That leads us neatly into your first book choice, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which looks at what is going wrong with government policies towards food production.

Michael Pollan looks at food production through four meals. One is a fast-food meal, the other is an industrial-scale organic meal, then there is a small-scale organic meal and finally he actually goes out and either grows or kills, in the case of the meat, the entire meal himself. That is the narrative.

The premise being that every day we have the dilemma of what we are going to eat.

Yes, if you are a panda bear you don’t have a dilemma because you only eat bamboo shoots but as an omnivore you have got choices. He looks at the way we subsidise big commodity agriculture in the United States – and there are some problems with subsidies. I think that is true for many places in the world, including Europe. It encourages an artificially cheap system for bad food. For example, we subsidise corn growing and make it into high fructose corn syrup at an artificially cheap price, which, of course, is fattening us up at an incredible rate.

The same corn getting subsidised is fed to the cattle that become hamburgers. And we are eating too much of that and the conditions at the massive places where they are reared are not good at all.

What do you think governments should be doing about this?

I don’t think they should be supporting the wealthiest farmers. Often the people who are getting these subsidies you wouldn’t even call farmers. They are more corporations than farms. Instead of focusing on them the government should be paying attention to improving small, sustainable, regional food systems.

Another group of corporations on many people’s black list in the world of food production are fast-food businesses. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation really got people thinking about just what eating a burger a day is actually doing to us.

Eric Schlosser takes apart a single fast-food meal and shows not only how it affects our health but also how the people who serve it to you are treated. He also looks at how the people in the slaughterhouses working with the cattle are treated, and so it shows you the true picture of the all-American meal – burgers and fries.

And this book has had an effect on that industry. Big companies like McDonald’s seem to be going out of their way to show how things are sourced and making an effort to provide healthier options and give more information about their food.

Yes, it has been 10 years since that book came out and I recently interviewed Eric Schlosser and asked him if things have improved and he said yes. People are getting much more aware of childhood obesity and the role fast food plays. And certainly in the States fast-food restaurants are required to give calorie counts, so people can see just how much sugar and fat are in some of these things. Eric said there had been a lot of progress on that front, but sadly the situation with the labour has got worse.

Your next choice continues with this idea of how our current diet is causing obesity in many areas of the world. But Raj Patel also points out in his book Stuffed and Starved that many people still don’t have enough food. So you get the two extremes provided by the global food system.

Patel is a very smart man, a scholar in the true sense of the word. He takes this huge global picture. The book goes everywhere from India to Brazil to southern Africa looking at how the global impact of industrialised food has led to this scandalous situation where there are a billion people who get too many calories a day and a billion people who do not get enough. Again, it often has a lot to do with economic choices made by government agencies and non-government organisations.

But do you really think that an efficient and healthier way of providing food to an ever-expanding world lies with locally produced food? Is that really viable?

I absolutely do and so do the United Nations. The Food and Agricultural Organisation did a study a few years ago that shows that it is the way to do it. What there hasn’t been is a real study on how the current system leaves a billion people today starving. How is that happening?

Locally produced food might work where you are living in Vermont but how about somewhere like war-torn Somalia?

Yes, Vermont is a small agricultural state which is very food conscious, so it is relatively easy for me. Even though we are a northern state right up against Canada without a long growing season, we can still manage. The growers and the people here are very tuned into the whole idea of sustainability. War-torn Somalia has so many problems I think it would be better to take another example.

OK, how about Namibia?

What has happened lately is that they have adopted some new crops, some of which are genetically modified. They are primarily cash crops, so crops that are meant to be sold and they are encouraged to do this. These crops require huge inputs as far as fertilisers go, which is an added expense. So you get the situation where you have taken people from producing food for themselves and turned them into producers of cotton or wheat or whatever it may be. That is true in other countries like India and much of agricultural Africa.

And all of sudden they are finding that things have changed. In the past they could at least farm from a subsistence basis but now they have stopped doing that and they are not making enough money because of the expense of growing these GM crops or hybrid crops that are designed to be used in connection with chemical fertilisers. You get situations in places like India where there is an epidemic of suicides from farmers. These were countries that used to feed themselves and now they no longer can. The United Nations study pointed to the idea that if they went back to smaller food crops they would be fed.