In These Times: Food Fights

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Culture > July 8, 2008
Food Fights
By Jeremy Gantz



Globally, 1 billion overweight people coexist with 800 million starving people.

That’s one of many perverse facts in Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Melville House, April 2008, U.S. release), author Raj Patel’s searing indictment of the forces that shape what and how we eat.

Patel is an ideal candidate to explain this tragic paradox: He has worked for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations. But as the book’s back cover notes, he’s also been “tear-gassed on four continents protesting them.”

Patel writes that he is appalled by global food inequality, but he tempers his anger with the informed and sharp analysis of a policy-wonk (he’s now a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley).

Patel is more precocious tour guide than dispassionate academic. He details the causes of agricultural crises around the world, from the suicides of indebted Indian farmers to the tens of thousands of slaves supporting Brazil’s rapidly growing soy industry.

And that is Stuffed & Starved’s chief strength and weakness: Throughout 300-plus pages, Patel’s wide-angle lens and agile intellect chronicle so many people, on so many continents, that the book ultimately is more a lucid list of injustices than a cogent argument.

And yet it should serve as an invaluable primer for anyone new to the politics of food. With a problem as complex and as hidden from affluent consumers’ appetites as our food system, descriptions of how that system undermines farmers’ livelihoods are in order.

Patel writes about how Britain’s colonial-era food system — built through Caribbean plantations and settler colonies — is a prelude to post-World War II U.S. food aid and development policies. He cuts a devastating path through the origins of the global food system and its increasingly transnational corporate management: from British imperialist Cecil Rhodes (who said, “The Empire … is a bread and butter question”) to Americans, such as Earl Butz, Nixon’s agricultural secretary (“Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the U.S. negotiating kit”). .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3786/