Stuffed And Starved

The bestselling and groundbreaking book for readers of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation

At no other time in history have people in wealthy countries had so much choice and so much abundance in what to eat. But in countries locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, there is no choice. There is no food.

Raj Patel shows us that these two extremes are deeply and inextricably linked. In Stuffed and Starved, he asks us to think about the way our food comes to us, to understand how what we buy directly affects the world’s poorest citizens and to recognize how we ourselves are poisoned by our choices. Patel gives us a broad view of the global food industry and the all-encompassing machine composed of organizations such as the World Bank and the WTO, corporate lobbyists, government agencies and the all-powerful distribution networks. He also traces the specific journey of coffee, soy and high-fructose corn syrup, from the fields to the kitchens of fast-food restaurants. Stuffed and Starved is a shocking and timely story of commercial greed, desperate hunger and inspirational alternatives to the current food system.

Raj Patel was educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University. He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California, a visiting researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, consulted for the UN and been involved in international campaigns against his former employers. Visit Raj Patel at www.rajpatel.org.