Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
by Raj Patel
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Manufacturer: Melville House
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.19
EAN: 9781933633497
ISBN: 1933633492
Label: Melville House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 448
Publication Date: 2008-04-25
Publisher: Melville House
Studio: Melville House
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Reclaiming our food rights
Comment: "Stuffed and Starved" by Raj Patel is an ambitious piece of research and critical analysis of the world food system. As both a seasoned policy analyst and news reporter, Mr. Patel's thinking has been enriched through interactions with farmers, businesspeople, policymakers, and activists in four continents. Sharing his thoughts and experiences in an intelligent, mature and accessible manner, Mr. Patel contends that the corporate dominance of the global food production and distribution system must be challenged at the pain of pushing humanity into an ever more insecure and unsustainable future.
Mr. Patel's core argument is that a relatively small number of giant corporations have used their power to benefit themselves at great cost to people's health and the environment. To help build his case, Mr. Patel traveled to Brazil, India and the U.S. to find small farmers who are all but forced to produce food under exploitative terms set by the agribusiness giants. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that farmers who are pressed to merely survive are becoming less and less concerned about conserving land and water resources, much less with preserving the unique varieties of crops that might otherwise enrich our collective experience with food. Instead, farmers tend to produce commodity goods such as soy beans that are often shipped to distant consumers located thousands of miles away; the author follows the flow of product through the supply chain to document and contrast how individual farmers receive next to nothing from their labors while heavily-capitalized distributors, processors and retailers gain enormous profits. Meanwhile, consumers in developed countries gain access to an abundance of cheap but nutritiously-dubious food while many in poorer countries live calorie-deficient lives.
Throughout the text, Mr. Patel provides valuable perspective and context. Mr. Patel views the Green Revolution of the 1960s as an attempt to help India and other recipient countries to resist communism and only secondarily as a project to support the local inhabitants. In fact, Mr. Patel discusses how the inroads made by multinational firms into the Indian farming economy has allowed these companies to successfully market patented pesticides, seeds and farm implements while simultatenously attempting to secure intellectual property rights to indigenous knowledge. Mr. Patel goes on to explain that the rubric of improving the lives of the poor has more recently been used by the biotech industry to market products such as 'golden rice', a food that offers a non-solution to the underlying conditions that drive poverty and malnutrition.
Interestingly, Mr. Patel shows how the military's development of packaged foods production and distribution laid the groundwork for the industrial system we take for granted today. Mr. Patel deconstructs the modern supermarket to demonstrate that the illusion of choice serves to alienate and distract us from our relative powerlessness, pointing out that the corporate food system's heavy dependence on oil exposes society to disaster in the event of supply disruption. Fortunately, the author also discusses how people are beginning to challenge the corporate model, including farmer co-ops, the slow food movement, organic foods, and other strategies. The author is hopeful that reclaiming our food rights can become the basis for a more humane and equitable relationship between people and help to heal the planet that sustains us all.
I highly recommend this outstanding book to everyone.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Contradictions with Connections
Comment: In his comprehensive critique of the global food system, Patel takes his time winding his way through every stage of the food production process, through the experiences and perspectives of all involved--lay and professional--from around the world. Patel ultimately blames both corporations and governments for their complicity in undermining local, cultural, and sustainable foodways and thereby causing the major food-related problems of today, from obesity to starvation. Drenched in details and indictments, Patel's Stuffed and Starved is a broad but accessible analysis of global food struggles that aims to inform and incite the general Western public.
Despite his heady academic and professional background, Patel keeps the technical and academic jargon to a minimum, using basic reportage and narrative description to convey his ideas, analyses, and anecdotes. As such, the book has the possibility of appealing to an audience beyond the academy. However, based on Patel's political bent, Stuffed and Starved is still most likely to play better to a more leftward-leaning and politically-engaged audience.
The breadth of Stuffed and Starved is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. Patel does not shy away from his stated task of examining the global food system in all its overwhelming complexity. He does explain in the introduction that he tries to maintain organization by arranging the chapters according to what should chronologically be the beginning of the food cycle--farming--and then winding his way through each of the stages of food production and distribution until he ends up at consumption. However, the complexity of the system, the global scope of the project, and Patel's own intimate knowledge and passion for the subject work against any kind of neat-and-tidy organization or argument. Although such complexities speak volumes about the current state of the global food system and the major problems within it, they also can be confusing on a number of different levels.
