Raj Patel Quotes

• Far from being a “luxury for the rich,” organic farming may turn out to be a necessity not just for the poor, but for everyone.

  Raj Patel

  Luxury, May, Rich

  52 Copy quote

• There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood ...in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.

  Raj Patel

  Real, Book, Years

  52 Copy quote

• Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.

  Raj Patel

  Believe, Food, Agriculture

  Raj Patel (2009). “The Value Of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy”, p.170, Granta

  25 Copy quote

• Generosity makes us happiest. We'll be happier people when we share, not when we impose, but when we learn from one another. Because when I'm connected to everyone I disappear... in being excellent you lose yourself. And when you're connected to everyone, that's the best thing that can happen.

  Raj Patel

  People, Generosity, Losing Yourself

  Raj Patel's speech at "21minuti", www.youtube.com. December 14, 2009.

  18 Copy quote

• We need to realize that these industrial methods of farming have gotten us used to cheap food. The corollary of cheap food is low wages. What we need to do in an era when the price of food is going up is pay better wages. A living wage is an absolutely integral part of a modern food system, because you can't expect people to eat properly and eat in a sustainable way if you pay them nothing. In fact, it's cheap food that subsidized the exploitation of American workers for a very long time, and that's always been an aim of cheap food.

  Raj Patel

  Long, People, Realizing

  4 Copy quote

• The opposite of consumption is not thrift - it is generosity.

  Raj Patel

  Opposites, Generosity, Consumption

  Raj Patel (2009). “The Value Of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy”, p.29, Granta

  7 Copy quote

• A recent review of different agricultural options for the future was conducted by a panel of experts. The scientists posed the question: How are we going to feed the world when there are nine billion people on it, as there will be by 2050? And the answer they came up with was industrial agriculture won't work and genetic engineering won't work and the solution is going to be sustainable, and going to ecological kinds of farming that are based on local environmental conditions that work with local ecosystems available to develop a richer kind of farming technology.

  Raj Patel

  Technology, People, Environmental

  8 Copy quote

• The problem is that we are living now with the consequences of the others people mistake. It would be nice to make our own and learn from them. That is the art of democracy. That is the art of citizenship.

  Raj Patel

  Art, Mistake, Nice

  11 Copy quote

• The opposite of consumption isn't thrift. It's generosity.

  Raj Patel

  Opposites, Generosity, Consumption

  Raj Patel (2009). “The Value Of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy”, p.29, Granta

  8 Copy quote

• For every $1 advertisers spend advertising something healthful like apples, they spend $500 advertising junk food.

  Raj Patel

  Apples, Environmental, Junk

  8 Copy quote

• We kind of know that food is necessary to survive. But our ways of connecting with food have been, in many ways, taken over by capitalism - certainly taken over by the influence large corporations have on the way that we eat and the way that we think about food. That's why kids these days are more prepared to take nutritional advice from Ronald McDonald than they are from their parents or their teachers or from scientists. And particularly in urban areas, you'll see kids who honestly believe tomatoes come from the supermarket rather than from a plant.

  Raj Patel

  Teacher, Believe, Taken

  4 Copy quote

• Food sovereignty... is most of all characterized by it’s conversations around how to end hunger and poverty.

  Raj Patel

  Hunger And Poverty, Ends, Conversation

  9 Copy quote

• All of human history is about the going from sudden fat years to the sudden lean years. We've always had good times and bad, and we've had ways of managing the bad times. We have ways of insulating ourselves, making ourselves less sensitive for the bad times by having things like grain stores, for example. Pretty much every civilization that's lasted for any reasonable length of time has some food management principles behind it. But what's been happening over the past thirty years is it's failed - the insurance policy.

