If we are what we eat, we’re in big, big trouble

Raj Patel is a man who has seen the worst that can be done to the world’s food system — yet retains hope that it’s not too late to rectify the atrocities. It’s a good thing he projects this optimism, because otherwise the information he conveys would be more likely to inspire despair than hope.

Patel spoke on Tuesday evening about his new book, Stuffed and Starved, at another of Pages Books’ “This is Not a Reading Series” events. And the incongruity between the examples he listed and his cheerful, upbeat demeanour, was surreal even while it was comforting.

A former employee of the World Bank, Patel really knows his stuff. And four years of touring the world to research the food situation first hand only deepened his understanding, and raised his level of urgency.

The facts are chilling. For example, a mere four super-corporations control 90% of the entire world’s food production and distribution. The World Bank is happy to lend money to poorer nations for food production — and then sets conditions (such as “liberalization” of the country’s economy) that put farmers directly in the sights of these corporations, which see to it that while the farmers are less and less able to survive on what they’re paid, the corporations become more and more staggeringly rich. The result is currently a veritable epidemic of farmer suicides, all over the world. As Patel puts it, a World Bank loan is “the gift that keeps on taking.”

Meanwhile, remember our mothers telling us, “Eat your dinner because there are children starving in Africa”? Well, because of the ”liberalization” of the economy in India, there are now more children starving there than in the entire continent of Africa. India, in fact, is a textbook case for how the capitalist redesign of the food system has devastated the planet. Alongside the 20 million starving people, you have the highest concentration of Forbes millionaires in the world. You also now have the highest percentage of diabetics in the world.

It’s because this Brave New “Liberal” Economy is explicitly designed to make us dependent on “convenient,” unhealthy food. Convenience, says Patel, is “socially constructed.” Our food isn’t being made for us — we are being made for our food. And the corporations happily play both sides: the same company that owns Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream also owns Slim-Fast.

Patel pointed out that for every so-called “famine” in the 20th century, there was actually more than enough available food for everyone. Why the famine, then? No one could afford to pay for food.

The super-corporations and their satellites have more right to become engorged and wealthy than you have to live. Think about that.

But all is not yet lost! Patel is very optimistic, and sets out ten ways we can still redeem the situation, on his Stuffed and Starved website. But he gave his audience some general direction on Tuesday evening, his ideas including changing our own food tastes, frequenting farmers’ markets, joining local Community Supported Agriculture organizations, and affirming every worker’s right to dignity and fair treatment. (Even organic food organizations can exploit workers.) All of these things are linked. The most important thing is to promote “food sovereignty,” since every community has an absolute right to control its own food system.

Patel takes great heart from the workers’ and peasants’ movements that are now mobilizing all over the world. The iron grip of the corporations (and the western governments that support them) has broken in many places, with food riots breaking out and agro-workers organizing to help each other and local consumers. Ideally, Patel said, we would de-fund the devastating World Bank, and remove agriculture from the World Trade Organization.

How on earth can we justify people starving, just so long as the corporations create “shareholder value”??

We shouldn’t have to, and in fact, we must stop it from continuing. Raj Patel has now raised his knowledgeable voice with many others, and inspires hope that it is still possible to break the back of the monoliths and reclaim our own food.

Universe Dies — Film at Eleven!

“Twenty-four hours from now, we’ll all be a million miles from here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”

After a physicist friend once explained the simultaneous terrestrial and stellar motions of the earth, sun, and Milky Way galaxy, that was what he concluded. Last night, at a University of Toronto Bookstore-sponsored discussion of Jim Lebans’ new book, The Quirks and Quarks Guide to Space, interviewer Bob McDonald picked up that same ball and ran with it. By the time he had calculated the movements and speeds involved, we realized that at that very moment, sitting in the Innis Town Hall on campus, everyone was moving at a speed of about 2.2 million kilometres per hour.

You kind of wanted to fling yourself to the floor and hang on for dear life, just thinking about it.

It was like a “space geek” convention. In fact Lebans, a producer for the Quirks and Quarks radio program, and Bob McDonald, the show’s host, unabashedly admit that they are the big space fans among the program’s staff. McDonald, in fact, was in Florida in 1977 for the launches of Voyagers 1 and 2, sitting with Carl Sagan and the team that designed the gold records sent with the two craft, conveying information about earth to any aliens that might find them. He’s returned to NASA over the years, every time Voyager drew near a new planet and began sending information. He’s watched himself, the scientists, and other journalists age while following the Voyagers’ progress through space.

Lebans, meanwhile, though it only took a little over two months to write the book, has actually been researching it for a decade, with each astronomy-related guest on the program bringing new information on space travel, asteroids, the stars, and the nature of the universe.

The book starts from the ground up, beginning with questions about the earth and working outward until it discusses the end of the universe itself. As far as that goes, by the way, there are three possibilities: 1) the Big Crunch, where the expanding universe begins shrinking back into the singularity that originally exploded in the Big Bang; 2) the Big Chill, where the universe just keeps expanding and cooling, until everything loses energy, goes dark, and becomes, as McDonald says, “very boring;” or 3) the Big Rip, where the recently discovered dark energy keeps pushing the universe outward until it rips everything apart. We have so much to look forward to!

But that’s pretty much the case, the duo says, when you study astronomy. Every scenario you pursue ends with the death of the earth, sun, solar system, and eventually the universe. Lebans and McDonald are both quite cheery as they talk about it.

