Exploring Food Justice and Its Societal Impact

Food Justice: Why Our Bodies And Our Society Are Inflamed | This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market, Athletic Greens, and Pique Tea

A large part of my work in Functional Medicine is addressing inflammation. I talk a lot about how the food we eat, and our current food system as a whole, promotes inflammation and leads to chronic disease. But it’s not just our bodies that are inflamed, it’s also our societies and our planet. Covid has only made racial disparities even more apparent, while the disasters that result from climate change continue to climb in frequency and severity as well. It’s all connected. I can’t tell you how excited I was to host Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, to dig into decolonizing the food system to address the inflammatory state of our world and our bodies. 

Dr. Rupa Marya is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where she practices and teaches Internal Medicine. Her research examines the health impacts of social systems, from agriculture to policing. She is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. Raj Patel is a Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the University’s department of nutrition, and a Research Associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A James Beard Leadership Award winner, he is the co-director of the award-winning documentary about climate change and the food system, The Ants & The Grasshopper. He serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and has advised governments on causes and solutions to crises of sustainability worldwide.

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Here are more of the details from our interview: 

• The root causes of the rise of inflammatory disease around the world (12:21)

• How external stress creates disease and illness within our body (20:10)

• Monopolies and corporate dominance in the food industry (27:17)

• The anatomy of injustice (39:15)

• How has our food system been colonized, and what does a colonized food system look like? (42:38)

• Why singing is medicine (45:36)

• The populations with the most biodiverse gut microbiomes (48:05)

• The link between chronic disease and our political and economic structures (54:51)

• Going beyond food security to food sovereignty and nutritional security (1:06:42)

• Our food system and climate change (1:20:25)

Learn more about Dr. Rupa Marya at https://rupamarya.org/ on Facebook @aprilfishes, Instagram @aprilfishes, and on Twitter @drrupamarya.

Learn more about Raj Patel at https://rajpatel.org/ and on Facebook @RajPatel and on Twitter @_rajpatel.

Get a copy of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice at https://www.amazon.com/Inflamed-Deep-Medicine-Anatomy-Injustice/dp/0374602514/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=inflamed&qid=1627477973&sr=8-6