Students are very engaged by the issues, and it's not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.

The real food is not being advertised.

The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.

The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.