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marmar

(76,976 posts)
Mon Jan 7, 2013, 09:38 AM Jan 2013

'Human sustenance has been reduced to a corporate portfolio item'


from Civil Eats:




Book Review: “Foodopoly,” by Wenonah Hauter
By Christopher Cook on January 7, 2013


What a frightful spectacle our food has become. Human sustenance has been reduced to a corporate portfolio item – one whose success rides increasingly on sheer size and market control. In the name of profit, everything else gets squeezed: consumer health; smaller-scale farmers and processors; food industry workers and farm laborers; and the soil, air and water that are the lifeblood of our food supply.

Add to this picture a whole phalanx of K Street lobbyists, well-remunerated by groups like the Grocery Manufacturers of America, dedicated to undermining food safety and labeling laws and other consumer protections, diluting pesticide laws and weakening antitrust provisions. Throw into the mix an increasingly corporate-controlled organics and local foods business, and you can begin to understand why farmlands are becoming industrialized wastelands and our waistlines keep widening.

“Foodopoly,” Wenonah Hauter’s fine contribution to the growing literature about our ailing food system, does a particularly good job of detailing both the methods and implications of this corporate takeover of food. From familiar ground such as the obesity epidemic and junk-food advertising, to the lesser-known yet important terrain of corporate supply chains and a largest-takes-all food infrastructure, Hauter provides bountiful evidence to buttress her deep working knowledge of the food system.

Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group, gives us a well-researched and politically smart volume that explains the complex economic relationships between various market players – from grocery powerhouses like Walmsrt and Kroger’s, to food processing empires run by PepsiCo, Nestle and Kraft, to produce behemoths like Southern California’s Dole, which sells 300 products from 90 countries. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2013/01/07/book-review-foodopoly-by-wenonah-hauter/



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'Human sustenance has been reduced to a corporate portfolio item' (Original Post) marmar Jan 2013 OP
du rec. nt xchrom Jan 2013 #1
Sooooooooo true! Brainstormy Jan 2013 #2

Brainstormy

(2,380 posts)
2. Sooooooooo true!
Mon Jan 7, 2013, 10:14 AM
Jan 2013

And the article doesn't even mention the greatest threat, which is the stranglehold over the world's food suppy that GMOs and biotech is giving to a handful of companies.

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