The elusive Pacific razor clam, in all its glory. (Photo: Ted Alvarez)

You know what would make supermarket food taste better? Making grocery shopping more like clam digging. Imagine having to paw through a bin of wet sand to find your onions, or thrash through icy waves for a chunk of Parmesan. Challenging, yes, but think of the feeling of accomplishment as you sit down to dinner.

I thought about this last Sunday as I stood knee-deep in the Pacific, wind-whipped and sandblasted. I’d come to Washington’s Roosevelt Beach on the second clam-harvest weekend of the year to up my foraging game: Having already tackled blackberries, mushrooms, and dumpster donuts, the coveted Pacific razor clam seemed the logical upgrade. The animal kingdom is a whole new ball game, even if the animal in question does look kind of like a stray pancreas.

Urban Roots is a documentary about farming within the city limits of Detroit, and as such, it’s a handy way to get an education on the subject in something like 90 minutes.

It's showing March 6 at the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

Photo by cfdls.

Weird things available on Amazon.com in the U.S. include wolf urine, fresh rabbit, canned unicorn, deer butt, and (fake) horse heads. But until yesterday, the company's Japanese subsidiary was selling something a lot more grisly: whale bacon, whale stew, whale jerky, and canned whale meat. Now, only a day after the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) put out a call to action to boycott Amazon, whale meat products have disappeared from the site. 

Sometime later this year, a yet-to-be-named guinea pig very lucky culinary pioneer will take the first bite of the first hamburger grown in a lab. At that point, the cost of making that burger will have totaled more than $331,000 (an estimated 250,000 euros). The meat will be grown from bovine stem cells that produce muscle and fat -- and if that sounds less than appetizing, keep in mind that the burger will be prepared by famed chef Heston Blumenthal.

Participants in the Millions Against Monsanto march.

Taking a play from the gay marriage battle, GMO-labeling advocates are taking a state-level approach. The plan has been to pass labeling bills in states where food is on the public’s radar, in order to convince Congress, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that the issue has teeth.

"We want to see it on a national level, but as more states put it up, we'll get more attention," says Cary Condotta, the Washington state representative who co-sponsored a GMO-labeling bill.

However, it's not as simple as pointing to the high percentage of Americans who would like to know when they're eating genetically modified food. According to a 2010 poll [PDF], 93 percent of Americans were in favor of such labeling.

Thanks to lobbying by seed companies and other agribusiness players, however, state legislators all over the nation have been hitting a wall. Now advocates are joining forces to create a super team in California, in an attempt to get a ballot initiative passed in the state that’s home to 10 percent of all the nation's grocery stores.

Last May, Prince Charles gave an inspiring keynote speech at the Future of Food conference at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Now, Rodale has published the speech in the form of an adorable little book titled On the Future of Food, with a foreword by Wendell Berry and an afterword by Will Allen and Eric Schlosser.

To mark the release of the book, Grist heard from three people whose work echoes Prince Charles' message: film producer and author Laurie David, sustainable agriculture thought leader Fred Kirschenmann, and nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle.

Want to experience the speech yourself? Watch it online here. Or join us for a live chat with Laurie David on Wednesday at 3pm EST/noon PST.

Q. What surprised you most about Prince Charles' book? What do you most hope the reader comes away with?

Marion Nestle: I attended the meeting at which Prince Charles spoke and was impressed at the time by his broad overview and understanding of the problems inherent in industrial food and the implications of those problems. He described himself as a farmer, which was not exactly how I had imagined him. It’s impressive that someone of his stature cares about these issues and is willing to go on record promoting a healthier food system.

Aaron Miller of Miller Livestock in Kinsman, Ohio. Bon Appétit buys half of all his hogs. (Photo by Sarah Piper.)

Last week, McDonald's announced it was making a move to end the use of gestation crates -- the especially despicable practice of confining pregnant sows in spaces roughly the width of their bodies. By May, their announcement read, they’ve requested concrete plans from their producers to phase out the practice.

In other words, the company managed to make a splash in the news without committing to a timeline. Of course, one of McDonald's biggest suppliers, Smithfield Foods, is supposedly four years into a 10-year process to phase out gestation crates by 2017 –- but it’s hard to know how much stock to put into their pledge considering the complaint filed by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) with the Securities and Exchange Commission in November alleging that Smithfield has been making false and misleading claims about their practices.

Prairie Crossing is a 669-acre subdivision in Illinois with small lots, 70 percent open space and 100 acres for food production.

It’s a familiar story: A farming family in a small rural town can’t make ends meet. After generations of farming, they’re forced to sell their land and call in the auctioneer. In 2005, I produced a short film about a family like this in Meridian, Idaho. All but one of the five McKay siblings had chosen to work off the farm, and the son who’d stuck around grew sod to sell to developers who were systematically paving over Meridian to make way for residential subdivisions. It was a doomsday view of the future of rural land and farming in this country.

Almost seven years later, the story, on the surface, hasn’t changed. According to the American Farmland Trust, over 4 million acres of agricultural land -- almost the size of Massachusetts -- were developed between 2002 and 2007. Meridian is now an official suburb of Boise and, despite the Great Recession, small rural towns across the country are still being devoured by urban sprawl. Meanwhile, the urban farm movement is in full swing in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Detroit, and the blighted landscapes of inner cities are increasingly transformed into vibrant plots of vegetables and flowers. Something else is happening too -- this renaissance, or reimagining of agriculture, is starting to spill over into the suburbs.

Photo by Rob Stone.

In the course of writing my two recent posts on vegetarianism, I came across some interesting data. According to a 2011 poll conducted by Harris Interactive:

• About 2.5 percent of Americans are vegan, saying they never eat meat, poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, or dairy.

• Another 2.5 percent are lacto-ovo vegetarian, meaning they also skip the flesh but still eat eggs and/or dairy.

• Add those up and you get 5 percent vegetarian (or, if you take into account the margin of error, 2 to 8 percent).

In addition to the vegetarians, 33 percent of Americans eat meatless meals on a regular basis, the poll found.

Pour yourself a cup of tea and get ready to chat with Laurie David on Feb. 22.

Editor’s note: The chat’s now over, but you can replay it in full.

Laurie David -- film producer, climate activist, and author -- is chatting live with Grist readers.

David is probably best known for producing the 2006 Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, for authoring the best-selling Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You!, and coauthoring The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming.

After a decade working to bring the issue of global warming into mainstream popular culture, David has expanded her purview: Now she's taking on sustainable eating and reforming our broken food system.