Talk to EU later: Georgia’s fiery protests

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Food that is heavily processed tends to be cheap, long lasting and often delicious. But there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that it's terrible for our health. Our correspondent digs through the sweet wrappers for some hard science.

And there's a quiet revolution going on in East Asia. Rigid gender roles of decades past are fading and fathers are doing a lot more fathering. A whole region of mothers says, well, finally, But first. Overnight, for the fifth night in a row, Georgia was wracked with increasingly violent protests. Thousands of people again took to the streets in the capital Tbilisi and elsewhere. It's been getting bigger and nastier. Protesters have been launching fireworks into the country's parliament and at police. The response? Water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets and vicious beatings. The spark for this blaze came last week when the ruling Georgian Dream Party said it would freeze talks on joining the EU for four years and turning away from Europe, many Georgians know, is turning towards Russia.

So the former Soviet republic of Georgia in the South Caucasus has known protests before, but these ones are larger and more angry and seem to fit into that pattern that we're seeing elsewhere of fragile Democracies being tempted between two parts.

David Rennie is our geopolitics editor and the author of our new column, the Telegram.

Towards a Western Liberal Democratic Future, or something much more authoritarian and under the clear influence of Vladimir Putin's regime in Moscow.

You say that Georgia has had protests before. What has the build up to these been like? What is it that's brought people out?

Well, we had some general parliamentary elections in October which the opposition say were stolen. They said that the opposition clearly had more support than the ruling Georgia Dream Party, the European Union, other international observers raising serious questions, wanting more answers about those elections. The European Parliament has demanded that they, in fact, be run again. We've also seen things that are familiar in other former Soviet states which look like Moscow's kind of handiwork. So we saw a new law that makes it much more difficult to work for a civil society group that gets funding from abroad. You're immediately called a foreign agent, basically photocopied from Russian law books. And Georgia, of course, has a particular history. It's just under 4 million people. It's in the Caucasus and it was part of the Soviet Union. It's actually where Joseph Stalin was born. But it was also invaded by Russia most recently in 2008, and still has Russian troops about 30 kilometres from the capital, Tbilisi, where many of these protests are taking place.

And so a stolen election, the foreign agent law that we've heard about before, wasn't enough to bring people out, but the freeze, the halt of these accession talks was enough?

No, that's what's really revealing and interesting, which is that if you think of this as one of these battles on the front line of a kind of ideological conflict in Eastern Central Europe, the spark for these protests is, was that idea that they were pushing away the European Union, an absolute wave of rage.

First of all, I'm the citizen of Georgia and I care about what is happening in my country.

So this is Anna Tokhlikishvili, who's worked for many years in civil society. She has an online platform, Political Transparency.

Vinici Being on the street is a very exceptional sense and feeling of unity among people. And there is a power of the people. What you see in Georgia now in the streets, because in Georgia's mainly that kind of protests have been successful in the past under the leadership of one single opposition party or one single person. But now it's entirely different. It's a grassroots civil society movement which is very sincere and also not dependent on instructions of any opposition party.

This is very different from previous Protests. We've seen five days of really large protest, not just in Tbilisi, but the largest in the capital, Tbilisi, and young people risking very severe beatings, which are being filmed night after night by the police. Barricades in the streets, tear gas, and then in the small hours of each morning, very brutal detentions of protesters picked up for crimes like insulting police officers or blocking traffic.

Georgian government should appoint new elections. Russia will never win in Georgia, so.

Restarting the EU accession process is clearly part of it. But when you talk to activists like Anna, you realise that they are arguing for something much larger. It's the path that they want Georgia to choose.

There's clearly plenty of resistance on the streets, but what about in government? What's going on politically here in the meanwhile?

