Slow Food Nation will hit San Francisco this weekend. The City's already fluttering with SFN posters, and the Victory Garden, planted on the land outside City Hall, looks very handsome indeed. To prepare for the jamboree, I thought I'd go back to Carlo Petrini's book of the same name, and to Geoff Andrews' new book, The Slow Food Story. Together, these writers offer a corrective to the hoity toity food culture that has become synonymous with the organization. Although it’s often forgotten, Slow Food’s roots are radical. ... read more »

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Posted on 28 August, 2008 - 20:50

One of the premises of this blog is that there's a deep connection between food and poverty. So it's not too much of a tangent to start talking about poverty directly.

The question asked by my friend Dan Moshenberg, who's guest blogging with this wee article, is this: how are the poorest treated in the world's richest country and the world's most impoverished? The answer: almost the exactly same.

Here's his striking analysis, comparing the Zimbabwean Operation Murambatsvina with Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans three years ago... ... read more »

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Posted on 28 August, 2008 - 20:37

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere - three quarters of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

Haitians have company - more than anyone thought. The news from the World Bank is that, cough, poverty might be more pervasive than they thought. Looking back at their figures, they've revised up their estimates of the number of people living in poverty from 985 million to 1.4 billion, a more than 40% increase.

The Bank's spin is that poverty is still lower now than it was in 1981, when there were 1.9 billion people living in poverty. But most of the world's reduction in poverty comes from China. Excluding China, world poverty fell from 40% to 30% over the past 25 years.
Read the full BBC report.

Worse, these figures don't include the recent increases in food prices. Poor people around the world, particularly in cities where you need money to buy food, are finding meals increasingly hard to come by. Ethiopia, as this report shows, is facing food price inflation of over 40%. Things are so hard that, in some cases, families are forced to choose which of their children they will save from hunger.

Some have taken to the streets rather than face this choice. In Haiti, as Reuters reports below, food riots have broken out again. Sadly, they're not likely to be the only ones we see as winter approaches. And, if you read French, you can see here how women are in the front lines not only of growing their own food, but in organising for it too... ... read more »

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Posted on 27 August, 2008 - 17:23

George Monbiot writes below, eloquently as ever, about the rapaciousness of the European Union. In particular, he trains his sights on how EU policies are harming African fisheries. (Veteran Stuffed & Starved readers will remember the BBC covering this from a slightly different angle.)

But you know things are fairly far gone when Monbiot's analysis is adopted by a senior UN official, and reported in the Financial Times. Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, puts it a little impenetrably:

"The risk is of creating a neo-colonial pact for the provision of non-value-added raw materials in the producing countries and unacceptable work conditions for agricultural workers.

But it's the same sentiment as Monbiot's. Below the fold, Monbiot parses out what, exactly, neo-colonialism means. ... read more »

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Posted on 26 August, 2008 - 23:34

Here's a piece with which I'm particularly pleased, which just came out as a commentary in this month's Radical Philosophy. ... read more »

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Posted on 25 August, 2008 - 15:58

Photo Credit: Limonada

I think what disturbs me about this Reuters news piece even more than the Let them Eat Mud story that I posted about mud cake consumption in Haiti, is that the government in Bihar, India, is actively promoting it.

Just to be clear. It's official government policy for people to eat rats. (The full story here and below.)

It's a useful case to ruminate over. What is it, after all, that's so appalling here? Clearly the idea of eating vermin is, by definition, distasteful, but what a culture decides is edible, and what is pestilent, isn't written in our DNA. As we used to chorus in Sociology 101: "it's a social construct". Some think pork is as dirty as rat. Some think that by renaming pigeons as 'squab', they'll taste better.

That people are eating rodents isn't the only thing that should turn our stomachs, though. The Bihari government endorsement of rat-eating is simultaneously a sign of defeat. They've given up on fighting poverty so that people can afford to eat. Given up on trying to protect the grain harvests with decent infrastructure. Given up, almost, on their people.

In a time of scarce resources and rising hunger, rat-eating becomes a handy technical fix. After all, what is rat-eating but a technology to increase nutrition and eliminate the use of pesticides and the need for secure grain storage?

And if we're appalled by this, and we should be, then how different is this from the logic that justifies Golden Rice? After all, doesn't golden rice become useful only when governments have resigned themselves to the fact that the only thing people can afford to eat is rice? That the healthcare system can't be resuscitated? That the best technology to fix the problem is one that doesn't address it?

_______________________ ... read more »

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Posted on 20 August, 2008 - 15:27

While this post isn't exactly about food, it is about the hypocrisy with which developed countries pretend to fight hunger on the one hand, and cause it on the other.

This is a graph of what embassies pay their security staff in Zambia. In none of the cases does the pay meet the requirements to feed a family of six in Lusaka, according to a union report. Predictably, at the bottom of the list, paying six times less than what a family needs to survive, is the World Bank. The full list, from best paying to worst, below the fold. ... read more »

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Posted on 20 August, 2008 - 14:53

Here's another fine article from Walden Bello, reposted from Business Daily Africa

Africa’s food crisis the handiwork of IMF, World Bank

Walden Bello

Despite being a net food exporter at independence, Africa now imports 25 per cent of her food from donors.

August 18, 2008: At the time of decolonisation in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter.

Its exports averaged 1.3 million tonnes a year between 1966-70. But today, the continent imports 25 per cent of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. ... read more »

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Posted on 18 August, 2008 - 19:16