Stuffed And Starved

Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System

Raj Patel

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781554680115
• eBook ISBN:
  9781554689460
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

At no other time in history have people in wealthy countries had so much choice and so much abundance in what to eat. But in countries locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, there is no choice. There is no food.

Raj Patel shows us that these two extremes are deeply and inextricably linked. In Stuffed and Starved, he asks us to think about the way our food comes to us, to understand how what we buy directly affects the world's poorest citizens and to recognize how we ourselves are poisoned by our choices. Patel gives us a broad view of the global food industry and the all-encompassing machine composed of organizations such as the World Bank and the WTO, corporate lobbyists, government agencies and the all-powerful distribution networks. He also traces the specific journey of coffee, soy and high-fructose corn syrup, from the fields to the kitchens of fast-food restaurants. Stuffed and Starved is a shocking and timely story of commercial greed, desperate hunger and inspirational alternatives to the current food system.

1
Introduction

Our Big Fat Contradiction

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.¹ 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. Yet the prevalence of hunger and obesity affect populations with far too much regularity, in too many different places, for it to be the result of some personal failing. Part of the reason our judgement is so out of kilter is because the way we read bodies hasn’t kept up with the times. Although it may once have been true, the assumption that to be overweight is to be rich no longer holds. Obesity can no longer be explained exclusively as a curse of individual affluence. There are systemic features that make a difference. Here’s an example: many teenagers in Mexico, a developing country with an average income of US$6,000, are bloated as never before, even as the ranks of the Mexican poor swell. Individual wealth doesn’t explain why the children of some families are more obese than others: the crucial factor turns out not to be income, but proximity to the US border. The closer a Mexican family lives to its northern neighbours and to their sugar- and fat-rich processed food habits, the more overweight the family’s children are likely to be.² That geography matters so much rather overturns the idea that personal choice is the key to preventing obesity or, by the same token, preventing hunger. And it helps to renew the lament of Porfirio Diaz, one of Mexico’s late-nineteenth-century presidents and autocrats: ‘¡Pobre Mexico! Tan lejos de Dios; y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos’ (Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States).

A perversity of the way our food comes to us is that it’s now possible for people who can’t afford enough to eat to be obese. Children growing up malnourished in the favelas of São Paulo, for instance, are at greater risk from obesity when they become adults. Their bodies, broken by childhood poverty, metabolize and store food poorly. As a result, they’re at greater risk of storing as fat the (poor-quality) food that they can access.³ Across the planet, the poor can’t afford to eat well. Again, this is true even in the world’s richest country; and in the US, it’s children who will pay the price. One research team recently suggested that if consumption patterns stay the way they are, today’s US children will live five fewer years, because of the diet-related diseases to which they will be exposed in their lifetimes.⁴

As consumers, we’re encouraged to think that an economic system based on individual choice will save us from the collective ills of hunger and obesity. Yet it is precisely ‘freedom of choice’ that has incubated these ills. Those of us able to head to the supermarket can boggle at the possibility of choosing from fifty brands of sugared cereals, from half a dozen kinds of milk that all taste like chalk, from shelves of bread so sopped in chemicals that they will never go off, from aisles of products in which the principal ingredient is sugar. British children are, for instance, able to select from twenty-eight branded breakfast cereals the marketing of which is aimed directly at them. The sugar content of twenty-seven of these exceeds the government’s recommendations. Nine of these children’s cereals are 40 per cent sugar.⁵ It’s hardly surprising, then, that 8.5 per cent of six-year-olds and more than one in ten fifteen-year-olds in the UK are obese. And the levels are increasing. The breakfast cereal story is a sign of a wider systemic feature: there’s every incentive for food producing corporations to sell food that has undergone processing which renders it more profitable, if less nutritious. Incidentally, this explains why there are so many more varieties of breakfast cereals on sale than varieties of apples.

There are natural limits to our choices. There are, for instance, only so many naturally occurring fruits, vegetables and animals that people are prepared to eat. But even here, a little advertising can persuade us to expand the ambit of our choices. Think of the kiwi fruit, once known as the Chinese gooseberry, but rebranded to accommodate Cold War prejudices by the New Zealand food company that marketed it to the world at the end of the 1950s. It’s a taste no-one had grown up with, but which now seems as if it has always been there. And while new natural foods are slowly added to our menus, the food industry adds tens of thousands of new products to the shelves every year, some of which become indispensable fixtures which, after a generation, make life unimaginable without them. It’s a sign of how limited our gastronomic imaginations can be. And also a sign that we’re not altogether sure how or where or why certain foods end up on our plate.

Arcadia Lost

Old Macdonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O,

And on his farm he had a cow, E-I-E-I-O,

With a ‘moo-moo’ here and a ‘moo-moo’ there,

Here a ‘moo’, there a ‘moo’,

Everywhere a ‘moo-moo’,

Old Macdonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.

Traditional

The story of food production to which most of us can admit, almost as a reflex, owes more to fairy tales and children’s television programming than anything else. Without a reason to revisit the creation myths of food we learned when young, we carry around unquestioned our received opinions of pastoral bliss, of farmers planting the seeds in the ground, watering them and hoping that the sun will come out so that the plants can grow big and strong. This is certainly one description of how food is grown. It’s just one that glosses over the most important parts. The tales we tell about farming stuff a sock into the mouths of the world’s rural poor. When food’s provenance is reduced to a single line on a label, there’s much we don’t understand, nor even understand we should ask.

Who, for example, is the central character in our story of food –the farmer? What is her life like? What can she afford to eat? If only we asked, we’d know: the majority of the world’s farmers are suffering. Some are selling off their lands to become labourers on their family plots. Some migrate to the cities, or even overseas. A few, too many, resort to suicide.

