Food fight: From plunder and profit to people and planet

Gillespie, Stuart. 2025. Food fight: From plunder and profit to people and planet. HarperCollins. https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443475297/food-fight/

Food is life, but our food system is killing us. Designed in a different century for a different purpose—to mass-produce cheap calories to prevent famine—it’s now generating obesity and ill-health and driving the climate crisis. We need to transform it into one that can nourish all eight billion of us and the planet we live on.

In Food Fight, Stuart Gillespie shares the insights he’s gleaned over a forty-year career in food, nutrition, and health, revealing how the global food system we once relied upon for nutrition has warped into the very thing making us sick. Many of us are now simultaneously overweight and undernourished. From its origins in colonial plunder through to the past few decades of neo-liberalism, our food system now lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful transnational corporations that are playing for profit at any cost—aided by governments who let them get away with it.

With his eye trained on solutions within our grasp, Gillespie also celebrates success stories from around the world, driven by remarkable citizens, social movements, policy makers, and politicians. These case studies offer hope that, by organizing, sharing, and learning, we can build a better food future for ourselves and for our children.

Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight shines a light inside the black box of politics and power before mapping a way toward a new system that gives us hope for a future of global health and justice.