Food Fight

Food is life but our food system is killing us. Designed in a different century for a different purpose – to mass-produce cheap calories to prevent famine – it’s now generating obesity, ill-health and driving the climate crisis. We need to transform it into one that can nourish all eight billion of us and the planet we live on. 

In Food Fight, Dr Stuart Gillespie shares the insights he’s gleaned over a forty-year career in food, nutrition and health. He reveals how the global food system we once relied upon for nutrition has warped into the very thing making us sick. Many of us are now simultaneously overweight and undernourished. From its origins in colonial plunder through to the last few decades of neoliberalism, our food system now lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful transnationals who are playing for profit at any cost – aided by governments who let them get away with it. With his eye trained on the future and on solutions within our grasp, Gillespie also celebrates the impact of success stories from around the world, driven by remarkable citizens, social movements, policy makers and politicians. These case studies offer hope that, by organising, sharing and learning, we can build a better food future for ourselves and for our children.

Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight shines a light inside the black box of politics and power before mapping a way towards a new system that gives us hope for a future of global health and justice. 

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‘Gillespie writes beautifully with an urgent clarity. Scholarly, literate and deeply moving – Gillespie deftly draws on global expertise built over four decades working in nutrition and food policy’ CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN

‘The need for a radical overhaul of our food system has never been more urgent. Food Fight powerfully articulates the intricate web of historical, economic and political factors that have led us to this point of crisis. It is a clarion call for action’ HENRY DIMBLEBY

‘Stuart Gillespie has spent over forty years working on the front-line of nutrition policies across the world – in this brilliant book, he pulls together why we’re still seeing such high levels of malnutrition in the world, the role of corporations and key suggestions on how to improve it. A must-read’ DEVI SRIDHAR