Stuffed And Starved | Granta

  • Published: 03/01/2013
  • ISBN: 9781846274794
  • 129x20mm
  • 464 pages

Stuffed And Starved

Raj Patel

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.

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

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 How To Change Your Mind

A magisterial account of the global food system. This is the kind of book from which you emerge enlightened, surprised, angry and determined

Paul Kingsnorth, Independent

The Author

RAJ PATEL is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. In addition to his scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics and public health journals, he regularly writes for the Guardian, and has contributed to publications including the Financial Times and the New York Times. Stuffed and Starved is his first book and is published in eleven countries. He is also the author of The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy and co-author, with Jason W. Moore, of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. www.rajpatel.org

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From the Same Author

The Value Of Nothing

Raj Patel

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. Yet despite its failures, the same market-driven ideas are being applied to everything from famine to climate change. We need to ask again one of the most fundamental questions a society ever addresses: why do things cost what they do? Radical, original, nimbly argued, The Value of Nothing draws on ideas from history, philosophy, psychology and agriculture to show how we can build an economically and environmentally sound future.