RAJ PATEL was educated at Oxford, the LSE, and Cornell. A former fellow at Yale and Berkeley, he now holds a Visiting Fellowship at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, consulted for the UN, and protested against his former employers. He is one of only a few activists trusted to work with the Via Campesina peasant movement. His first book was Stuffed & Starved. www.rajpatel.org

We have so much choice over what we eat today because rural communities all over the world have had their choices taken away. To understand how our supermarket shopping makes us complicit in a system that routinely denies freedom to the world's poorest, and how we ourselves are poisoned by these choices, we need to think about the way our food comes to us. Stuffed and Starved takes a long and wide view of food production, to show how we all suffer the consequences of a food system cooked to a corporate recipe. This is also the story of the fight against the unthinking commerce that brings it to us. In the wrecked paddy fields of India, in the soy deserts of Brazil, in the maize ejidos of Mexico, the supermarket aisles of California, French McDonald's and Italian kitchens, there's a worldwide resistance against unhealthy control of the food system.