rockville_reader says:

I won’t cover the same ground as Mr. Vannoni did. His review is spot on. I wish I had seen it before I bought this book.

Readers should know first that the book’s title is cleverly misleading. The book is only tangentially about the unhealthy make-up of the modern diet and the agribusiness oligopolies that have created it.

Instead, author Patel seems to be mainly concerned with fixing blame for the world’s food problems, and that blame rests almost exclusively with Britain and the U.S. We are told over and over that even when they were seemingly doing good, it was with evil motives. He “proves” this by selective quotations which he dredges up and takes as representing whole nations, and by assuming that if multiple motives are possible, only the worst one can be true. Thus, for example, it was with wholly evil intent that the U.S. led the Green Revolution (which much of the world enthusiastically followed) by developing high-yield fast-growing crop strains. The rich and well-off are always bad, and the poor are always innocent and good. And if governments of poorer countries do wrong by their people, it is only because the rich bad countries made them do it. These are not unlike the views I had when I was 15. But when you grow up you learn that the world is a much more complex place than that.

Patel grossly misuses statistics. Everything is twisted to support a predetermined result. He calls this “teasing out” the truth. Twisting is more like it. The book is basically a collection of whatever he can find, however obscure, to support his agenda, while ignoring or twisting anything that contradicts his view. Thus he tells us Mexicans living near the border are less healthy because they are now compelled to eat processed junk, while at the same time he notes that they are better off economically the closer to the border they are. It never occurs to him that they are eating junk for the same reason people in the U.S. do: not because they have no choice, but because, just like us, they like cheap fatty sugary unhealthy junk food.

This is not to say that Mr. Patel is wrong about everything. Far from it. But he has an agenda and it isn’t to inform. It’s to inflame, and that spoils the book. I read half of it before I decided that there are better books I can read, and since I won’t live forever, I’ll spend my time on them.
Rating: 2 / 5

R. J. McCabe says:

Mr Patel reveals how the food industry operates from the farm to the supermarket. The essence of his book is how a handful of international corporations control the world’s food system, resulting in unhealthy foods for the consumer, loss of living wages by small farmers, and environmental degradation. These corporations possess remarkable political power to control how the food system operates, who is subsidized, what regulations & international agreements are signed, etc.

A few of the claims made by the author:

* NAFTA (and U.S. farmer subsidies) basically destroyed the ability of small farmers in Mexico to earn a living, thereby increasing illegal immigration into the US.

* Use of Monsanto’s “Roundup ready” seeds and insecticide strongly encourages large single crop farming — ie, mono culture — which depletes the soil of nutrients. This and other “high tech” solutions are pushed on third world countries in lieu of sustainable farming practices that small farmers can implement and earn a living.

* The vast usage of soybeans as a food & food additive has resulted in the expansion of soybean plantations in Latin America. This has caused massive deforestation, soil depletion, and expulsion of the small farmer – severely impacting the food security of the region.

* The meaning of “Certified Organic” has been diluted so that the large players in the food industry can claim their products meet the criteria.

I recommend this book with a caveat that, while apparently thoroughly researched, some of the claims struck me as having been made without particularly strong supporting evidence, but were presented because they’re consistent with his general hypothesis. Just a gut feeling, and perhaps not a fair assessment.

Rating: 4 / 5