Raj Patel on Fossil Fuels, Food, and Columbus’s Wicked Legacy

What are the hidden costs of our current food system and its deep reliance on fossil fuels, a system that burdens citizens with financial, health and environmental consequences? With Raj Patel, research professor at the University Texas at Austin and IPES-Food panel member, we cover this and Christopher Columbus's wicked legacy, middle-class environmentalism, and what a food system free of fossil fuels could look like.  

We thought this extended interview with Raj Patel was so compelling we wanted to share it in its entirety.

For more info and resources, please visit our episode webpage.

Guests

• Raj Patel, IPES-Food

Produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Fuel to Fork is powered by TABLE, IPES-Food and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Transcript

Matthew

Quick sound check here: what did you have for breakfast today?

Raj 

I had... ooh, I had oatmeal and it was terrific. And it only takes 10 minutes to make and I just don't understand why people want instant oatmeal because you can make it in 10 minutes. Anyway, did that give you a good dynamic range? 

Matthew 

Hey Fuel to Fork listeners, this is your guide Matthew Kessler. 

Next week, we will be back with the next step in our journey through the supply chain - looking at why grocery stores are filled with individually plastic-wrapped cucumbers and ultra-processed foods.

But now, we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming.

So I’m recording this intro a day after learning Donald Trump will return to the office of the president of the United States. Throughout his campaign, he received 75 million dollars from those representing the interests of Big Oil. Trump’s energy policy, in short, is to “drill baby drill”. Look, we don't yet know what Make America Healthy Again will bring, but it does look like the fossil fuel tap  - at the very least - will stay wide open.

One thing I’m thinking about, is that throughout our series, we repeatedly point out that governments need to step up - to spend money in ways that supports healthy and sustainable food systems, to enact regulation to constrain fossil fuel companies, to take action on the fact that our current fossil fueled  food system is dangerous, to the environment and our health. But this is another reminder that we won’t always have a willing partner in government. People will always also need to step up.

Raj

And that is, I think, the revolutionary idea of the care economy, of a green transition that moves us from an economy that demands consumption towards an economy that gives care and receives care, not just of one another, but of the planet. 

Matthew

That’s one of the reasons we’re going to play an extended interview with Raj Patel,  a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. 

The guests in this series don’t all share Raj’s views on corporations or on the fight to end capitalism. But, we can all agree on at least two things. 1) We need to seriously look after each other. And 2) Fossil fuels have permeated every part of our food, our farms, and our lives, and the stakes are high.

Matthew 

So we're going to have some listeners who work with food systems, with climate, with energy, or some combination of them. We'll have people who are deeply in the weeds of these issues and others who really care about food and the environment but don't really know what a food system is. We'll have some who know a lot about, we'll have some who know very little about fossil fuels outside of the fact that it's bad for the environment and it makes their lives more convenient. Big picture, why should we care about whether there are fossil fuels in our food?

Raj

Well, first of all, it's important to understand what the food system is. You've heard this word food system and you've sometimes thought, well, I know what that is. That's when the food is grown on the farm and it goes to a processor and then it ends up in the supermarket and then I buy it and then it gets to me. That's not the food system. That's just a supply chain. The food system is the way that society has made normal.

certain ways of growing in certain places by certain people or certain kinds of technology and has made normal also the way that that stuff from the land ends up in animals, ends up on your plate, in a diet that seems perfectly reasonable right now. That's the food system. The food system isn't the sort of pipeline, it's the mechanics that makes the pipeline normal.

So once you understand that, you can start to ask a more interesting question about the, you know, about fossil fuels. Because again, when people think about fossil fuels in food, sometimes, you know, you go to food miles because that seems like the thing where you see your favorite fossil fuel like petroleum or diesel in some sort of vehicle and it's schlepping your food from one place to another. And  for a little while, the conversation around fossil fuels in food was very much concentrated on, you know, the sort of distance food travels.

And that’s kind of important, but that's not the most important part that fossil fuels play in our food system. Fossil fuels are there from the beginning to enable certain kinds of large -scale industrial agriculture to be profitable. They're there as the basis for synthetic pesticides, they're there for synthetic fertilizer, they're there obviously as traction, they're there to ferry the food from one place to another. They're there to provide power in a lot of the industrial food processing. They're there also to provide raw ingredients in a lot of the ultra -processed food that we eat.  

