GET TO KNOW RAJ PATEL
Scroll down to preview some of Patel’s work, and then visit your local library to borrow one of his books! We can’t wait for SLEE 2021 – and to see you there. Find tickets at tinyurl.com/SLEE2021tickets.
Documentaries Books Podcasts + Talks Website
| Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist, and academic. Kenyan-Fijian and British raised, Raj once worked for the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations. He has since been tear-gassed on four different continents for protesting against their global economic policies. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of several books including Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System; The Value of Nothing, a New York Times and international best-seller; Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, co-authored with Rupa Marya; A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, co-written with Jason W. Moore. We are honored that Raj also wrote the foreword to the second edition of CAGJ’s publication, Our Food, Our Right. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee, and was Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. He is co-host of the excellent podcast The Secret Ingredient. |
The Ants and the Grasshopper – Documentary
Climate justice, food justice, feminism, and internationalism converge in Patel’s new Moving Mountain’s award-winning documentary. “What do we owe each other in the face of an existential crisis like the climate emergency? That’s one big question at the heart of The Ants and the Grasshopper, a recently released documentary exploring how power and privilege shape climate justice and food justice from Africa to America – and how we might move forward together (Lauren Zanolli, The Guardian).
Read the full review here and find the film here.
CAGJ is hosting a free screening and following Q & A with Raj Patel on Sunday, Sept 26. Register for FREE. We can’t wait to see you there! 
2021
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
Interview with Democracy Now!” August 2, 2021
Nutritionists, this one’s for you (and also economists, public health professionals, students, farmers, or just about anybody).
Fresh off of the press, Inflamed “takes us on a medical tour through the human body—our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain’s development to our immune system’s functioning. It’s connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the traumas endured by our ancestors. It’s connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice (Macmillan)”.
2017
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
Open this book to focus your radical aperture on global capitalism. One of Verso’s recommended reads on climate change.
“A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is a fascinating and informative work that reveals the role economics played in driving our species to the precipice of ecological disaster. . . . This book would be a valuable read for undergraduates, graduate students and scholars, as well as general audiences.
Patel and Moore have captured very succinctly how divergent areas of human life have brought us the world we inhabit, and offer a fresh perspective on intersectionality, that encourages readers to think deeply (Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics).”
2010
The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy
“With great lucidity and confidence in a dazzling array of fields, Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no value to the resources we all need to survive. This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness — argued with so much humor and humanity that the enormous tasks ahead feel both doable and desirable. This is Raj Patel’s great gift: he makes even the most radical ideas seem not only reasonable, but inevitable. A brilliant book.”
– Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine
2007
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese—both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly. To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the “green deserts” of Brazil and protester-packed streets of South Korea to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India. What he uncovers is shocking—the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets. Yet he also finds hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system.
From seed to store to plate, Stuffed and Starved explains the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance (rajpatel.org).
The Secret Ingredient
From rajpatel.org: “Veteran food-politics writers Raj Patel and Tom Philpott have teamed with Rebecca McInroy, a seasoned producer at KUT, Austin’s NPR affiliate, to launch The Secret Ingredient, a bi-weekly podcast that “won’t tell you what to eat, but will explore why you’re eating it.”
In each episode, the hosts interview a guest who’s deeply versed in a particular foodstuff or aspect of food production or consumption. Rather than ask how to prepare it or what wine it goes well with, the hosts probe its history, and how it has made the world we live in. The show covers the hidden life of food—the “secret ingredient” of the title.”
Find this podcasts wherever you find your podcasts.
Hot and Bothered, 2020
It’s April of 2020 and we’ve just been tossed into global coronavirus lock down. Listen to Patel’s analysis of the broken response of our food system.
