Happy Ag Day!

On this day, we celebrate agriculture’s abundance … and the subsidies that determine what is grown. As this cartoon, which is featured in Eat Drink Vote, reminds us, the small farmer is being overshadowed by big agricultural companies that influence how government subsidies are allocated. Here’s a link to the day’s events that have been […]

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Coming to a Mall Near You: Fresh Food!

While the passage of the food bill reminds us about the challenges of changing the food environment, it is nice to see how an entrepreneur can overcome the obstacles and marketing of the established food industry. Farmer’s Fridge, founded by Luke Sanders, is a fresh food “kiosk” in two Chicago locations with plans to expand. […]

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Fun new term: Food Swamp

We came across this term in a segment on NPR about the top health concerns of Latinos. It was coined by Alex Ortega, a public health researcher and professor of public health at UCLA, to describe areas where healthy food is hard to find. Ortega is one of several people involved in an interesting effort […]

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Trick or treat?!

Halloween is a wonderful example of some of what is discussed in Eat Drink Vote: it combines marketing to children with support for a product (i.e., candy) that depends heavily on government subsidy for its ingredients. And – the marketing works! Here are a few pieces of information picked up in a quick perusal of […]

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Profit is Most Important Ingredient

As Marion Nestle notes in Eat Drink Vote “Food marketers, of course, are in business and always looking for ways to cut costs and increase profits.” Yes, food marketers aim to make products that people want but their ability to stay in business depends on their ability to make a profit. So, profit has to […]

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Eating Less In An “Eat More” Environment

The challenge to eat the right amount is part of the human condition. Marion Nestle notes “Dieting to lose weight is as old as recorded history. Hippocrates discussed diets and dieting in the pre-Chtristian era, and today’s diet books are perennial bestsellers.” (p.42 of Eat Drink Vote). As the environment has shifted from one of […]

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Worldwide Hunger Goes Up

The simultaneous gains in obesity and hunger share a common root: The competing interests of corporations and people are represented unequally in the food environment. In the post-Citizen’s United world, we might say that the interests of people people are secondary to those of corporation people. This is especially true when the people people are […]

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As Obesity Goes Up

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, one result of how our our food system operates is that while one-half of the world battles obesity, the other half starves. We’ll comment about obesity here. In the next few days we’ll add a post about hunger. As stated in Eat Drink Vote, “The prevalence of obesity in […]

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Matt Wuerker on the Ag Bill – Money Falls From the Sky

Matt Wuerker is the Editorial Cartoonist at Politico which means he has a front row seat on the politics of food. He provided the following background about the above cartoon which is featured on p. 6 of Eat Drink Vote. “This cartoon resulted from the disparity between the perception of who is believed to receive […]

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