Vandana Shiva is still mad

She describes this succinctly in chapter two, in which she criticizes a mechanistic view of ecology, one in which human inputs can create bigger “yields” that are worth any detrimental environmental impacts. Instead, she calls for an agroecological approach in which crops that help each other grow and add nutrients to the soil are planted together. “When we grow food in accordance with ecological laws, we regenerate the earth, her soil and biodiversity, her climate system,” Shiva writes, reflecting her long-held ecofeminist belief in earth-as-woman.

This might sound like what many big food companies are currently trendily touting as their “regenerative” practices, but Shiva insists this is merely greenwashing by these corporations of their same old practices. She calls them out by name early on in the book, writing, “Agribusiness, represented by ADM, Bayer, Cargill, Danone, Nestlé, Olam Agri, Syngenta and Google, which have systematically destroyed biodiversity in the soil and the environment, launched an initiative to mislead people into thinking that it will contribute to what it calls ‘regenerative agriculture.’”

In this book, as in previous ones, Shiva’s complex academic and activist background shapes her understanding and presentation of her ideas. While her undergraduate degree from Punjab University, from which she graduated in 1972, was in physics and she counts Albert Einstein as her major inspiration, she has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, where she also focused on physics. She became interested in working specifically on subjects of seed and food sovereignty in the 1980s, following a gas leak from a pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Through books and speaking, she has been influential ever since in advocating against genetically modified seeds and for small farmers, in India and abroad.

Her ideas have garnered her accolades and a large following, but Shiva is a controversial figure in some circles. A 2014 New Yorker piece written by Michael Specter criticized Shiva for being so dogmatically anti-GMO that she advocated for aid agencies not to send food to starving populations and, if they did, for the Indian government not to accept them. The 2021 documentary “The Seeds of Vandana Shiva,” documented the moment in her life when the New Yorker piece came out, interspersed with footage of Specter on a stage espousing the no-brainer brilliance of GMOs, revealing his own biases. The aid agencies still sent the food and the government accepted it, so one must ask, what is the real power of rhetoric? What is so materially dangerous about this woman, whose latest book has been released by Chelsea Green, a small independent publisher based in Vermont? According to a recently-exposed U.S.-government funded private social network that profiles, with personal information, those public figures who are against pesticides, such as Shiva and authors Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, quite dangerous. 

Shiva has also come under attack for reportedly being paid well for her speaking appearances (I’m not sure this counts as a crime under capitalism) — but criticizing power and the Western belief in the endless upward progress of technology as a woman of color will never earn friends in high places.

While there is a lot of scientific and economic critique in the book, Shiva always brings the conversation back to food: to pulses (beans, chickpeas, lentils, etc.) as the true pulse of the world and culinary heritage in agroecological systems where they’re grown in a complementary way with vegetables and grains; to the ways in which women of society were once responsible for food processing that has now been outsourced to factories; and to the ways in which seasonality is stripped from food to the detriment and sidelining of local farmers working within their regional ecosystems. Highly processed foods, Shiva writes, also lead to diet-related diseases that she calls “foodstyle” diseases rather than “lifestyle” ones, blaming the food supply from which most people are disconnected for increases in cancer, diabetes and other ailments, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

She engages with some newer issues as well, taking aim at “fake food” and ecomodernists who believe that future foods like lab-made meat could solve the current woes of our food system, noting that, “Replacing one resource intensive and energy intensive industrial food system with another within the old paradigm is not the transformation of the food system that the people and the earth are seeking.” This might be the most compelling chapter in the book for its freshness and clarity, bridging the philosophy of her anti-corporate arguments into the conversations happening now around plant-based meats and cell-derived proteins.

Shiva has a polemical style that can be a turn-off for those who prefer their nonfiction with a heavy dose of journalistic objectivity (for those readers I’d recommend Dan Saladino’s “Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them” for a similar philosophy). But sticking with a Shiva text can still be rewarding. “The Nature of Nature” is citation- and quote-heavy, demonstrating a commitment to being in conversation with contemporary discussion around our most pressing issues, like climate change, even while this topic is old hat for her. “The transition for climate action is a transition from oil-based thinking and living to soil-based thinking and living,” she writes, in the final chapter. There’s no question that she’s provocative — what remains to be seen is whether that can provoke necessary real change in the global food system.