Stuffed and Starved; The Body Hunters

[sanguinity]

...So. Far. Behind. Also, these numbers are annoyingly all out of order. What I'm calling "book 18" I finished yesterday; what I'm calling "book 19" I finished in October. Ergh.

18. Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World's Food System.Wide-ranging, engaging analysis (from a systems perspective!) of the global markets in

Comments

[sophinisba]

I hadn't heard of Stuffed and Starved and it sounds like something I'd be really interested in. Thanks so much for the rec.

[sanguinity]

Oh, yay! I've been having a hard time not shoving this book at people, telling them that they want to read it, no really, they do. ;-)

[gigerisgod]

i've read Michael Pollan, so i'm thinking Stuffed & Starved will be a great read. thanks for the recc.

[sanguinity]

Yay! Patel's scope is much larger than Pollan's, which I found satisfying. The U.S.-centrism in Pollan's analysis of meal production seemed a bit unlikely, somehow. That, and I wanted to understand how the U.S. food system interacted with food in the rest of the world.

[eccentricweft]

The absolute standard makes it very difficult to conduct some kinds of experimentation. For example, new treatments for an already-treatable disease can ethically only be tested to see if they are more effective than existing treatments; they cannot ethically be tested to see if they are more effective than a placebo.

It seems like this is another element tempting drug companies to seek test subjects among populations that have no access to health care. If they want to test a placebo, but they can't do it with subjects who are already getting the existing treatment, use subjects who aren't getting any treatment at all.

There are at least two ethical standards concerning experimental subjects: one is local and relativistic (the experimental subjects should be no worse off from participating in the experiment than they would have been had they declined to participate)I'm familiar with the relativistic standard from university research situations. The way it was explained in the training I had to take was that you can compensate

[eccentricweft]

Okay and I also did not mean that a society so screwed up that it allows children to be housed in conditions such that they're likely to get hepatitis is as morally neutral as randomly tripping on your shoelaces. It's horrific. It just seems to me that deliberately infecting them is even worse. Horrific-plus.

[sanguinity]

:: If they want to test a placebo, but they can't do it with subjects who are already getting the existing treatment, use subjects who aren't getting any treatment at all. ::

Absolutely. It's difficult to find subjects for HIV trials stateside, because the existing treatments already work pretty well. Who would give up an existing, effective treatment to roll the dice on an untried one? And what drug company wants to put their proposed drug up against a proven treatment, when they only need to show that they are better than a placebo?

Whether or not it's acceptable to do placebo-controlled out-of-country studies is another matter, though. International ethical standards have relaxed on that point during the past decade; prior to that, the Declaration of Helsinki (if I'm getting my various standards documents correct) appeared to prevent the use of placebos in out-of-country studies when a treatment existed in the originating country. Revisions in 2000 appeared to codify the permissibility of placebos out-of-country even when

[sanguinity]

There's just been a settlement in one of the major cases Shah discussed. A glimpse into how not to conduct a drug trial.

[jacquez]

thanks for posting these -- I'd just asked for nonfiction recs in the recs post; rydra_wong had rec'd Shah's book but I think Patel's sounds wonderful, too.

[sanguinity]

In the recs post you said something about liking Stiff, didn't you? You might try Pauline Chen's Final Exam. It doesn't have the absurd component that Roach's book has, but there may yet be things you like about it.

[oyceter]

Ooooo, these both look like books I'd be interested in, and I'm particularly looking forward to reading the first: I've wanted a discussion of food and environmentalism that also examines race and class and sex and colonization.

[sanguinity]

Colonization is central in Patel's analysis, with class being one of the big driving forces for colonialism, but also a central factor in food justice issues.

Sex and race are more incidental to Patel's analysis -- basically, Patel inserts notes that race or sex comes into play in this part of the discussion in a particular way. So race and sex aren't treated extensively, but he does give info that they do come into play, and (if you go into the endnotes) there are resources which expand upon that particular item.