In the Great Depression, it's not like anyone was starving to death. Rather it was like they were eating flour paste and dying of malnutrition.
That we are in an era that we need the SBC speaks to how bad things are. Here in the states, we don't have food deserts, we have food swamps, where the only thing one can get is junk food.
Which is great until you get heavy metal poisoning or pfas or whatever the latest one is. My local DNR recommends eating just ONE meal of freshwater fish a MONTH because of water pollution. We are so fucked.
My doom and gloom is catalyzed by a lot of things including, yes, a novelty cookbook that appears to be made in recognition of desperate times. It isn't the only thing that informs my doom and gloom, and this isn't to say I don't have hope. But it is a Goblins at the gates of Gondor kind of situation, in which a lot of things have to go simultaneously right before we're out of the fine mess we're in.
In my case enjoying life is not something that I can simply do. I manage mental illness which features chronic suicidality, but it's been driven into me very hard that I am at fault for my grief and trauma. But having a sober understanding of why I feel the way I do, and the social forces that drove parents, teachers and authorities to treat me the way I did helps me counter those neural processes.
This cartoon illustrates the dynamic I've encountered, and I hypothesize the mental illness epidemic in the US is intergenerational and compounding.
That we're also dealing with a couple of imminent great filters the human species is unprepared to navigate hits hard for me.