The “Stuffed” and the “Starved”

I’m posting great gobs of a Q & A with Raj Patel, author of “Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System”, because I think what he says is so f*#%g important and also, critically different and “more than” what folks like Michael Pollan have to say:

Free markets in food and certainly global markets in food are a very new thing. They are barely 200 years old and their origins have everything to do with colonialism. The world’s first free market in grain was the market in wheat in the 1880s. This market was forged in imperialism and conquest, particularly by the British over the grain baskets of South Asia.

The social safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked away by the British. If people couldn’t afford food, they didn’t get to eat and if they couldn’t buy food, they starved. As a result of the imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism. Those are the origins of markets in food.

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The middleman will buy at 14 cents per kilo and sell at 19 cents. The mill will buy at 19 cents and sell at 24. Then it is bought by Nestle in West London where it will cost $1.64 per kilo and then it gets turned into instant coffee. By the time it comes out, it costs $26 per kilo — more than 200 times the cost of what it was in Uganda. That transformation suggests that whenever there’s a price spike the benefits of that tend to accumulate in the parts of the food system where the most power is concentrated.

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I don’t think people realize quite how much food culture and body image really matter.

The example that comes to mind is Fiji. Anorexia and bulimia were virtually non-existent before 1995 when television was beamed in. Within three years of predominately U.S. television, 12 percent of teenage Fijian girls were bulimic. That’s batshit crazy yet I think we are so inured to all the advertising and food culture that is around us that it feels normal. There’s nothing normal about it.

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The message that is so much harder to explain to Americans is that politics is necessary. People do need to get their hands dirty by getting involved in social change. There is a particularly American fantasy that we can together create a better world by shopping. It’s absolutely a case of thinking we can go to Whole Foods, choose the right thing, shop here, pay for this and all of a sudden we will lift the righteous above the impure.

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It’s interesting to me that when the Italian Communist Slow Food movement gets talked about in America, the first bit gets dropped off. But they are communist and they have this very radical question: Why is it that only rich people get to have pleasure? Why is pleasure not the birthright of everyone? The rich and radical moment is when you take this idea that pleasure should be the right of everyone and you go do something about it The slow food movement was responsible for helping to drive up agricultural wages and instrumental in creating a two hour lunch break. They did this, not through individual shopping choices, but through concerted political action and working with people, organizing, being democratic, and then taking on power.

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I think too often our guilt rather than our anger takes over and the guilt points us to look at the right kinds of labels. But I don’t think we should feel guilty; we should feel angry. That’s definitely what I’m trying to get across in the book.

at Alternet