Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

...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 food, their control by a relatively small number of corporate giants, and the effect of that control on both farmers and eaters. Little explosions of connections kept going off in my brain while I was reading: Oh, so THAT explains that! I found myself wishing it was not a library copy so that I might highlight to my heart's content (and I am not normally one who reads with a highlighter in hand).

( Food Sovereignty and Illusory Choice )

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in Michael Pollan's work, or in issues of obesity, starvation, free trade, and other issues of food justice. Patel also maintains a related website -- stuffedandstarved.org -- with updated news, educational articles, resources, and action items.


19. Sonia Shah, The Body Hunters: How the Drug Industry Tests Its Products on the World's Poorest Patients.

Also very good. I've delayed reviewing so long because I wanted to a decent summary of the content, but that was not happening. ( In which I try to summarize, anyway )

In the end, Shah is not so much against pharmaceutical testing as she is against the hypocrisy and mythologizing that often surrounds pharmaceutical testing. When a company says that an experimental protocol should be permitted because it is "for society's benefit," will the society that bears the burden of the experimentation also be one of the societies that benefits from the resultant drug? Is the societal good available in the here-and-now, or is it available in "some speculative future when prices fall, or poverty ends"? Will the new knowledge actually benefit a society-at-large (e.g. a treatment for a previously untreatable disease) or does it benefit only corporate shareholders (e.g. a replacement drug for a soon-to-expire patent)? Do the designated ethical gatekeepers for medical experimentation have conflicts of interest? Unfortunately, as Shah documents, the pretty rhetoric about societal benefits often doesn't match the observed realities.

In her conclusion, Shah sums up with a discussion of the phrase "due to ethical concerns":

It's hard to imagine anyone talking about indentured labor, or oil spills, or corporate embezzlement as not being possible "due to ethical concerns." Those things are simply considered morally wrong and socially illegitimate, and are punishable by law. But when clinical researchers deceive patients, exploit their poverty, or divert scarce resources away from their care, it isn't considered an unalloyed bad. The main business of medical research -- improving health, saving lives -- overshadows it. The exploitation and human rights violations are just side effects.

We have two options, as Shah sees it. We could "mothball the mythology" that surrounds drug-testing, the mythology that frames the exploitation and human rights violations as "side-effects", and hold the drug industry to the same moral standards that we (try to) hold other self-serving industries to. Or we could demand that drug companies and medical researchers live up to the myths, and hold them accountable for actually doing the mythic work that they claim to do. The latter would require a political movement, Shah is well aware. In the meanwhile, she asserts, we need to find ways to do medical experimentation fairly.