BuzzFlash Reviews
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Paperback)
Raj Patel
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-— Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine
“This is a book full of insight, that makes an important contribution to understanding that the politics of food is not a narrow matter of shopping, ethical or otherwise.”
—- The Guardian
“[A] magisterial account .... the kind of book from which you emerge enlightened, surprised, angry and determined”
—- The Independent
From the Publisher, Melville Books:
It's a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before (800 million) while there are also more people overweight (1 billion).
To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India's wrecked paddy–fields and Africa's bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor–packed streets of South Korea.
What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa.
Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.
Read a "Democracy Now" interview with the author at
Stuffed and Starved: As Food Riots Break Out Across the Globe, Raj Patel Details “The Hidden Battle for the World Food System”
Excerpt from the interview:
AMY GOODMAN: Raj Patel, you write in the beginning of your book, “Our Big Fat Contradiction,” that “the hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical fact: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.” Talk about that contradiction.
RAJ PATEL: It’s a contradiction actually that you see everywhere. I mean, you see it in the States. I mean, the US is the most obese country on the planet. There are only three in ten Americans are now at a normal body weight. And at the same time last year, about thirty-five million Americans went hungry at some point last year. So this contradiction between hunger and obesity is worldwide.
About the Author:
Raj Patel, former policy analyst for Food First, a leading food think tank, is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, and though he has worked for the World Bank, WTO, and the UN, he's also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them.
This wonderful books has a literally global sweep to it, showing, for instance, how some "solutions" to our dependence on oil -- such as biofuels (e.g., ethanol) -- may actually contribute to the world food problem for the have-nots.
Take this excerpt from the author's interview with Amy Goodman:
AMY GOODMAN: Ethanol has been posed as an alternative to oil. What is your response to that?
RAJ PATEL: It’s an alternative to oil if you’re in the grain business. It’s an alternative to oil if you are one of the large industrial grain processors who are looking and lobbying very hard to make money out of the transformation of grain into ethanol.
But it’s an absurd idea. I mean, in terms of just the carbon, the level of carbon that’s in—the level of CO2 that it takes to produce ethanol is much higher than the actual—you know, the saving that you get from burning ethanol. So, in terms of a climate change strategy, ethanol is madness. And sadly, all the major presidential candidates at the moment seem to have been drinking the Kool-Aid on this one. And it seems to be something that doesn’t enter popular discourse as one of the grave dangers in modern American agricultural policy.
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