There's a small outpost of academic work called Future Studies that examines new and emergent trends and attempts to forecast how they will effect human existence in the future. Much of the focus for Future Studies has been on new technologies and new cultural forms surrounding those technologies. The Web has certainly been dominant, along with various claims that the Web as we know it will soon become obsolete.

I'm not particularly invested in Future Studies, but if I may be so bold, I'd like to suggest that they focus more on human continuities--those taken-for-granted aspects of human life that are fundamental to human existence. Perhaps more than anything else, our future is rooted in food.

I've been thinking a lot about food lately, for two reasons. First, in preparation for a unit on food in my Introductory Sociology class, I've been reviewing a wealth of literature on food. My students are reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and will be watching the documentary Super Size Me. My lectures are based on several books--including 2 by nutritionist Marion Nestle, Food Politics and What to to Eat; Peter Singer and Jim Mason's The Way We Eat; and a collection of essays edited by George Ritzer called The McDonaldization Reader--as well as a few documentaries--The Corporation and The Future of Food--and a Website--Best Food Nation, which offers a retort to Schlosser's work and other criticisms of American Food Production. Additionally, my students have just finished Juliet Schor's Born to Buy, which is ostensibly of critique of marketing to children, but also offers a heavy critique of the production and celebration of junk food.

The second reason that I have been studying food regards my own health. Don't worry, I am not sick or ailing. On the contrary, I'm in the best shape I've ever been in, and I'm trying to make it better. I started adulthood (well, college at least) tipping the scales at 245. Across my twenties I lost the weight, put on a lot of muscle through weight-lifting, and even recently took up yoga and pilates. This past summer I started working with a physical trainer who determined through an assessment that I need to not lose any more body fat and recommended that I work out less and eat more. That required a sea change in how I think about diet and exercise, abandoning the notion of eating to avoid fat, sugar, and calories in favor of the notion of eating to obtain protein, fat, sugar, vitamins and fiber; abandoning the notion of working out with a focus on the clock (as much time as possible) in favor of working out with a focus on my body (how's my heart rate? what muscles are fatigued? do I need a rest?). As part of that process, I started attending nutrition workshops and conducted a lot of web research. I've been heavily guided by Andrew Weil's book Healthy Aging, which is not the sort of book you'd ever use in a college classroom, but which offers a wealth of advice on healthy living that accords well with my own values.

All of this research has left me with a long list of reasons to despair over food. Consider the following:

• Pork, which most of us non-vegetarians happen to love, is almost exclusively produced in mega-piggeries. Every year, the number of pig farms declines while the number of pigs produced (slaughtered) for eating increases. These pigs endure some pretty horrifying conditions that include total confinement in tiny cages (pigs are naturally inclined to explore, dig, and socialize), male castration, and tail-clipping. They also produce a lot of excrement which has polluted our waterways and killed a lot of fish.

• Vitamins, that goal we're seeking when we eat our 5 (fruits and veg) to stay alive, are fragile things that are easily lost from food through a variety of processes including genetic modification, refrigeration, and processing. The result is that it's easy to eat 5 or more servings of fruit and vegetables per day and not get a lot of vitamins.

• Corporations now claim patents over living organisms. They use these patents to levy fees against farmers who plant their seeds and to block farmers from saving the seeds of their harvests (to avoid purchasing new seeds for next year's crop). Courts have consistently upheld the patent rights of these corporations.

• Organic food choices, which generally include pesticide-free food and meats from animals raised in nature, not factories, have long been viewed as the safe and responsible alternative. But their significantly higher prices make safe and responsible eating a luxury of the wealthy. Meanwhile, recent legislation by Congress allows food manufacturers to use the label 'organic' in ways that severely violate popular understandings of the term. A company may sell non-organic food with the organic label if no organic crop is available.

