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I’m back from a trip to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, as part of a delegation of food justice activists. For a full report, do read the thoughts of the excellent Tom Philpott. To supplement his report, though, I thought I'd jot down a couple of impressions.

Although I’d never been there before, our guided tour around the town of Immokalee felt familiar. Immokalee means ‘my home’ in Seminole. And it was peoples’ homes that I’d seen before, in another country. The trailers where tomato-pickers sleep reminded me of South African townships, filled with densely packed low-income houses, built by the government to keep the supply of black labour close, but not too close, to the cities where their work was required.

Except that the conditions in Apartheid era township houses were better than in Immokalee. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 184 comments

Posted on 7 March, 2009 - 17:15

Here's a guest post from Wayne Roberts, whose No Nonsense Guide to World Food is, as I've said before, a cracking introduction.

Hopeless Romantics Do Valentine’s Day Chocolate One Better
Oaxaca, Mexico
By Wayne Roberts

Traipsing through the jungles of Mexico in January with Michael Sacco, a Toronto-based fair trader partnering with Indigenous people in Oaxaca, I got a taste of the bittersweet romantic adventure behind the romantic and sweet treat recently branded to symbolize Valentine’s Day.

Chocolate goes to the heart of the Indigenous experience in Mexico, a testimony to the high level of agriculture and civilization developed before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Aside from chocolate, now the world’s most talked-about treat, about two-thirds of the planet’s most common fruits and vegetables, including corn, tomatoes, chilies and potatoes, were domesticated in this region, some before the era of ancient Greece and Rome. ... read more »

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Posted on 25 February, 2009 - 06:18

I'm in Ohio at the moment, at Miami University, meeting with some exceptionally bright students. One of the conversations, with students who were tasked with developing a post-peak-oil agricultural plan for Iran, reminded me of this fine video. ... read more »

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Posted on 10 February, 2009 - 15:47

Pambazuka News has published another winner, this time from William Aal, Lucy Jarosz and Carol Thompson. It's a response to a particularly bad Foreign Affairs article in which Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, suggests that what we need to combat hunger is to throw the peasant off the land, bring machinery to bear on agriculture, and plant GM crops.

It is, as Aal et al note, a full-speed backward vision of agriculture, filled with wild fantasies of infinite production and zero environmental or social consequences. Frankly, it's a Stalinist vision, one that owes more to the dreams and delusions of the 1950s than anything else. In the next issue of Foreign Affairs, Paul Collier presents his solution to the transportation crisis: nuclear-powered flying cars. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 17 comments

Posted on 6 February, 2009 - 14:16

How do you fight obesity, food import dependence, global warming and food price inflation, while eating great Japanese food? Live in Japan!

Here's a public service announcement from the world's largest importer of food which ends with a "why can't consumers, producers and the food industry all get along - after all we're all Japanese?" message which ignores the reason we're in this mess at the moment. But the video nonetheless pushes the question - what's your ministry of agriculture doing to join the dots between hunger, obesity and the globalisation of food? [Via DD]

Raj's blog | 24 comments

Posted on 19 January, 2009 - 18:27

The ever popular Men's Health Worst Foods in America has been updated for 2009. The winner is this dose of diabetes, the Baskin Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake. It has 2310 calories, and gives you three days' worth of your recommended daily allowance of fat.

For the curious, here's the ingredients list (worth reading to the end ... read more »

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Posted on 15 January, 2009 - 02:28

Here's a short piece that came out in the UK's Food Magazine late last year.

If you’ve been following the debates around the international food crisis, you’ll have spotted a new and odd bit of language coming from the progressive corner. In defence of a sustainable food system, activists are summoning up a new and portentous term -- ‘food sovereignty’.

It all sounds grand, but many people, even in the progressive community, are a little baffled by it. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 January, 2009 - 07:01

Dear Mr Obama

I owe you an apology. In the run-up to the election, I said that you had been flying around in the Archer Daniels Midland jet, implying that you were still doing it. My mistake. Your team made it clear that you paid for all your own travel.

And although the same team neglected to mention that you’d only been flying around in the ADM jet in your first year of office as a Senator, the fact remains that I was wrong to suggest that this was an ongoing lapse in judgment.

In associating you with ADM, I realize I may have implied that you were, in some way, in hock to the interests of large corporations. This is an implication for which some observers have sought further evidence in the selection of your economic team. With the appointment of Timothy Geithner to the Treasury and Larry Summers to the position of top economic aide, accusations like Obama Chooses Wall Street Over Main Street have been flying through the blogosphere.

On behalf of those authors, I apologise. Even before you have taken office, they have tarnished the reputation of your office with innuendo, raising the trivia of the past, such as Larry Summers' views on women’s brains (they’re not very good at maths), Africans (they could be a lot more polluted than they are), or indeed Mr Summers’ culpability in creating this crisis. These are churlish observations, all. In 2009, we look forward to an era in which economic prosperity reigns once more, a time when the columnists will fill their thoughts not with the ephemera of the past, but the trivia of the future. ... read more »

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Posted on 17 December, 2008 - 14:38