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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.