So I spoke to a few protesters yesterday and they all said that there is one politician, and only one who they feel has legitimacy, and she is the country's pro European president, Salameh Zurabichvili. Unfortunately, her term of office ends in December and she is currently saying she won't step down from her position. It's at basically a figurehead position. It doesn't wield a lot of power, but it's giving her tremendous moral power because she is calling the current government illegitimate. But one of the things that makes these street protests so important is that traditional party politics has not been very effective in recent years. The opposition is extremely fragmented, and the prime minister, Irakli Kobachidze, he is really the creature of a billionaire oligarch behind the scenes, and he has rejected appeals to hold a new election. The police have arrested opposition leaders. And I have to say I spoke to some protesters who, for all of the European flags and the talk of the collective west, he had a pretty dark vision about how this might end.

It's difficult to say, really, at this point in time. I hope that they will step down and they set up the elections, fair elections, with help from others. But at the same time, it is really possible that it might become a really bloody revolution, because people aren't going to fall back. They're going to fight. I'm going to fight. And the police are becoming brutal day by day. So I think we are on a verge. It won't be a civil war, but it will be a revolution.

And you hinted before that this is all a very familiar story in the sort of post Soviet sphere.

That's right. And in fact, you're seeing this kind of war of narratives. You know, on the Kremlin side, they're saying, yes, this is a Typical example of Western hidden forces meddling and trying to start what they would call a color revolution. And they point to parallels with the Maidan Revolution in 2014. That was actually a pro Russian government in Ukraine sparked protests by seeming to move away from things like a free trade deal with Europe towards Vladimir Putin. But that's a very, very politically charged comparison. The Kremlin, their propaganda machine, their spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, absolutely playing on those Ukraine parallels, because for him, that's proof that the CIA is, is sort of behind everything. If you're a protester on the street, you say, well, yes, that Ukraine example is exactly. When pro Russian oligarchs take over our government, we have no choice but to take to the streets.

So what to watch for next in terms of seeing how this is going to go and whether Georgia ends up as a Belarus or worse?

I think we're all going to be watching two places. Clearly, what happens on the streets of Georgia is going to be decisive if these protests continue, if they keep resisting the police brutality night after night. You know, we have seen other cases where governments fall with this level of chaos. But there's also reason to be watching what happens in Brussels and other European capitals and even in Washington. Though Lord knows Washington's quite distracted right now. Because when you have young protesters on the streets saying that they believe in the west, that they believe in their journey towards Europe, that of course runs headlong into a rather sadder reality, which is the appetite for opening the door to new members, to enlarging the family, to all of those kind of post Soviet acts of integration. That's not a popular track. Right now. We're electing our own populist nationalist leaders who have no desire to lower the drawbridge and allow new members in and subsidize their economies and make them modern and European. So there is a real dilemma here. The problem that Europe has is that its superpower, if you like, is generosity, offering that hope of one day letting you into the European family and the modernisation that comes with being an EU member. But if you have a thuggish government applying to join, do you turn a blind eye to its thuggery? Because if you don't, if you punish it, if you sanction it, if you push it away, are you actually just pushing it into the arms of Moscow and Vladimir Putin? So this is a dramatic moment on the streets, but also a geopolitical puzzle of all puzzles.

David, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

For millennia, people have altered food to make it taste better. 3,000 years ago, people living in what is now Mexico and Central America hooked corn kernels in solutions to of wood ash or limestone, softening their outer shells, unlocking nutrients and making them easier to grind. In the 19th century, pasteurization and canning meant that foods could be produced on an industrial scale. Innovations in processing meant that what we ate became cheaper, more convenient, and plentiful. But at the same time, obesity and other diseases have skyrocketed. So what does the heavy processing of food really mean for our health in the rich world?

Most of our diets are now made up of what is known as ultra processed food, made using industrial processes, additives.

Shailesh Chitnis is a global business writer.

Now, over time, there's been a steady stream of research that shows these kind of foods are harmful to human health. And what is the challenge right now for the research communities identifying exactly why these foods are harmful for you? Is it the particular composition of nutrients they happen to be very high in salt, fat, sugar, so on and so forth? Or is there something inherent in the processing itself that makes these harmful to human health?

Ultra processed foods is a term that we're suddenly hearing everywhere. Remind me exactly what it means.