So it may feel very convenient, right? But convenience itself is weird. And I just want to stop for a second just to pause and enjoy your question, Matthew. For food to feel convenient, what does it mean? Because there's no taste for convenience. There's nothing inherent in food that makes it convenient. The only thing that makes food convenient is the speed of our lifestyle. Because if we weren't having to run from pillar to post and hold down two jobs to be able to basically make rent and maybe buy medication and maybe provide food for the table, then we would be able to slow down and, you know, the most convenient food would be the one that brought everyone to the table with the most happiness. But convenient these days just means edible on the go. And I just want to point out that that idea of convenience is itself a product of the food system. There's nothing natural about it. And in that food system story, fossil fuels are there every step of the way making normal some of the weirdest things about the way we -

Matthew 

I really liked how you just described a lot of the assumptions that we have baked into what we think the future should look like. So I want to follow up, which is what's at stake in this conversation? 

Raj

Well, you know, in the United States, we spend about $1 .1 trillion on food in 2019. And in addition to that, for every dollar we spent on food in the US, we spent a dollar on diet -related disease health care treatment. And then on top of that, if you look across a range of things looking at say the environment or social processes or you know biodiversity the sort of total bill and this was calculated by some very clever people at McKinsey in a Ford Foundation report on the true cost of food. They found bottom line that for every dollar you spent on food Americans were spending more than two dollars on mopping up the consequences of that and that runs from healthcare through worker exploitation to environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, and of course, climate change writ large. So the costs of eating the way that we do are already hidden from us and hidden from us very intentionally, very successfully by the food industry. When we talk about the subsidies that the food industry gets.

We will maybe argue about the farm bill. And yes, the farm bill here in the United States is very big over the course of five years. It's a trillion dollar game. But most of that goes towards making sure that the very poorest people in America can at least have something to eat and that food insecurity is managed, not eradicated. I mean, we still have more than 30 million people in the US who are food insecure. But the goal is never to make hunger go away. It's to make hunger manageable and a sufficient stimulus to get people into the workplace so that they're work in low -paid jobs, so you have seven out of the ten worst -paying jobs in America are in the food system. Now, I mention all of this because fossil fuel oils the wheels here. One of the sort of historic bargains in the United States in particular is that in exchange for low wages, Americans get cheap food and cheap gasoline, right? So keeping the cost of oil or the cost of the consumer cost of gasoline down, is an integral part of the food system, but it's also necessary in order that food remain cheap because so much of our food system is hostage to the fossil fuel system. 

When we're thinking about the sort of hidden costs and who it is that suffers, you know, we're in a strange situation where obviously workers and working families are at the same time most dependent on the cheap availability of fossil fuels to keep food and fuel prices down. And they're most disproportionately affected by the sort of scourge of ultra -processed food and the kind of modern diet that both insists on low wages and low quality food to meet the expectations of cheap food that come from this sort of vicious cycle of the breaking of workers' power here in the United States. 

So fossil fuels are there all along the way, but not in the way that you would expect. I mean, I imagine most people would say, well, of course, climate change, that's what's at stake here. And you're right. I mean, the future of the planet's at stake and the future of the planet is not divorceable from the future of the working class. And I think that that's pretty important to understand right off the bat because otherwise you get these sort of well-meaning environmentalists who say, well, clearly what we need to do is just jack up the price of food, jack up the price of oil so that it reflects its true environmental cost and everything's going to sort itself out. The market will just work its thing.

And of course, what will you get as a reaction to that? Well, of course you'll get working class people in the streets, quite rightly demanding to be able to feed their families. And now look at what these middle -class environmentalists have made them do. And that's where this kind of middle -class myopia about the working class, when we come to thinking about fossil fuels, is what makes possible an orchestrated right -wing backlash against environmental policies, even though, again, who is it that's most going to be affected by climate change but the working class around the world?

Matthew 

So Raj, you've recently added filmmaker to your list of growing, to your growing list of talents. Say you were to direct a movie about this intersection of fossil fuels and food systems. You want to build the narrative arc for this story, and you're trying to spotlight the people or the forces who are most responsible for the situation we're in today. So far, we've talked about kind of describing the present, but this didn't happen by accident. So who is behind it? What's behind it? What would your opening scene be here?

Raj

What a great question, Matthew. I mean, I think it's going to be Christopher Columbus. Let's start right at the beginning. Because, you know, he's an entirely wicked man. And, you know, the more you read about him and the more you read his words, the more you realize what a bastard this man is. I mean, he comes across to the Americas with dollar signs in his eyes looking for anything that will bring him money.

And he writes back to Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs in Spain who've done some of the bankrolling of his adventures and says, “well, I'm very sad that I can see all these wondrous things, but I don't know how much money they will bring.” 

