Combat Vegetarianism: In Search of Bread N’ Omelette
If I want bread and omelette for breakfast in a hotel in Hyderabad today, I will have to go to any of the three big railway stations or to the…
Food
Caste and Cost of ‘Pure‘ Vegetarian Hotels
What does a ‘ Pure’ vegetarian hotel offer that a vegetarian hotel doesn’t? Twenty-five to thirty-nine percent of Indians self-identify as vegetarians. Benefiting from this substantial consumer base are the…
Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest (NAPi) Applauds Economic Survey 2024-25 for Acknowledging the Need to Reduce Ultra-Processed Food Consumption for Public Health
The Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest (NAPi), a national think tank of independent experts on public health and nutrition, commends the Economic Survey 2024-25 that marks a significant milestone by…
Towards Comprehensive Food and Farming Policy
There is increasing realization that while various countries have varying levels of success in their food and farming policies, on the whole, at world level, the existing farming and food…
The Glaring Hypocrisy and Embedded Deceptions of the Global Food Giants
Bryce Martinez (18) from Pennsylvania is mounting a legal challenge against major food companies, alleging that their ultra-processed foods (UPFs) led to his development of Type 2 diabetes and fatty…
A Teenager’s Lawsuit: Taking on the Global Food Giants
In a bold move, 18-year-old Bryce Martinez from Pennsylvania has taken a stand against some of the world's largest food corporations. Martinez has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against 11 major…
Food: from commodity to commons
Below I republish an article I wrote almost ten years ago. It can give new readers a summary of my perspective on the food system. For those interested in even…
Techno-Feudalism or Food Sovereignty? Reclaim the Future
The control of global agriculture has long been a tentacle of US state-corporate geopolitical strategy. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests, and poorer nations adopted Western agri-capital’s…
Corporate Vision for the Future of Food: Manifesto for Control and Technocratic Tyranny
Sainsbury’s is one of the ‘big six’ supermarkets in the UK. In 2019, it released its Future of Food report. It is not merely a misguided attempt at forecasting future…
In 1649…
This is an extract from the author’s new book "Power Play: The Future of Food" In the annals of agrarian history, one particular movement has left a profound impact on…
The American food system creates chronic diseases; the medical system ‘manages’ them
The explosive growth in the use of weight-loss drugs is a supreme irony within a food system that creates the very chronic diseases that lead to obesity and a medical system that…
New study singles out the riskiest of all processed foods
A decades-long study examining the risks of ultra-processed foods is corroborating what other studies have revealed: Processed meats and sugary drinks aren't doing our bodies any favors. What's happening? As detailed by the New York Times, around 73%…
The Violence of Development: New Version of the book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order
A revised version (September 2024) of the open-access e-book ‘Food Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order’ (2022) by Colin Todhunter is now available. A brand-new concluding chapter,…
Food Companies Intentionally Make Their Products Addictive, and It’s Leading to Chronic Diseases
Foods with unnaturally high levels of sugar and salt keep Americans snacking their way to obesity. Can’t stop eating that bag of chips until you’re licking the salt nestled in…
Menace on the Menu: The Financialisation of Farmland and the War on Food and Farming
Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling…
Ensure nutritional security
Nutritional security is essential for all-round development of an individual and the society. Only a physically and mentally healthy person can contribute for growth of the nation. Therefore it is…
Sick to Death: Unhealthy Food and Failed Technologies
The world is experiencing a micronutrient food and health crisis. Micronutrient deficiency now affects billions of people. Micronutrients are key vitamins and minerals and deficiencies can cause severe health conditions.…
How the Food Industry Uses Big Tobacco’s Playbook
In the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tobacco and public health advocates were locked in a battle. The anti-smoking supporters were gaining ground as cities were innovating ways to reduce smoking and protect…
Road to Freedom — One Liberated Apple at a Time
A minor but significant spark of direct action occurred in New York on 15 December. A group of people entered a Whole Foods store (owned by Amazon), took groceries without paying…
Huge increase in restaurants for the rich, a serious decline in eating places for common people
Writing about exotic food, fancy restaurants is now the in thing. Even Abhijit Banerjee, the Nobel economics prize winning economist, wrote about his own cooking and eating out in the…
Public Distribution System is much more than PMGKAY- Improve legal entitlements, not mask them as election doles
