Why don't we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.

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

But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

The other way that you democratize the food movement is through the public school system. If you can pay enough for the school lunch system so that it can actually be cooked and not just microwaved, so that these schools can buy local food, fresh food, because right now it's all frozen and processed, you will improve the health of the students, you will improve the health of the local economy, and you will have better performing students.

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.