And the reason I think we'd start with him is because he embodies both the kind of entrepreneurial metal that often gets celebrated in the food system today as people sort of reinventing the food system or reinventing capitalism. But he's also the guy who inaugurates a genocide in the New World. He makes it possible to imagine new land denuded of the original people who are on it. He was also very familiar with slavery. Before he crossed the Atlantic, he was ferrying sugar that was produced with enslaved workers on one of the Portuguese colonies in Madeira. So he was quite happy with slavery. He was quite happy with the exploitation of anyone who didn't look like him. He was a misogynist, obviously. 

And all of these come together to make an opening scene where you see Christopher Columbus look across a world that is verdant and wonderful and then you would cut to the modern food system in which all the biodiversity has been eliminated in which you see row upon row of a single crop. And that's I mean you know the original crop for that was sugar. And sugar cane and the technologies of sugar cane are in fact most of the modern technologies that we see, and we associate with industrialization come from sugar and sugar processing. So the terraforming of land in order to be able to create these vast sugarcane plantations, the bringing in of enslaved people. Obviously the sort of evisceration of indigenous communities. The inhuman hours that are made, you know, the workers are made to go through in order to provide these sugary treats that now, of course, we're trying to get out of our diet, we're spending billions trying to reduce our consumption of. 

But this is the sort of arc that from the moment of colonialism and sort of high modern capitalism to, you know, the moment we find ourselves in today with late capitalism and the climate crisis. You can trace a fairly straight line in thinking about not just the financiers who make Columbus possible, but also, you know, the technologists who provide the new instruments for industrial agriculture that today, of course, depend on fossil fuels. So there's, you know, we would have to point our fingers not only at the monarchs of the past, but the monarchs of the present. You know, you would look at the US government, but you'd also look at philanthropists. You'd look at the Rockefeller Foundation. You'd look at now the Gates Foundation as organizations pushing a certain model of turning the land into money that Columbus first was embodied, but today you can find in the sort of high encomia of the Gates Foundation's propaganda for an alliance for a green revolution in Africa. 

All of this is really interestingly bound together in similar ways, just as the adventurers of the past had their sponsors and celebrants in finance and in monarchy. Today philanthropy, government, sort of government development aid, international banks and of course just straightforward sort of large corporations looking for profit. All of them together it lock in the way that we farm and the way that we think farming can possibly change and I think that that that that idea of these you know, the money that keeps us on the path that we're in despite us heading towards already certain disaster is the way that this film would go at least until the end of the second act, because we need a third act. We need to pivot from this rather disastrous situation to understand exactly how we're going to fight back.

Matthew

And we'll get to that third act, but what I find really interesting is you mentioned the Gates Foundation and these other philanthropic organizations, who are putting a lot of money towards food. They recognize that food is broken. They're investing in a particular solution where they want to see outcomes that reduce environmental impact of food. They want to see food that is affordable, accessible, culturally appropriate. I’m curious, what do you think they're missing if this is the outcomes that they're seeking?

Raj

You know, I've heard a quote attributed to Arundhati Roy, though I'm not sure I can find exactly where it comes from, which is that the sort of crux of middle -class environmentalism is to engage in certain kinds of practices that look environmental so that everything can stay the same. And that, it seems to me, is what the Gates Foundation is up to. I mean, they're investing quite a lot of money to tweak current environmental, ecologically damaging practices to make them slightly less ecologically damaging, but never stepping back to ask whether we need these practices in the first place and whether a systemic change would more comprehensively stop these practices than merely, you know, cow 2.0 or, you know, giving, adding seaweed and garlic to cow feed to reduce methane emissions, but otherwise, you know, keep things exactly the same.

And, you know, and in the same way, you know, using ultra processed food to simulate meat. I mean, I think that there's some sort of moderate argument for people eating that rather than beef. But ultimately - that's not the world that we want to be in, in a sort of synthetic biological world. I think the big wins when it comes to agricultural transformations are the ones that break with the fossil fuel complex in the same way that they break with the sort of routine Armageddon that comes from the pesticide complex. 

In order for that to happen, you need some big structural changes. 

Matthew

Hmm. So let's get to Act 3. And I want to start with a description of this vision. We'll afterwards talk about maybe the mechanics, the supports that are needed to get there, what that will look like. But let's just project ourselves into the future. Say 2050, Can you describe what's on our plates? What's on our farms? Who's growing our food? What do landscapes look like?

Raj 

Well, Matthew, I mean, it would depend where we are and what time of year it is. And I think already that's a break from where we are now because, you know, the world we find ourselves in, for example, in the United States, go anywhere and you'll find the same kind of few standard restaurants and few standard meals. 

