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

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.

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

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.

Those of us who think about what we eat, how it's grown, those of us who care about the environmental impact of food - we've been educated by fabulous books, like Fast Food Nation and documentaries like Food Inc. But despite these and other great projects that shine a critical light on the topic, every year the food industry spends literally tens of millions of dollars to shape the public conversation about our food system.

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.

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.