This splendid article has been sent in by a number of you. It’s a fine joining-the-dots piece, linking together farmer suicides with the dirty politics of market-making – and it’s a link that binds the fates of farmers in India with those in Iraq. Tremendously well written too.
While one needs to be a little suspicious about initiatives claiming to be from “the Global South” (most people in the Global South likely didn’t get the memo), this is a useful wee intervention on agrofuels (biofuels). A little heavy going, but if you’re interested in biofuels, it’s a must read piece.
Photo credit: Sixintheworld
At one of my first public talks, in London, someone asked me what I thought of the fact that New Zealand lamb involved the production of less CO2 than British lamb. I responded that there was something odd about the study being conducted by the New Zealand Lamb Marketing Board (or somesuch), and rubbished the idea.
The good people at Food News sent me a snippet this morning that’ll come in handy on my last day here in Australia. It’s a piece from the Murdoch-owned Australian, that nicely sums up the pinch that we’re going to be feeling in our pockets in the future…
I’m here at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, buoyed by a good review in the Guardian, and by some great audience response here at the Festival. Seems only fair to give something back. So here’s a piece that’ll soon be up on the ABC’s website. It’s a slightly rejigged version of the introduction to Stuffed and Starved, with an Australian twist.
Slow Food was an invention of the Italian Communist Party, and has some important roots in workerist organising, with a radically egalitarian vision of why everyone needs to be able to savour food more. In Slow Food sites outside Italy, this rather tends to get lost, and Slow Food becomes just an alibi for a certain kind of conspicuous consumption. So I was very pleased to speak with someone from Slow Food Perth, where I am at the moment, and where people are aware that theirs is a political project. They’ve got Edible Schoolyard-type projects, and they’re a great resource on how to avoid supermarkets in Perth (which, I’ve been told by more than one reader, is very hard to do). If you’re in this neck of the woods, do check them out.
I know this isn’t directly related to food, but it certainly is related to the economic architecture that keeps countries in the Global South poor. The film below is by two people whom I rate very highly: Naomi Klein, who was kind enough to blurb Stuffed and Starved, and Alfonso Cuarón, director of my favourite film last year, Children of Men.
Unusually, this clipping comes from Newsweek, which has a particularly good article on food and place and, although it doesn’t actually mention the idea by name, class too.
The Tablet magazine has just published a piece I wrote explaining who wins and who loses from the rising price of food. Here’s the full piece.
There’s a Steve Martin line: ‘some people have a way with words, and other people … no have way’. When it comes to speeches, I no have way, so at the Stuffed and Starved book launch on Thursday, I jotted down these few notes. I’m posting them up here for the twin reasons that they make a sound point about race and food in Britain, and that it’d make my parents happy.
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