Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World's Food System

By Raj Patel, Melville House Publishing. Posted June 2, 2008.

The following is an excerpt from Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel, published with permission from Melville House Publishing.

Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.

Global hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same problem and, what's more, the route to eradicating world hunger is also the way to prevent global epidemics of diabetes and heart disease, and to address a host of environmental and social ills. Overweight and hungry people are linked through the chains of production that bring food from fields to our plate.

Guided by the profit motive, the corporations that sell our food shape and constrain how we eat, and how we think about food. The limitations are clearest at the fast food outlet, where the spectrum of choice runs from McMuffin to McNugget. But there are hidden and systemic constraints even when we feel we're beyond the purview of Ronald McDonald. Even when we want to buy something healthy, something to keep the doctor away, we're trapped in the very same system that has created our Fast Food Nations?

Try, for example, shopping for apples. At supermarkets in North America and Europe, the choice is restricted to half a dozen varieties: Fuji, Braeburn, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and perhaps a couple of others. Why these? Because they're pretty: we like the polished and unblemished skin. Because their taste is one that's largely unobjectionable to the majority. But also because they can stand transportation over long distances. Their skin won't tear or blemish if they're knocked about in the miles from orchard to aisle. They take well to the waxing technologies and compounds that make this transportation possible and keep the apples pretty on the shelves. They are easy to harvest. They respond well to pesticides and industrial production. These are reasons why we won't find Calville Blanc, Black Oxford, Zabergau Reinette, Kandil Sinap or the ancient and venerable Rambo on the shelves.

Our choices are not entirely our own because, even in a supermarket, the menu is crafted not by our choices, nor by the seasons, nor where we find ourselves, nor by the full range of apples available, nor by the full spectrum of available nutrition and tastes, but by the power of food corporations.

The concerns of food production companies have ramifications far beyond what appears on supermarket shelves. Their concerns are the rot at the core of the modern food system. To show the systemic ability of a few to impact the health of the many demands A global investigation, travelling from the green deserts of Brazil to the architecture of the modern city, and moving through history from the time of the first domesticated plants to the Battle of Seattle.

It's an enquiry that uncovers the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, why there is a worldwide epidemic of farmer suicides, why we don't know what's in our food any more, why Black people in the United States are more likely to be overweight than white, why there are cowboys in South Central Los Angeles, and how the world's largest social movement is discovering ways, large and small, for us to think about, and live differently with, food.

The alternative to eating the way we do today promises to solve hunger and diet-related disease, by offering a way of eating and growing food that is environmentally sustainable and socially just. Understanding the ills of the way food is grown and eaten also offers the key to greater freedom, and a way of reclaiming the joy of eating. The task is as urgent as the prize is great.

In every country, the contradictions of obesity, hunger, poverty and wealth are becoming more acute. India has, for example, destroyed millions of tons of grains, permitting food to rot in silos, while the quality of food eaten by India's poorest is getting worse for the first time since Independence in 1947. In 1992, in the same towns and villages where malnutrition had begun to grip the poorest families, the Indian government admitted foreign soft drinks manufacturers and food multinationals to its previously protected economy. Within a decade, India has become home to the world's largest concentration of diabetics: people -- often children -- whose bodies have fractured under the pressure of eating too much of the wrong kinds of food.

India isn't the only home to these contrasts. They're global, and they're present even in the world's richest country. In the United States in 2005, 35.1 million people didn't know where their next meal was coming from. At the same time there is more diet-related disease like diabetes, and more food, in the US than ever before.

It's easy to become inured to this contradiction; its daily version causes only mild discomfort, walking past the homeless and hungry, signs on the way to supermarkets bursting with food. There are moral emollients to balm a troubled conscience: the poor are hungry because they're lazy, or perhaps the wealthy are fat because they eat too richly.

This vein of folk wisdom has a long pedigree. Every culture has had, in some form or other, an understanding of our bodies as public ledgers on which is written the catalogue of our private vices. The language of condemnation doesn't, however, help us understand why hunger, abundance and obesity are more compatible on our planet than they've ever been. Moral condemnation only works if the condemned could have done things differently, if they had choices.

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