Food Fight
From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Scholarly, literate and deeply moving, this isn't just a good read, it's an essential reference for anyone hoping to understand the food system, why it's broken and how we might imagine fixing it."—Chris Van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People
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, ill-health and premature death. We need to transform it, into one that is capable of nourishing all eight billion of us and the planet we live on.
In Food Fight, Stuart Gillespie reveals how the food system we once relied upon for global nutrition has warped into the very thing making us sick. From its origins in colonial plunder, through the last few decades of neoliberalism, the system now lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful transnationals whose playbook is geared to profit at any cost.
Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight shines a light inside the black box of politics and power and, crucially, maps a way towards 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.