To break with fossil fuels and the power that the fossil fuel industry, along with other industries and philanthropies and financiers have over our food system is to crack open our imagination fairly radically. It's to imagine publicly owned supply chains. It's to imagine that, for example, in one neighborhood, the stuff that grows well in one Agri hood, maybe, like I'll use the example here in Austin.

The east side of Austin was a hub for the growing of spinach. The west side of Austin, the soil is much more limestone heavy and it wasn't great. So even in Austin, we would have different kinds of food being exchanged across the city and different kinds of ways of getting that food. One of the examples we have as a way of surviving climate change is in our local parks and recreation facilities to have local kitchens that serve both as emergency supply stores in case we have a major climate catastrophe as we did a few years ago. But then also as incubators and as homes and as employment generators for people who want to be in hospitality and food service and in cooking and in community building. And so what we would have is meals, for example, in one community hub that maybe tonight is Caribbean night. And so it would be influenced by local Caribbean migrants who would be doing some of the cooking. 

And they would use whatever is in season and would give away the food because it would be funded by the government to whoever would want it. I mean, we see these examples already happening in Brazil where local community kitchens run by the social movement, the MTST, the movement of workers without roofs. They have these community kitchens where everyone gets together, everyone gets to eat, and the government provides money for local purchasing to be able to bring labor into the space and then be able to give away the food for free. 

So in 2050, there would be a range of, again, ways of growing food that were agroecological, that kept carbon in the ground, that were robust in terms of climate catastrophe, but were cognizant of the fact that even the best agroecological system is going to be hit hard by climate change. 

As we record, large parts of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil are flooded, and they do fantastic agroecological farming, but they're flooded. There's nothing that they can do immediately to feed themselves, and so community resilience hubs in cities will be quite important. And building those now is within our grasp, and by 2050 I imagine that we will have this archipelago of ways of surviving the climate change that will already be upon us.

And there's no avoiding the climate change. My students always get rather depressed when the first day of class they come in and I say, look, the choice is not whether the world's going to get worse. It's going to get worse. Don't worry about that. The choice we have is how bad are we going to let it get? And by the right kind of break with the current system that has driven this world, driven our world towards climate catastrophe, we can manage the worst of climate change and make it an opportunity to build our communities to survive it better.

Matthew

So we have this heterogeneous patchwork of all these regional food identities. Cityscapes would have their own food identity.  Rural areas would have their own. There probably would be more connectivity. Any reflections on what markets and food sharing or food selling commerce would look like?

Raj

Well, I mean, I certainly think that there will be a lot more sort of seasonality when it comes to food. I think there'll be a lot less meat. I think there'll be a lot less processing because all of these are fairly fossil fuel intensive. And what I would like to see is a break with the kinds of you know, toxic diet that we have here that's driving so many people into the healthcare system in the United States. 

But globally, I mean, I think local and regional markets and, you know, local food hubs are the way to go. And that means, again, that we will need, you know, networks of logistics because, again, these networks are fantastic for resilience if they are dense and if they are nimble and if they are generally short, you know, the supply chains are generally short as we found in COVID. We'll need them to be publicly owned and we'll need to make sure that rather than being able to buy whatever you want, whenever you want it, the priority is making sure that everyone is fed whenever they need it. 

And so I imagine retailing would be, you know, rather different from the way we see it at the moment. It's not to say that food retailing goes away, but it is to say that we have much more institutional purchasing from cities, from governments, from states, from schools, from a range of institutions that are ready to support farmers and ready to support eaters in ways that are convenient in a slower and more caring economy.

Matthew 

As you teed up, some of these descriptions are not such a radical departure from how food works in some parts of the world. I want to focus on the areas that look nothing like this, where it would take this kind of radical departure, radical imagination to move in this more desired direction. What would a transition look like? What are some kind of key levers to focus on?

Raj 

The great news here is that to some extent, however imperfectly, people have already experienced communism. And that experience has usually, in its most ideal form, been about the care that one receives through youth, through childhood, where one generally tends not to pay one's parents for the kinds of care and love that one experiences.

And if one gets to provide that care in turn, it's again, it's provided without charge and with grace and with understanding. The expansion of that experience is the closest I can offer to what it might be like to have this become not the small corner of our lives in which things are provided for free, but the large corner of our lives in which we are coordinating with one another to make sure that everybody experiences what they need without going broke. 

