It is difficult to pick up a newspaper without reading about increasing food crises in much of the world or the epidemic of obesity in America. Raj...
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Aug 16, 2008
angela
rated it: 
Saying: READ THIS BOOK! is the most logical place to begin this review. Seriously. Read it.
This is an incredibly nuanced look at the global food market. He addresses everything from rural poverty, failure, and farmer suicide (in the Global North and Global South) to the bottlenecks in our global food chain (mostly at the distributor and retailer level, where distributors are increasingly the same people as the retailers) to supermarkets to worker's rights and movements to obesity t More...
This is an incredibly nuanced look at the global food market. He addresses everything from rural poverty, failure, and farmer suicide (in the Global North and Global South) to the bottlenecks in our global food chain (mostly at the distributor and retailer level, where distributors are increasingly the same people as the retailers) to supermarkets to worker's rights and movements to obesity t More...
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May 01, 2009
Ian
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When I first saw this book in our local bookstore, I was interested in its purported claim to trace the intricacies in the power structure surrounding global food production/distribution. As a broad primer about the different ways in which campesinos growing soy in Brazil, Koreans fighting against the WTO, rural South Africans growing Bt cotton, etc. relate to the Global North's food acquisition and lack of satisfactory distribution, Stuffed generally succeeds. There is no shortage of vignettes
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Sep 02, 2010
Mary
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I really wanted to like this book! I really wanted to read it to the last page without skimming. The subject matter is fascinating to me--the food politics of the US and the rest of the world. It seem that Patel and I have a lot of similar opinions about many things, such as the WTO, NAFTA, and the UN. However, we do not agree on why we do not like them. However, what he suggests to do about it is nearly the opposite of what I would do, policy-wise. I was also a bit turned off by the exten
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Feb 09, 2009
Melissa
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This book differs from other food politics books I've read in that it addresses the issues from a much more global perspective. I learned a lot about peasant/farmer movements, and really found that first part of the book pretty engaging. Things start to fall apart, however, when Patel starts to move into urban US issues, health issues, slow food movement, etc. These parts of the book aren't very well developed, and by the end I started to wonder if the author didn't feel like he had to have a
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Nov 04, 2011
Katie
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Very interesting book about the global food system, corporate agribusiness giants, and how all this has shaped the things we eat every day (in really fundamental ways). Did you know that there are tons of species of apples that you will never get to eat, just because they don't grow well, or preserve well, or have tough enough skins, or generally have attributes that make them ideal for storing, preserving, and shipping long distances? There were lots of interesting factoids like this in the boo
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May 12, 2010
Justin
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This book makes a splendid introductory text to the evils of the modern food system. I can say that because it was my introduction and I feel well introduced. You may have suspected that there was something rotten about the modern alimentary chain and Raj Patel will tell you exactly what. It starts with the nifty premise that the world’s overfed and underfed have something in common: they’re both getting played by multinational food interests. It explores that connection from the top of the supp
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Nov 29, 2011
Adrien
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Raj Patel tackles a daunting, sprawling subject in taking on the world's food systems, but he manages the job with intelligence, humor and grace. A talented writer, Mr. Patel brings dismaying statistics to life sanguinely, like the high suicide rate among Indian farmers in the last decades. He surgically deconstructs many of the biggest problems facing our time in regard to food production, supply, distribution and consumption, and rather than leave us on the shore of despair, proceeds to report
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Oct 01, 2008
Martinxo
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Didn't enjoy (odd word to use I know) this as much as I thought and ended up flipping quickly through the last two thirds.
Patel tells me what I already know in grinding, depressing detail. But don't let that put you off, if you know little or nothing about the global food situtation then read this book, get a little depressed...then act.
Patel tells me what I already know in grinding, depressing detail. But don't let that put you off, if you know little or nothing about the global food situtation then read this book, get a little depressed...then act.
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Dec 06, 2010
Billy
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An absolutely fantastic, well-researched, and very readable book about the global food system. Raj Patel obviously has a strong bias against the policies of the WTO, international food distributors, and super stores like Wal-Mart, but his arguments against them seem very well founded. This book really opened my eyes to the systemic problems that help to keep farmers poor and suicidal, food distributors rich, and consumers overweight and obese. He also points to a number of possible solutions,
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Dec 18, 2008
Nadia
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okay, so i actually lost this book somewhere between the airport and work (i know i had it on the train, but now i can't find it), and i was about 30 pgs from the end... so technically, i haven't finished this, but i'm not gonna buy it again. this was a tough read, especially in the beginning. though the author tries to break it into sections, because it isn't chronological, sometimes it's easy to get lost... but the facts are incredibly interesting, despite being dry. at times this reads lik
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Mar 22, 2009
Brian
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I’ve been aware of and fascinated by a modern paradox for a while. For the first time in human history, a growing number of people are obese and suffering a form of malnutrition. By eating a diet composed mostly of empty calories, people will gain weight but still practically starve. Raj Patel explores this phenomenon in Stuffed and Starved. Patel is a British Indian educated at the London School of Economics and as his blurb put it, has been tear gassed on four continents.
