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.

I'm used to learning about causes from hired spokespeople, but in this case, it's the other way around.

The Binge Eating Disorder Association has hired Chenese Lewis as its spokeswoman, and I've heard of it, but not of her. So I went to her website, of course, and I learned that she's making a good career of being of a larger size.

She was crowned the first Miss Plus America in 2003, and she's been on Dr. Phil and in Figure Magazine. She is the chief creative officer of Chenese Lewis Productions, which was founded "on the principal [sic] that you don't have to be size 0 to be beautiful."

A host for an amalgam of science bloggers is in trouble with some of its writers because it agreed to "host a blog sponsored by Pepsi where the soft drink company's employees would write about nutrition," according to a news site at nature.com.

To hear their reps talk, Corporate Accountability International is a giant killer: "Every campaign we take on, we win," is how Sarah Holzgraf put it last night at a gathering in Cambridge, one of 60 the group is organizing in Massachusetts in support of its newest foray, the Value [the] Meal campaign.

To win this one, it will have to be. Here are its goals: