The food pyramid is very complicated. It doesn't give you as much info in a quick glance as the plate does.

If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.

Food during my early years was a very difficult issue for me. I grew up in an addictive family. My mother had serious problems with alcohol and prescription drugs. I was an overweight kid. I can remember back in those days there weren't the strategies that there are today to deal with those issues.

More than half of America's rural counties are losing population and with it, political representation.

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois.

Local and regional food systems are about opportunity.

I wish I could give you all the examples over the last two years as secretary of agriculture, where I hear people in rural America constantly being criticized, without any expression of appreciation for what they do do.