Stuffed and starved
Evelyn Ross reviews an uncomfortable examination of the world food situation by writer Raj Patel
This book will make you angry. And if you still have any illusions that the majority of those who process and manufacture our food have our best interests at heart, then they will be dispelled. Today on this planet, 800 million people are hungry, and they are outnumbered by one billion people who are overweight. Raj Patel maintains that these are symptoms of the same problem. He describes in tragic and sometimes witty detail how ‘overweight and hungry people are linked by the chains of production that bring food from the fields to our plate’.
One of the issues that he explores is that of farmer suicide. In India this has reached epidemic proportions (see the satirical film Peepli Live) and in the prosperous global North, including the UK, farming has the highest suicide rate of any profession. Patel explains the reasons for this and his arguments are compelling.
He also explores the roles of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, which are run by and for those in power in the global North, and the role of GM (genetic modification) technology and the power of agricultural companies like Monsanto. The large supermarkets and food production companies are certainly not let off the hook – reading the Ethical Consumer magazine in the past few months shows how many of their practices are unethical. Their thirst for profits has led to food full of fat, sugar and chemicals, and they present this as ‘our choice’.
Patel chooses the growing and trading of soya beans as one illustration of the degradation and injustice that the system can impose. Soy is a component in nearly three-quarters of the products on supermarket shelves; it is also a key animal food (and worth noting that most soy, and therefore the soy in your meat, is probably genetically modified), and in different forms it is omnipresent – it would be difficult to manage a day without coming into contact with it (a bit like fossil fuel). It is indeed a marvellous plant. Patel says: ‘It has come to occupy a key place in the world food system, not because of its taste or flavour, but because of its utility to everyone except the consumer.’ The darker side of the story is that its monoculture and industrial production involves ‘environmental destruction, murder and slavery’.
In case we should begin to despair, Raj Patel tells us in his last chapter that there is hope. This comes in the form of farmers’ movements all over the world that are fighting for a better food system. Today’s food system is failing as we deplete our reserves of fossil fuels, soil fertility and water, and those who argue for a sustainable food system are frequently gagged or ignored. But organisations like Via Campesina and the South African Landless People’s Movement are not deterred. Patel also lists what we can do to make a difference, including changing our tastes, eating locally and seasonally, eating agroecologically, supporting locally owned business (so that money stays in the local economy rather than going straight to the HQs of multinationals), campaigning for workers’ rights and living wages for all, and owning and providing restitution for the injustices of the past and present. He points out that all of us in the global North have profited from the exploitation of rural people in the global South, and more than that we are now the cause of climate change that will hit agriculture in the global South hardest of all.
For Quakers, issues around food involve all of our concerns – justice, integrity, equality, care for the planet, peace.
Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel, Portobello Books, ISBN: 978 184627 011 6. £8.99.