In fact, when reading his chosen chapter - “What Will Happen When the Asteroid Hits” - Lebans describes the various scenarios with great relish. Everything from a smallish impact that “merely” destroys Quebec City and sets the entire province on fire - to a larger collision that extinguishes our species - he lays out the consequences with ghoulish enthusiasm, assuring us that we have a greater chance of being hit by an asteroid than of buying a winning lottery ticket. The greatest known potential for collision currently resides with Asteroid 1950 DA, which has a 1 in 300 chance of hitting the earth on March 16, 2880.

But even if we think that gives us plenty of time to avoid it, we’re still  not out of the woods. Lebans reminds us that while scientists are busily mapping all the potentially dangerous asteroids in the solar system, it’s the objects way out in the Oort Cloud, beyond Pluto, that could swoop in undetected, giving us no time to stop them.

Like I said. Cheery.

But even in the midst of that doom and gloom (after all, most of it would be billions of years from now), the two men’s excitement is palpable and contagious. The mere descriptions of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn (volcanic, sulphurous Io; the methane rivers of Titan) discovered for us by Voyager 1, makes it hard not to want to go out there and see for ourselves.

And imagine! In about five years, Voyager 1 will cross the outer boundary of the sun’s magnetic field, making it the very first human-made object to transmit from true interstellar space. It’s hard not to get goosebumps about that.

Do I want to read this book? If I hadn’t already been interested in the topics it discusses, the enthusiasm and excitement of both Lebans and McDonald would have convinced me.

Almost too beautiful to bear - Jodhaa Akbar

Cecil B. DeMille could take lessons. Seriously. Though I’m not sure he would have used quite as many elephants as Ashutosh Gowariker.

Last night I saw the latest Bollywood mega-release, Jodhaa Akbar, and to say the movie is stunningly beautiful is an understatement. We know Bollywood loves colour, but this time it’s outdone itself.

The movie portrays the strategic sixteenth century marriage between Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar to the Rajput princess Jodhaa. Despite some dispute about her real name, or even whether she married Jalaluddin or his son, we know the marriage took place to bring Rajput into the empire. So the rest, as Gowariker admits, is artistic licence.

Stress the “artistic.”

Everywhere you look, there is riotous colour: in the elaborate designs on the walls, in the flowing silks, and even on the elephants and horses. Characters stroll through panels of lightly billowing fabric, or gaze through ethereal curtains, their bodies richly adorned with gold. A gathering at the Mughal court is a study in regional costumes, all wildly colourful.

The music meshes both with the intricate architecture (primarily Agra Fort outside Delhi, and Amber Fort in Rajasthan) and the swirl of the fabrics. Everything flows, in this movie. Hrithik Roshan, playing Jalaluddin, stands and walks like an emperor, each step measured and graceful, his Mughal dress flowing with him as though he was born wearing it. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, as Princess Jodhaa, carries her brightly coloured Hindu dress and veils with equal grace.

The music, more subtly than we’d normally expect from Bollywood, weaves organically through the plot rather than in the “insert musical number here” fashion of other movies. The first song takes an hour to emerge: a short piece featuring only Rai Bachchan. When we finally encounter a more extensive song, several Sufis singing at the wedding, Jalaluddin slowly twirls with them, immersed in mystical experience. None of the typically manic musical numbers here. Most of the remaining songs are equally solitary and dreamy.

But when the larger, heavily choreographed number finally shows up (you knew it must), it stuns you with its complexity, scale, and beauty. It’s as though they saved up the energy from earlier songs and lavished it all at once in a production that would have left Mr. DeMille, of the “thousand extras,” weeping. It certainly brought me to tears.

The casting of the main characters was frankly a master stroke. Roshan was born to play this role, perfectly portraying both the emperor’s carriage and authority (with a slight touch of arrogance), and the man’s struggle to rule and love justly without jeopardizing that authority. Rai Bachchan conveyed both grace and resolve, viewing the world with shy uncertainty one moment, then fixing it with a strong, steely-eyed stare. And both actors conveyed more emotion with their eyes than could ever be expressed in words.

Was this, then, a perfect movie? Of course not. For example, in the various fights, some of the “near misses” were too obviously faked, so these scenes were “not bad” rather than entirely convincing. They were plenty dramatic, though.

There were plot holes, too. Nobody ever explained why Jodhaa’s foster brother, Rajkumar Sujamal, was passed over as crown prince of Rajput. Given that much of the plot revolved around his attempt to regain his status, one might have considered such info to be important.

Similarly, it was never explained why Jalaluddin’s mother had to be away for 15 years, leaving him to develop his emotional attachment to Maham Anga. Nor did we clearly see how his mother acquired the information that exposed Maham Anga’s plots, even though it resolved the intrigue and set the stage for the emperor’s reconciliation with Jodhaa.

The various intrigues were in fact resolved rather more easily than they would have been in real life. But that’s an issue in most historical movies.

What makes Jodhaa Akbar important, aside from any art or imperfections, is its attempt to convey that one can rule justly, neither harming nor dancing attendance on any religious world view. Gowariker learned as much as possible about the different cultures brought together under Jalaluddin’s rule. And he made his point convincingly in the massive dance scene, where the costumes of those cultures were vividly displayed as each group paid homage to the emperor.

Taken overall, the sheer visual and musical magnificence of the movie, the emotional and convincing portrayal of Jalaluddin and Jodhaa, and the drama of a ruler trying to develop a just, secular reign in the midst of a religiously polarized world, make this a movie you must see if you love Bollywood. Even moreso, if you love India.

Wikipedia article on Agra Fort (be sure to enlarge the photos)

Wikipedia article on Amer (Amber) Fort