And that is, I think, the revolutionary idea of the care economy, of a green transition that moves us from an economy that demands consumption towards an economy that gives care and receives care, not just of one another, but of the planet. And that, I think, is the great promise of this, is that to some extent,

People have sort of dipped their toe into this and have experienced it in one mode and can get to experience it in a different mode with more equality, with more justice. And that, I think, is the thing to hold onto in the post-fossil fuel economy. It's not an economy of privation. It's an economy of an abundance of care that is at the moment lacking.

Matthew 

Sometimes this transition, anything associated with degrowth or post-growth, can be framed under the lens of the politics of sacrifice. And that's a very different reframing what you just offered there.

Raj 

And it's okay. In the same way that to put an end to your and my patriarchy, we are going to just have to be constantly vigilant about that and to recognize the ways in which it has shaped us and to, you know, every day understand that we are going to give up our patriarchal privilege and that's a good thing, then that's a privation I think we can lean into because it's not a privation, this power was never ours to have and enjoy in the first place, not by justice. 

And so it's okay to some extent, particularly as we think about what the global north owes the global south. Or what white people in the US owe people of color, and particularly indigenous and formerly enslaved people, to imagine that part of the process of liberation is privation. And it's okay, I don't want to step away from that.

But again, I think the framing of that is privation as liberation, as freedom, as emancipation from being a shitty person. And I think that's okay. I think people are generally down with that project.

Matthew 

Yeah. So the questions that we're wrapping up with asking every guest is: what can we act on right away and what's going to be the toughest nuts to crack here?

Raj 

I mean, the closer you are to the sort of sites of struggle, the easier it is to imagine enacting things. So there are local resilience hubs that can and should be funded by local and state municipal government, wherever you find yourselves. And that's certainly one of the battles we're fighting here in Austin. 

But obviously, the harder nuts to crack are the ones where the fossil fuel industry and the food industry have their hands most deeply around the necks of government. And so, I mean, there was a report that came out here in the United States very recently from the Union of Concerned Scientists who observed that the food industry spends more on lobbying than the oil and gas industry or the defense industry in Washington here. But bear in mind that the fossil fuel industry and the food industry are, to some extent, sort of, they work hand in glove. 

So to imagine a world where Washington isn't so poisoned by these entities is going to be much harder. But we need to understand how flows of money work, how capitalism works in the food system in order for us to fight it effectively. And that's going to be harder because again, while the idea of degrowth may swirl around in some parts of the world, particularly in Europe, the rest of the world is not sold on that idea. Degrowth is a particularly European phenomenon.

I think the hard part is organizing to fight and end capitalism. And that's, you know, that's a project that we need in order by 2050 to live on a planet that's worth a damn. I mean, you know, again, it's going to be worse, but the degree of that worse is entirely, I think, correlated to our ability to be able to stop capitalism doing what it's doing. And that's very hard because there's so much at stake for so, for a handful of people who are so very moneyed and very powerful. And so, you know, the way to get there is through this local organizing, but then through national organizing and organizing in revolutionary ways is I think the only way that we get to see a 2050 that is dignified for everybody.

Matthew 

This episode will be a big picture overview, but the next episodes will be the slice by slice cross section of the supply chain, looking at farm inputs, what energy goes into powering the farm, processing and packaging, retail and consumption. I'm going to be speaking to very smart people who have thought about this for a lot longer than I have. What are you most curious about within these?

Raj 

Well, no, Matthew, I'm jealous of you because the question I'm always keen on is not what can we substitute for fossil fuel, but what structural change would be required to make fossil fuel irrelevant? And it's always that, you know, that issue where if you're looking at processing, for example, you know, making fossil fuel irrelevant means no ultra-processed food or if one thinks of industrial agriculture, making fossil fuel irrelevant means land reform and agroecology. Those kinds of questions, particularly from the experts who thought about, well, how do we get from here to that through that structural change? Those are the questions I'm really excited about.

Matthew 

Great. And is there anything else that you wanted to say or talk about that I didn't ask you about specifically?

Raj

I don't think so, Matthew. You've given me plenty of rope to hang myself, but I'm really grateful for the way that you've passed this through, and I'm really excited for the series.

Matthew 

Next week: Plastics, Ultra-Processed Foods, Transport 

Errol

Trillion dollar grocery industry, maybe 250 billion is trade spend for promotions and advertising, much of it targeted towards kids and consumers who are most prone to buying processed foods for the reasons we’ve talked about.

Emma

I think the more important question is where aren't plastics in the food system.

Matthew

Thanks to Raj and thanks to you for listening. You can learn more about the series on our webpage fueltofork.com/  We are produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you next week.