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I'm very much looking forward to seeing the new film by Steve McQueen (no, this Steve McQueen) about hunger-striking IRA prisoners, entitled Hunger. I'll write about that when I've seen it, but in the meantime, here's another film, La Faim - 'hunger' in French - that remixes ideas of hunger, gluttony, desire and fear. It's an entirely captivating eleven minutes long, and one of first 1970s stabs at computer animation.
Posted on 17 May, 2009 - 15:28
White House Organic Garden of Death
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Posted on 15 May, 2009 - 17:56
Once again, apologies for the lengthy intermission between posts here at Stuffed and Starved. I’ve been working my next book, which has taken a little more time and travel than I’d have liked. But the results will, I think, be worth it. My most recent research trip involved going to visit the Zapatistas in Chiapas, which means that your intrepid writer has recently returned from Mexico. There are many stories to share, and if you’re in New York, you can hear me talking about it on WBAI tomorrow morning, or at the Brooklyn Food Conference on Saturday.
If you’re not, here’s the roundup of articles that nicely pull the different strands of what’s happening together. ... read more »
Posted on 1 May, 2009 - 04:46
International Day of Peasant's Struggle Digest
Friday was International Day of Peasant's Struggle, and in over one hundred actions around the world, the day was celebrated (see, for instance, this lovely piece by Jim Goodman), and commemorated.
The day is a memorial to nineteen Brazilian landless activists, members of the MST who were massacred by paramilitary forces in Brazil as they made their way to present their demands for land to the government. These activists were among a group of 1500 workers marching to Para, the regional capital. ... read more »
Posted on 20 April, 2009 - 04:30
The World According to Monsanto
Here's a film that's well worth watching. It's long, and the framing device of a woman Googling away her ignorance about one of the world's most powerful corporations is, I think, a little crass. But perhaps because the film maker seems so naive, she has been able to get some of the most important men behind the scenes of the pesticide and genetically modified seed business to explain how they came to wield such power. I doubt that a more polished film crew would have been able to draw out some of the confessions that appear in this nearly-two-hour documentary. Highly recommended.
Posted on 7 April, 2009 - 22:36
Lord. It'd all have to happen at the same time, wouldn't it? A deadline to hand in a draft of the next book, traveling to a conference on the other side of the continent, an attack by spammers on this website, and the disproportionate response by some lunatic at my hosting company to shut down every site I manage, with no instructions about how to fix things. The site is now back from the dead, but for the time being, you'll not be able to get in touch with me until I patch the software on this site. Hope to do that soon...
Posted on 6 April, 2009 - 14:17
Here's another excellent report from Grain, about the agricultural 'aid' to Afghanistan. In Stuffed and Starved I wrote about how, after the Korean War, the US sent large quantities of wheat to Korea. Since wheat had never been part of the Korean diet, the US had to invest in 'education', so that a taste for everything from pasta to bread might be planted in the barren Korean palate. And successfully too. Consumption today is four times higher, per person, than it was in 1961. And much of that wheat is now purchased from the US.
Can we expect something to happen in Afghanistan? To borrow a campaign slogan: Yes we can. [via DM].
Here's why:
Soya has never been grown in Afghanistan and it doesn’t form part of the country’s culinary tradition, but a new programme, supposedly devised to combat malnutrition, plans to change all that. USAID has funded Nutrition and Education International (NEI), set up by Nestlé, to teach Afghans to sow and eat soya beans. ... read more »
Posted on 10 March, 2009 - 14:53
JJ Tiziou Photography - please donate!
I’m back from a trip to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, as part of a delegation of food justice activists. For a full report, do read the thoughts of the excellent Tom Philpott. To supplement his report, though, I thought I'd jot down a couple of impressions.
Although I’d never been there before, our guided tour around the town of Immokalee felt familiar. Immokalee means ‘my home’ in Seminole. And it was peoples’ homes that I’d seen before, in another country. The trailers where tomato-pickers sleep reminded me of South African townships, filled with densely packed low-income houses, built by the government to keep the supply of black labour close, but not too close, to the cities where their work was required.
Except that the conditions in Apartheid era township houses were better than in Immokalee. ... read more »
Posted on 7 March, 2009 - 17:15
This site 
Raj Patel.