"Changing farm policy to provide that chance is key to preventing our nation's rural areas from becoming industrial sites and to truly remaking the food system for all Americans. We must address the major structural problems that have created the dysfunction — from the failure to enforce antitrust laws and regulate genetically modified food to the manipulation of nutrition standards and the marketing of junk food to children. We need to move beyond stereotypes and simplistic solutions if we are to build a movement that is broad-based enough to drive policy changes.

"Most people are several generations away from the experience of producing their own food. This leads to many misconceptions — from over-romanticizing its hard, backbreaking work to the dismissal of farmers as greedy, ignorant, and selfish 'welfare queens.' Understanding the difficult challenges they face is critical to developing the policy solutions necessary for saving family farms and moving into a sustainable future. We need to develop a rural economic development plan that enables farmers to make a living while at the same time providing healthy, affordable food choices for all Americans.

"We have the opportunity, before it is too late, to change the course of our food system's development away from factory farms and laboratories and toward a system that is ecologically and economically sound. We can challenge the monopoly control by fighting for the reinstatement of antitrust laws and enforcement of them. We have the land and the human capacity to grow real food — healthy food — but it will take a wholesale effort that includes restructuring how food is grown, sold, and distributed. It means organizing a movement to hold our policy makers accountable, so that food and farm policy is transformed and environmental, health, and safety laws are obeyed.

"It will require a massive grassroots mobilization to challenge the multinational corporations that profit from holding consumers and farmers hostage and, more important, to hold our elected officials accountable for the policies that are making us sick and fat. We must comprehend the complexity of the problem to advocate for the solutions. We cannot shop our way out of this mess. The local-food movement is uplifting and inspiring and represents positive steps in the right direction. But now it's time for us to marshal our forces and do more than vote with our forks. Changing our food system is a political act.

"We must build the political power to do so. It is a matter of survival."