The Gary Null Blog

Raj Patel

September 14, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/163402/why-hunger-is-still-with-us

Amid the joy of local, seasonal ingredients and tides of young people with dirt freshly lodged under their fingernails, it feels unkind to point to the bigger problems within the food system. But it’s worth tempering an optimism of the will with a pessimism of the intellect. Despite the food movement’s gains over the past decade, it’s hard not to feel the latter outweighing the former.

The full extent of the damage from the BP disaster will not be known for years, but if we are to learn anything now, we must confront the question: What are the true costs of our energy needs?

For every White House organic garden, there’s an appointee to the US Trade Representative’s office from the pesticide industry. Sasha and Malia may be getting good grub, but the global South still gets stuck with chemicals.

Harvests remain strong, and people still go hungry. This isn’t because of population growth—there’s enough produced to feed everyone on a Small Planet’s diet. But the economics of crop production have increasingly left concerns about human eating in the dust.