Eco-feminists believe that women and nature share certain traits and are innately attuned. Both women and nature cycle through rhythmic patterns of death and renewal. And women, as caretakers of community life, have a greater awareness of the complex community-level interactions of ecology and nature.

In recent months major international banks, financial newspapers and mass media have been forced to recognize that there is a major food crisis and that hundreds of millions of people face hunger, malnutrition and outright starvation. World conferences have been convoked and national emergencies have been declared, as millions riot in nearly fifty countries, threatening to overthrow regimes.

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.

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.

Completed more than two years ago, Seeds of Change was my first feature documentary film. The documentary was supposed to facilitate communication among farmers and the residents of rural communities regarding the effects of the new technologies associated with Genetically Modified Crops (GMCs). Farmers and the public have yet to see the video because the original goal has been subverted.

Canadian food activists celebrated World Food Day 2004 by creating a new national organization to be the voice and vehicle for accomplishing our food-security goals. Members are united in their commitment to the following three principles: “zero hunger,” “sustainable food systems” and “healthy and safe food”.

Fat is slowly becoming Public Health Enemy Number One, replacing cigarettes and Big Tobacco on the hit lists of leading-edge public-health advocates in Canada—and for good reason! Obesity now surpasses smoking as a cause of chronic illness and health-care costs, and it appears to be on the rise in every country in the world.