Safe Food is based in on U.S. information and statistics, but much of the manipulation of language that occurs in food-industry lobbying might easily apply to any country.

If ever there was an appropriate title for a book, Food Politics is it. Author Marion Nestle provides extensively researched documentation that food is not simply about sustenance – it is highly political. Who would think that something as innocuous as the Food Pyramid could be so contentious? Nestle purveys her work experience on various nutrition committees into a most revealing look at the disturbing, behind-the-scenes workings and power of the U.S. food industry.

From his student days in the late fifties campaigning for nuclear disarmament to representing the International Uranium Congress in hearings on nuclear-waste disposal in the nineties, Jim Harding has been holding Saskatchewan nuclear proponents to account.

The Dope Poet Society’s front man, Professor D, strides on stage with a rapper’s typically confident air. Snatching the mic with one hand, he thrusts the other straight up, V-shaped fingers projecting peace to the thousands gathered at Metro Hall Square for the Global Day of Protest.

It is time to take stock. The centrality of the American economy to the capitalist world – which now literally does encompass the whole world – has spread the financial crisis that began in the U.S. housing market around the globe. And the emerging economic recession triggered in the U.S by that financial crisis now threatens to spread globally, as well.

While soy is increasingly promoted as a healthy alternative to animal products in the North, the soy industry is destroying homes, livelihoods, health and the environment across South America. In the context of a global food crisis, in both the North and South large-scale agribusinesses are tightening their grip and local alternatives are espoused as the only saving grace.

Rapidly rising food prices are casting millions of the world’s poor into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Various food-centred scenes of suffering and associated social tensions have become regular fixtures in the news in 2008: people staving off hunger pangs by eating mud in Haiti; guarded warehouses and grain shipments in the Philippines; export prohibitions in India; food rationing in Pakistan; and food-price riots in more than thirty countries across the Global South.

The extraordinary British radical historian Edward Thompson described one of his goals as being to spare those whose lives and dreams are lost to history from the “enormous condescension of posterity.” In writing the first half of the life of James P. Cannon, Bryan Palmer takes up an even more ambitious task.

Jeffrey Simpson, Mark Jaccard and Nic Rivers belong to the second group. In Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge, they show convincingly that, if government doesn’t act, this country’s appalling record on greenhouse-gas emissions will get much worse.

Every street in every old Canadian industrial town has its own Gus Popadopolous. He’s the old timer on your block that stuck around when the abandoned factory morphed into gentrified condos. His mode of dress is a white undershirt, no matter what the weather. His all-purpose accoutrement is a shovel, not a cell phone. He might cheer you on at road hockey, but wouldn’t hesitate to yell at you if the ball went into his garden. You know him. You might even be him!