Let Them Eat Junk Food!

Robert Albritton (Ethiopia 1963-65) teaches at a university in Canada and has a book coming out this month that might interest you. It is entitled, Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity. From the book jacket, “Capitalism may promise cheap, nutritious food for all, but it has failed to deliver on that promise.” The book explores the economics of our food system, and it explains why a quarter of the world’s population go hungry despite the fact that enough food is produced worldwide to feed us all.

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, says about the book, “Marx understood the dynamics of the current food crisis over a century ago. Robert Albritton has written a fine primer, bridging the best thinking of the nineteenth century to the urgent needs of the twenty-first.”

And Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, author of Food Politics, writes. “[This book] pulls no punches in its analysis….To understand how starvation and obesity can coexist in the same populations, follow the flow of capital. Everyone who cares about food equity and the preservation of democracy should read this book.”