Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel

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Unfortunately I didn't finish this book, not because it's bad but because I'd reached my quite low mental limit for nonfiction books(*) (Why yes, this did help make my Phd unbearable) "Luckily" I accidentally arrived at the library 45 minutes before it opened, so spent the time reading the last chapter (having read the first 2 or 3 already) and deciding on bits to quote.

So: this is a very good book, exploring the problems with the global food industry, how it's bad for everyone from farmers to consumers, and how everyone can fix it.

There's a website, which has one of the most important things to take away from it, what to do.

Here's a the full annotated list but in short:

• Transform our tastes.
  
• Eat locally and seasonally.
  
• Eat agroecologically.
  
• Support locally owned business.
  
• Insist that the workers who grow our food have the right to dignity.
  
• Advocate profound and comprehensive rural change.
  
• Demand living wages for all.
  
• Support a sustainable architecture of food.
  
• Snap the food system’s bottleneck.
  
• Own and provide restitution for the injustices of the past and present.
  

And yes, I know a lot of you have been doing this stuff for ages, and good for you. I'm still not becoming vegan :P And I must admit I've been avoiding some of these ideas partly because I don't want my smugly activist father and sister to be all..smug about it. But that's silly.

I think the easiest and most personally beneficial thing for me at least is to buy fruit and veg from local stores and preferably farmers markets (supermarket F&V is foul). Luckily I have a quite good fruit and veg store right near my house, I realise this is harder for other people.

I think I shall buy a copy, possibly from Boffins (a locally owned bookstore) and think about it all some more.

And now two photocopied and scanned bits which I hope Mr Patel wouldn't object to (and yes, if I was smart I would have scanned it BEFORE going to library):



(*)This being entirely sanguinity's fault.

Comments

[sanguinity]

:: "Snap the food system's bottleneck." ::

It's a reference to the situation shown in the diagrams Sophie scanned. The width of the figures at any point shows the number of... decision-making entities at any point of the food production/distribution system, while the top-to-bottom axis shows the flow of food through the system. So in the left-hand figure (western Europe, more-or-less), there are 3 million farmers and 160 million consumers, but there's a point just after the food manufacturing and just before the supermarkets, where 110 people are making the decisions about what food is going to be available in the supermarkets.

Patel points out that those 110 people have a stunning amount of power on the market -- they determine what the farmers can find markets for and what prices they get, and what's available for consumers to buy and again at what prices -- and they don't work for the benefit of either the consumers or the farmers, but for the big food conglomerates. And, Patel continues, everyone who isn't a big food conglomerate is suffering accordingly.

Patel doesn't give detailed plans for how to "snap the bottleneck"; he more points our attention at it as being an action that would give a lot of benefit, if we could figure out how to do it. Patel does give hints, though -- collective action is a big, recurring theme in the book.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Oh I see. Thanks for explaining. (I confess I hadn't actually read the scan - I glanced at it and decided the font was too small for me to cope.)

A lot of work is being done in Britain at the moment about snapping that bottleneck. The strategies focus on means of permitting direct supply between farmers and consumers. So things like farmer's markets, farm shops, vegetable box schemes, small local co-operatives etc. And also organisations like the Countryside Alliance do a lot of work promoting local foods and retailers who concentrate on local suppliers, as well as alternative agriculture products such as game or local alternatives to foodstuffs that would otherwise have to be imported and which are frequently those requiring the heaviest use of agrochemicals (promoting rape seed oil instead of corn oil is a good example). Most of this is bottom up inspired - driven by the commercial needs of the farmers - but a real sea change has begun to occur, and several of the major supermarkets are now trying to push local produce as well because they are feeling top down pressure from the consumers as well.

But it is one of the (numerous) things that worries me about the current economic climate - a lot of people are already starting to cut back on the costlier foodstuffs, and that normally means local food grown to high environmental and welfare standards.

From the other side of course, there will always be a market for uniform, cheap produce, so work is being done to try to grow more of that locally. A friend of mine is a farm manager for one of the large vegetable suppliers on the South coast, and they are experimenting with all sorts of crops that ten years ago would never have been considered. New crop protection and raising techniques, along with new breeds, mean all sorts of things are now possible.