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.

To argue that we need some technology in order to produce food to tackle hunger is completely blind to the facts on the ground. Actually, what we need is the exact opposite of what GMOs give us. We have to empower farmers to grow food for themselves and plant and grow their own seeds and use practices to deal with weeds and the need for fertility, not from purchased products like a seed or a chemical, but from their own farms, from their own knowledge and skill sets.

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.

The food industry is spending almost $2 billion a year marketing directly to children and teens. We know that those ads lead to children demanding certain brands, and we know that food and drink marketing gets all of us to consume more calories. If we're going to address diet-related illnesses, talking about marketing to kids is a key step. There should be places like schools that are protected sanctuaries from commercialization and from advertising, especially when it comes to kids' health.

Courage is saying maybe what I'm doing isn't working, maybe I should try something else.

Diet-related illnesses are causing nearly as many deaths as tobacco-related illnesses, not to mention the impact on quality of life when you start to develop adult-onset diabetes as a child, or all these other diet-related illnesses.

Part of what the food industry does with public relations, just like the chemical industry or the oil industry, is to try to erase their fingerprints from their messaging.