The questions continue. What, for example, does a farmer plant? Most farmers’ choice of crop is tightly circumscribed by the kinds of land they own, the climate, their access to markets, credit and a range of visible and invisible ingredients in the production of food. There is no moment of sucking a finger, holding it to the wind and deciding what it’d be nice to eat next year. If they’re hoping to sell their crops for cash rather than eat them themselves, most farmers have few options, particularly those in the Global South (the term I use in this book to refer to the world’s poorer countries).⁶ They will have to grow the crops that the market demands.

The business of farming is, at the end of the day, constrained by the playing-field of the market. What this language hides, though, is that the terrain of the market isn’t so much a playing-field as a razor’s edge. If there’s room to make planting choices at all, they are tough decisions based on optimizing multiple parameters, with little room for error. The market punishes poor choices with penury. For farmers who are already highly indebted, this means bankruptcy. Banks and grain distributors have developed novel ways for dealing with the subsequent insolvency. Contract farming or land rental arrangements, for example, reduce farmers to providing raw labour on what used to be their own land. Old MacDonald now rents his farm. Yet farmers are willing to subject themselves to these new farming arrangements because they have so little choice. With banks wielding the threat of foreclosure, any kind of farming, even the kind of farming that asset-strips the soil, is preferable to no farming at all.

As the farmer is forced into ‘choosing’ among these alternatives, other options are removed as possibilities. And at the same time as the set of choices for farmers is winnowed down, others – powerful groups, corporations, governments – expand the empire of their options. At every stage of the story of food, choices are made over a wide range of issues, from the obvious to the esoteric. Who chooses the safe levels of pesticides, and how is ‘safe’ defined? Who chooses what should be sourced from where in making your meal? Who decides what to pay the farmers who grow the food, or the farm workers who work for farmers? Who decides that the processing techniques used in bringing the meal together are safe? Who makes money from the additives in food and decides they do more good than harm? Who makes sure there is plenty of cheap energy to transport and assemble the ingredients from all around the world?

These choices may seem impossibly distant, so removed from our experience as food shoppers that they might as well happen on Mars. Yet the very same forces that shape farmers’ choices also reach to the stacked aisles of the supermarket. Who, after all, fixes the range of items that fill the aisles in the supermarket? Who chooses how much it costs? Who spends millions of dollars to find out that the smell of baking bread and the wail of Annie Lennox in the aisles might make people buy more? Who decides that the prices in the market are higher than the poorest can afford?

Here lies the crux. The narrow abundance of the aisles, the apparently low prices at the checkout and the almost constant availability of foods, these things are our sop. ‘Convenience’ anaesthetizes us as consumers. We are dissuaded from asking hard questions, not only about how our individual tastes and preferences are manipulated, but about how our choices at the checkout take away the choices of those who grow our food.

About Joe

A recent report from Oxfam provides fodder for thinking about where the power lies along the chain of food production. Consider the case of Lawrence Seguya, a coffee-grower in Uganda. He puts it like this: ‘I’d like you to tell people in your place that the drink they are now drinking is the cause of all our problems.’⁷ His assessment is widely shared. Salome Kafuluzi lives on a coffee-farm with her thirteen children, and she has this to say: ‘We’re broke. We’re not happy. We’re failing in everything. We can’t buy essentials. We can’t have meat, fish, rice, just sweet potatoes, beans and matoke [a kind of green banana mash]…We can’t send the children to school.’ Salome’s husband, Peter, links their situation quite directly to the price of coffee: ‘I remember when kiboko [the local term for sundried coffee cherry] sold for 69 cents/kg. We slept without worries. We could support our families. For me, I’d need to see a price of at least 34 cents/kg. Even at 29 cents/kg we can’t look after the land.’⁸ The price at the moment is around 14 cents per kilo.

The laws of supply and demand would suggest that coffee-growers would move out of the market and do something else. This would presuppose that there is something else they can do. Too often, there isn’t. The immediate result of low farm income – and this is a law to which anyone living on the breadline can attest – is a panicked self-exploitation. Rather than throwing in the towel and moving to the cities, or trying to grow something else, farmers grow more coffee, working themselves to exhaustion and scraping together whatever they can to be able to maintain some sort of standard of living, and sometimes, reluctantly, hurting the natural environment in a desperate bid to survive. This has resulted in a global coffee surplus of 900 million kilos. You’d think that with all that coffee floating around, we’d see the end-price of coffee go down. But there are a good few steps along the way from the fields to the bottom of the cup.

Lawrence and his family live in an area well suited to coffee – it’s high-altitude, hilly terrain. This means that their land is unsuited to anything else. The choice that faces them is this: grow coffee or leave. With little else to go to, they grow coffee.

They sell to a local middleman at around 14 cents per kilo, who then takes the bag to the mill and sells it for 19 cents. The mill will process it for an additional 5 cents per kilo – which is barely enough to keep the mill going. Mary Goreti runs the mill in Kituntu to which the coffee is brought. ‘The profit margins are so small right now,’ she says, ‘and the electricity is so high…We have so few people bringing kiboko. Some farmers are just keeping it at home because the prices are so low. If the prices stay low, the business will fail. You can’t open a factory to process ten bags.’⁹ But she can’t choose to do an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Rural Autopsy
• 3 You Have Become Mexican
• 4 ‘Just a Cry for Bread’
• 5 The Customer is Our Enemy: A Brief Introduction to Food System Business
• 6 Better Living through Chemistry
• 7 Glycine Rex
• 8 Checking out of Supermarkets
• 9 Chosen by Bunnies
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Permissions
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• International Acclaim for Stuffed and Starved
• Copyright
• About the Publisher