I've come to the deep south of USA.
To talk to a guy who is obsessed with chickens.
Or more specifically, chicken nuggets.
Hi.
Well hello.
-Nice to meet ya.
-Nice to meet you Laura.
Raj Patel is a British activist, academic and writer.
On a quest to tackle poverty and famine.
Why is the chicken nugget the symbol of our modern times for you?
If there is going to be any intelligent life after humans,
they will look in the fossil record and what are they gonna see?
They're gonna see plastic, they're gonna see radiation from atmospheric weapons tests.
And they're going to see trillions of chicken bones.
And those chicken bones don't get there by magic.
They get there because of capitalism.
Perhaps the one thing that Raj is obsessed with more than chickens, is capitalism.
It's taken him from working inside the global halls of power.
To fighting against them on the streets.
And the obsession started when he was just 5 years old on a family holiday in India.
I remember being in a monsoon and there was at a traffic light, a girl.
She can't of been more than 12.
And she was swaying backwards and forwards saying
'Please we're hungry, we're wet, we don't have any money, please can you give us some money.'
There was a kid in her arms who was screaming and screaming and screaming.
And in the end I was screaming and screaming and screaming,
trying to figure out why is she out there?
Why doesn't she have money and why do we have money?
And in the end my parents sort of cranked down the window a little bit and shoved some money out.
And then we sped off into the night.
But I couldn't stop thinking about her, I can't stop thinking about her.
When I came back home I started renting out my toys at kindergarten so we could send money for hunger relief.
How much money did you end up raising?
It can't of been more than 5 quid but, y'know, it was 5 quid!
You have worked at The World Bank, The World Trade Organisation, United Nations.
What was the most important thing you learned from being inside these behemoth organisations?
What I found in these institutions was not an evil guy, in a leather chair, stroking a white cat.
But the people inside them aren't particularly malicious.
But they are both products and participants of a system that is making us head in the wrong direction.
At the World Trade organisation it was very easy to see whose expertise was being relied on.
So when the man from Motorola came by and offered trade analysis, that went to the top of the pile.
Whereas when the person from 'Friends of the Earth' came, that went straight into the trash can.
Because we looked at these organisations for ideas of impartial analysis and truth and in fact nothing could be
further from the truth.
Discovering that bodies like the U.N and the World Trade Organisation didn't hold the solution to ending poverty.
lead Raj to another discovery.
I discovered tear gas.
And that was with thousands of other people for things like the World Trade Organisation protest in Seattle in
1999.
I'm lucky compared to some of my colleagues who were caught and arrested and beaten.
For me I was a double agent.
I was one of many thousands of people on the streets.
But I was also part of the Zimbabwean delegation.
Being part of those protests and spreading the word about what was happening inside
and then running back inside and going back and forth.
'The market speaks by hiding prices, hiding the real cost.'
'They hide them from me.'
How did you first find out that there's a group of people out there, that are convinced that you're the Messiah?
I was on the Colbert Report, the day after I got a series of messages asking 'Are you the Maitreya?'
And so I looked it up I found out that there was prophecy.
A man born in the same year I was born, travel from India London the same years I did.
Who worked in the East End fighting hunger.
Going to be on American television when the stars were in a certain position.
That person would be the Maitreya.
The thing they don't tell you when you're made the Messiah,
is that there are a bunch of people that also think that you're the anti-Christ and want to kill you.
And so I had a fair bit of that as well.
Is that something that's still following you around today at all, that experience?
Y'know, 10 years later.
Oh yeah!
My students routinely mock me about it.
And you know, occasionally I grant a couple of wishes.
'It stops people who are grappling with this problem, from being able to be agents of change.'
What kind of advice would you give to a young person who wants to get involved in activism?
One of the ways that we've been taught that we can make change, particularly in America,
is by shopping smarter.
If only you buy organic and fair trade, everything's going to be fine.
And that's just not enough.
The ultimate activist question is this
Who do you love?
Tell me who you love. I love my grandma, I love my aunty, I love my uncle.
Okay now, how are they doing?
They're fine. Are they really doing fine? No they're struggling.
And in that conversation, you've started with a conversation about love.
But you move towards conversations about structural racism, about hunger, about poverty.
And what's always been true about activism and social change
is that if you start from a place of love rather than a place of 'What policy issue must we tackle next?'
Love is the rocket fuel that you need to be able to get you through, particularly if you are organised together.
So that's how a British academic ends up on a chicken farm in Texas.
Wearing a suit on a 40 degree day and plotting to bring down capitalism.
So how do chickens come into this again?
Capitalism is always on the hunt for cheap things.
And the nugget is sort of an embodiment of seven cheap things.
Raj believes that nature, money, work, care, lives and energy
have all been cheapened to create our current society.
And, this:
But the final ingredient to making cheap chicken?
Cheap food.
And that's an irony. You need cheap food to make cheap food.
In order for workers to be paid very little, their food needs to consume a very small amount of their wages.
And in the United States we spend less than 10% of our annual household income on food.
So it's all the seven cheap things you need to make this chicken.
Are we gonna eat any?
Well no this chook's not for me, I'm vegetarian, so I'm gonna have some bread.