Overall, Stuffed and Starved is an informative introduction for the lay reader interested in political issues related to food production, distribution, and consumption around the world, particularly those who appreciated Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and would like a look beyond the North American context. Academic audiences may also find Patel's text useful for the broad coverage that he gives to various food-related economic and political problems all over the world, as well as his extensive bibliography and research. The book can be used almost like a reference text in this way, indexing an expanse of contemporary food-related issues.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Farmer Suicides and Other Foods For Thought.
Comment: A great documentary story of how we in the better off world end up living off the rest of the world and keep repeating that its for the common good.
Books like this are invaluable in all aspects of the human condition today because it joins the dots to show the economic motive force for many things that happen whether its food, healthcare or wars.
I hope many people read this and mull over the thoughts when they next walk into a Starbucks under the delusion that they are participating in a Dylanesque "cafe" moment from the 1960's or think of MacDonalds as a cheap meal
Customer Rating:
Summary: Smart, Opinionated Reading on Food Politics
Comment: I picked up this book during the Slow Food Nation event and couldn't put it down. Incendiary, smart and endlessly thought-provoking, Stuffed and Starved should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the politics of food. I've read Omnivore's Dilemma and lots of recent nonfiction on food politics, but wasn't familiar much of Patel's subject matter, like Via Campensina and related peasant farm movements.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Sheds light on a difficult subject
Comment: Daniel B. Schuster says:
I was entranced by this book. Mr Patel discusses the micro effects of our agriculture system as well as the macro effects and shows their interaction.. On both farmers and consumers. Every claim or fact in the book is footnoted. And the graphs. The geek part of me could finally understand relationships between farmers, processors and consumers based on the charts of Mr Patel. I've read several books that tried to explain this but failed. Mr. Patel was able to take a complex topic and break it down step by step. Great book.
I agree with the previous reviewer - this book will cause indigestion with mega producers of food.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Reclaiming our food rights
Comment: "Stuffed and Starved" by Raj Patel is an ambitious piece of research and critical analysis of the world food system. As both a seasoned policy analyst and news reporter, Mr. Patel's thinking has been enriched through interactions with farmers, businesspeople, policymakers, and activists in four continents. Sharing his thoughts and experiences in an intelligent, mature and accessible manner, Mr. Patel contends that the corporate dominance of the global food production and distribution system must be challenged at the pain of pushing humanity into an ever more insecure and unsustainable future.
Mr. Patel's core argument is that a relatively small number of giant corporations have used their power to benefit themselves at great cost to people's health and the environment. To help build his case, Mr. Patel traveled to Brazil, India and the U.S. to find small farmers who are all but forced to produce food under exploitative terms set by the agribusiness giants. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that farmers who are pressed to merely survive are becoming less and less concerned about conserving land and water resources, much less with preserving the unique varieties of crops that might otherwise enrich our collective experience with food. Instead, farmers tend to produce commodity goods such as soy beans that are often shipped to distant consumers located thousands of miles away; the author follows the flow of product through the supply chain to document and contrast how individual farmers receive next to nothing from their labors while heavily-capitalized distributors, processors and retailers gain enormous profits. Meanwhile, consumers in developed countries gain access to an abundance of cheap but nutritiously-dubious food while many in poorer countries live calorie-deficient lives.
Throughout the text, Mr. Patel provides valuable perspective and context. Mr. Patel views the Green Revolution of the 1960s as an attempt to help India and other recipient countries to resist communism and only secondarily as a project to support the local inhabitants. In fact, Mr. Patel discusses how the inroads made by multinational firms into the Indian farming economy has allowed these companies to successfully market patented pesticides, seeds and farm implements while simultatenously attempting to secure intellectual property rights to indigenous knowledge. Mr. Patel goes on to explain that the rubric of improving the lives of the poor has more recently been used by the biotech industry to market products such as 'golden rice', a food that offers a non-solution to the underlying conditions that drive poverty and malnutrition.