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Jan 07, 2011
Harrison
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The public understanding of where our food comes from is deeply misinformed, rooted more in a pastoral myth than in reality. The real story of our supermarket shelves is complex, but in Stuffed and Starved Raj Patel expertly guides the reader through the systems of modern food production to reveal the profound injustice ingrained in their structure.
We enter this narrative with stories of farmer suicides, a rising trend in the global south as more and more farmers find themselves in i More...
We enter this narrative with stories of farmer suicides, a rising trend in the global south as more and more farmers find themselves in i More...
Dec 06, 2008
Dawnbg
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I was really excited to read this book and had to wait months to get it from the library. I had seen the author interviewed on several TV programs & he was great.
In short, this book is WAYYY too long.I've never thought about the book editor before, but while the info is good, it is repeated too much.If it was half the length it would be a much more powerful book.The book is about the global food system, and how government policy and large corporations have changed the way we eat, grow foo More...
In short, this book is WAYYY too long.I've never thought about the book editor before, but while the info is good, it is repeated too much.If it was half the length it would be a much more powerful book.The book is about the global food system, and how government policy and large corporations have changed the way we eat, grow foo More...
Jul 19, 2009
Nathaniel
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Patel's book contains some alarming and resonant chapter full of specific information about community-level outrages perpetrated in a calculating and anonymous way by big players in the food industry. Spotlighting the trauma caused by the food system is Patel's strength; exploring its history and discussing its alternatives, somewhat less so. The first 80 pages are a clear, graph-spattered introduction to the tactics that agricultural giants and powerful economies use to ensure that their produc
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Jan 30, 2011
sdw
rated it:
Compared to many popular books on contemporary food politics, Patel uses a global perspectives to examine the choices that are made for us about food. His book is arranged to move from the rural farmers who produce the world’s food to the customers at the check-out stand. Yet his analysis is thoroughly-grounded in a producer oriented framework. The story of food production, Patel argues, is not one about the choices we make about food, but the choices about food that are made for us. The f
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Dec 22, 2011
Laura
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I read this hoping to get a better grasp of the world food system and so be able to make better personal choices when it comes to food. This was not a good place to start. Patel has clearly done an impressive amount of research, but his presentation is painfully dry and jumps all over. I feel like I have been exposed to an overwhelming quantity of facts, but still don't have any sense of how they really fit together. And given how cherry-picked his presentation of the US immigration system w
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Sep 17, 2009
Meera
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This book was very educational for me, as I didn't know much about world food systems. It describes the origins of famines, the increasing rates of obesity and malnutrition world-wide, and how they are all tied to corporate food enterprises that have monopolies over seeds, soy, cattle, etc - and price foods 40-100 times greater than what the worker that plowed the fields got for these products.
It comes at a very appropriate time, since books about food culture seem to be all the rag More...
It comes at a very appropriate time, since books about food culture seem to be all the rag More...
Jun 03, 2008
David
rated it:
A very digestible read for the consumer that’s liable to provoke dyspepsia in the bellies of food giants and governments alike.
In taking a moralistic view of starvation and obesity, our media, governments and many NGOs have condemned those suffering to more of the same. While the institutional causes remain unaddressed – in large part thanks to public sector responsibility being abdicated to private sector interests – we can only expect more headlines about food riots and editorials on fa More...
In taking a moralistic view of starvation and obesity, our media, governments and many NGOs have condemned those suffering to more of the same. While the institutional causes remain unaddressed – in large part thanks to public sector responsibility being abdicated to private sector interests – we can only expect more headlines about food riots and editorials on fa More...
Apr 23, 2008
Ben
rated it:
I hope this book gets widely read, it's couldn't be more timely, and cuts through a lot of bullshit without cutting any corners on the way to its powerful conclusions.
Will post a link to review when I write one, in the meantime, I have to post this paragraph on Haiti, as I've been thinking a lot about my brothers and sisters there:
p.87 “Just as workers in Europe and the US resisted the poverty of life in new cities’ slums, so did the slaves whose labour kept food prices l More...
