Raj Patel (II)

Raj Patel is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

He has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world, and has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US, UK and EU governments. He is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and a member of the council of Progressive International. He has supported sustainable food policy from the municipal to international levels, and in 2016 he was recognized with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award.

His time in southern Africa involved policy research with SEATINI, the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Initiative. At the WTO meetings in 1999 in Seattle, he was a member of the Zimbabwean civil society delegation inside the WTO meetings and an activist with the People’s Global Action outside the meetings. He has also supported Abahlali baseMjondolo Shackdwellers Movement South Africa since its inception 20 years ago. He currently sits on the advisory board of a range of organizations including the Climate + Community Institute and co-chairs the board of Just Associates, an organization committed to feminist popular education in the Global South.

His writing and editorial work has including the founding of IndyMedia Zimbabwe, co-editing the Voice of the Turtle, judging the National Book Award for Non-Fiction and contributing to a range of editorial boards including The Journal of Peasant Studies. In addition to scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics and public health journals, he has contributed to a range of publications, from The Guardian, to the Financial Times, the New York Times, The Mail on Sunday, The Observer and the Scientific American.

His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. He is the co-author with Jason W. Moore of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things and with Rupa Marya, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice. His latest book, on taste and the future of food, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Atlantic Books in January 2027.

His first film, co-directed with Zak Piper and filmed over the course of a decade in Malawi and the United States, is the award-winning documentary The Ants & The Grasshopper. He was a co-host of the food politics podcast The Secret Ingredient with Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott, and KUT’s Rebecca McInroy.