Raj Patel

Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist 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 the university currently known as 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. Raj co-taught the 2014 Edible Education class at UC Berkeley with Michael Pollan. In 2016 he was recognized with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and was an Advisor to Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Ohlone people

‘Repair is the reimagination of power’: Healing from the injustices of colonialism

‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’, a new book by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya, is a tour of the human body that reveals the links between our biology and political and economic injustices such as racism, poverty and colonialism.

March 15, 2022

Inflamed bookcover

“Inflamed”: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness

As much of the world struggles to cope with the pandemic and its impacts, we begin today’s show with the authors of a new book that examines the social and environmental roots of poor health. “Your body is part of a society inflamed,” write the authors.

August 5, 2021

American agriculture

A Green New Deal for Agriculture

The Green New Deal’s success depends on refashioning this common sense. To rewrite common sense is to unpick the alliances that the current bloc works to maintain, to find the fault lines that can pry that bloc apart, and to develop the organizational links that can build a counter-hegemonic bloc.

April 10, 2019

Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology

Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene.

January 4, 2018

How to Feed Ourselves in a Time of Climate Crisis

Changing the food system is the most important thing humans can do to fix our broken carbon cycles. Meanwhile, food security is all about adaptation when you’re dealing with crazy weather and shifting growing zones. How can a world of 7 billion—and growing—feed itself? Here are 13 of the best ideas for a just and sustainable food system. 

September 13, 2017

Against Cheap Food: An Aide Memoir

Either we accept cheap food at the grocery store, and have people – invariably poor people – pay for environmental damage in health, social and economic costs incurred elsewhere. Or we have more expensive food that reflects the full costs of its production.

March 13, 2017

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