Interestingly, Mr. Patel shows how the military's development of packaged foods production and distribution laid the groundwork for the industrial system we take for granted today. Mr. Patel deconstructs the modern supermarket to demonstrate that the illusion of choice serves to alienate and distract us from our relative powerlessness, pointing out that the corporate food system's heavy dependence on oil exposes society to disaster in the event of supply disruption. Fortunately, the author also discusses how people are beginning to challenge the corporate model, including farmer co-ops, the slow food movement, organic foods, and other strategies. The author is hopeful that reclaiming our food rights can become the basis for a more humane and equitable relationship between people and help to heal the planet that sustains us all.
I highly recommend this outstanding book to everyone.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Contradictions with Connections
Comment: In his comprehensive critique of the global food system, Patel takes his time winding his way through every stage of the food production process, through the experiences and perspectives of all involved--lay and professional--from around the world. Patel ultimately blames both corporations and governments for their complicity in undermining local, cultural, and sustainable foodways and thereby causing the major food-related problems of today, from obesity to starvation. Drenched in details and indictments, Patel's Stuffed and Starved is a broad but accessible analysis of global food struggles that aims to inform and incite the general Western public.
Despite his heady academic and professional background, Patel keeps the technical and academic jargon to a minimum, using basic reportage and narrative description to convey his ideas, analyses, and anecdotes. As such, the book has the possibility of appealing to an audience beyond the academy. However, based on Patel's political bent, Stuffed and Starved is still most likely to play better to a more leftward-leaning and politically-engaged audience.
The breadth of Stuffed and Starved is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. Patel does not shy away from his stated task of examining the global food system in all its overwhelming complexity. He does explain in the introduction that he tries to maintain organization by arranging the chapters according to what should chronologically be the beginning of the food cycle--farming--and then winding his way through each of the stages of food production and distribution until he ends up at consumption. However, the complexity of the system, the global scope of the project, and Patel's own intimate knowledge and passion for the subject work against any kind of neat-and-tidy organization or argument. Although such complexities speak volumes about the current state of the global food system and the major problems within it, they also can be confusing on a number of different levels.
Overall, Stuffed and Starved is an informative introduction for the lay reader interested in political issues related to food production, distribution, and consumption around the world, particularly those who appreciated Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and would like a look beyond the North American context. Academic audiences may also find Patel's text useful for the broad coverage that he gives to various food-related economic and political problems all over the world, as well as his extensive bibliography and research. The book can be used almost like a reference text in this way, indexing an expanse of contemporary food-related issues.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Farmer Suicides and Other Foods For Thought.
Comment: A great documentary story of how we in the better off world end up living off the rest of the world and keep repeating that its for the common good.
Books like this are invaluable in all aspects of the human condition today because it joins the dots to show the economic motive force for many things that happen whether its food, healthcare or wars.
I hope many people read this and mull over the thoughts when they next walk into a Starbucks under the delusion that they are participating in a Dylanesque "cafe" moment from the 1960's or think of MacDonalds as a cheap meal
Customer Rating:
Summary: Smart, Opinionated Reading on Food Politics
Comment: I picked up this book during the Slow Food Nation event and couldn't put it down. Incendiary, smart and endlessly thought-provoking, Stuffed and Starved should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the politics of food. I've read Omnivore's Dilemma and lots of recent nonfiction on food politics, but wasn't familiar much of Patel's subject matter, like Via Campensina and related peasant farm movements.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Sheds light on a difficult subject
Comment: Daniel B. Schuster says:
I was entranced by this book. Mr Patel discusses the micro effects of our agriculture system as well as the macro effects and shows their interaction.. On both farmers and consumers. Every claim or fact in the book is footnoted. And the graphs. The geek part of me could finally understand relationships between farmers, processors and consumers based on the charts of Mr Patel. I've read several books that tried to explain this but failed. Mr. Patel was able to take a complex topic and break it down step by step. Great book.
I agree with the previous reviewer - this book will cause indigestion with mega producers of food.
“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 and The Shock Doctrine Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese—both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly. To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the “green deserts” of Brazil and protester-packed streets of South Korea to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India. What he uncovers is shocking—the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets. Yet he also finds hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system. From seed to store to plate, Stuffed and Starved explains the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance. RAJ PATEL, 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.
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