An Empty Plate: Why we are losing the battle for our food system, why it matters, and how we can win

Why is it that food prices are so high millions of South African families go hungry, while the prices paid to farmers for that same food are so low, many cannot stay in business? Why are the people who produce our food – farmworkers – among the most food insecure of all? Why do high levels of rural poverty persist while corporate profits in the food sector keep rising? How did a country with a constitutionally guaranteed right to food become a place where 1 in 4 children is so malnourished that they are classified as stunted? An Empty Plate makes a close and critical analysis of the South African agri-food system, showing how a combination of misguided government policy and consumer apathy has created the most important threat to our hopes of a more equitable society. Tracy Ledger demonstrates how this system is perpetuating poverty, threatening land reform, entrenching inequality and tearing apart our social fabric. The book asks two crucial questions: how did we get to this point and how might we go about imagining and building something different? This is a story of money, of power, of unanticipated consequences, and of personal and social tragedy. But it is also a story of what is possible if we reimagine ourselves and our society and build a new system on the foundations of solidarity and ethical food citizenship.