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“Stuffed & Starved” by Raj Patel – a review
Amanda Kovattana, Flickr blog
Raj Patel is much sought after these days since the rise in the price of food worldwide. In his book he attempts to explain the world food system in the tradition of Frances Moore Lappe’s Food First and Diet for a Small Planet.
… He describes a couple of movements working to change the system including the Landless Rural Movement in Brazil which is a voluntary cooperative system that is democratically run and organized by the farmers trying to occupy land. The details he gives from having visited one of these settlements broadened my understanding of this movement which Noam Chomsky called the world’s most important social movement.
He is a fan of the Slow Food movement and farmer’s markets, but not organic food in that organic food production as applied to agribusiness is not much different from chemical agribusiness.
In his conclusion he lists 10 ways to change the system
- Transform our tastes and get away from what commercial food production has taught us to want.
- Eat locally and seasonally
- Eat agroecologically meaning eat food produced in harmony with the local environment as developed in Cuba and embraced by Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution in Japan as well as the UN developed sustainable agriculture network.
- Support locally owned business not supermarkets or big box stores. He points out the flaw in corporate responsibility because it hinges on profit being made.
- All workers have the right to dignity through unions that are allowed to organize without persecution.
- Profound and comprehensive rural change such as equitable land distribution, but also including education, healthcare and infrastructure.
- Living wages for all so poor can access food.
- Support for sustainable architecture of food. Local markets and CSAs.
- Snapping the food system’s bottleneck. Curb power of monopoles through anti-trust laws.
- Owning and providing restitution for the injustices of the past and present. Forgive debt owed by the Global South to the Global North and start paying back for damage we have done.
(16 July 2008)
Raj Patel spoke at a local bookstore tonight – sincere, articulate and with a British sense of humor. -BA
UPDATE (Aug 31). Amanda just posted an account of a lecture by Raj Patel.
An interview with Bob Waldrop
Aaron Newton, Groovy Green 3.0!
This spring I had the pleasure of talking with Bob Waldrop as part of a series of interviews done for the forthcoming book A Nation of Farmers. Bob is a native, 4th generation Oklahoman, who was born and raised in Tillman County in southwest Oklahoma. His great-grandparents came to Oklahoma Territory before statehood. He is the founder of the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House (which delivers food to people in need who don’t have transportation), the president of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, and works as director of music at Epiphany of the Lord Catholic Church.
… Aaron Newton: Is it correct to characterize your work with local food as social justice work?
Bob Waldrop: Well, that’s true. During a lot of my life I’ve just been really poor, and so there was a time in my life where the only reason that I had bread was that I had wheat and I had a grinder and I was able to grind my own flour to make bread. And the only reason that I had tomatoes is because I had tomato plants in my yard. And the only way that I had a meal at all was that I was willing to cook meals from basic ingredients. So I actually come at this not from a position of affluence, but from a place of experience with scarcity and having to figure out how to feed eight people with a quarter pound of sausage and a cup of milk.
AN: As the cost of food is rising in this country we’re hearing that people making poor nutritional choices. The idea being that if they can’t afford to buy better food, fresh food, or organic food and that they’re forced to buy processed foods- that they’re basically eating ramen noodles every evening for dinner. Are you saying that they can have nutritionally adequate diets?
BW: Well, you can take ramen noodles and you can make something better, more healthy out of them also. I’ve eaten a lot of ramen noodles in my day and ramen noodles are actually kind of an interesting substrate for many different kinds of stirfries. People aren’t changing their food choices so that they’re buying, say, pork neckbones and whole wheat flour- or even white flour for that matter- they’re just buying the cheaper processed foods, the corn dogs and the cheap pizzas and hot dogs and mystery meats like that.
There’s been an almost complete loss of cultural information from generation to generation in a lot of poverty communities. A lot of strategies of their parents and grandparents, the younger generation simply isn’t aware of.
… AN: From a big picture perspective, Bob, what concerns you most going forward about the future of food or in a more general sense the future of human existence going into the 21st century? Is there a particular problem that most concerns you?
BW: Well, I just think we’re coming to a perfect storm with the whole peak oil, the climate change, and general ecological devastation. And I think we’re more dependent than we’ve ever been on highly centralized systems of distribution, just-in-time inventory systems. That’s all just a lot weaker than most people think, and it puts us truly at risk.
About interviewer Aaron Newton:
By day this mild mannered land planner seeks ways to transform the current course of human land use development in an effort to prepare for global oil production peak and its effects on automotive suburban America. By night he writes at Groovy Green regarding resource depletion, energy descent and reasonable responses to the issues not addressed on the nightly newz.
(25 August 2008)
Cambodians eat rats to beat global food crisis
Mark Tran, The Guardian
Rat meat has become such a popular alternative to other dearer meats in Cambodia that its price has increased fourfold.
As inflation pushes the price of beef beyond the reach of the poor, increased demand for rat meat has pushed up rodent prices. A kilogram of rat meat now costs 5,000 riel (69p) compared with 1,200 riel last year. Spicy field rat dishes with garlic are increasingly on the menu as beef costs 20,000 riel a kilo.
Officials said rats were fleeing to higher ground from flooded areas of the lower Mekong Delta, making it easier for villagers to catch them.
“Many children are happy making some money from selling the animals to the markets, but they keep some for their family,” said Ly Marong, an agriculture official. “Not only are our poor eating it, but there is also demand from Vietnamese living on the border with us.”
He estimated that Cambodia supplied more than a tonne of live rats a day to Vietnam…
(27 August 2008)
Why urban farming isn’t just for foodies
Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine
This year, Carol Nissen’s crops include mesclun, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and assorted herbs. When she sits down to dine, she’s often eating food grown with her own two hands.
But Nissen isn’t tilling the soil on a farm. She’s a Web designer who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey — one of the most cramped, concrete-laden landscapes in the nation. Nissen’s vegetables thrive in pots and boxes crammed into her house and in wee plots in her yard. “I’m a micro-gardener,” she says. “It’s a pretty small townhouse. But it’s amazing what you can do without much space.”
The term for this is urban farming — the art of growing vegetables in cities that otherwise resemble the Baltimore of The Wire.It has become increasingly trendy in recent years, led by health-conscious foodies coveting just-picked produce, as well as hipsters who dig the roll-your-own vibe.
But I think it’s time to kick it up a notch…
(18 August 2008)
