What makes the interview really interesting is that he is attacking the underlying capitalist structure of the current food crisis - in particular the neoliberal idea that "individual rational choice" in a "free" market will save the day, and that while we have "free choice" now, we don't have enough and the problem to overcome is that we need more. Which is complete bullshit. Sorta unrelated, but I heard an interview with Jack Layton on CBCR1 yesterday morning concerning curbing carbon emissions and the interviewer kept pressing Jack as to why the NDP focuses on "big" emitters and not on the consumer with carbon taxes and such things - Jack should have just let loose on this, instead he tried to dance around saying that some of the costs will trickle down, that big producers make up 50% by themselves, and that poor people can't afford to make the changes. It was a valiant attempt, and a horrible interview because the interviewer tried to keep making it sound like the "consumer" was the problem and we just have to find the "market" solution to making them more environmental consumers... passing the collective problem onto the shoulders of the individual. This has the consequence of making the individual feel guilty, helpless, and ultimately powerless in the face of an economic system. Yes they can effect some "changes" but not the major ones that bring around the systematic changes needed. Here is the relevant quote from the interview with Raj Patel:
OR: Can you talk about how the individualizing of obesity and health problems is problematic?
RP: The first edition of the Atkins diet had a long tirade against the sugar industry. Atkins was saying that we're being poisoned by the sugar industry -- they're putting sugar in everything. But then Atkins makes the turn that is very common in America: It's a problem of the industry, it's an economic problem, it's a political problem, and the solution has to be individual. The solution is not to confront the sugar industry, not to legislate, not to use government to change that, but to exercise an almost Puritan control over the will as a way of getting out of a situation that has everything to do with politics.
That's why the diet industry is so very big. It is a particularly American solution to the problems of obesity. Why is it that 20 percent of fast food meals now are eaten in cars? This is a figure that you get from Michael Pollan's work. He bemoans the fact. But when I explain to people outside America that 20 percent of fast food meals are eaten in cars, they are blown away. It's inconceivable to them. They wonder whether it's because Americans like their cars so much.
Here, we understand that this isn't some preference for the dashboard; it's because Americans work much harder than any other industrialized country to be able to have healthcare, to have the promise of a pension. In particular if you're from a working family, your income has been dropping in real time since the 1980s. Chances are you live far away from where you work because you can't afford to buy land or buy a house there. So you spend a long time commuting, and if you're in a community where people are of a lower income, you'll find less access to fresh fruits and vegetables, less access to green space. Is it any wonder that so many meals are eaten in cars? Is it any wonder that across the industrialized world, we're seeing levels of obesity in communities of poorer people going up so fast?
All of the reasons I've given for why people are forced to eat bad food have nothing to do with choice. Choice is almost entirely absent from any of these calculations. Yes, you can choose between Burger King or McDonald's, but you don't get to choose to have time to have a healthy meal. You don't get to choose to have time to sit down with your family and cook a decent meal, to really enjoy food, savor it, and connect with it. What we're left with is this poor simulacrum of choice -- constrained between two options that are equally bad for you. Individualizing this is a case of blaming the victim. When we say that it is your fault because you're choosing McDonalds rather than the Whole Food's salad, that's bullocks because people couldn't choose the Whole Food's salad. The choice is Coke or Pepsi, Burger King or McDonalds, either because people don't have the time or the money.
OR: I think that's such an important critique. To read your book is to see the infrastructure behind what Pollan proposes: to spend more time to have meals together, to grow more of our own food. I think it's critical for people who are middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy, who are trying to be conscientious eaters, to understand why they have the choices they have and why these may not be as readily available to others.
RP: The message that is so much harder to explain to Americans is that politics is necessary. People do need to get their hands dirty by getting involved in social change. There is a particularly American fantasy that we can together create a better world by shopping. It's absolutely a case of thinking we can go to Whole Foods, choose the right thing, shop here, pay for this and all of a sudden we will lift the righteous above the impure.
The rest of the interview is interesting and has some good quotes as well (this section just fit with where I wanted to take this): http://www.alternet.org/environment/85395/
The same problem Jack Layton had in explaining the problem with targeting the "consumer" is driving a lot of food and health problems in the developed economies. We think that there is "rational choice" at work, and that if we just adjust the parameters of the "rational choice" of the consumer the market will respond and we will be saved. This meme is so pervasive that it is passed off as common sense, but there are serious problems with this thinking.
First, the idea that we all can be equally rational consumers. Patel demonstrates this point clearly: the rich can be more "rational" because of their purchasing power. This is because decisions are not "free", they cost money - we don't have "free choice" we have a what is "affordable choice". As Patel points out, rural and urban poor alike within the US simply cannot afford to make the "rational choice" of eating healthy by buying nutricious vegetables, meats, and dairies and preparing their own food. Instead their "rational choice" mechanism is constrained to what is fastest and cheapest as the social-economic constraints prevent a free choice. Wealthier people, who can afford to have leisure time and buy what have been marked as "high value" food items and as a consequence are able to eat more healthy. The inequality of wealth and exploitation for profit under this system makes the irrational, a more unhealthy population, a "rational choice".
That point leads me to the second inconsistency - competitions of "rational choice" between the consumer and (primarily) the vendor (and depending on the product the producer and the middleperson) because of unequal power dynamics. The "rational choice" of the vendor is to maximize profit, this is not socially rational in terms of food as it leads to a competition with the consumer. Instead of being socially rational and provide healthy food alternatives at a price that allows equal access, an economy that makes healthy food and healthy living an activity of the wealthy to increase the profit margins, while providing processed "by-product" consumption (calories from chicken nuggets, hot dogs, and high fructose syrup) for the poor the affordable option. Patel makes the point that poor rural producers of "high value crops" cannot afford the products they produce, which is an insane inconsistency. This has been a problem plaguing developing countries for years - there is the old import-substitution-industrialization problem of selling bananas for machinary, but what about even just buying back those bananas (not to mention the local food production that those bananas displaced). It is simply more profitable for a company to sell "high value" crops to the wealthy than make sure everyone has equal access and a fair "rational choice" as to what they eat. The interests of corporate profit are set against the rational interest of the consumer - so that the ability to make a free choice is manipulated by an interest in "profit" and not what is socially rational.
This is at the core the biggest problem with the current food crisis. We do not have a "supply and demand" problem - there is a more than adequate food supply for the global demand at present. There may be loaming problems with the supply following peak oil, but at current production levels there should not be food riots anywhere on this planet because of hunger, simply put. So if "rational economics" made any social and ethical rational sense, then the market price of a basic and healthy quality of food would be affordable for everyone. But it is not, the problem is not the individual consumer making more "free choice" under the language of the current model - since that "free choice" is actually constructed to be dis-empowering.
The inequality of power between consumers and between the consumer and the vendor/middle-companies makes an economic situation that is not "rational" by any sort of criteria beyond the profit for a small group of people. The idea of making the economy respond to consumer's "rational choice" better by reducing collective action against the elites, as the interviewer suggested to Jack Layton in terms of the collective carbon problem simply advances the social and ethical inconsistencies of this economic model. Ultimately, as we see both with global warming and the rising food prices, the economic system of "rational choice" capitalism leaves people, contrary to the western capitalist idea of "free choice", dis-empowered and furthers the social, economic and political inequality that makes this economic model so devastating to our planet and people's lives.
