You are More Than What You Eat: Food Activist Raj Patel Says It's Delusional To Think We Can Shop Our Way Out of This

You Are More Than What You Eat
Food activist Raj Patel says it’s delusional to think we can shop our way out of this mess
(And no, Obama isn’t going to save us either)
Interview by E.B. Boyd
March 2009

http://wholelifetimes.com/2009/03/conversations0903.html

Raj Patel used to not give much thought to food. He grew up in a London convenience store, surrounded by, as he puts it, “all kinds of crud.” And in graduate school, where he pursued studies in development sociology, Red Bull was his fuel of choice. But while helping to organize the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle, Patel — who holds degrees from Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cornell and who has worked at the WTO, the United Nations, and the World Bank — met a group that gave him cause for reflection. La Via Campesina is an international movement of small-scale food producers challenging the global corporate system that controls much of the world’s food supply. The group advocates for food sovereignty (the right of peoples to make their own agricultural and land-use policies). Inspired, Patel set off to write a book about the mechanisms and consequences of the way food is produced in the United States and
around the world.

The result was Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System. The book — well received during its 2007 release and now sharing pride of place with The Omnivore’s Dilemma on foodie bloggers’ recommended reading lists — takes a look under the hood of the global food system to explain why one billion people on the planet are overweight while another billion go hungry. What Patel found wasn’t pretty: a small number of corporations, bolstered by asymmetric trade policies, controls how land is used in developing countries and places empty calories on the shelves of rich ones.

Today, Patel, who holds research positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Food First (an Oakland think tank), and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is evangelizing a reorganization of the food system and challenging consumers in the West to think more deeply about the processes that bring food to their plates. His next book, which examines the underpinnings of the current economic crisis, comes out this summer.

Reading Stuffed and Starved could leave a person feeling quite depressed, like you can’t walk into a supermarket to pick up even the basics without feeling like you’re contributing to the oppression of millions around the world. How do you reconcile that?

Feeling guilty is the wrong emotion. If you’re feeling guilty, you feel you’re somehow benefiting from the stuff inside the supermarket — the processed food and what have you. But, of course, the processed food harms you. Americans, particularly women in rural areas, are seeing their life expectancies fall because of the poor quality of their diets. I don’t know why people should feel guilty about that. People should feel outraged.

Not being paralyzed by guilt is a great way of starting to effect change. There are simple things people can do: Going to a farmers’ market, rather than a supermarket. Joining a CSA. Forming a buyers’ cooperative with your neighbors or church group. Those are ways you can avoid going into a supermarket and being manipulated, and actually be in more control of your relationship to food and the people who grow it. Guilt leads to paralysis, but outrage can lead to something much more constructive.

You’ve talked about how, if we followed through on some of your ideas about restructuring the global food system, one of the outcomes might be that we’ll lose access to the gobs of chocolate we enjoy today, and you said you’d be fine with that.

One of the things that has never happened in the Ivory Coast, for example, where the majority of the world’s cocoa is grown, is for the people there to decide how their economy should be run. That decision has always been made by people in Europe and North America — people in rich countries who decide they want chocolate or bananas or coffee. That decision has nothing to do with the wants or desires of people on the ground.

What I’m advocating is not necessarily an end to trade. What I’m saying is that, if there is trade, it should be on the basis of free exchange. So I’m okay with us eating a lot less chocolate, if it means there’s a lot more freedom and democracy in the places that used to grow chocolate.

You’ve also talked about how buying fair trade isn’t the solution.

I buy fair trade. The alternative is blood-on-your beans coffee. But I also know it’s delusional to think you can transform the world merely by shopping. The way we shop is important, but the way the food system is set up is not the result of unenlightened consumerism. It was the result of colonialism and slavery and exploitation. So it will take political change to undo that.

How do you think the appointment of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as secretary of agriculture will change the political landscape?

I doubt it will. The choice of Vilsack says to agribusiness, “We’re going to have business as usual.” It’s very disappointing because there were up to 50,000 people who petitioned the administration not to have a “Department of Agriculture” but a “Department of Food.” The folks who campaigned very hard for Obama in the sustainable agriculture industry are outraged and disappointed, and they are campaigning hard to make their voices heard — engaging with the administration, but also building alternatives. Because at the end of the day, this is a centrist Democratic administration. These are not going to be the people who are in the vanguard of creating a sustainable food system. That will have to be a more widely spread and decentralized effort. We can’t be waiting for Obama.

Still, 50,000 people did sign the petition. Is that a sign of hope?

I think it’s phenomenal. Who would have thought, after Bush was elected, that within eight years, we would have something like last year’s New York Times Magazine “Food” issue, which was widely quoted and had a manifesto written by Michael Pollan, about how to create a sustainable food system? If you’d teleported that issue of the magazine back eight years, I’d have thought we were living in some kind of bomb-throwing anarchist commune. A lot of the ideas in there were very radical eight years ago. They were very unconventional, minority views.

Why do you think that’s changed?

Food, under Bush, became a way for progressive politics to survive and to grow. Food was an area where progressives could actually make headway. And part of it is the spread of California cuisine. To some extent it’s fueled by food snobbery — high-end people starting to care about whether their meat was pasture-raised. Also, the fact that there are obesity and diabetes epidemics in the United States has pointed out to many more American families the importance of diet in their lives. The recession, the food crisis last year, all of these have contributed to more and more people being aware of food, from the effect on their waistlines, to the effect on their wallets, to the effect on their well-being, to the way they feel about the world, to the way they imagine the world possibly being different.

There’s been backlash against the Slow Food movement recently. Is that going to set things back?

If you look at what Slow Food really stands for, there are a lot of reasons to applaud it. It’s an organization that believes everyone has the right to pleasure. And so far, it’s only been rich people who’ve been able to exercise that right. That’s why it has earned the reputation of being an elitist organization. But more and more, people are discovering that it’s entirely possible to have pleasure on a low budget, and you can get involved in community change to make sure everyone gets to enjoy pleasure.

What keeps you up at night?

I worry that it might be too late. I worry that humanity is so hitched to a way of producing food that destroys the environment, that disconnects us from the pleasure of eating, that we’ve already undermined the possibility of our environment to recover. We need to shift to a way of eating that not only connects us to seasons, land and joy, but is sustainable and just. The technologies are out there, and we could start this work tomorrow if we had the collective political will.

What is one change our readers should make in their lives?

It’s tempting to offer the standard advice about eating locally, seasonally, organically and joyfully. But while it’s important to stay out of supermarkets and eat better, I think the one big thing we can do is realize that we are more than consumers — we’re citizens. We’re more powerful than the dollars we spend on food, and the only way to make lasting change is to get involved in the world around us, whether that means fighting so that kids eat proper food in schools, to making sure your municipality supports sustainable agricultural practices, to your place of work buying locally. The main thing, though, is to realize that there’s a bigger world of change than just shopping ethically.

For more, visit stuffedandstarved.com and viacampesina.org