping trash everywhere and not driving “like complete idiots.”

Oh, communism:

In Laos, opposition to government policies is often squelched. The director of Helvetas, a Swiss development organization, was expelled on 48 hours’ notice last month, accused of an unfriendly attitude to the government. The director, Anne-Sophie Gindroz, had raised the issue of the government’s forcing peasants to sell their land at very low prices, a practice that is now seen as mainly serving the interests of Chinese-financed developers.

Latvia bore its austerity and came out ahead, but it's too unique to serve as a model.

If you're after energy, eat food.

Changing the food system will take patience and tradeoffs:

Well-cared-for animals will necessarily be more expensive, which means we’ll eat fewer of them; that’s a win-win. They’ll use fewer antibiotics, they’ll be produced by more farmers in more places, and they’ll eat less commodity grain, which will both reduce environmental damage and allow for more land to be used for high-quality human food like fruits and vegetables.