• The food industry funds most of our scholarly studies of nutrition. I can't tell you how much chocolate I've eaten since we learned that chocolate contains flavanols that are good for the heart, but I recently learned that those pro-chocolate studies were largely funded by Mars and Nestle.

• Though much debated, a lot of research points to high fructose corn syrup as a major cause of American obesity. This stuff is in everything and taking it out of your diet is both difficult and expensive. Obviously it's in sweets, but it's also in most breads, fruity yogurts, breakfast cereals, flavored oatmeals, salad dressings, spaghetti sauces--it's even in those seemingly nutritious Nutri-Grain Bars.

• Food production accounts for a large amount of economic inequality. This ranges from the low wages and anti-union policies of fast food restaurants to the increasing displacement of family farmers who are replaced by factory farms that employ hired hands at low wages and little benefits. These inequalities are experienced across the board, but they also reveal racial, gender, and global disparities.

The list goes on and on. It reminds us that what we eat and how we eat it are incredibly political. But it also reveals tremendous room for bipartisan action. The major political leaders from both parties have colluded with corporations to weaken our nutrition, reduce our food choices, and undermine our health. Consumers from across the range of political ideologies should be able to find common ground in their assertion that healthy food is our birthright. All religious perspectives share the belief that the harvest is a gift of the creator, and all of them make food central to their basic meaning systems, from the apple of Adam and Eve to the fasting of Ramadan; from the manna of the Israelites to the Japanese tea ceremony. Who wants a communion wafer that carries a patent or a kosher label that is legitimated by Congress rather than custom?

At the moment, this is an issue where consumers are stuck. It is hard to determine what to do or how to do it. Simple solutions like buying organic are easily appropriated by the very system they are meant to challenge. Buying local is a wonderful alternative, but is generally only a supplement to the items in our grocery carts. It's hard to find a whole kitchen's worth of items at the farmer's market. The reality is that individual solutions such as consumer choice are important but insufficient, and that consumers will have to band together to seek regulatory policies and production methods that are in the best interests of our health and of the environment.

The average blogger-essayist would end here, with a message of despair and a call to arms, but no particular specification of which arms to take up or what to do with them. I'd like to go further by making some suggestions about what we can actually do, with a focus on how to act socially, not just individually. The ethic of individualism and personal responsibility is what so often gets us stuck. How can 1 consumer's choices stand against the wealth of corporate power and money?

I'd like to shift gears and focus on social responsibility rather than individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville identified this social responsibility as a core American value when he observed that Americans uniquely and frequently act collectively, through citizen associations, in order to make the interests of the individual and the interests of the group work hand-in-hand. As Robert Putnam observes in his book Bowling Alone, this value is swiftly being displaced in twenty-first century America as we increasingly act alone, or not at all, rather than through civic associations.

So how can we act with social responsibility in this area of food politics? First, we need to use both political parties to make our elected officials responsible for our food choices. Nutrition information labels came about thanks to citizen actions and political legislation. The food industry fought hard to prevent this labeling. So we've already proven that political action can make a difference. We need to make the list of what we want to see from our food producers and then transform that list into political demands.

Second, we need to dream together about the kinds of foods we would like to have and the ways that we want those foods to be produced. The Center for a New American Dream is my primary resource for this kind of imagining. I don't think we should do this through just one group, so every reader will need to search out her own best resource. But the point is that we need to join together and share resources in order to a) identify the changes we want, and b) make those changes a reality.

Third, we need to involve those associations we already know and trust--our churches, our neighborhood groups, our parent/teacher associations--so that they can levy their resources and influence in favor of positive food change. Start a discussion group at church and see how quickly it turns into collective action.

If these 3 actions seem somewhat abstract, it is because their main point is to encourage joining a group and making decisions socially. I have avoided a checklist of individual actions. These are important, too, but they are easily found online and elsewhere. But significant change demands that we talk together about these issues, rather than just looking to one or two sources for an easy action plan. After all, the American Constitution doesn't open with "Each of, individually," but rather, "We the people."