By: Deanna McFadden
How to green your life is a topic on just about everyone's minds. Whether it's thinking about the plastic bag you don't really need from the grocery store or making sure that every piece of organic waste gets in the green bin, the precarious state of the Earth is an issue for our collective conscience.
Full disclosure time: I work at HarperCollins, a large publishing house, and one that while consistently trying to green our business, realizes the irony of cutting down trees to bring people literature. If I didn't think it was worth it, I wouldn't work there, and that's why I'm only going to talk about one event this month, and that's Raj Patel's TINARS event at Innis Hall. His book, Stuffed and Starved (which is published by HarperCollins Canada) is about an issue close to my own heart: global food production and its impact on our environment.
Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved is a deeply felt call to action that explores another irony: how in a world as rich in resources as this one, half the population is starving. The two contrasting sides are intricately linked through the food production system developed to bring the western “haves” anything they might fancy on their plate, despite the consequences to the “have nots” on the other side of the world.
At 7:30 on March 11th, Pages Books & Magazines, HarperCollins Canada, and Eye Weekly present a This is Not a Reading Series event featuring Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved. The author comes armed with a poignant presentation about the global food chain. Wayne Roberts from the Toronto Food Policy Council will moderate a question and answer session with the audience following Raj’s presentation. The event is free and it takes place at Innis Town Hall on the University of Toronto campus (at the corner of St George, one block north of Harbord).
There have been plenty of books urging people to eat local, which is just one small thing you can do to preserve not only our environment, but also a strong sense of community, but none that examine the issue in such detail. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (who'll be in Toronto later this spring), and the The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating brought the issue to the forefront last year. Raj Patel takes it all that much further, and his expose will actually force you to change the way you see the items on the rows in your local supermarket.
I won't say much more except I'll leave you with a shocking statistic from the book itself that we used to create the trailer: "Today, when we produce more food than ever before in human history, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight."
Just a little something to chew on.
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