So you're right, it's a relatively new term. This was coined in 2009 by a Brazilian scientist called Carlos Montero. And what had noticed was in Brazil, even though the rates of consumption of sugar and oil had been decreasing in a certain part of the community, the other outcomes that you typically associate with those kind of foods had been increasing. And so he was kind of puzzled with that disparity. He thought the culprit could be highly processed food that this particular segment of population was eating. And that led him to actually look at classifying foods based on the amount of processing that they go through. And so he came up with this classification that is known as the Nova classification. It buckets food into four different categories. The first is your fresh foods, vegetables, which don't undergo any kind of processing. The next is what I would call minimally processed. Think of your milk that goes through pasteurization or things like butter. The third category is more lightly processed. It still goes through some processing, but not as much. And then finally is this last term that we've been talking about, which is ultra processed food. Think of your salty chips, chocolates, all kinds of frozen pizzas, frozen dinners. That is the category of ultra processed food that we are talking about. And that is where a big area of concern is right now.

Processing food was once seen as the answer to all our Problems. You know, it saved us time. Food tastes delicious. So how long has this actually been a problem?

So the concerns around processed food and harm predates even the discussion on upfs. That has always been an area of discussion in terms of as we process food, we make it more palatable, we eat a lot more of it. What are the side effects of that? I think what is new is just the proportion of these kind of foods that are in our diet that has grown huge in the last few decades. And there are good reasons for this. These foods are very tasty. They're also very cheap. So if you look at kind of the calories to dollar count, they're really high. And so that's the reason there's been a lot more attention on these.

And do we know what it is in ultra processed food that's the problem? Is it the ingredients, is it the amount that we eat, or is it the processing?

That is what scientists are trying to figure out. And that's a big area of debate between scientists and researchers on one side, and to be honest, the food industry on the other side. What the food industry claims is it's the ingredients or the nutrients itself that we always know about, like salt, sugar, fat, starch, all these different things are the culprit. And so any food that is high in those ingredients will lead to bad outcomes. I don't think they disagree with that. And so you've seen them formulate a lot of low fat, low sugar, all these different kinds of products. But what a lot of food scientists and nutritionists are saying is even if you account for that, and a lot of observational studies actually try to take that into account, even once you do that, there is still something in those UPF foods that lead to unhealthy outcomes. And so that is where we are at right now.

And what is the current thinking on that? You know, how do you analyze the processing to work out what could be the problem?

So that's a very difficult question. And if, you know, in nutrition science, what we eat is not just about the food itself. It's a function of our environment, our socioeconomic conditions, where we happen to stay, many different conditions. And so how do you isolate that? The gold standard really is what is known as domiciled feeding, where you take a certain population, put them in a diet hotel, give them food to eat, and literally monitor what they've eaten, then measuring calories. So once a study was done in 2019 at the National Institute of Health by the scientific called Dr. Kevin hall, and it was done On a small sample, it's 20 people. As you can imagine, it's pretty expensive and time consuming to run a domicile feeding study. But what they found is if you compare a diet that is rich in ultra processed food versus one that's not, even when you balance them for nutrients and calorie count, the people on the ultra processed diet tended to eat a lot more. And the numbers were actually quite astonishing. Participants gained an average of around 1 kg in the two weeks that they ate ultra processed food, as opposed to the other food samples. So quite striking in a two week period to have that kind of a weight gain.

So what was the conclusion from that, from this diet hotel experience? That it was really what the food was made of or what?

So the conclusion from this experiment was right, we can't just say that it's the nutrients itself because we've controlled for that and even when we control for that, we are still seeing some adverse effects. So there's definitely something in the processing itself. Now the next step is I talked to Dr. Kevin hall and he had two theories. The first is ultra processed foods tend to be what are known as hyper palatable. So if you've eaten one bag of crisps, you'll know you can't just stop at one, you just want to keep eating more. And they're essentially engineered to really appeal to those taste buds, so you overeat a lot. The second is these foods are also very energy dense. In the process of making these foods, typically they're dried out so that they can stay on the shelf for a longer period of time, so a lot of the moisture is removed. And going through these different industrial processes, they pack a lot of energy. If you compare it to unprocessed food, the energy density is going to be much higher here. And so the thinking is it's either the hyperpalatability or the high energy density that's causing people to gain weight. Dr. Hall is now conducting a much larger study, cycling through different combinations of ultra processed foods, some high in hyperpalatability, some not. So to identify where the culprit could be.

