Food Fight
From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Using decades of research and insight gathered from around the world, health and nutrition expert Stuart Gillespie reimagines our global food system, plotting a way forward for a sustainable, equitable, and healthy food future
Food is life, but our food system is killing us. Designed in a different century for a different purpose—to mass-produce cheap calories to prevent famine—it’s now generating obesity and ill-health and driving the climate crisis. We need to transform it into one that can nourish all eight billion of us and the planet we live on.
In Food Fight, Stuart Gillespie shares the insights he’s gleaned over a forty-year career in food, nutrition, and health, revealing how the global food system we once relied upon for nutrition has warped into the very thing making us sick. Many of us are now simultaneously overweight and undernourished. From its origins in colonial plunder through to the past few decades of neo-liberalism, our food system now lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful transnational corporations that are playing for profit at any cost—aided by governments who let them get away with it.
With his eye trained on solutions within our grasp, Gillespie also celebrates success stories from around the world, driven by remarkable citizens, social movements, policy makers, and politicians. These case studies offer hope that, by organizing, sharing, and learning, we can build a better food future for ourselves and for our children.
Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight shines a light inside the black box of politics and power before mapping a way toward a new system that gives us hope for a future of global health and justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
International food policy analyst Gillespie (AIDS, Poverty, and Hunger) provides a dogged dressing-down of the global food system. He argues that the system is a 20th-century "anachronism" functioning exactly as initially designed—mass-producing cheap calories for huge profits, with the careless side effect of slowly killing consumers (or quickly killing them if they live in the Global South, where the fatal effects of ultra-processed food are compounded by poverty). The book's focus is mainly on the "Big Five"—Nestlé, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, and Unilever—who control three-quarters of all food retail, run America's largest political lobby, and each bring in more income than half the countries in the world. Gillespie's prose is fast-paced and bare-bones, and while he occasionally gets lost in the weeds of social issues (one section is simply titled "Patriarchy"), the most propulsive chapters take an up-close look at a harrowing selection of corporate practices—from General Mills paying Instagram dietitians to post about cereal while using "body positivity" hashtags like #DitchtheDiet, to Nestlé allegedly making KitKats from chocolate harvested by child slaves (readers will be affronted to learn that, in one child slavery lawsuit, Nestlé' "reference the Nuremberg Trials extensively" in its defense). Surveying potential solutions, Gillespie makes a convincing case that a "major" structural change is needed rather than "fiddling on the fringes." At times overwhelming in its relentlessness, this is nonetheless a massive wake-up call.