Stuffed and Starved brings to light the uneven hourglass shape that exists within our world’s food system, and describes what factors contribute to these discrepancies. It begins with the decisions farmers are forced to make on the farm, and ends with the decisions the consumers are able to make at the grocery stores. The purpose of Stuffed and Starved was to describe what factors attribute to the hourglass shape of the food system. Author Raj Patel points out who is profiting and who is suffering in this system, and gives insight as to how the system may be improved.
The shape of the hourglass describes the large amount of farmers at one end, and the large amount of consumers at the other. The middle of the hourglass represents the few large corporations that control the food system. These are the food processors and distributors that are in control of the food from farm to table. It is here where money is being squeezed out of the pockets of farmers and consumers, and into the bank accounts of large corporations. Throughout Stuffed and Starved, Raj Patel describes each entities role in the food system and where is it failing.
Our nation was founded on agriculture, and for hundreds of years we were able to migrate across the nation bringing our farming tools and techniques with us. Technology has driven populations away from rural areas towards industrialized cities. With money now being pumped into cities, rural farmers are suffering the most. Farmers are taking out large loans in order to sustain their farms, leading to debt and in some cases suicide. Patel spoke about a farmer in India whose husband took his life because he was unable to live with the amount of debt from his struggling farm. This man left his wife and chi...
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...struggling to earn any income at all and sometimes do not even get the opportunity to eat. Another issue that Raj Patel did not touch on is the lack of care consumers have for the farmers. It seems that consumers care about farmers about as much as the corporations do, which, in my opinion, is not a lot. When consumers only care about low prices and large corporations only care about making a profit, the farmers are left out to dry. Many consumers believe “food should be available at a bargain price, a belief that relies on labor exploitation and environmental exhaustion at multiple points along the commodity chain.” (Wright, 95) Corporations as well as consumers generally tend to be selfish and I think Raj Patel is afraid to mention this. If only these people cared a little bit more about each other I believe the hourglass of the food system will begin to even out.
In Raj Patel’s novel Stuffed and Starved, Patel goes through every aspect of the food production process by taking the experiences of all the people involved in food production from around the world. Patel concludes by eventually blaming both big corporations and governments for their critical role in undermining local, cultural, and sustainable foodways and in so doing causing the key food-related problems of today such as starvation and obesity. In this book of facts and serious crime, Patel's Stuffed and Starved is a general but available analysis of global food struggles that has a goal of enlightening and motivating the general Western public that there is something critically wrong with our food system.
The documentary A Place at the Table reveals some very startling facts about food insecurity in the United States. The directors, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, relate the stories of three people to present the struggles common to people who are faced with food insecurity. Barbie is a young single mother who struggles to provide for her two young children. Rosie is a young student who has trouble focusing in class because she is hungry. Trmonica is another young student who has health problems, which are worsened by the unhealthy diet that her mother is able to afford. Through the stories of these three people and the testimonies of some experts, the directors present an argument dealing with food
The article highlights and includes the documentary Food, Inc. which exposes the inability of the profit system to provide safe and healthy food for the vast majority of the population. Eric Schlosser investigating journalist quotes, “The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us”. Schlosser also quotes, “Birds are now raised and slaughtered in half the time they were 50 years ago, but now they’re twice as big”. He believes they not only changed the chicken, but they changed the farmer implying that capitalism has taken the place for the need of small scale farming. In addition, Michael Pollan also a journalist believes that the vast array of choices which appears in everyday supermarkets is nothing but an “illusion of diversity”. The advancement of technology and how consumers react to products has been further developed and continues to be in this generation. Food scientists are now genetically modifying and engineering products to satisfy and manipulate consumers to desire more of these unhealthy product choices. The biggest advance in recent years has
Our current system of corporate-dominated, industrial-style farming might not resemble the old-fashioned farms of yore, but the modern method of raising food has been a surprisingly long time in the making. That's one of the astonishing revelations found in Christopher D. Cook's "Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis" (2004, 2006, The New Press), which explores in great detail the often unappealing, yet largely unseen, underbelly of today's food production and processing machine. While some of the material will be familiar to those who've read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" or Eric Schlosser's "Fast-Food Nation," Cook's work provides many new insights for anyone who's concerned about how and what we eat,
The Economy is really bad in parts of India, people are usually not using technology, the way they cook is unsanitary, and houses are not modern. Indian farmers used to use seeds that required only cow poop for fertilizer. The Jai BT seeds that Monsanto created requires two different fertilizers, Jai BT seeds are more expensive than the old seeds, so farmers have to pay extra for the fertilizer and seeds. The Jai BT seeds did not germinate in the soil and rotted, causing the farmer much stress. The farmers pay a high amount of money for the land. If their farm does not grow, the farmer doesn't get any money and will eventuall...
Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved analyzes the paradoxical content in its title statement. Patel demonstrates how the world food system has created two opposite, but inherently linked epidemics: obesity and crippling hunger. Throughout the course of this book, it becomes painfully clear that the majority of the world’s population is being manipulated by our global food system and by the corporations and their CEO’s who control it. Patel encourages his readers to make themselves politically responsible (313) and through Stuffed and Starved, highlights the discrepancies and major imbalances of our world food system, the small percentage of people who benefit from it, and the vast majority of humanity who does not. He does all this while pointing out they we are starving not only physically, but also politically and socially. And Patel encourages his readers to get hungry, but in the right way.
Farmers face many problems such as, a corrupt monetary policy, overproduction, and differential freight rates. The complaints of the farmers are justified because with the correction of these issues the farmers would continue with successful business. Each of the problems caused the farmers to lose money and become where they could not afford to run the businesses anymore, therefore, causing even more failure within the farming occupation.
In the article “The End of Food,” Lizzie Widdicombe describes an advancement of our food culture through a new product developed by three young men living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. After failing to produce new inexpensive cellphone towers on a hundred seventy thousand dollar investment, the three men went on to try and develop software with their remaining funding. While trying to maximize their funding’s longevity, they realized that their biggest budget impediment was food. In fact, it reached the point where their diet comprised of mostly fast food, and eventually they despised the fact that they had to spend so much time and money on eating. Due to this hardship, Rob Rhinehart, one of the entrepreneurs, came up with the
The book that I read for the required assignment is titled Food Justice, written by two authors. The authors of the book are Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi. The book, in my opinion seemed to be a series of historical and somewhat current stories. The stories in the book discussed how different individuals were affected, whether it be farmers or consumers. Food Justice teaches us that growing and eating food are political acts that challenge a system that is neither good, nor clean, nor fair.
Food Inc. directed by Robert Kenner gives viewers an eye opening experience to the politics of the industrial food manufacturing and processing system. Kenner is an award winning documentary director and producer since the 1970’s. He has perfected his craft in Food Inc. by allowing the viewer to better understand where processed food comes from and the corporations that own it all. The film takes a look into three of the most popular goods of corn, beef and pork. There becomes a better understanding of the corn industry and how almost all processed food can be traced back to the genetic modification of corn. Beef can be tied into this scenario with the newer practice of feeding cattle corn. The film takes some interest in explaining how corn
The developed world’s love affair with local/organic farming (peasant farming as Collier describes it) has decreased food production worldwide because it does not use the land efficiently enough as with commercial agriculture companies. It also requires government subsidies that large commercial farming companies do not necessarily need. By increasing commercial farming, the world food supply will inevitably increase over a short period.
Just as food insecurity and social agricultural movements are no longer limited to the Global South, so to have such movements extended beyond the borders of rural landscapes into urban settings across the globe (Dubbeling, & Merzthal, 2006, pp. 20, 21; De Zeeuw, Van VeenHuizen, & Dubbeling, 2011, pp.
We live in an age in which we have come to expect everything to be instantaneously at our fingertips. We live in an age of instant coffee, instant tea, and even instant mashed potatoes. We can walk down the street at 5 in the morning and get a gallon of milk or even a weeks worth of groceries at our discretion. Even though it is great that food is now readily available at all times, this convenience comes at a price, for both the producer and the consumer. Farmers are cheated out of money and are slaves to big business, workers and animals are mistreated. And, because food now comes at a low cost, it has become cheaper quality and therefore potentially dangerous to the consumer’s health. These problems surrounding the ethics and the procedures of the instantaneous food system are left unchanged due to the obliviousness of the consumers and the dollar signs in the eyes of the government and big business. The problem begins with the mistreatment and exploitation of farmers.
Agriculture holds a significant role in underdeveloped countries. It is often the backbone of their economic and social well-being. It acts as the main source of employment and income, 70% of a country's population rely on framing as a mean of living (CITE HERE). Because most underdeveloped countries have low rates of educational attainment, farming is a popular source of employment. It requires little to no education. As a result agriculture employs many people contributing to nations economic development. Residents can also sell what they grow, providing them with a source of income, thus not only raising the national income level but the standard of living as well. Agriculture is not only a ...
Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. 2006. “Food Security, Agrarian Crisis and Rural Livelihoods.” Economic and Political Weekly 41 (52): 5376-5388.