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.

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.

In the apocalypse that is now, Davis offers us a simple oppositional truth: “If the Empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.” Perhaps. But we cannot trust in the deities of disorder. Only the godless materialism of revolutionary change can save us from the barbarism at our gate, be it in Sao Paulo or Saskatoon.

As filmmaker Elaine Brière tells it, the merchant seamen emerged from the Second World War with a strong, progressive union, publicly lauded for their war effort, straddling a hugely profitable public enterprise that gave Canada the fourth-largest shipping fleet in the world. Yet just five years later, the ships were sold, the union was broken and most of the seamen were blacklisted as “Communists.”

What can those of us committed to the socialist project, to laying the groundwork for a viable mass, democratic, but revolutionary party learn from what our fathers and forefathers did? Serious inquiry into the history of the Canadian socialist movement will help us not only to learn from the mistakes of the past, but also to reclaim what is valuable from this history.