Raj Patel, provides us with a compelling book on the nature of the food system in the modern world. You will never look at food at the supermarket the same way again after reading this captivating book. He shifts effortlessly from dissecting the historical processes leading to the spate of farmer suicides in India, to the global epidemic of starvation and obesity which each plague roughly a billion people. As the book’s title puts so aptly, excess and scarcity are two faces of the same malaise that afflicts the global food system — where food producers are starved of income, and consumers of real choices. The book exposes the world food system for what it is, a system that benefits a very select few to the detriment of the majority.

Today’s food system, explains Patel, is effectively a stitch-up. The legacy of an imperial past in which European nations destroyed countries to get their hands on sugar, tea or spices, it is controlled almost entirely by a surprisingly small number of powerful corporations. These are the global middlemen, who come between producers and consumers and, in doing so, control both.

Supermarkets, food processors, seed sellers, agrochemical manufacturers – these are the people who really control the contents of your plate, and Patel has figures to prove it. Retailers turned over US$3.5 trillion in 2004; agrochemical corporations sold US$25 trillion of produce. The GDP of Canada is just over US$1 trillion.

Billions suffer the diseases brought on by our bad food industry: mass starvation in some parts, obesity and diabetes in others. Many of the obese are not rich, as in the past. Malnourished children brought up in slums are less able to metabolise food as adults; they store more fat from the cheap foods that they can afford.

Meanwhile, supermarkets and grain companies are screwing farmers into the ground so hard that agricultural suicides are at record highs, and millions-strong rural resistance movements are flowering everywhere from India to Brazil. New tastes are invented for us, agricultural waste products are poured into our processed foods, the alternatives to supermarkets and global seed companies are being extinguished and people in ‘developed’ nations are forgetting where food comes from or how to cook it. Meanwhile, countries like India, desperate to sustain their ‘economic miracle’, are destroying their own rich farmlands.

It’s often a hugely depressing tale, but Patel is determined that things can change. Stuffed and Starved is itself stuffed with a huge volume of information. It is also a book that inspires change, and brings back the idea that we have to win back our food, and with it the control over how and for who it is produced.

Published by Harper Collins (Indian Edition), 2008.