The highly infectious coronavirus Delta variant is causing huge spikes in cases across the United States and around the world with China struggling to control surging infections and the Philippines preparing for a new, stricter lockdown. The United States is now averaging some 80,000 new COVID cases a day, about six times as many daily cases than a month ago. As much of the world struggles to cope with the pandemic and its impacts, we begin today’s show with the authors of a new book that examines the social and environmental roots of poor health. “Your body is part of a society inflamed,” write the authors. In a minute, we’ll speak with the co-authors of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, bestselling author Raj Patel and physician and activist Rupa Marya. But first, this is an animated introduction to their book by Aaron Kierbel.
RAJ PATEL: Thank you, Amy, for having us. For listeners and viewers who are unaware, one of the ways that the modern food system operates is through a sort of legacy of separating humans from the rest of the web of life. Now what that means is that humans feel, under capitalism and particularly under capitalist colonialism, to be free to exploit the world around us. We feel free to be able to do that because the rest of the web of life is just worth less than our profit motive. That is why, for example, 60% of current human infectious diseases come from pathogens that jump from one species to another, and the industrial food system incubates those kinds of diseases.
Now, while the jury is out around COVID, it is certainly the case that we have seen a vast array of diseases coming from the industrial food system. H1N1, for example, in 2009, was one example of a disease that emerged from a food system which is quite happy with treating the rest of the web of life as a disposable resource. And also quite happy in treating the working class as an expendable kind of insulation between the burn of disease and the needs of the rich and the Global North.
Now, when you have a kind of set-up that’s based on this 600-year process of exploitation and colonial domination, then you are preparing the world for pandemics not just of a
— source democracynow.org | Aug 02, 2021