Greetings and welcome to another episode of 10 Words or Less, in which I ask brief questions, and request brief answers, of interesting people. Today’s guest is a senior analyst for the Environmental Working Group who focuses on food and agriculture policy. (“My old job,” as Bill Maher often cracks.) Remember, the 10-words thing is a goal, not a rule, so please, no counting. Read more »

I was conversing the other day with my autodidact pal, Ron, when we stuck on a point about eating: He considers "food addiction" and "compulsive eating" to be the same thing, and I don't. Read more »

A version of this was also posted today at Sprout Savvy. I'm delighted to share with them, and delighted they invited me to.

One of the first questions people have for me is, Never mind how you lost 155 pounds, how have you been keeping it off for almost 20 years?

I have several answers, depending on how much time we have, but the best, most accurate one is, I finally realized and accepted that I’m a citizen of the planet. Read more »

Some people oppose any public suasion of any kinds on food choices — and even some of those do so honorably, instead of being motivated merely by their paycheck. I suspect they would object to the above.

But here's the thing, even putting aside the question of whether sugary soda is even food, or, in the coinage of Michael Pollan, a "foodlike substance." If any currently "acceptable" food or drink product warrants this sort of treatment, it is sugary soda. Read more »

My longest-standing readers know that I started out blogging on topics of sustainability, which I rather narrowly defined as issues around energy use. Gradually, I shifted to food issues because I wanted and needed to support my book, "Fat Boy Thin Man."

In the transition, I saw how sustainability, defined as the dictionary does, rather than cloaked in the meaning "we" have attached to it, applies in so many ways to food. Yes, my thinking was absurdly narrow. Read more »

Do I have hope? Yes, I have hope because, as Michael Pollan wrote in "The Omnivore’s Dilemma," what it means to say that something is “unsustainable” is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply.

The speaker is Joan Dye Gussow, "the mother of the sustainable food movement," as ID'd by writer Paula Crossfield, setting up her interview on Grist (and, previously, on  Civil Eats).

Read more »

This is the post I promised earlier, at the bottom of this post about the veggie garden I greatly expanded at home this spring. This one is about a veggie garden, too, but I wanted the post to stand alone — to get a headline, as we used to say down at the newspaper factory. Read more »

The Globe's Sam Allis trotted out a perennial for his column yesterday, which leaves little doubt of its direction from the opening gun: "Red alert: the gardeners are back. Run to the attic and barricade the door. " You gotta respect the declarative sentence. Read more »

Few sweeping statements can be applied broadly, but here's one I'm willing to stand by: The first action any problem eater should consider is to take responsbility for what he or she eats, and look for support and help to change.That's what I did, albeit haltingly and irascibly, and I'm maintaining a 150-pound-plus weight loss for almost 20 years. Read more »

I’m writing en route from Boston to Seattle, where I’ll be living for about a month, attempting to keep (well, return to) a regular work schedule while participating in a family member’s effort to regain health. As departures from routine often do, I’ve encountered a couple of surprises during the journey. The first one isn’t so surprising, actually, given the prevalence of overweight in America; for those of you keeping score, the estimate is 145 million American adults, two out of every three of us. Read more »