INTRODUCTION

... the very basis for life on earth is declining at an alarming rate.

... the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate profit, stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations.

Around the world, farmers and farm workers are dying, with the connivance of elected officials, and at the whim of the market. Through processed food, consumers are engorged and intoxicated. The agribusiness's food and marketing have contributed to record levels of diet-related disease, harming us today and planting a time-bomb in the bodies of children around the world. ... Most of this happens with consumers ignorant of the suffering that precedes every mouthful of food.

On being told that her people had no bread, Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), the soon-to-be beheaded Queen of France, purportedly remarked, "Let them eat cake." Such a callous indifference to the hunger of masses of people speaks volumes about why the French Revolution occurred. Today, the place of Marie Antoinette is taken by giant food corporations and the governments they influence, who, having learned from Marie Antoinette, would never say "Let them eat junk," but who, in the face of massive global malnourishment (one half of the global population is overfed, underfed or badly fed), simply continue to aggressively spread their radically unsustainable systems of agricultural production around the world, topped off as it were with "junk food" high in additives, sugars, fats and salts but low in nutrients. While this junk food is often relatively cheap, even its prices are rising with the diversion of large amounts of corn and soy into ethanol production, particularly since the US government has made the decision to feed the bottomless appetites of US sports utility vehicles (SUVs) rather than the hungry people of the world.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Today we have a truly disturbing situation, with parts of the world having so much food they do not know what to do with it, while nearly half the people in the world suffer malnutrition. Approximately 1 billion people suffer almost continual and acute hunger globally. What is most disturbing, however, is that we are on the brink of a far more massive global starvation because of skyrocketing food prices around the world. And this is only the beginning. Imagine what such rising food prices mean to the 40 percent of the world's population who try to survive on $2 or less per day.

"Let them eat junk" captures some of the indifference to global hunger, and it also highlights the existence of "junk foods" which emerged most dramatically after World War II, as a product of the capitalist food regime. "Junk food" is, of course, a colloquialism, but it is one that can be given a very precise meaning. It is food that is extremely high in sugars, fats and salts, or what are often called "empty calories". Of course, the "junkiness" of foods is a matter of degree. Some soft drinks contain only calories from sugar and no other nutrients (the epitome of "empty calories"), whereas a double bacon cheeseburger deluxe, though containing lots of saturated fats, cholesterol, salt and calories, would typically also contain a considerable array of nutrients. Thus if the cheeseburger is classified as junk food, it is not because it contains no nutrients, rather it is because the nutrients are overshadowed by the large number of unhealthy fat calories and high levels of salt. As a result, there is a grey area where people will disagree about whether a particular food item should be classified as "junk" or not, and no doubt it would be possible to construct a "junkiness index". In any case, the basic point is that eating too much junk food or food high on the junkiness index can make us obese, and because junk food lacks the nutrients that humans need, a diet of junk food can make us more vulnerable to disease.

"Junk" in its most common meaning refers to things that are worthless and should be thrown away. In the case of junk food, if the choice is between eating it frequently or throwing it away, the latter seems preferable assuming one has other sources of food. The problem is that globally close to 1 billion people do not have enough food of any kind to eat. They suffer the pangs of hunger much of the time. While hungry people are spread across the globe in both rich and poor countries, it is in the countries that have suffered the worst effects of colonialism that hunger is most often the greatest. The phrase "Let them eat junk" would be most cruel with regard to people who are hungry and starving much of the time. It is also cruel towards the working classes of advanced capitalist countries, who are lured by advertising, cheapness, convenience and the quasi-addictive quality of much junk food, to eat without consuming nutritious food. An emptiness of nutrients hollows out the health prospects of the working class. And in the case of food production, field workers and poor farmers in the United States are often reduced to life at the tipping point of the barest survival. In 2005 there were 35.1 million hungry people in the United States, and it is predicted that largely because of diet, children born in the United States today will on average live five fewer years than their parents.

"Après moi le deluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation." When Marx first wrote this sometime in the 1860s, he had no idea that his rhetorical flourish might some day become all too accurate. For Americans live in an age when governing bodies at all levels, ever-pressured by corporations to allow them to maximize short-term profits, are severely constrained in their policy options. Politicians are so tuned to the needs of corporations that they seem unable to act in any decisive ways in the face of the truly catastrophic consequences of global warming just around the corner of the future. We have known about global warming for over 20 years, and at least in the United States, corporations have so far largely paralyzed government into the most limited of responses. With every year that passes scientists are discovering that the indices that measure the rate of global warming are increasing at a faster rate than previously thought, and yet, given the enormity of the problem, little is being done in the United States and many other countries to effectively counter it.

David Pimentel, an agricultural researcher at Cornell University, has estimated that if the whole...