Stuffed And Starved: From Farm to Fork: The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

by RajPatel (Author)

New
Paperback
2013
$11.03

We have so much choice over what we eat today because rural communities all over the world have had their choices taken away. To understand how our supermarket shopping makes us complicit in a system that routinely denies freedom to the world's poorest, and how we ourselves are poisoned by these choices, we need to think about the way our food comes to us. Stuffed and Starved takes a long and wide view of food production, to show how we all suffer the consequences of a food system cooked to a corporate recipe. This is also the story of the fight against the unthinking commerce that brings it to us. In the wrecked paddy fields of India, in the soy deserts of Brazil, in the maize ejidos of Mexico, the supermarket aisles of California, French McDonald's and Italian kitchens, there's a worldwide resistance against unhealthy control of the food system.

Synopsis

We have so much choice over what we eat today because rural communities all over the world have had their choices taken away. To understand how our supermarket shopping makes us complicit in a system that routinely denies freedom to the world's poorest, and how we ourselves are poisoned by these choices, we need to think about the way our food comes to us. Stuffed and Starved takes a long and wide view of food production, to show how we all suffer the consequences of a food system cooked to a corporate recipe. This is also the story of the fight against the unthinking commerce that brings it to us. In the wrecked paddy fields of India, in the soy deserts of Brazil, in the maize ejidos of Mexico, the supermarket aisles of California, French McDonald's and Italian kitchens, there's a worldwide resistance against unhealthy control of the food system.

$11.03

Save:$3.66 (25%)

Quantity

Temporarily out of stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 464
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 03 Jan 2013
ISBN 10: 1846274796
ISBN 13: 9781846274794
Book Overview: A FULLY UPDATED AND REVISED NEW EDITION that reveals the hidden complexities and terrifying simplicities of a planet squeezing itself dry in order to make half its citizens obese and the other half malnourished

Media Reviews

Compelling. At first glance, Raj is another depressing voice in the chorus. But in traveling the world researching the book, he also found hope in international social movements working to create more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food systems.
--Mark Bittman, New York Times
For anyone attempting to make sense of the world food crisis, or understand the links between U.S. farm policy and the ability of the world's poor to feed themselves, Stuffed and Starved is indispensable.
--Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma

Stuffed and Starved remains a brilliant didactic account of the powerful interests (dis)organizing our food systems, and why, when food is an object of profit, there are no modern solutions to modern problems such as endemic hunger, ill-health and environmental degradation...Raj Patel's unique sensibility and intelligence in evaluating grassroots alternatives provide a road map to understanding and changing the world through re-centering food as a cultural anchor rather than a product, especially at this moment of environmental uncertainty. --Philip David McMichael, author of Development and Social Change
One of the most dazzling books I have read in a very long time. The product of a brilliant mind and a gift to a world hungering for justice.
--Naomi Klein, author of No Logo
Patel's broad treatment helps the layman connect the dots, as well as hear the voices of those who occupy the lower rungs of the global food chain.
-- Time Magazine
A blistering indictment of the policies of multinational agribusiness conglomerates and charges that their drive for profit at any cost has left the developing world starving while wealthy countries like the United States are experiencing epidemic obesity rates and related health problems.
-- Newsweek
For Patel, it is a short step from Western consumers 'engorged and intoxicated' with cheap processed food to Me

Author Bio

RAJ PATEL is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He has degrees from Oxford, the LSE and Cornell, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He's currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He is currently an IATP Food and Community Fellow. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for the Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Mail on Sunday, and the Observer. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: From Farm to Fork, The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and his latest, The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times best-seller.