Book Title:  Stuffed and Starved:  Markets, Choice and the Battle for the World's Food System

Author:  Raj Patel

Publishing Company:  HarperCollinsPublishersLtd.

Year:  2007

# of Pages: 423

ISBN010:  0-00-200811-4

ISBN – 13:  978-0-00-200811-2 

Reviewed By: Deborah Ground Buckner (Kansas City Correspondent, USA)

A world of prosperity and poverty, of plenty and pittance, has become a world of obesity and starvation.  In Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Choice and the Battle for the World's Food System, Raj Patel depicts, in documentary style, how these seemingly polar nutritional positions are caused by the same factors.

Patel takes on the entire food industry, ruled by corporate distributors who shape our appetites for food, determine what food is available to us, and control its distribution.  For example, he presents the case of a Western consumer in the supermarket purchasing apples.  The varieties available have been chosen, not based on consumer interest, but on color, skin thickness, ability to hold up through shipping, etc., factors that mean consumers never learn of many other varieties in existence.

Patel tells stories from around the world of the plights of farmers, pointing out it is one of the highest suicide-prone vocations.  Low prices that distributors and consumers demand lead to poverty and starvation for the food producers in countries where there is no national subsidy for the industry.  Meanwhile, processed goods—easy to store and distribute—are laden with fat, sugar, and salt, contributing to obesity and related diseases of hypertension, diabetes and heart disease in developed countries.

Food distribution corporations and major supermarkets will find much in this book to cause discomfort, and the average consumer will think twice about entering the local mega-market.  Patel calls for a transformation of our approach to eating.  His recommendations include:  learning to alter our tastes, realizing we don't need the sugar, salt, and fat marketed to us by the minute; eat locally and seasonally, eliminating the major role of food distributors who choose food based on transportability rather than quality and flavor; eat agroecologically, a fancy term for supporting organic farming; and, related to eating locally produced food, support locally owned businesses, rather than the corporate mega-markets.

Patel's work is accompanied by 46 pages of notes and 52 pages of references.  Clearly, he has done the research and, without attempting to be objective, clearly states his position on the issues of food production and distribution.

Patel was educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University.  He is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California, a visiting researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.  He has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, consulted for the UN and been involved in international campaigns against his former employers.