You Must Read—Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

Unless you’re a corporate food executive, the food system isn’t working for you.

-Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

It’s amazing how a 300 page book can be summed up in thirteen words, but the quote at the top of the page succinctly describes what Raj Patel lays out in Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. 

However, there is a lot of value to be had in not assuming the message of the book is as simple as those three words.  You must read this book because it gives you the context and nuance behind why the food system does not work anymore unless you are an employee of the large industrial agriculture or food companies.  Heck, executives at Monsanto probably get a copy of this book as a detailed list of the things they believe that they did well as a company.

Primarily, this is one of the few books that you will find readily available that puts the food system in a global context.  It’s one thing to write a book about the decline of the family farm in the rural Midwestern United States.  There are sympathetic audiences to that story across the political spectrum from MSNBC to Fox News.  But talk about cotton farmers in rural India or Brazilian farmers trying to work out from under the thumb of the industrial soybean regime and you will find the task increasingly difficult.  Nonetheless, Raj Patel has done a commendable job in describing the global disaster that is our modern food system.

One of the major takeaways, in my opinion, from this book and the many talks that the author gives is that the problem in the modern food system is its “hourglass” shape.  That is to say, on one end you have many producers who funnel the raw ingredients of our food system to a few companies who control production, distribution, and retailing.  These few mega companies, in turn, sell the products to many consumers.  The constriction in the middle is what has allowed the policies that shape our modern food system to become so warped.

This constriction also removes us, as consumers, away from any true understanding of what it means to actually grow food.  The author puts it bluntly:

If we ever think of fields, our thoughts about the countryside are benign, passive, and vapid.  To become and remain idyll, the rural is forgotten, sanitized and shorn of meaning to fit the view from the city.  For our purposes, airbrushing the countryside serves us badly. [Page 299]

It’s Currier and Ives or Norman Rockwell visions of farmers on small homesteads.  Or, if you are in Iowa, Grant Wood’s ideal landscapes of rolling hills and young corn.

If our perceptions of rural landscapes and farmers are deluded, then we should shudder at the delusion we are under when it comes to choice in the supermarket.  The supermarket may be convenient, but the products on the shelves do not represent true or meaningful choice.  It’s the Coke versus Pepsi choice that is artifice embodied as independence.

Do not even think certified organic is somehow freeing you of guilt.  One of Patel’s most stunning indictments is of certified organic:

Think of it as a kind of culinary taxidermy, in which the living social relations are shot, stuffed and mounted on the shelves.  Never having experienced a direct connection to the people who grow our food, we’re tricked by the simulacrum, mistaking the dead green “Certified Organic” packaging for a living connection. [Page 252]

Furthermore, the supermarket is another of the great constrictors because it removes many local producers from being able to access local markets.  It also turns local farmers into racers in a competition to the lowest rung on the ladder of price because the foodstuffs they now produce are commoditized ingredients in processed food.  Speaking of women farmers who wanted to have the capability to grind their own corn for meal rather than selling their whole corn at low prices and buying meal at higher prices, Patel writes:

This way they could be independent of the supermarket, but still profit from the technology that made it convenient.  In other words, the women wanted control of the means of production. [Page 245]

And I thought that Karl Marx’s theories were dead.

I may have made the book sound like Debbie Downer, but the tone is more hopeful than that.  The proponents of the modern food system may be powerful.  These proponents, however, share the fatal flaw in that there policies are killing people on both ends of the hourglass.  Between suicides of farmers and diabetes in consumers there is a growing consensus that something is fundamentally wrong.  The number one rule of marketing should be “Don’t let the consumer know you are killing them.”  How did it work out for the cigarette manufacturers when people found out they had hidden evidence of the harmful effects of smoking for decades?  People were a smidge pissed.

Okay, he is probably not the messiah but he has very profound things to say about the global food system.  If you get a chance, check out his talks at UC Berkeley’s Edible Education course in 2011 and 2012.

You Must Read: Walmart’s Greenwash

Walmart is big.  Everyone with any exposure to the company understands on some level that Walmart is very large, even in a world where multi-national corporations have taken on sizes that dwarf many countries.  Quoting from their own website, “Walmart serves customers and members more than 200 million times per week at more than 10,130 retail units under 69 different banners in 27 countries. With fiscal year 2012 sales of $443 billion, Walmart employs 2.2 million associates worldwide.”  That size is hard to understand.

If Walmart were considered a country, it would have the 23^rd highest nominal GDP in the world just ahead of Saudi Arabia.  Walmart is the world’s third largest employer trailing on the United States Department of Defense and China’s People’s Liberation Army.

This size, quite simply, means that Walmart’s moves—good, bad, or otherwise—have an enormous impact on the markets, governments, and ecosystems in which it operated.  Put another way, what Walmart does on its own has an appreciable impact on the planet.

Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has authored an excellent report that details the myth of Walmart’s much lauded move toward a more sustainable future entitled Walmart’s Greenwash: How the company’s much-publicized sustainability campaign falls short, while its relentless growth devastates the environment.

In 2005, Walmart launched its sustainability campaign.  On its own website, the sustainability goals are stated clearly.  Too bad it is entirely crap.

Page 4of the report pretty much lays out the statistics in stark terms.  Take for example:

• 698 million: total square footage of Walmart’s U.S. stores in 2011
• 641 million: total square footage of Manhattan—yes the entire island give or take a few bodegas

What the report shows is that Walmart landed one of the all-time PR coups.  People started to view the company more favorably—38 percent of people had an unfavorable view of the company in 2005 and by 2010 that same viewpoint had fallen to 20 percent—without the company having to do much outside of issue some press releases.

Take for example the Sustainability Index.  Launched in 2009 under the aegis of its larger sustainability campaign, the Sustainability Index was supposed to be a way to assess the sustainability of every product that Walmart sold.  Been to Walmart lately?  Seen any Sustainability Index references on the shelves?  Nope.  It’s greenwashing, pure and simple.

The report also nails Walmart for its greatest green sin: sprawl.  Walmart’s land use and development patterns are a nightmare.  The model is to build gigantic stores on greenfield sites that encourage car use and have acres of parking.  Essentially everything we have learned about smart development is ignored by a Walmart supercenter.  About the only “green” claim a store like this could make is that it reduces the number of trips required to purchase all of one’s goods.  It’s all available in store for everyday low prices.

I find the most troubling thing about Walmart going forward, as highlighted in this report and Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating , is its apparent takeover of the retail grocery market in the U.S.  In 2011, Walmart captured 25 percent of the total U.S. grocery spend of $550 billion.  In some markets, Walmart’s market share is 50 percent or greater.  Consider that prior to Walmart entering the grocery business it was a fractured and regional market.

As Raj Patel, the most excellent observer of the food industry, points out that the food system has become warped.  It used to be that the system worked by a lot of producers selling to a lot of consumers through a large number of retailers or manufacturers.  However, the system is now squeezed in the middle.  Power and control are being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few manufacturers or retailers who move or even make markets.  Check out his presentation at UC Berkeley’s Edible Education.

This is the reason we end up with things like pink slime…er “lean beef trimmings.”  Heck, Walmart has barely touched this issue while a lot of other traditional grocers moved quickly to stop selling meat with the nasty leftover scraps treated with ammonia.  If Walmart did not capture one-quarter of the U.S. grocery spend, do you think that the company would be as obdurate about stopping the sale of meat containing pink slime?

In the end, none of this should be surprising.  Walmart is a publicly traded company.  Why is this important?  Because the reason for being of the modern publicly traded company is maximizing shareholder value, which is translated into beat year-over-year targets for revenue and profit growth.  Everything else is secondary or less to that driving mantra.  Walmart is hyper-focused on revenue and profit growth.  Something like the environment is not going to get in its way.

At the end of Walmart’s Greenwash Stacy Mitchell posits four ways that everyone can do to hold Walmart accountable:

1. Push the media to hold Walmart accountable
2. Focus on the right question
3. Recognize Walmart’s economic power as a threat to the environment
4. Don’t lose sight of labor issues

While I agree with all of those points as a basis for holding any large multi-national accountable there is one thing missing from the equation—do not shop at Walmart.  Each dollar you spend at Walmart enables the beast.

Remember, as large as a company like Walmart seems, even the largest and most successful companies fall victim to their own hubris or stupidity.  Who in the 1950s would have thought that Woolworth’s would be defunct by the close of the Twentieth Century?  Or that Pan Am, the icon of air travel, would go belly-up in 1991?  No one.  Not even the people who ran those companies. 

Heck, on September 14^, 2008 how many people on Wall Street would have thought Lehman Brothers would cease to exist the following day?  The world can change as if it were on a hinge.  Even for people who think they are masters of the universe.