My Food Hero: Sheila Dillon meets writer and campaigner Susan George

The Food Programme

BBC

Food, Arts

4.4 • 977 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the second of a special series of food heroes, Sheila Dillon meets one of the most influential writers on international hunger and social justice in recent times.

Susan George published her first book 'How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger' almost 40 years ago. It was a book that, at the time, offered a radically different perspective on famine in the developing world.

In 1985, as pictures of East African drought and hunger started appearing on our TV screens, Susan George published 'Ill Fares The Land' a collection of essays which didn't shy away from criticising International aid efforts, and demanded a different approach to trade and development. She wrote 'A more just society is a better-fed society'. It would become a seminal text.

Now, aged 81, and continuing to speak at conferences around the world, Susan George speaks to Sheila Dillon about her career, the predictions she made 30 years ago, and the problems we still face in feeding our growing global population.

Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Sheila Dylan and welcome to this BBC download of the Food Program.
0:06.0	For information on the BBC's terms and conditions of use, visit
0:09.6	www.
0:10.9	BBC.co. UK slash Radio 4.
0:15.0	And now, enjoy the podcast.
0:18.0	My idea was, you know, hunger is not necessary.
0:22.0	I said it's not a scourge, it's a scandal, and that's still true.
0:27.0	You might not have heard of Susan George, well at least this Susan George.
0:31.0	This one isn't a Hollywood star, but she did change the way we think about food
0:36.0	and particularly about who goes hungry. Until I was in my mid-30s, I hadn't heard of her either, but she's part of a long American tradition of
0:45.2	radical thought, a tradition of paying attention, doing the hard work of research, and then speaking
0:51.6	and writing what's on your mind.
0:54.0	In the early 70s when there was a lot of public pontificating
0:58.0	about the frightening levels of starvation
1:01.0	and hunger in the developing world, she refused to go along with the wailing.
1:06.9	She wrote, hunger is not an unavoidable phenomenon.
1:10.9	It's caused by identifiable forces within the province of rational human
1:16.1	control. And she spelled out what that meant in clear readable prose which
1:22.0	wasn't always palatable to the powers that be.
1:25.8	She changed a lot of lives and minds.
1:29.2	If I had to use one word to describe the impact of Susan's work on me and more broadly, it would be transformative.
1:37.0	Understanding the relationship between power and politics and the international trading system is really the key to
	...

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