When people hear about legal restrictions on marketing and advertising, often the response is: Aren't you just being a food nanny? Isn't that government playing too much of a role in our lives? When people have that response, they're forgetting the extent to which what kids are eating and drinking is having as much of an impact on their lives as, say, if they were starting to smoke cigarettes as teenagers. Diet-related illnesses are causing nearly as many deaths as tobacco-related illnesses.

When people hear about legal restrictions on marketing and advertising, often the response is: Aren't you just being a food nanny? Isn't that government playing too much of a role in our lives? When people have that response, they're forgetting the extent to which what kids are eating and drinking is having as much of an impact on their lives as, say, if they were starting to smoke cigarettes as teenagers. Diet-related illnesses are causing nearly as many deaths as tobacco-related illnesses.

Just in the past couple of years, there's been pushback against some of that marketing, as parents have gotten really upset. Now we're seeing Coke and Pepsi kind of shape-shifting. Instead of doing these very explicit marketing deals, they are getting into schools in much more hidden ways - things like My Coke Rewards, where they encourage schools to push their student body to purchase Coke products, in exchange for points that go toward various products for the school. It's a way for these companies to get in front of kids, presented as a form of charity.

Hope doesn't come from calculating whether the good news is winning out over the bad. Its simply a choice to take action.

You could increase farmworker wages significantly and not change the price to the consumer at all - for instance, if you redistribute how revenue is paid out across the food chain. Labor costs, particularly farm labor, is a tiny portion of the price we pay at the supermarket.

Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.

Yes, there is a crisis of hunger on the planet, but hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.