Eat This Podcast
Talking about anything around food

Food in post-independence India Still hungry after all these years

21 June 2021 Filed under: Tags: ,

India gained independence in 1947 with nationalist politicians promising food for all and an end to the rapacious imperial administration. What happened next?

Farmers protest near Delhi in November 2020

Poster suggesting that Indians do not eat one of three chapatis

India, like most places on Earth, suffered its fair share of famines over the centuries. From the horrendous Bengal famine of 1769, when a third of the population perished under the gaze of the East India Company, to the awful famine of 1943, this time under British imperial rule. Indian politicians gained independence in 1947, promising that they would do better for their citizens. Although they coped well with the refugees after partition, they were ill-prepared for crop failures across much of northern India in the early 1950s. Campaigns urging Indians to skip a meal seem, now, to have been misguided at best and tone deaf at worst.

Benjamin Siegel, who teaches history at Boston University, has written a terrific book on food in post-independence India. Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India explores the often contradictory and confusing history of Indian food policy with clarity and compassion.

Notes

  1. Benjamin Siegel’s book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.
  2. A paper ‘Self-help which ennobles a nation’: development, citizenship, and the obligations of eating in India’s austerity years is available online thanks to Boston University Libraries.
  3. The transcript is here.
  4. Banner picture was all over the place in November 2020, uncredited as far as I could tell.

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The original global food system The British Empire outsourced its food supply in a big way

7 June 2021 Filed under: Tags:

Diet for a Large Planet shows how the world is still living with free trade policies from the 19th century

Map showing food trade routs into Britain

Diagram of planetary boundaries showing that four of the nine boundaries have now been exceededThe idea of planetary boundaries, within which human life can “develop and thrive for generations to come”, was launched in 2009. Even then, we had crossed three boundaries, all intimately tied up with food production. But the process of “using up” resources, rather than simply making use of them, to supply our food is a much older pattern. In his book Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter, professor of history at Ohio State University, makes a powerful case that it was the British Empire that set the pattern, outsourcing the production of its food around the world. If food could be produced more cheaply elsewhere, then it made sense to do so, as long as the reckoning did not have to account for the wider costs.

By the 1880s, almost all the meat and wheat consumed in the United Kingdom was traveling vast distances to get there. Globalisation required mechanisation and turned food into an industrial commodity. The consequences of that original global outsourcing are still with us today, and still exceeding planetary boundaries. And the trade deals being struck in the aftermath of Brexit may well repeat that history.

Notes

  1. Diet for a Large Planet is published by University of Chicago Press.
  2. An article by Chris Otter — Scale, Evolution and Emergence in Food Systems — is a good introduction to his thesis.
  3. This rebuttal of some misconceptions is probably a good place to start finding out about planetary boundaries.
  4. Transcript available here for download.
  5. Banner and cover images from Fortune magazine, thanks to the exceptional VTS.

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