Those who wonder how it is possible to buy a shirt in a high street shop for only a few pounds might also have questioned why we can now eat juicy strawberries all year round, and why the average price of chicken has plummeted in the past ten years.
Raj Patel’s book confirms a widespread suspicion that the system is grotesquely out of balance – and not just because 800 million people in the world are undernourished. For the first time ever, there are actually more overweight than underfed people in the world. Patel argues that hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same global malaise.
This exhaustively researched book demonstrates how the “choice” we get in supermarkets is an illusion: what we are offered is dictated by the reality of a market controlled by a few key players, and comes at an undisclosed cost to others. It also deconstructs the
long accepted folk wisdom that “the poor are hungry because they are lazy”, or, conversely, that the wealthy are fat because they eat too richly. While the minutiae of the Brazilian soy market may not captivate everyone, Patel writes with a precision and clarity that make his unavoidably bulky suitcase of statistics accessible.
