Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel

In 1733 George Cheyne, an English vegetarian who was clearly ahead of his time, issued a broadside against "the English malady". "Since our wealth has increas'd," he wrote, "we have ransack'd all the parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock of Materials for Riot, Luxury, and to provoke Excess ... Is it any Wonder, then, that the Diseases which proceed from Idleness and Fulness of Bread, should increase in Proportion...?" Almost 300 years later, the English malady has become the world's.

As Raj Patel shows in this magisterial account of the global food system, diseases of "idleness and fulness of bread" now sit alongside diseases of hunger and poverty in almost every country. A billion people are clinically obese, while 800 million go hungry. Patel's aim is to expose this global system for what it is: to explain where food comes from and how; to look at the system's historical roots and examine why it serves so many people, from farmers to shoppers, so badly.

"Unless you're a corporate food executive," he writes, "the system isn't working for you." He gives himself over 400 pages to explain why and, impressively, he largely succeeds.

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. According to the UN, farmers in Punjab, formerly the nation's breadbasket, face "ruin and a crisis of existence".

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, some of which, despite its accessible style, can be hard to get your head around. But this is the kind of book from which you emerge enlightened, surprised, angry and determined.

Paul Kingsnorth's book 'Real England' will appear next year

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