Raj Patel
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2022
last heard May 2022
Raj Patel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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No one loves saying it, but that itself is rather intriguing, isn't it?
Hears a word that's central to everything that we do, and hearing it makes you wince.
What's up with that?
Unless you understand it, then the sort of tumbling initiatives I see falling out of medical schools around the world where all of a sudden it's been recognized that food is medicine.
We should do something about that.
But almost all of those initiatives fail to recognize that, in fact, the food that comes out of the food system is based on systemic exploitation.
In the United States, seven of the ten worst-paying jobs in America are in the food system.
People who are working in the food system
Are exposed to things like the need to take payday loans.
And if you take a payday loan where you borrow $300 and you have to pay $800 at the end of the loan, that is generative of inflammation.
And there was a study again that we found that if you were to abolish payday loans, then the suicide rate would drop by 2.1% and the death rate from accidental drug overdoses would drop by 8.9%.
Now
You can either have the food for your food as medicine experiment and not touch that, or you can start recognizing the fact that actually that food only comes because uh people of color predominantly and the working class are desperately exploited in order for that food to be so cheap.
And that should again give you pause.
If your food is medicine initiative isn't really recognizing that, in fact, the food system is built to make harm, it's not a bug in the food system.
It's a feature.
If you don't recognise that it's a feature of the food system to generate the systemic inflammation, then your food as medicine initiative is going to just stigmatize the poor for not eating enough kale, but not really do anything about addressing the structures that produce the kinds of disease that your food is meant to treat.
Yeah.
In Malawi, for example, I worked with an organization called Soils, Food, and Healthy Communities.
And it started off as one of these interventions about maybe we need to make sure that that poor folk are eating the right food.
Showing 61–80 of 157 · page 4 of 8
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