Food Democracy Now! has prepared a petition listing names for Barack Obama’s selection of the next Secretary of Agriculture. See and sign it here.

The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, the start of lent, has long been called Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras if you speak French) or Pancake Tuesday if you come out of England. For some reason, growing up Lutheran in the Pacific Northwest,…

“One of the critical things the group helped me to identify was the nature of human desire,” she said. “Just because so many of us can have what we want doesn’t mean that we should have it. Having what we want isn’t necessarily what’s best for the world.”

It’s raining in the desert. The jungle is becoming a dry forest, a “bosque seca.” Mountains white with snowcaps melt into brown dust. This isn’t the magical realism of a Mario Vargas Llosa novel. This is the reality of Peru….

Daniel Deffenbaugh is an Associate Professor of Religion at Hastings College and a gardner. He is also a theologian and author of the book Learning the Language of the Fields: Tilling & Keeping as Christian Vocation. I like his book…

It is looking like drought time is coming over us here in Northern California. After a year of floods we’ve now seen two years of blue sky and now we’re midway through the third winter of little to no rain….

Food will not bring us close to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. Superbowl Sunday is the largest food-consumption day of the American year, after Thanksgiving. If you’re like me, you probably won’t spend much time thinking about what you eat today. Someone will just plunk some chips or wings or potato skins in front of you, and you’ll down ’em. The Christians in Corinth thought about food a lot, trying to decide what to eat, who to eat with, and why it mattered. The quote above is from one of those Corinthians, and while I love how thoughtful theyre being about eating, I respectfully disagree that food can’t bring us close to God.

It was the first day of 2009. A cold beginning in Wisconsin, with 3 or more feet of snow and ice chunks on Lake Michigan. A friend and I went for a walk to catch up, as we were both…

Leslie Hatfield, in the Huffington Post begins her article, “Maybe Jeremy Piven didn’t get mercury poisoning from fish at all — according to the results of a new study released by the Institute for Agriculture and Trace Policy (IATP), the actor may well have been sickened by soda or candy or anything that contains high fructose corn syrup, which, if you eat processed food in this country means, well, just about anything.” All this makes one believe John Calvin may have been right about human depravity. Speaking of which – If you didn’t realize, this year is his 500th birthday. Yes, he is very old. And you can learn about the celebrations here.

report about mercury in the already maligned high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).Thanks a lot, Dennis. When this can happen and salmonella-tainted peanut butter is sold on supermarket shelves nation-wide, it does seem to indict the centralized, corporate-driven food system we have created. How often are you ingesting mercury? Around 50% of the time you eat anything with high fructose corn syrup in it! At least that is the frequency mercury was found in the samples taken in a study published today in the scientific journal, Environmental Health. A separate study was done by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), where my former friend Dennis works (just kidding Dennis, but I did take you out of my will), which detected mercury in nearly one-third of 55 popular brand name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first or second highest labeled ingredient. Among them were products by Quaker, Hershey’s, Kraft and Smucker’s. We North American consume a heck of a lot of HFCS. On average, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of HFCS. Consumption by teenagers and other high consumers can be up to 80 percent above average levels.