Will post a link to review when I write one, in the meantime, I have to post this paragraph on Haiti, as I've been thinking a lot about my brothers and sisters there:
p.87 “Just as workers in Europe and the US resisted the poverty of life in new cities’ slums, so did the slaves whose labour kept food prices l More...
Feb 01, 2011
Michelle
rated it:
I found this book to be fascinating, but like many books that tackle the issue of the problem with the world food system, it doesn't offer any solutions or ideas as to how to solve our problems. That is my only problem with the book. It is clearly researched and sited well. But it doesn't end with a sense of optimism but maybe that's just the reality of the situation. There's just no real way to dig ourselves out of the situation we've created without completely throwing it.
Feb 25, 2010
Corey
rated it:
A book about the food system. Scary, as you might imagine, but the book did not depress me like I thought it would. While much of the content was sub-happy, Patel provided examples of people and groups taking action against the ridiculousness of the system, and making their way work. Mostly. There was enough upside to leave me feeling somewhat hopeful at the end of the book.
Lots of interesting facts in the book. I think I'd call this a must read if you are a person who tends to eat.
Lots of interesting facts in the book. I think I'd call this a must read if you are a person who tends to eat.
Sep 28, 2009
Ann
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Powerful quite readable about the world food system and how fucked up it is, why there is so much soy and various other additives in our food, how Monsanto is a big bully, how CSAs are great and about the Via Campesina and other farmer movements that are fighting back. You wont want to eat some things after reading this though nor patronize WalMart, and you will think twice about the supermarket system!
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Jul 31, 2008
Julie
rated it:
A well-crafted, intelligent, and utterly relevant treatise on the food distribution monopoly held tightly by a handful of corporations. There is a sense of urgency and anger in Patel's writing- particularly when presenting farmer suicides, the travesty of India's Green Revolution and the slavish devotion to soy, but he is not a propagandist. Instead, he presents a rationale view of the politics of food, shopping, eating trends by examining the history of crop development and distribution and how
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Sep 14, 2011
Rosanne
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I actually rather enjoyed reading about the dichotomy between the "stuffed," those of us who have an abundance of food and struggle with obesity, and the "starved," those who are growing our food and who have barely enough (food or money) to sustain themselves and their families. Patel has a conversational writing style, which enlivens what could have been a very dry recitation of facts and statistics. However, after reading two-thirds of the book I lost the need to read mo
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Dec 12, 2009
Bill
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great take on the inequities in the global food "system" whose main premise is that people are hungry not because there is not enough food around, but because food is a commodity. patel convincingly argues that the solution to hunger is not new technology or more global trade, but more democracy -- i.e., more local control by people over how their food is grown and distributed.
Feb 07, 2009
Linda
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The basic summary of this book is that the way our current food system is set up is bad for the environment, bad for poor people, bad for our health and is good only for the corporations that make a ton of money. It is a system that heavily relies on the use of fossil fuels and is not sustainable. This book also makes me question any actions taken by the WTO, NAFTA, the World Bank, and other such organizations that, on the face, are suppose work for the better good of all, but in reality do mo
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Dec 30, 2008
Ilene
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I read "Stuffed and Starved" because I heard a lecture by Patel broadcast on the radio - my favorite station WMNF in Tampa. (See http://www.alternativeradio.org/ - Unfortunately the podcast costs a few bucks - but it was a very good talk.) The whole issue of food - who produces it, how it's produced, how it's distributed, and who makes a buck off of it... complicated!
Aug 10, 2011
Jessica
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Pretty, pretty, good. (Sorry LD). This was an excellent first person essay style book about the horrors industrialized food have visited upon us. From the obesity and illness epidemic in the 'Global North' to the farmer suicides and destruction of subsistence farming in the 'Global South,' Patel illustrates the path of destruction corporate food has wrought. This book is not definitive, but is a good manifesto. It would surely urge the reader to change their habits and those of others with
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Apr 14, 2010
Shavone
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Think world hunger has something to with population? Think again. The world's farmers currently produce enough food to feed every person on the planet 3500 calories a day.
This book is a must-read for anyone who'd like to be correctly informed about reasons behind the well-known failings of the world food system-- hunger, obesity, food insecurity, etc.
This book is a must-read for anyone who'd like to be correctly informed about reasons behind the well-known failings of the world food system-- hunger, obesity, food insecurity, etc.
Jun 06, 2011
Adelaide
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This book was interesting, but I question its credibility. Some information in it prompted me to research Bt cotton for ES180B. However, I found that the sources used in the book for this topic (which contradict most of the peer-reviewed literature) were pretty questionable.
