In "The End of Overeating," Dr. David Kessler sketches this very useful, very accurate image: When customers step up to the McDonald's counter and pull out their $4.50 (or whatever), it's as though Uncle Sam is standing next to them, pulling out his wallet and paying another dollar (or whatever), because of the ways the federal government subsidizes corn.

I dunno about this:

Many thanks (and a little "woo-hoo!") to childhoodobesitynews.com, which referenced some of my reporting in a blog post a couple of days ago.

I hope it won't be the last time Oprah and I appear in the same sentence:

That is regrettable, but, fortunately, there are people like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Prager, who are doing their best to raise consciousness and offer the beacon of hope to fellow addicts.

I haven't checked it out yet, but I'm very interested in Steven McFadden's "The Call of the Land," in which he profiles members of a group he calls Millennial Agrarians, who are working to create a secure and sustainable food system.

Been meaning to get to this for a while; the video above was released by the TED organization in May. It is of Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, speaking about the value of connection and social networks — the actual kind, as opposed to merely the virtual kind.

What caught my interest is the first example of his research, obesity. He says his research showed that if your friends are obese, your chance of being obese is 45 percent higher.

Just want to give a nod to Crop To Cuisine,\ which I only recently became aware of. A good site for food news, such as this apparent example of fast-food rage. 

For someone turning to the whole food, whole earth, locavore lifestyle, I still have some glaring "opportunities for growth," which is to say practices that could be a lot truer to my talk. (I've also heard those expressed as AFGOs: "another f'ing growth opportunity.") I know that, like all of us, I'm a work in progress, but still, I'm reminded of the quite irreverent-but-true epithet my college buds used to toss: "Let's see you do it, then spout off."

Lawrence Yang of San Francisco is an information architecture nerd by day, an art nerd by night, according to his website. He scored a night coup with this one...

The Center for Science in the Public Interest says that practically all of Ben and Jerry's 53 flavors have processed substances in them, which undercuts the brand's claim to the word "natural" on its labels. Here's more detail from Crop to Cuisine:

The Boston Herald has a story on food addiction today, and mine is the photo they used to illustrate it.

Apparently they had someone else lined up to shoot, but she backed out. I gather that it was because she's in a Twelve Step fellowship and they have an anonymity clause, which hadn't come up earlier in the paper's process.