The Right to Food Campaign is against the central government’s actions to misrepresent National Food Security Act 2013 (NFSA) as their own initiative through Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana…
On the Occasion of World Food Day, Our Demand for a Dignified Right to Food and Life for All
The celebration of World Food Day on 16th October began in 1979 as a way to commemorate the founding date of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945.…
World Food Day as Seen in Gaza, Ukraine and Afghanistan
Within three days of the violence that has erupted recently in Gaza, reports from there were speaking about the big rush for staple food like bread and yet people having…
Fast-Food Graveyard – Sickened for Profit
The modern food system is responsible for making swathes of humanity ill, causing unnecessary suffering and sending many people to an early grave. It is part of a grotesque food-pharma…
Food Banks as a Means of Reducing Hunger
Jarva Chauki is a village in Atarra rural area of Banda District (Uttar Pradesh). Several households face a livelihood crisis here and at times lack the minimum food stock needed…
International Year of Millets
Millets, as we know, belong to the category of drought-tolerant, nutrient-rich grains primarily grown in arid and semi-arid regions of India and other countries. Due to their high protein, vitamin,…
How to Fix Our Food System
No food should be worth the amount of suffering experienced by sentient animals trapped in our food system. The facts are clear and they are shocking: Factory farming is unhealthy for…
Our Food System Is the Bullseye for Solving the World’s Climate Challenges
The industrialized food system is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of agriculture on climate change is significant. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agriculture…
Food for Thought: Caste, Communalism, and Culinary Majoritarian Identity Politics
As I scrolled through my social media feed in the morning, a provocative statement by Sudha Murty, Chairperson of Infosys Foundation, caught my attention. She remarked that when travelling abroad,…
Toxic Contagion – Funds, Food and Pharma
In 2014, the organisation GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world's food in its report Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter…
The World’s Coffee Shops Have Emerged as Plant Milk’s Front Line
Milk made from plants is entering the public consciousness (and stomachs) in coffee shops across the globe. While plant-based milk has been around for centuries, the market is undergoing a modern-day…
National Food Safety Day – February 9
Why GM Crops and Foods Are Becoming the Core Issue of Food Safety February 9 2010 was an important day for food safety in India when after a very broad-based…
We Just Can’t Wait for World Leaders to Fix Our Broken Food System
by Laura Lee Cascada, Nital Jethalal & Anita Krajnc We’re facing an unprecedented “code red for humanity,” in the words of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres—yet global action has stagnated. The world’s…
An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued US Dominance
In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine. Guterres said food, fuel and…
Food for Thought… Literally
Our journey with food had a tumultuous start with our progenitors being banished from paradise for eating the forbidden fruit. Since then, food has been predominant in our existence, evolving…
Avoid Banning Food Or Fertilizer Exports, WFP, IMF, World Bank and WTO Urge Countries
The World Food Program, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization on Wednesday called for urgent, coordinated action on food security, and appealed to countries to avoid banning…
Food: World Prices Hit New High, Alerts UN
Global food prices jumped to a historic high last month on grain and edible oil supply woes brought about by the conflict in Ukraine, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization…
An Inconvenient Truth: The Peasant Food Web Feeds the World
In October 2020, CropLife International said that its new strategic partnership with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) would contribute to sustainable food systems. It added that it…
The Right to Healthy Food: Comorbidities and COVID-19
In early 2020, we saw the beginning of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’. The world went into lockdown and even after lockdowns in various countries had been lifted, restrictions continued. Data now…
Plastic And Salt Threat Soil, Food Security, Health And Environment, Says FAO
The quantity of plastic used in agriculture, food industries, livestock, etc. industries the world over is millions of tones each year. Asia is the largest user of plastic in these…
Front-of-Pack Label regulation will be ‘good for India’
I was in PM Modi’s constituency witnessing some changes and listening to demands for changes- all for the better. I got a chance to attend a public dialogue on Front-of-Pack…
Time to Evaluate Front of Packet Labeling
Poor diet is responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other risk factor, and is a leading cause of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Global estimates suggest that…
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