  Raj Patel

  Past, Good Times, Management

  7 Copy quote

• India has the largest number of hungry people. Yet it's an outcome of precisely the same mechanism. It's the control of agriculture that drives down the price it paid for food that it buys from farmers, who are the poorest people. Then you're paying very little for food. You're underpaying the poorest people in any society. Then they're marketing to us the things that are most profitable to them. And those are the things that are packaged and processed and what-have-you. That means you have the simple thing of the explosion of obesity and hunger as a result of capitalism in our food system.

  Raj Patel

  Mean, Simple, People

  5 Copy quote

• There isn't enough planet for everyone to eat as much meat as the United States does. The meat industry is responsible for a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico every year because of the runoff through the Mississippi - runoff from hog farms basically nukes the water.

  Raj Patel

  Water, Enough, Responsible

  4 Copy quote

• A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanctions policy that kills one and a half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

  Raj Patel

  Hurt, New York, Oklahoma

  52 Copy quote

• We have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof - making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.

  Raj Patel

  Beautiful, Math, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• Right now you're seeing more and more families reporting that they are skipping meals. They're having to give up meat. Mothers are foregoing food so their kids can have something. People are growing their own vegetables, not because they've gone organic, but because it's one of the few assured sources of food they have. For low-income Americans food is costly right now. The price of food has been going up, and wages haven't. This puts working Americans in a real bind. The fact that the mainstream media hasn't reported it doesn't mean that it's not happening.

  Raj Patel

  Mother, Giving Up, Real

  4 Copy quote

• The one thing that everyone knows about America is people will say, I know my rights. One of those rights is the right to organize. When workers do get together and organize and drive up their wages, they are much, much better off. I think this is one integral part of food policy. We can't talk about increasing the price of food without figuring out how working Americans are going to pay for that.

  Raj Patel

  Thinking, People, Together

  4 Copy quote

• The current food crisis is an opportunity for companies to engage in agriculture or biotechnology.

  Raj Patel

  Opportunity, Crisis

  4 Copy quote

• Exporters monitor economic and political policies to the developing world, but the consequences of that have been to make developing countries far more sensitive to the constant fluctuations. Developing countries are not always allowed to support their farmers in the same way as the U.S. or Europe is. They're not allowed to have tariff barriers. They're forced, more or less, to shrink their social programs. The very poorest people have fewer and fewer entitlements. The consequence of this has been that there's been a chronic increase in the vulnerability of those economies to price shocks.

  Raj Patel

  Country, People, Political

  4 Copy quote

• One of the most abused country on earth is Mexico. The marketing spills over the border, and people are persuaded to eat food that's bad for them, more in rich countries than in poor ones. I was traveling the world. What really struck me was the way we engage with food - how it's a global phenomenon - the world becoming more and more disconnected from it.

  Raj Patel

  Country, People, Marketing

  4 Copy quote

• I definitely think the price of food is going up. We need to figure out ways to manage that in a sustainable way. We have to figure out ways of increasing wages so people can afford it. That means redistribution, and rich people don't like to hear that. This administration simply won't hear of it. But without it, I fear even more Americans will be going hungry in the future.

  Raj Patel

  Mean, Thinking, People

  4 Copy quote

• Yet if you go to the supermarket and look at food that's produced through industrial agriculture, look at what's happened to the prices. Have they been going down? They've been going up and they will continue to go up. So the choice is either, do we hitch onto a system of agriculture that's doomed and will doom the planet with it, and go along the route of industrial agriculture, or do we want to shift to a kind of system that we know is going to be, in the long run, cheaper, because we'll have a planet left at the end of it? We need to factor that cost in.

  Raj Patel

  Running, Long, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• When you have weird policy decisions in the United States that then ripple out throughout the world, the rest of the world really takes it on the chin. When the U.S. decides to set their corn on fire rather than to eat it, which is what the biofuels policy basically is - then that drives up the price of corn. It drives up the price of substitutes. And all of a sudden you have a sort of spiral of food prices. And other countries don't have the resources, because they're not allowed to, to weather the storm.

  Raj Patel

  Country, Decision, Storm

  8 Copy quote

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