What can an analysis of food policy prior to, during and immediately after World War II contribute to our understanding of food issues in the 21st century? As it turns out, a great deal. Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) not only provides rich historical detail about a topic receiving limited attention in prior accounts of the war; it also offers a lens through which critical aspects of today’s global food system are brought into sharp focus. Along the way it helps us answer key questions about who eats well in our world, who does not, and why. And it exposes in stark relief the disturbing potential for a new conflict over food to reemerge in the coming decades. Read more

Bouncing along a bumpy desert road as we made our way to Bikaner, India, I thought back to a conversation I had with my 13-year-old sister a few months earlier.

“How was school today?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said.

“OK. Learn anything new?”

“Just the usual,” she replied.

At the time, that conversation hadn’t struck me as atypical. We exchanged niceties about her school day then moved on to what we believed qualified as more interesting conversation. Read more

“If you think an artist is trustworthy, you've never met one.”

“If an artist has kids, he doesn't spend much time with them.”

I read these words in a certain influential music industry blog that had been recommended to me, and my defensiveness went into high alert.

I am an artist, a food justice activist, and a mother -- who at that moment happened to have some 20 spare minutes to write a response while my artist husband was yes, spending time with our kids. In my two paragraphs full of passion and typos I told of how my parenting and my music are inextricably intertwined, and described the dedicated parenting and artistic accomplishments of my Grammy-nominated bassist husband. In parting, I mentioned that I thought we were both pretty ”trustworthy.” Personally so, was the implication, but for me, it’s broader than that. Read more