I Signori Del Cibo: Viaggo nell'industria alimentare che sta distruggendo il pianeta
by Stefano Liberti, Logan Nonfiction class of Spring 2016 / Minimum Fax / September 22, 2016
According to UN forecasts, in 2050 there will be 9 billion people on Earth. How do we look at it, if resources are increasingly scarce and the inhabitants of hyperpopulated countries like China are suddenly changing their eating habits? Global finance, along with food multinationals, have sensed the deal: the overpopulation business.
Stefano Liberti presents us an important report that follows the chain of four food products—pork, soy, canned tuna and tomato concentrate— to see what happens in a sector devoured by the aggressiveness of finance that has decided to turn the planet into a giant meal. The book is a global survey lasting two years, from the Brazilian Amazon where the endless soy monocultures are destroying the largest biodiversity factory on Earth to the mega-fishing boats sifting and sacking the oceans to ensure increasingly cheaper tuna cans, from industrial farms of pigs in the United States to a futuristic Chinese slaughterhouse, up to the Puglia countryside, where the Ghanaian workers collect the tomatoes they previously cultivated in their lands in Africa.
Liberti sheds light on the power games that regulate the food market, dominated by a few colossal actors increasingly intent on controlling what we eat and grinding monumental profits.