Stuffed and Starved Quotes

“It’s not the people that are the problem. It is the way we consume through this food system, which allows a few to eat healthily, many to eat unhealthily, and many more not to eat at all.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Increasingly, obesity and hunger are two points on a continuum of poverty. But the stuffed and the starved are also linked through the chains of production that bring food from fields to our plate. Guided by the profit motive, food corporations shape and constrain how we eat, and how we think about food.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In his path-breaking research, economist Amartya Sen observed that modern famines weren’t related so much to the absence of food as the inability to buy it.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“With the blows dealt to worker organizing in the 1980s, and through the breaking of union power around the world,65 fears of worker insurrection were set, temporarily, at bay. The new food order offered a way of maintaining cheap food supplies globally, but with an increased role not just for the US government, but for the private sector, in providing agricultural technologies and in international trade itself. And one institution above all was to frame this new agricultural order – the World Trade Organization.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“And the Global North managed to replace the old colonial instruments of command and control with newer, and cheaper, mechanisms of ‘self-imposed’ market discipline.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Under these conditions governments ceded large parts of their economic and social spending sovereignty to their donors. From this point on, choices over national development would be shaped not by national governments, but by their creditors.64”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“times. To do this, countries needed to borrow and, precisely because it was a time of recession, with high rates of inflation (and therefore high interest rates), money was much harder to come by. With the shrinking of other lending sources, a new series of actors were able to shape the destinies of the Global South: international financial institutions. This cluster of organizations is funded by taxpayer dollars”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“banks in which oil exporters had invested were lending money to anyone who’d take it. It was a system ready to collapse at the slightest breath of change. When that change came, with the high interest rates and global recession at the end of the 1970s, the accumulated debt set large parts of Latin America, Africa and eventually Asia on the route to bankruptcy.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The new political economy of food rested not on control through the United States’ food surplus, but through the Global South’s fiscal debt.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The oil shock also forced a recalculation of the economics and politics of the Cold War. With drivers lining up for gasoline in the United States, securing the domestic supply of fuel became a strategic priority.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The price of oil quadrupled from October 1973 to 1974.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“There’s no tombstone for it, but the post-war food order died in 1973.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Between 1956 and 1960 more than one-third of the world trade in wheat was accounted for by American aid. The world price of wheat was kept artificially low through food aid, hurting growers, but hooking countries of the Global South on US largesse.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Any US-aligned government that found itself battling worker-led organizing or, indeed, any plausibly left-wing political opposition could gain access to the US strategic grain reserve.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Development was, in other words, part of a policy mindset that linked international trade, military power and a programme of redistribution. What was to be redistributed was, it turned out, food. The Marshall Plan – the US aid programme to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – had instigated, among other initiatives, the transfer of food to the hungry and possibly querulous European population in response to the post-war food shortages.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“This is why slave uprisings were so fearsome to the architects of the new international food system. Without slaves, no sugar, and therefore no food to quiet the industrial worker.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The solution to worker dissatisfaction in Europe involved blunting the edge of discontent. It involved adhering to an unwritten social contract, keeping levels of hunger and deprivation within manageable limits by making sure enough quantities of cheap food were available. The cheap food demanded slaves and low-paid agricultural workers.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The Industrial Revolution (from roughly the 1780s to the 1840s)35 had transformed the country.36 Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the new working class were battered by the harsh living and working conditions in the new cities.37 It is from this time that the word ‘slum’ derives, a new word to describe a new urban geography.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Through directly extracting food resources from its tropical empire and a new commercial frontier of export agriculture in settler colonies, and with only a twinge of guilt at the human cost wrought, Britain was able to feed its working class.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Peasants could no longer expect to receive free grain from the village lord if the harvests failed. Under modern British rule they were to work for food. The result was extreme rural hunger and poverty.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Settler colonies were made possible because agricultural commercialization in Europe was driving smallholders off the land. Displaced settlers were sent from Europe en masse to populate newly conquered territories.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The mechanics of setting up a global food system involved the twin processes of colonization and the forced creation of markets.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The demise of beer’s place in everyday life does, however, show how traders in tea and sugar were able to ride, and further cause, changes in centuries-old tastes, reduce levels of nutrition and get a more caffeinated workforce for the ‘workshop of the world’ as a result.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In order for the companies to supply tea and sugar, imperial power was necessary, in India and China principally for tea, and in the Caribbean for sugar. Britain had dominion over both regions. Religion also played a part, with the Temperance movement and the Protestant work ethic driving beer and gin out of the workplace.19 And, for the working poor, tea held an important advantage over a cold glass of beer: ‘Two ounces of tea a week … made many a cold supper seem like a hot meal.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In the consumption of tea as a source of calories, exploited urban workers in London mirrored nothing so much as the slaves at the other end of the food system in the Caribbean, who chewed sugar cane for energy enough to get through the working day.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In 1645 (at the beginning of the two-centuries-long era of slavery), records show the purchase of 1,000 slaves for Barbadian cane sugar production. A commentator noted that more slaves would soon be on their way, for so lucrative was the sugar industry, and so low the value of human life, that within eighteen months, slaves had recouped their strike-price for their masters.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“To grow tea and sugar required industrial agriculture’s single most bloody innovation – the plantation. The agricultural technology of advanced and permanent monoculture came bundled with its own social technology, of soil tilled, cane hacked and leaves plucked by an endless supply of almost disposable people from the Global South.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“free’ landless poor made their way to the cities to seek work. Those who remained on the land worked for a wage and only after-hours worked to feed themselves. On the other hand, for those who owned land, the shift from feudal to capitalist economics generated vast efficiencies, profits and hence the means to fund a growing national appetite to buy foreign food.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“From the fifteenth century, rural England was undergoing Enclosure, the process by which the community rights of the poor to the land of the rich were transformed into what we understand today by ‘private property’. The rural poor found themselves without access to common land, and had only their labour left to sell. It was an economic revolution, with profound social repercussions. For the landless, options were few.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Today, the UFW still fights for the rights of farm workers – winning concessions like basic access to toilets and running water – in an economy in which farm workers remain exploited, if a little less than before.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated