Dispatches

This year’s CERES conference in Boston was provocative and challenging -- as it should be in celebration of 25 years of creative, innovative, and collaborative advocacy to bring greater openness and accountability to corporate behavior. And it is behavior, of course, that needs to change; openness and accountability are only the tools of the trade in modifying corporate practices.

I am comforted by the awareness that changes we dismiss as inconceivable are often viewed by historians as having been inevitable. A Happy New Year might thus include news of the following momentous changes.

Video for the first two morning panels of The James Beard Foundation 2013 Food Conference (The Paradox of Appetite: Hungering for Change, Oct. 21-22) appears below. For the entire two-day's proceedings, visit the James Beard Foundation's 3013 Food Conference video channel.

The story of hunger in America is quite instructive, and as the radical right plays financial chicken with the federal budget and the good faith and credit of the United States, 47,000,000 citizens wonder where they will find their next meal. In an America where compassion remains a core value, this is only possible because people have differing visions of reality.