Stuffed and Starved Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System

Naomi Klein
`One of the most dazzling books I have read in a very long time. The product of a brilliant mind, and a gift to a world hungering for justice.'
I searched hard for this book because I couldn't wait for it to come out in the USA. Normally when I work that hard to find a book, it doesn't live up to my expectations. S&S exceeded my wildest hopes for astonishment. Patel's radical hypothesis is that 1 billion starving and 1 billion fat is inevitable to the market logic of capitalism where a small number of corporations control the entire food growing, distribution, and selling network. Poor people are squeezed for every hour of labor, and rich countries are squeezed for every dollar they will spend, leading to an efficient system that runs poor farmers to the edge of starvation, and markets high-fat, cheaply made, poisoned food to the rest of us. Patel marshals an extraordinary range of evidence to show how this works at every level, and where the soft underbelly of this system is susceptible to positive change by grass roots movements. This would make an excellent documentary TV series. Much more enlightening than the other books I've read on this subject. I come away convinced that the greatest moral choice I can make is not how I vote or what I drive, but what I chose to eat.