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Raj Patel Biography

Raj Patel (born 1972) is a British Indian academic, journalist, activist and writer who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States for extended periods. He is best known for his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His most recent book is The Value of Nothing which was on The New York Times best-seller list during February 2010. He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing."

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Raj Patel Quotes

The opposite of consumption is not thrift - it is generosity.

Consumption, Generosity, Opposite, Opposites, Thrift

One of the most abused country on earth is Mexico. The marketing spills over the border, and people are persuaded to eat food that's bad for them, more in rich countries than in poor ones. I was traveling the world. What really struck me was the way we engage with food - how it's a global phenomenon - the world becoming more and more disconnected from it.

Abused, Country, Marketing, Mexico, People

I think we do need to worry about a food shortage, but we also need to worry about the quality of the food. A lot of the stuff that's marketed to us tastes delicious because it fools our bodies. It fools our bodies into thinking that a particular mix of fat and salt and sugar is good for us. In fact, it isn't. That's why you're seeing in the United States life expectancies are declining, particularly in rural areas. You're seeing life expectancies falling in part because of diet.

Fall, Food, Good, Think, Thinking, Worry

The one thing that everyone knows about America is people will say, I know my rights. One of those rights is the right to organize. When workers do get together and organize and drive up their wages, they are much, much better off. I think this is one integral part of food policy. We can't talk about increasing the price of food without figuring out how working Americans are going to pay for that.

America, People, Price, Think, Thinking, Together

I do think we have a food problem. In 2006, which is the year for which we have the latest data, 35. 5 million Americans were food insecure. That means there are 35. 5 million Americans who are so hard up at some point during the year that they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. That's a lot of Americans. They don't get reported very much because there's nothing spectacular about people skipping a meal because they're poor. The media tends to ignore that, just as it ignores the sort of chronic food shortages elsewhere in the world.

Americans, Insecure, Mean, Million, Skipping, Thinking

There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood. . . in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.

Book, Chunks, Fantasy, Like, Real, Two

Food sovereignty. . . is most of all characterized by it’s conversations around how to end hunger and poverty.

Conversation, Conversations, Ends, Food, Hunger And Poverty, Poverty

Yet if you go to the supermarket and look at food that's produced through industrial agriculture, look at what's happened to the prices. Have they been going down? They've been going up and they will continue to go up. So the choice is either, do we hitch onto a system of agriculture that's doomed and will doom the planet with it, and go along the route of industrial agriculture, or do we want to shift to a kind of system that we know is going to be, in the long run, cheaper, because we'll have a planet left at the end of it? We need to factor that cost in.

Choice, Choices, Doom, Factor, Long, Running

Generosity makes us happiest. We'll be happier people when we share, not when we impose, but when we learn from one another. Because when I'm connected to everyone I disappear. . . in being excellent you lose yourself. And when you're connected to everyone, that's the best thing that can happen.

Generosity, Happiest, Losing Yourself, People, Thing

The current food crisis is an opportunity for companies to engage in agriculture or biotechnology.

Opportunity, Crisis, Engage, Biotechnology, Companies

We kind of know that food is necessary to survive. But our ways of connecting with food have been, in many ways, taken over by capitalism - certainly taken over by the influence large corporations have on the way that we eat and the way that we think about food. That's why kids these days are more prepared to take nutritional advice from Ronald McDonald than they are from their parents or their teachers or from scientists. And particularly in urban areas, you'll see kids who honestly believe tomatoes come from the supermarket rather than from a plant.

Believe, Kids, Parents, Taken, Teacher

Exporters monitor economic and political policies to the developing world, but the consequences of that have been to make developing countries far more sensitive to the constant fluctuations. Developing countries are not always allowed to support their farmers in the same way as the U. S. or Europe is. They're not allowed to have tariff barriers. They're forced, more or less, to shrink their social programs. The very poorest people have fewer and fewer entitlements. The consequence of this has been that there's been a chronic increase in the vulnerability of those economies to price shocks.

Chronic, Country, Europe, Monitor, People, Support

A recent review of different agricultural options for the future was conducted by a panel of experts. The scientists posed the question: How are we going to feed the world when there are nine billion people on it, as there will be by 2050? And the answer they came up with was industrial agriculture won't work and genetic engineering won't work and the solution is going to be sustainable, and going to ecological kinds of farming that are based on local environmental conditions that work with local ecosystems available to develop a richer kind of farming technology.

Ecological, Environmental, Industrial, People, Richer, Technology

Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture. ' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.

Agriculture, Agritechnology, Believe, Depends, Emphasis, Food

When you have weird policy decisions in the United States that then ripple out throughout the world, the rest of the world really takes it on the chin. When the U. S. decides to set their corn on fire rather than to eat it, which is what the biofuels policy basically is - then that drives up the price of corn. It drives up the price of substitutes. And all of a sudden you have a sort of spiral of food prices. And other countries don't have the resources, because they're not allowed to, to weather the storm.

Biofuels, Country, Decision, Resources, Storm, World

The problem is that we are living now with the consequences of the others people mistake. It would be nice to make our own and learn from them. That is the art of democracy. That is the art of citizenship.

Art, Learn, Living, Mistake, Nice

The opposite of consumption isn't thrift. It's generosity.

Consumption, Generosity, Opposite, Opposites, Thrift

For every $1 advertisers spend advertising something healthful like apples, they spend $500 advertising junk food.

Apples, Environmental, Food, Junk

All of human history is about the going from sudden fat years to the sudden lean years. We've always had good times and bad, and we've had ways of managing the bad times. We have ways of insulating ourselves, making ourselves less sensitive for the bad times by having things like grain stores, for example. Pretty much every civilization that's lasted for any reasonable length of time has some food management principles behind it. But what's been happening over the past thirty years is it's failed - the insurance policy.

Failed, Good Times, Management, Past, Things, Years

By the end of the 1960s, the United States owned more than half of the Indian rupee money supply, and that had been acquired through food aid. So I think it's very interesting to see the very long history of how sovereignty and food go together. When some countries remove another country's ability to feed itself, it is a very powerful tool. Imperialist countries, like the United Kingdom, like the United States, have used it for centuries.

Country, Feed, Kingdom, Powerful, Thinking, Together

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