When Raj Patel begins speaking, I scan the audience at the Bring Food Home conference hosted by Trent University. This is clearly a crowd that loves food, and not just food, but the idea of food. So what’s this knot in my stomach?
At the podium Raj Patel shines. He is the definition of charisma. His hair is sexy, his British accent is sexy and his message is sexy. He’s like a movie star of social justice. Food is his stage.
The dignified-looking woman sitting next to me actually sighs. I find out later she is a faculty member at Toronto’s Ryerson University.
This is a conference about how consumers can and should connect with the people who grow their food. So it seems a good signal that the conference is being held in a rural part of Ontario (Trent is in Peterborough) and also that it is being held in mid-autumn, the peak of the corn harvest, although I seem to be the only farmer here.
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In the room, all eyes are on Patel. He is an international bestselling author, and he is both a researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and a visiting scholar at California’s Berkeley. Patel talks about rooting out the cause of poverty and he points a big finger at global capitalism. The bottleneck of distribution, he tells us, is caused by the few multinational food companies dominating the food industry.
In the half-hour of his wide-sweeping, left-bending presentation, he manages to bash every major seed and crop protection company, and all the major grain-processing and -handling companies too. “There are only five to six corporations per sector that dominate each commodity,” says Patel, pausing for effect.
In his book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System Patel links rural poverty with government food policy and also with multinational agribusiness. Although broad, his thoughts are both provocative and thoroughly researched, and he uses specific heart-wrenching situations and statistics.
After all, Patel does have global academic and work experience. He grew up in England, raised by immigrant parents, and he has worked for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. His education includes degrees from Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University.
This conference’s message, which Patel shares, is that the public needs to control food policy instead of leaving it up to untrustworthy lobby groups and politicians. Existing North American farmers seem to be classified somewhere between victim and foe. The power of consumers can change the system by food choices and discussion.
“Our communities joined through eating are going to flatten the hierarchy of our global food system,” says Patel, pumping his fists.
Few in the audience seem to understand how modern farms operate, and as they respond to Patel, most seem to be politically motivated.
Patel is clearly preaching to the choir here. This conference is all about empowering consumers to sidestep large food companies. It’s about connecting with farmers directly and eating locally, and even about urbanites growing some of their own food.
Increasingly, however, Patel’s message is also spreading beyond the walls of this room and other rooms like it. His message is appealing to a much more diverse audience, and his latest book, The Value of Nothing is a national bestseller.
In it, Patel explains why you’d have to pay over $200 for a Big Mac hamburger if you added in the costs of environmental damage, health care, slavery in agriculture, and even hidden subsidies. It’s more of the same of his first book just shorter, more poignant and a little more readable.
“We are not merely consumers of democracy. We are its proprietors,” says Patel.
Patel started his presentation by saying that the problems with most current food aid go beyond multinational food companies and government policy. Societies and culture also impact food insecurity. The solution, he says, is about gender empowerment even in wealthy developed countries. Food is about power. To make his point, Patel tells us poor women are the largest group in Canada that consume less than 1,900 calories a day and don’t know where their next meal will come from.
From there, Patel glides smoothly into the world’s inequity. Even though we produce more food than ever before, more than one in 10 people are hungry. Some 800 million are malnourished, mostly in the global south. But then the world also has one billion folks who are overweight.
How will be be able to feed the world? Patel says the solution for all these problems can be found in democratically resolved food policies.
“Food sovereignty,” Patel calls it. “On a base level this means a community’s right to shape its own food and agricultural policy.”
Patel is excited by the Occupy protest movement and was in attendance with former NFU president Nettie Wiebe at Occupy Saskatoon. He agrees with Wiebe that de-monopolizing the Canadian Wheat Board will be detrimental to farmers, and that it will only help large grain companies.
What Patel likes about these general assembly protests is their communal nature. “They want people to come to the planning meeting,” he says breathlessly. “What’s new about this is that they’re looking to build a safe space for politics to be discussed, ideas to be respected.”
He talks about an HIV hospital in Africa that spawned a community farm and garden. It has become a sort of community meeting place with both men and women working in it. “People around the world are looking for a safe space to realize the future and recolonize their minds,” says Patel. “Talking about food sovereignty is the beginning of the conversation.”
The room fills with applause. Everyone nods over their empty dinner plates, and it crosses my mind to wonder if any of them has ever gone hungry, and to ask if I’m the only one who wonders whether they’d be willing to pay the actual price of Patel’s food freedom.
The applause continues. My stomach lurches. How much will these ideas influence our country’s future food policy? CG
