Raj Patel tells Naresh Fernandes about the consequences of companies taking over our kitchens.
Every morning, the male elders of California-based author Raj Patel’s family perform a blood sacrifice. All the men older than 50 must prick their fingers “in honour of the Western diet” to track the progress of their diabetes, said Patel over the phone from San Francisco.
It’s a situation that’s coming soon to India. In his book Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System, which has earned admiring reviews around the world, Patel points out that India already has the world’s largest number of patients of Type II diabetes. NRIs, he says, have been like “canaries in a mineshaft” because they have “for a generation or two been exposed to Western diets that are now being introduced in India”.
Contrary to popular perception, diabetes isn’t hurting only India’s rapidly growing class of affluent people. A study in South Delhi’s Gautam Nagar slum found that ten per cent of its residents had the disease. The soaring rates of diet-related diseases are a direct consequence of “the increased availability and marketing of diabetes-promoting foods, which was in turn ushered in as a moment of ‘progress’ in Manmohan Singh’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s”, Patel writes. In Stuffed and Starved, he puts this neo-liberal notion of development under the scanner, using food as a device to examine whether globalisation is actually benefiting the world’s people.
Taking a long journey through the global food cycle, from corn fields in Mexico through banana trading posts in Central America and supermarkets in the US, Patel considers a conundrum from which his book gets its title: though global food production is at its highest level, more than one in ten people on the planet are hungry. Even as 800 million are undernourished, one billion people are overweight.
It’s not as puzzling as it appears, says Patel. “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,” he writes. “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 corporatisation of food, Patel says, has been undertaken with the claim that it increases consumer choice. But in reality, he says, no one benefits except for the firms that trade in food. While small farmers who grow the food have been reduced to penury around the world, consumers are forced to eat processed foods.
To illustrate this, Patel, who is a visiting scholar at the Centre for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and a researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, explained how supermarkets don’t actually deliver the advantages they are imagined to. “Though it’s cosmetically true that a supermarket increases your range of consumer choices – you have a wide variety of breakfast cereal or dozens of kinds of soft drinks – it isn’t really much of a choice at all,” he said. “It’s the difference between Coke and Pepsi. You’re being told to choose between two constrained parameters. ”
Though the problem might seem too enormous for individuals to fix, Patel insists that a solution isn’t impossible. In the West, he said, many people react by eating less because they feel paralysed by guilt. Instead, he advocates outrage. “As a consumer, you’re being manipulated by these corporations, you’re being fed stuff that’s demonstrably hurting you,” said Patel. “The reasonable response to being exploited like this is to get angry.”
In addition to “reclaiming our eating habits”, he urges readers to engage with social policies. “Of course, we can change the way we consume but we’re bigger than merely being consumers – we’re political animals who can engage in change that’s more than shopping,” said Patel. “As consumers we’re embedded in a larger ecosystem that we’re destroying by the way we eat. We need to get involved in political action so that everyone can afford a good decent meal.”
Stuffed and Starved, Harper Collins, Rs 495.
Source : Time Out Mumbai ISSUE 11 Friday, January 22, 2010
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