The Nation Releases their Food Issue

If you’re looking for some good food-related reading, pick up the current issue of The Nation on newsstands now. Author Frances Moore Lappé opens the issue with an update on her perspectives of hunger and food since 1971, when she wrote Diet for a Small Planet. Her insights are not surprising to those who have followed hunger and food insecurity over the past 30 years:

The number of hungry people has soared to nearly 1 billion, despite strong global harvests. And for even more people, sustenance has become a health hazard—with the US diet implicated in four out of our top ten deadly diseases. Power over soil, seeds and food sales is ever more tightly held, and farmland in the global South is being snatched away from indigenous people by speculators set to profit on climbing food prices. Just four companies control at least three-quarters of international grain trade; and in the United States, by 2000, just ten corporations—with boards totaling only 138 people—had come to account for half of US food and beverage sales. Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers. Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years.

That’s one current. It’s antidemocratic and deadly.

There is, however, another current, which is democratizing power and aligning farming with nature’s genius. Many call it simply “the global food movement.” In the United States it’s building on the courage of truth tellers from Upton Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and worldwide it has been gaining energy and breadth for at least four decades.

I, for one, am never satisfied with just one voice on a topic, so I appreciate the diverse symposium of authors The Nation has gathered for this issue: Raj Patel, Bridget Huber, Vandan Shiva, Michael Pollan, and more. Check it out online here. (Warning: They ask for an email sign up.)

Cover illustration by Tim Robinson, design by Milton Glaser Incorporated.