Word: patel
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...What is the worst part of your job? -Trishna Patel, Highlands Ranch, Colo.The time you spend with the media. It's probably the toughest part of my job because I'm more familiar with the baseball aspects. One of my pledges to my players is that if there's something they need to know, it's going to come from me before they read it in the papers...
...soybean's ascendancy is one of many pieces of a global puzzle that author Raj Patel aims to fit together in his new book Stuffed and Starved - a sweeping look at the development of the international food chain that delivers calories from nation to nation with an alarmingly uneven hand. As its title promises, the book tackles one of the chief dysfunctions of our unique era in alimentary history: that 800 million people are getting too little to eat and are malnourished, while over 1 billion are getting so much they've become overweight or obese...
...conundrum, and Patel is obliged to rake through centuries and continents for the seeds - pardon the pun - of the world's dietary inequity. The library work is solid - he is currently a researcher at South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. As you would expect from that résumé, he writes like an academic - but that's not to say the book is bloodless. Patel has a highly developed historical sense of why we eat as we do, and if readers who have enough food understand...
...those decisions might be to examine the corporatization of agriculture, and the present organization of the global trade in food, asking if these really are the best means of delivering sustenance to the human race as a whole. Patel opens the book with the epidemic of farmer suicides that have hit rural India, South Korea and the United States, depicting a grim picture of despair and debt, and conclusively dispelling the strangely persistent myth of farming as some sort of pastoral pleasure. He then argues that the past century's lowering of trade barriers and opening of agricultural markets, with...
...Stuffed and Starved does veer, at times, into the social footnotes of food. Patel recounts the rise of Wal-Mart, and tells how obesity became a symptom of race relations in America, or how the desire to counter scurvy among sailors spawned the huge food-conservation industry. (Then there's the story of Ellen G. White, the founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, who claimed to have had a vision revealing vegetarianism as the key to longevity - thus making her congregation the "the first white people in the United States to make tofu.") The author also makes no pretence...