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 »

Raj's blog | 4 comments | email this page

Posted on 17 December, 2008 - 14:38

I'm just finishing work on an academic article about the return of food riots, which I'm co-writing with my good friend Phil McMichael. As part of that work, one of Phil's finest graduate students, Mindi Schneider, prepared a research report on 2008's food riots.

It was such an excellent document, and such a valuable resource to anyone wanting to know more about the protests that happened this year, that it would have been criminal to keep it to ourselves. So here, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, is Mindi's splendid report: A Summary Report of Food Riots, Government Responses, and States of Democracy in 2008 [2MB PDF]. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment | email this page | 1 attachment

Posted on 15 December, 2008 - 16:10

If I were anywhere near New York City next weekend, I'd be going to Give Us Bread, a reading of a play about the 1917 Food riots. The crew who put it together, the Anthropologists, have a splendid research blog on which they've been collecting materials about the riots. On it, you'll find everything from the City's response to the riots (eat rice!) to a racial classification of NYC push-cart vendors. If the research for the project is so surprising, challenging and entertaining, it can only speak well for the reading of their production. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 12 December, 2008 - 02:47

Image credit:Mitchell Siporin

Tonight, I can't read Langston Hughes' Let America Be America Again without crying. When Hughes uses "America" twice in the title of his poem, he uses the word to signify a promise and a betrayal. Tonight my tears come not through the joy of a Democrat elected to the White House nor, it must be said, from one gin and tonic too many. For me, tonight is painfully familiar; the betrayal can’t be far off.

Growing up under nearly two decades of Conservative rule in the UK (Margaret Thatcher 1979-1990 and John Major 1990-1997), I remember when the British electorate put Tony Blair 1997-2007 in power. Having voted Green in the 1997 British Election, I came to America on the day that Blair's Labour Party came to power. I wasn't around to see the day when, I'm told, people smiled at one another on the London Underground - a sign of unrefined joy if ever there were.

But Blair's Britain turned to ashes. And I've no doubt that the Obama presidency will disappoint the vast majority of those who voted for him - he will not redistribute as forcefully, nor demilitarise as vigorously, nor change quite as hopefully as he offered.

Despite all that, tonight is still a promise partially delivered. In Britain it would have been, and still is, impossible to imagine a native-born person of colour winning the highest office in the land. It couldn't happen anywhere in Europe. When the United States elects a person of colour, one who grew up without the benefit of inheritance or patrimony, that's a clear sign of transformation, even if it's ultimately an egalitarianism among the bourgeoisie. That said, of course, this wee table from CNN is rather telling.

As we'll soon discover though, in any person's vision of how the future might be, there are always exclusions. In Hughes' poem, it's women. It won't be long before we find out who Obama's forgotten are. And it's as well to understand that Hughes' full promise will be fulfilled not when there's one Barack Obama, but where there are millions. To get from here to there, though, we'll still need to to celebrate the fall of tonight's a very real barrier (even as another is erected).

Let America Be America Again

by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.) ... read more »

Raj's blog | 2 comments | email this page

Posted on 5 November, 2008 - 07:54

The New York Times ran a special food-themed issue of its Sunday magazine a week back. It was kicked off by a fine piece by Mark Bittman, who observed quite rightly that the conversation being had in the magazine’s pages reflects America’s new, and healthy, interest in what they’re eating.

Indeed, just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine this sort of interest, and even harder to imagine that the New York Times would countenance the sorts of politics espoused in Michael Pollan’s Farmer in Chief essay, or David Reiff’s subtle dissection of the Gates Foundation’s African Adventures.

I like David’s piece a great deal, not just because I appear in it as a reasonable person, but because he captures exactly what’s wrong about the Northern do-gooder in Africa. For the record, a mistake crept in to the piece – I’ve never actually met Raj Shah – but the piece certainly captures how I feel about the Alliance for a New Green Revolution in Africa.

And yet, despite all that, the issue had one or two gaping holes. Labour didn’t really get a look in and, most important, the entire issue was almost wholly silent on the issue of gender. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 5 comments | email this page

Posted on 23 October, 2008 - 06:35

Photocredit WendyUsuallyWanders

This is the bleakest World Food Day in a little while. World Foodless Day, some are calling it.

The commodity price boom of early 2008 has passed. Prices are settling down on the international commodity markets, but most of us don't get our daily bread from the Chicago Board of Trade. And I've not noticed any significantly cheaper food being available at the supermarkets.

It looks as if we're moving into the worst of all possible worlds. Low commodity prices for producers (especially smaller farmers, who didn't do very well out of the boom in the first place), but a high price for food, because retailers are loath to drop prices that they've already spent time getting us accustomed to. This is what economists mean when they say that prices are 'sticky'.

Since I think we should get used to paying more for food, you'd think I'd approve of us getting used to high prices. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 16 October, 2008 - 15:29

Yes, it has been an embarrassingly long time since I posted something of substance up here. I blame it on too much travel, and the flu. Sifting through the accumulated mail, the financial crisis is of course front and centre.

The Retort group here in the Bay Area have sent along two items that deserve particular mention - one, above, a bit of ephemera from the streets of San Francisco, the second a timeless comedy skit from two very British comics, John Bird and John Fortune. And it's all the more impressive for having come out last year...

... read more »

Raj's blog | 3 comments | email this page

Posted on 8 October, 2008 - 17:57

I'll not make a habit out of trumpeting upcoming speaking engagements, much less repeating said trumpeting, but for two good reasons, I'm going to make an exception. First, I'll be speaking this Friday at the new California Academy of Sciences and it is one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen. Above, a picture of the 2.5 acre living roof that Renzo Piano put on top of the building, and crammed with nearly 2 million native plants. The Academy has just opened its doors, and it is just as thoroughly on the inside as it is out.

But, and this is the second reason I'm being a little more vigorous in self-publicising, the good people at Litquake tell me that because the Academy is so new, their ticketing system is still getting up and running. So, for those of you who are in the Bay Area and keen to see the building, as well as hear a fine conversation geared towards thinking about how architecture and food will intersect in the future, the details on how to get in are below. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 3 comments | email this page

Posted on 8 October, 2008 - 17:27