Food is essential to our survival. It impacts our health and well-being. It has the power to bring people together.

Food can be manipulated in many ways, from cooking to processing to using it as fuel. It provides tremendous opportunities to create value, and, as such, food is big business.

Picture an angry young man with a sign. He appears to be agitated, holding a sign that condemns what his opponent stands for. There's a chain link fence behind him.

Take a second to capture how you feel about those three sentences. Has your heart rate jumped? Do you associate...

In 2001, Houghton Mifflin Company published a book by Eric Schlosser titled Fast Food Nation -The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Much like the work of Upton Sinclair in his 1906 title The Jungle, Mr. Schlosser, an award-winning investigative journalist exposed how the explosive growth of fast...

Lost in the ear-splitting uproar over Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's controversial venture into the health care debate, is a bigger, though less subtle story.

It's a story about how a small, well-intentioned sustainable food company lost its way. It's a story of how that company went from a single...

"The grand thing about cooking is you can eat your mistakes." -- Julia Child

There was a time not so long ago that cooking shows resembled today's reality TV, where mistakes were made and corrected right before your very eyes. No second takes. No editing. Just the real thing.

How...

I grew up in a home where family meals were the norm. Nearly every night, nine of us would crowd around the kitchen table to enjoy a home-cooked meal together, recount our days, laugh and argue, celebrating each unique personality's contribution to the whole. Each meal made the fabric of...

It's no secret that I have a difficult time accepting genetically modified (GM) foods at face value. My primary concerns have to do with what we know, and, more importantly don't know about how this "promising" technology may or may not be impacting human health and our environment.

For those...

With my recent introduction of the term "Pro Food", and a definition of its core principles, several readers have questioned how Pro Food differs from Slow Food. Rather than try to answer this question on my own, as I am only somewhat familiar with Slow Food, I am opening...

What if I told you that America's food system is broken? What would you say?

Would you defend it by pointing out the abundance of choices offered in today's average supermarket, estimated to be over 45,000 items? Would you cite that per capita spending on food has dropped significantly...

In the battle for the hearts and minds (and pocket books) of everyday Americans, the large corporate players in today's industrial food system must be pleased.

Consumer advocates for sustainable, healthy food are fighting with farmers, not because either picked a fight with the other, but because the knowledge gap...