Raj Patel

In his acclaimed 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, sociologist and activist Raj Patel traces the ironically concurrent problems of world hunger and obesity to European colonialism, which nearly wiped out subsistence farming and replaced it with the single-crop plantation system. Patel currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a fellow at Food First. His most recent book, The Value of Nothing, critiques the global free-market system and exposes the hidden consequences of cheap food on public health and the environment. Updated 2011