Fatima Ibrahim was having two of her children weighed, measured and fussed over when we found her with 30 other mums and more than 50 hungry kids at an emergency feeding centre in northern Kenya. Barwaco came in at 12.8kg and her brother Mohamed at 8.1, and both were crying lustily as people crowded round Dida Jirma, a young community doctor.

Jirma noted the children’s weights and height and measured the circumference of their left upper arms. Some were ominously quiet and clearly ill, others playful. When it was Fatima’s turn, the doctor dived into a big cardboard box and counted out two dozen silver foil sachets of Plumpy’nut – one of the 21st century’s true superfoods.

Barwaco and Mohamed come from Nana, a small village way up on the stony Kenyan Ethiopian border. But like millions more children around the world, they owe their lives to this brand of food which is never advertised and is unknown outside disaster spots. The sweet paste, invented by a French scientist, is made under licence to UN children’s charity Unesco on an industrial estate outside Le Havre, and its mix of peanut butter, vegetable oils, powdered milk, sugar, vitamins and minerals is the equivalent of royal jelly, açaí berries and chocolate all wrapped into one for malnourished children. It’s cheap – a sachet costs about 85p – and because it needs no cooking or added water, children can safely feed themselves on it at home. In just a few years “ready-to-use therapeutic foods” (RUTF) like Plumpy’nut have revolutionised the treatment of severe malnutrition.

It’s taken a long time, but the issue of global climate change is finally getting the attention it deserves. While enormous technical, policy, and economic issues remain to be solved, there is now widespread acceptance of the need to confront the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. Collectively, we are beginning to acknowledge that our long addiction to fossil fuels — which has been harming our national security, our economy and our environment for decades — must end. The question today is no longer why, but how. The die is cast, and our relationship to energy will never be the same.

The global imagery of capitalist plenty has long ago been usurped, not only by other visions of an earthly paradise, but also other versions of prosperity. Capitalist ideology has ceased to be abstract theory and is made tangible in every object of desire set before us. At the same time, in this promiscuous spillage of commodities, a whole moral universe is implicit.

Puritans and moralists sometimes identify consumerism, the bonus culture, the acquisitive society, live-now-pay-later philosophy as “greed”. But these, like all other sins and vices, have been recast by the altered moral order. Many of what were regarded as human failings have been transformed into economic virtues. Covetousness has become ambition, envy now reappears as a manifestation of a healthy competitive spirit, gluttony is only a natural desire for more and lust a necessary expression of our deepest human reality. Temptation is no longer an impulse to be resisted: it is our duty to yield to it in the name of that most exalted of purposes, “consumer confidence“.