And where does this leave us as consumers? It used to be said that you know everything in moderation. As long as it wasn't too much, then it's okay. Hey, is the answer to this that actually we shouldn't have any ultra processed foods or is it still a question of moderation's alright?

So I think the science is going to take a long time to give a definitive answer. But I think what you said is absolutely right. Anything in moderation is always right. And we also know that the fresher food you eat, the better it is. Now, obviously everybody doesn't have that option every time and there are different reasons. But as far as possible, if you can eat fresh food, that is still the best outcome.

Shailesh, thank you so much for your time. Great to talk to you.

Thank you so much.

For years, Ito Tsubasa never questioned his family life. Like most Japanese men, he worked long hours while his wife did all the housework.

Moeka Iida writes about Japan for the.

Economist, but when his wife was pregnant with their second child, she suggested he take paternity leave so that she could focus on her job. For Mr. Ito, that came as a shock. Initially, he said no. The idea felt unacceptable. He didn't know any other man who has taken paternity leave. His wife was very upset and even insisted on aborting the baby. After a heated argument, he eventually gave in and took six months of parental leave. But in hindsight, Mr. Ito is very glad about that experience. He realized the value of having a meaningful relationship with his child, and he also finally understood how difficult it is to raise a child. He said before he thought he was a great dad just because he hung out with the kids on weekends. But he says he couldn't have been more wrong. He told me that now he and his wife share the housework evenly. Mr. Ito is not alone. Across East Asia, ideas about fatherhood are changing. In the region, rigid and conservative gender roles remain entrenched, but younger men are increasingly setting their priorities outside of work, and younger couples are moving towards a more egalitarian approach to childcare. In Japan in 2023, the percentage of eligible men taking paternity leave reached 30% for the first time. In South Korea, the figures are still much lower, but still the rates are increasing there, too. So across the region, women are educated and employed at levels never seen before. But the corresponding movement among men to be more engaged at home has been much slower. That's not necessarily a result of poor policies, and in fact, policies are pretty good in the region. According to unicef, Japan and South Korea have the best paid parental leave for men across the world. In both countries, fathers are able to take a full year of paid leave, but cultural barriers stand in the way. Opinion polls show that in Japan, for instance, a lot of young fathers are keen to take parental leave, but they often hesitate, usually because of senior male managers who are less sympathetic. They also fear losing out on promotions by taking time off and even if they do manage to take parental leave, it tends to be somewhat performative. In Japan, for instance, most men go on leave for just less than two weeks, whereas most women go on leave for more than six months. Neighboring Taiwan offers a somewhat different picture. Taiwanese society is relatively progressive and gender egalitarian. For instance, the gender pay gap there is as narrow as 15%, compared with over 30% in South Korea and 21% in Japan. But that doesn't mean there isn't disparity at home. Women are still doing a huge chunk of the housework. One expert in Taiwan mentioned that in Taiwan, a lack of economic incentives is the main barrier. Taiwan's paid parental leave policy lacks flexibility, and it also sets a monthly upper limit, which means that a lot of high earners face a huge pay cut. For Mr. Ito, the father in Japan, engaged fatherhood is his life mission. He now runs a non profit that supports parenting, and he thinks so many Japanese men are missing out on a great opportunity and the wider social implications could be pretty big. According to Matthias Doppke, an economist at the London School of Economics, cooperative fathers are essential to maintaining high fertility rates. There's many reasons behind this, but experts have repeatedly pointed out the role of unequal family dynamics, which makes it hard for women to balance child rearing with work. If governments want to tackle the demographic crisis more babies and better dads are desperately need.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.