To Eat or Not to Eat

     In the book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, the author Raj Patel argues that not enough people are paying attention to the starving populations and the obese populations and why they have become this way. Patel does this through affecting his readers’ emotions, his credible positions as an activist and journalist, and use statistical evidence and reasoning. In this book, Patel is going to appeal to readers that are interested in how and why the world varies in weight and different food consumptions. Stuffed and Starved will teach you about the reasons there are obese individuals in poor countries, starving individuals in the rich countries, and vice versa. At least one million malnourished children die every year because they lack the access to the necessary treatment.

     Patel argues that in the United States alone, in 2005, 35.1 million people do not know where they are going to get their next meal from. Patel states many of these gruesome, heart wrenching facts throughout his book. That is how Patel uses pathos of the reader to support his argument. When Patel affects the emotion of his readers and hits their “soft side”, this is going to influence them to take action and pay more attention to not only the starving societies in the world but the obese as well. In the book, Patel has an entire chapter dedicated to examining farmer suicides and the forces that destroy rural communities across the planet. One example of a farmer committing suicide is a Korean farmer and peasant organizer who climbed the fence where trade meetings were happening, shouted “the WTO kills farmers”, flipped open his red penknife and stabbed himself high in his chest. When Patel uses these types of examples, he goes into great detail of how the innocent farmer killed himself just to prove a point. When Patel goes into great details like this, he is using imagery to give his readers a visual while they read which affects their feelings even more. This strategy of pathos is backing up Patel’s argument effectively by showing that not just the starving and obese people are dying around the world because of the food but the people who are making the food like farmers! Every time the reader decides to put a piece of food in their mouth, Patel did a good job of making them think of the farmer who spends his life to put that food there. The rhetoric strategy of emotion is one of the strongest forms of persuasion because as many people say, the way to people’s hearts, is through their stomachs.

     Another way to get to people’s hearts is by controlling their minds. Once you control a person’s mind, they become like you, think like you, and spread the word like you. Patel does an amazing job of this by convincing his audience through statistical data and facts. One of the examples he uses is on P.148 Table 6.2, it shows mortality from twentieth-century famines in Africa and the triggers that caused these mortalities. There are many people who won’t be convinced by words unless they get the hard facts through numbers. This table shows different countries with thousands to hundreds of thousands of people that are dying due to starvation. People need to see those facts and data because a lot of the people that Patel is trying to get involved don’t see the starving people in their own state or country and therefore don’t know what is going on. The power of statistical reasoning and evidence is effective in supporting his argument is extremely important because it reaches the millions of people that are “cold-hearted” and that only believe what the news tells them because everything the news says is true or everything that looks scientific with numbers will be true. This is the way many people think and by providing the statistics on how many people are starving in this world, it helps them spread the word on hunger and obesity confidently. They get to use data as evidence to help them convince the people they may argue with. With this, they get to argue loud and proud just like Patel.

     This brings along another huge factor of how Patel convinces his audience that not enough people are paying attention to the starving and obese populations in the world. Patel shows that he is a very credible source for this topic on his back cover of the book by stating that he was a former policy analyst for Food First. He is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, and though he worked for the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations, he has also been tear gassed on four continents protesting against them. When Patel speaks in public and writes in this book, he is confident. His word choice is not sounds sketchy or too hesitant which makes people believe him. Not only the way you speak will affect an argument but your background and resume of what you’ve done in your career has a major effect. If you had to take sides between to individuals on an argument of how food is affecting populations throughout the world, would you side with a food critic taster or would you side with someone who has worked for the global companies in charge of food and has traveled to different continents analyzing and gathering information first hand. Now if you don’t believe the information coming out of a book, which is why Patel has written academic journals that have been published.

     Similarly to the rhetorical strategies used in Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Patel also uses these same strategies in his article “The Unthinkable in the Pursuit of the Eatable”. In this article, Patel argues that in the demand for well-paid rural employment creation, movements around the world are presenting new policies that challenge and are prevented by the current constitution of international power. He does this also through his credibility, emotional appeal, and statistical evidence. One of the biggest reasons Patel can prove his argument is legitimate is because it has been published by Palgrave Macmillan which is an international academic and trade publishing company. He is also credible to his audience of higher educated people because he changes his tone and choice of words in this academic article. An example in the text is when he writes, “One of the most significant transmission vectors for the oil price into the food system is the increasingly widespread application of inorganic chemicals in industrial farming.” Another sentence with wording the average reader will not understand is when he writes about agrarian hegemony and hydrocarbons. A lot of will not understand the terminology Patel is speaking about but to the right audience, he can have a great deal of effect on their opinions they have in mind. Speaking of their minds, Patel does a great job of controlling that through this article as well.

     Patel controls the reader’s mind in convincing them about his argument through data as well. He uses a figure that shows transport costs reflect less than a third of the production costs in industrial US agriculture. Looking at the graph, it is also slightly more technical than the data given in Patel’s book. This is because the graph given provides more detail that applies to the audience of his article. Although you may need different types of graphs and wording in this article, you will not need a different style of emotional appeal to an audience because you can’t change their hearts.

     Patel uses emotional appeal in his article in multiple ways but in this article he ends it with a statement that makes you want to take action immediately. What he says is, “Unless that constitution is changed, it is certain that many of us will lose not only ways of thinking but also ways of eating, and some of us will lose our very lives.” That really ends the article making you think about what is going on in the world and leaves you with the thought of again all the people that are losing their lives daily to this world-wide issue. This strongly helps Patel’s argument because like I said before, he speaks about the subject that almost everyone will take for granted and by using statements similar to that. He makes everyone second guess themselves when they see a homeless citizen on the side of the road with a sign that says “will work for food” or think about the starving people across the world every time they take a bit out of their juicy steak or burger.

     As we step back and analyze both the book and the article as a whole, we are finally able to notice and identify the rhetorical strategies Patel uses to convince his audiences. Whether his audience are scholarly readers or the average joe who found this book in a library, Patel manages to manages to use all three aesthetic appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is found when he uses statistical data to prove the amounts of people around the world that are dying of starvation or obesity; ethos is used by Patel’s personal hands-on experiences in these countries dealing with famine the most and working for the global companies that can help solve this problem; lastly pathos will be found when the audience encounters his descriptive deaths of people because of this issue and making them feel sorry for them. Overall, Patel clearly puts together these three rhetorical strategies and creates a book and an article to prove his points. At the first glance of the book, it may seem cheap or a boring read. At first glance of the article to a scholarly reader, it may seem like another author trying to bring up a topic everyone has heard repeatedly. As it turns out, Patel uses these two pieces and successfully helps the readers recognize the starving and obese populations around the world and why they have become this way.