Martha Payne had some sad-ass lunches at her school in Scotland -- unsatisfying food that sometimes had more hair than vegetables. So the 9-year-old decided to start a blog with photos and vital statistics about her meals. Almost immediately, the blog got international attention, including from prominent school lunch busybody Jamie Oliver. Result? Martha's dad just met with the local council, and it announced that kids could have unlimited salad, fruit, and bread.

Love him or hate him, the man knows how to mobilize a following. (Photo by Scandic Hotels.)

However you might feel about Jamie Oliver -- most seem to love him or hate him -- you can’t deny that the man has a following, and he knows how to mobilize it. Since he declared this Saturday, May 19, Food Revolution Day -- calling on “an international community of foodies, chefs, parents, educators, companies, activists and celebrities to arm people with the knowledge and tools to make healthier food choices” -- that community has responded in force. So far they’ve planned over 600 events in 58 countries to answer the celebrity chef and real-food champion’s call.

The events range from privately hosted dinner parties to school excursions to cooking and gardening workshops -- anything that falls under the mantle of spreading the gospel of good food and healthy living. If you’re in Amsterdam, you can take a “Good Food Tour” of the city. Stuck in the Maldives? Attend an “outdoor fitness event.” Those in Singapore can tour the few farms that still exist in this land-scarce country. Volunteers in Lorain County, Ohio, will be planting gardens for low-income families. Multiple cities will host grocery store and farmers market tours. If you can’t find an event in your area, you can sign up to host one. The @FoodRev twitter feed includes replies like: “it’s not too late to get an event on the map. We’d love to see another event in Kuala Lumpur.”

A sweet potato from Saura Pride Purple Sweet Potato, a fledgling business that was once a tobacco farm. (All photos by RAFI.)

Alan Flippin comes from a long line of North Carolina tobacco growers. But, a few years back, the crop just stopped making sense. His family’s operation stopped making much of a profit as the cost of fertilizer and other inputs rose. And, Flippin says, “I don’t really enjoy growing tobacco; I don’t use it. I was looking to get into something else.”

He wanted to transition to growing produce instead -- something he could feel good about cultivating, eating, and selling. But shifting to a completely different crop is a hugely risky proposition. “With tobacco, you pretty much know how to grow it; you’ve got a market, and you get insurance for your crops,” Flippin says. “Whereas for produce, it’s very scary because there’s so much you don’t know.”

Flippin’s fledgling produce operation got off the ground with the help of a grant from something called the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund. The grant enabled him to build a greenhouse and experiment with several varieties of organic vegetables to sell to wholesalers, farmers markets, and at a local co-op.

The fund was created in the wake of the Tobacco Master Settlement to help North Carolina’s agricultural communities transition to new sources of income. According to the terms of the settlement, announced in 1997, the country’s four largest tobacco companies would make perpetual payments to 46 states to compensate them for smoking-related health-care costs and, in tobacco-growing states, economic losses (four other states already had individual agreements with tobacco companies).

A percentage of North Carolina’s settlement money goes to the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund, which is a program of the nonprofit Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI).

Humanity has apparently given up on inventing new forms of junk food, and is instead nesting existing forms inside one another like some kind of hideous fast food Turducken. I was on vacation when the mini-cheeseburger crust pizza happened, so I was blissfully spared awareness of that until today, but I did not miss the hot dog stuffed pizza or the Double Down or the "everything KFC makes layered into in a sort of nightmare lasagna" ... thing. This trend was always bound to end in greasy, greasy tears, and thanks to this video, we know that those tears will fall upon cinnamon buns topped with mashed potatoes, gravy, cheeseburgers, and taco shells.

At this point, the message about eating too much processed sugar is clear: That stuff screws up your body in serious ways. But a new study suggests that too much sugar could do more than that. It could mess up your brain, as well.

Technically, what this study found is that too much sugar can screw up rats' brains. The study let rats OD on high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and found that it disrupted their ability to learn, think, and remember. Here's what Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, the UCLA neurosurgery professor who led the study, had to say about it:

Editor's note: For another perspective on this series, see this post.

The Weight of the Nation -- a four-part mini-series that ran this week on HBO (and online) -- has received a lot of attention. Produced in coordination with several federal government agencies and paired with a major national conference, the show has been heralded as “groundbreaking” and “bold.” But it’s really just the same old story.

The Weight of the Nation trailer alone smacks of tired stereotypes, but colleagues implored me to watch the entire series, so I did. And it was even worse than I feared.

I’m all in favor of bringing more attention to the nation’s diet-related health crisis. But the HBO series distracts us with the usual scare tactics, dances around the hard political issues, and leaves the viewer with the misguided impression that if we all just worked harder in our own communities, we could fix this mess.

Estancia Ranch, one of few remaining traditional pasture-based ranches in Argentina. (All photos by Jessica Weiss.)

Buenos Aires, Argentina: It’s no secret the people here love beef.

In 1958, the average Argentine consumed 216 pounds of it per year. (For context: U.S. beef consumption peaked in 1975 at 89 pounds per person.) Argentina was once the world’s fifth largest economy, due largely to the strength of its global dominance in the beef trade. Because of a grand confluence of factors including climate and natural grass diversity, Argentina was long known as a hungry cow’s heaven -- and the arbiter of the world’s best beef.

But today, much of the country’s famous grasslands have been turned over to crops. Beef consumption and exports are way down. And lest you think it’s because overall meat consumption is down, irony would have it that Argentina is now the world’s No. 1 exporter of soymeal, No. 2 of corn, and No. 3 of soybeans, increasingly used as animal feed in China, where meat-eating is through the roof.

Photo by Chelsea Phillips.

The time to start crying over spilled milk is NOW. According to researchers from the University of Edinburgh, wasted milk in the U.K. creates the equivalent of 110,000 tons of CO2 every year. That's equivalent to the emissions from 20,000 cars.  

Editor's note: If you liked the series of photos we featured from the Lexicon of Sustainability this winter, you might enjoy this video -- which is one of three currently running on PBS.org.

Breakfast time (7 a.m. PST).

I don't have to tell you that people eat crappier food late at night than they do in the light of day. You probably figured that out when Taco Bell invented a fourth meal in the middle of the night. But according to Massive Health's interactive map of self-reported food quality, we're on a slippery health slope from the time we wake up in the morning. Food choices get consistently more lousy as the day wears on.

Lunchtime (12 noon PST).