Food for Beginners

Susan George

Nigel Paige

June 2008

This is not a cookbook. It contains food for thought - and the recipes of power. Food for Beginners is a disturbing book: the facts are grim, the picture bleak. But the wit, sheer logic and force of this documentary comicbook, point beyond despair to justice.

800 million live under the constant threat of famine. Most are food-producing peasants in the Third World.

The baffling question is: why are so many food-producers, rather than we, the consumers, the first to go hungry?

Food is power

Susan George takes a cold, clear look at the facts and myths of food production, and provides answers. She considers its history, from its origins 10.000 years ago to the Global Supermarket of today. Clichés and half-truths about over-population, climate and inefficient farming, usually given as the reasons for Third World hunger, are discarded. She exposes the ruthless game of multi-national agribusiness, the methods of New Malthusianism and neo-colonialism. She unmasks pious aid programmes and reveals the basis of further exploitation.

ISBN:

0-906495-85-7

Susan George

TNI fellow, President of the Board of TNI and honorary president of ATTAC-France [Association for Taxation of Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens]

Susan George is one of TNI's most renowned fellows for her long-term and ground-breaking analysis of global issues. Author of fourteen widely translated books, she describes her work in a cogent way that has come to define TNI: "The job of the responsible social scientist is first to uncover these forces [of wealth, power and control], to write about them clearly, without jargon... and finally..to take an advocacy position in favour of the disadvantaged, the underdogs, the victims of injustice."