In Hoodwinked, John Perkins exposes the rotten core of a system that we here on this blog have been chipping away at around the edges. The manifestations of the problem come in our lack of a health care system, our unjust, pollution-based food system and its failure to nourish us… Not for the faint of heart! For equally good education on another topic related to the food industry, see Annie Leonard’s new stick figure animation, this time about Cap & Trade, the proposed solution to global warming. And if you missed The Story of Stuff, you are in for a treat.

Please excuse the lack of actual food references in this article. I am posting it as an awareness raising tool about consumer choices in general, to recognize the purchasing power we have in the US (for Christmas gifts or for…

Just over a year after his death, FUKUOKA Masanobu was the main topic of conversation at our Thanksgiving meal table today. Fukuoka was an amazing man who I had the chance to meet at his farm on Shikoku Island back in 1985, when I was living in Japan. His contributions to agriculture, permaculture and profound philosophies undergirding farming, nature and life are innumerable.

A few weeks ago, in a town in Peru called Huancayo in the Central Andes, we celebrated the anniversary of CEDEPAS, one of the founding organizations in the Joining Hands Network Peru (a program of the Presbyterian Church USA Hunger…

Thanksgiving isn’t just a rote exercise over turkey and stuffing one time a year. Truly giving thanks means making the connection between our daily bread and the Bread of Life, writes Fred Bahnson.

“The local food movement is going nowhere.” That’s according to my friend Mike. Mike is an intern at a nearby sustainable, organic farm, and he told me this while we were sitting at a locally-owned restaurant eating grass-fed bison burgers…

Data from the Rodale Institute’s long-running comparison of organic and conventional cropping systems confirms that organic methods are far more effective at removing the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and fixing it as beneficial organic matter in the soil. Consider this fact: If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles. Right now, I’m on an initial conference call of the ad hoc Interfaith Food and Agriculture group, which is convened by Rodale. We are sorting through who else should be part of the conversation and what we might do together…

My eldest son loves blackberries. They have been his favorite food since he was old enough to pick them himself. Even when he was quite young he was not deterred by the thorns, which can be vicious on the wild…

Days ahead of the Summit, the negotiations on the Draft Declaration of the Summit are entering their final stage. What is at stake is our ability to take the necessary steps towards a global food system that will make decisive progress towards realizing the human right to adequate food and building our resilience against the risk of future economic shocks and increasing volatility of food prices. The Declaration coming out of the Summit should be coherent, ambitious and unambiguous on five issues: the right to food, governance, sustainability, trade, and the strengthening of international cooperation.

While it may be obvious to say this, it’s sometimes hard to remember: Our food, everything we eat and drink, comes from somewhere, not just the back room of the local grocery store. Coffee, in particular, has to get from…