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“If you asked me 12 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I could be doing work on enforcing a law that would provide access to inexpensive, highly productive agricultural land for thousands of small family farmers,” explains Maia Sortor of National Land for People in Fresno, California. “I used to earn my living doing commercial art for products I could no longer stomach. And now I do graphics for the purpose of educating people about how they can get more control over their lives and stomachs.”

Marilyn Fedelchak, who farms 320 acres in Churdan, Iowa, works with the U. S. Farmers’ Organization, seeking a fair income for farmers. “When I married a farmer,” she says, “I looked forward to living in rural America. I thought I would be close to nature and be part of a community … I guess I got involved because I think there is still hope for the kind of rural America that I wanted to live in.”

Leah Margulies, a leader of the Nestlé infant-formula boycott at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility in New York, recalls, “Ten years ago I was a housewife. I was pretty despairing about changing my life. I first got involved through the women’s movement, in a collective studying how multinational corporations are expanding their markets overseas. What I started to think about initially was the way women’s realities are formed by economics. I started to question whether or not the kind of people that are being created by the necessity of ever-expanding sales of consumer goods are really the kinds of people we in the women’s movement wanted to be!”

The Interfaith Center where Leah works coordinates efforts by church denominations and agencies to use their power as shareholders to raise questions of social justice within corporations. Every shareholder in a corporation has the right to introduce resolutions suggesting changes in corporate policy, and the Interfaith Center has used these resolutions to force discussion of bank loans to repressive governments, the portrayal of women and minorities on television, and unfair labor practices.

The Center works closely with INFACT, a national coalition of 450 local organizations trying to prevent the advertising of infant formula to third world mothers. (Once mothers get hooked on using formula, their breast milk dries up, but often third world mothers are too poor to buy as much formula as their babies need. They are forced to stretch it with water that is frequently unsanitary or with other nonnutritious substitutes. So millions of babies die who might have lived if their mothers had breast-fed them instead of believing the suggestion of Nestlé and other multinationals that bottle feeding is “modern” and better for babies.)

Ten years ago Michael Jacobson was getting his doctorate in biochemistry at MIT. He had no particular interest in food. “In 1970, I’m not even sure I’d ever heard of a ‘whole grain,’ ” says Michael. “I was spending all my life in the library and with test tubes. But I was dying to do something—anything—that would touch our immediate social problems. So I took a chance. I signed on as an intern with Ralph Nader. Since I had the science degree, my assignment was to look at the hazards of food additives. And out of that summer eventually came my first book, Eaters’ Digest (Doubleday, 1972).

Within a year, Michael and two other scientists had launched the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based public interest group which now boasts 25,000 members. Its nutrition education materials are used by thousands of teachers around the country. And its public advocacy has helped alert the country to dangers of the new American diet I describe in Part III. The Center has taken on the food industry in fighting for accurate food labeling and against hazardous additives. It has exposed the shocking collusion among industry officials, government regulators, and “objective” academics.

Trapped by the pressure of exams and term papers, students often feel they just can’t get involved in the kind