[56] Stuart Gillespie — Food Fight: How Corporate Profit Overwhelmed Farming

The current regime of agriculture leads to a paradoxical situation: not only does this system destroy more in terms of natural resources than it creates in terms of food, it also leads to hundreds of millions of people being overfed while simultaneously being undernourished. There are now more obese children in the world than undernourished ones, and the effects on their physical and mental health are severe. But how did we get here? Stuart’s changing point lies at the end of the Second World War, when the international food market was ordered anew and the production of calories became top priority. What comes afterwards is almost too familiar: the rise of industrially produced agricultural products which locks farmers into a product palette from particular seeds to fertilisers, pesticides and other products to the rise of highly processed foods, which are designed to exploit our evolutionary craving for sugar, fat, and salt. The result of these developments have brought global food production to a crisis point. But what has to be done to change this destructive system?