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| Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System | 
 enlarge | Author: Raj Patel
Publisher: Melville House
Category: Book
Buy New: $19.95
New (4) Used (7) from $15.86
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 87610
Media: Paperback
Edition: 398
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 1933633492
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.19
EAN: 9781933633497
ASIN: 1933633492
Publication Date: April 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The world food crisis explained May 28, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
The price of food is skyrocketing. There are food riots emerging across the globe. It's a crisis that threatens the stability of some governments. Why is this happening? Raj Patel explains how we got here in this remarkably prophetic book. And he's not afraid to name the bad guys. Patel has deservedly emerged as one of the top experts on this crisis, and he writes with an abundance of passion and wit.
-Kemble Scott, editor, SoMa Literary Review
 A Disappointing Polemic July 12, 2008
5 out of 16 found this review helpful
I won't cover the same ground as Mr. Vannoni did. His review is spot on. I wish I had seen it before I bought this book.
Readers should know first that the book's title is cleverly misleading. The book is only tangentially about the unhealthy make-up of the modern diet and the agribusiness oligopolies that have created it.
Instead, author Patel seems to be mainly concerned with fixing blame for the world's food problems, and that blame rests almost exclusively with Britain and the U.S. We are told over and over that even when they were seemingly doing good, it was with evil motives. He "proves" this by selective quotations which he dredges up and takes as representing whole nations, and by assuming that if multiple motives are possible, only the worst one can be true. Thus, for example, it was with wholly evil intent that the U.S. led the Green Revolution (which much of the world enthusiastically followed) by developing high-yield fast-growing crop strains. The rich and well-off are always bad, and the poor are always innocent and good. And if governments of poorer countries do wrong by their people, it is only because the rich bad countries made them do it. These are not unlike the views I had when I was 15. But when you grow up you learn that the world is a much more complex place than that.
Patel grossly misuses statistics. Everything is twisted to support a predetermined result. He calls this "teasing out" the truth. Twisting is more like it. The book is basically a collection of whatever he can find, however obscure, to support his agenda, while ignoring or twisting anything that contradicts his view. Thus he tells us Mexicans living near the border are less healthy because they are now compelled to eat processed junk, while at the same time he notes that they are better off economically the closer to the border they are. It never occurs to him that they are eating junk for the same reason people in the U.S. do: not because they have no choice, but because, just like us, they like cheap fatty sugary unhealthy junk food.
This is not to say that Mr. Patel is wrong about everything. Far from it. But he has an agenda and it isn't to inform. It's to inflame, and that spoils the book. I read half of it before I decided that there are better books I can read, and since I won't live forever, I'll spend my time on them.
Farmer Suicides and Other Foods For Thought. September 9, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A great documentary story of how we in the better off world end up living off the rest of the world and keep repeating that its for the common good.
Books like this are invaluable in all aspects of the human condition today because it joins the dots to show the economic motive force for many things that happen whether its food, healthcare or wars.
I hope many people read this and mull over the thoughts when they next walk into a Starbucks under the delusion that they are participating in a Dylanesque "cafe" moment from the 1960's or think of MacDonalds as a cheap meal
Sheds light on a difficult subject August 8, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Daniel B. Schuster says:
I was entranced by this book. Mr Patel discusses the micro effects of our agriculture system as well as the macro effects and shows their interaction.. On both farmers and consumers. Every claim or fact in the book is footnoted. And the graphs. The geek part of me could finally understand relationships between farmers, processors and consumers based on the charts of Mr Patel. I've read several books that tried to explain this but failed. Mr. Patel was able to take a complex topic and break it down step by step. Great book.
I agree with the previous reviewer - this book will cause indigestion with mega producers of food.
Smart, Opinionated Reading on Food Politics August 28, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I picked up this book during the Slow Food Nation event and couldn't put it down. Incendiary, smart and endlessly thought-provoking, Stuffed and Starved should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the politics of food. I've read Omnivore's Dilemma and lots of recent nonfiction on food politics, but wasn't familiar much of Patel's subject matter, like Via Campensina and related peasant farm movements.
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