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We don’t often think about where our food really comes from. Tracing back last night’s dinner from our plates back to the hands that actually harvested our vegetables or the machines that slaughtered our meat, perhaps half a world away, provides a disturbing lesson about how our food supply is built.

Conventional foods that form the majority of our diets are grown elsewhere, often by impoverished workers, sprayed with pesticides or pumped with antibiotics, transported thousands of miles over land and sea using precious fossil fuel resources, packaged in plastic and set out on refrigerated store shelves before landing in our kitchens.

Along the way farmers get ripped off, multinational companies make huge profits, and consumers get gouged.

People are literally fed up, and have sparked a global movement to transform the politics of food – that movement is the subject of a new book by Tory Field and Beverly Bell called Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems in the Americas.

GUEST: Beverly Bell, co-author with Tory Field of Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems in the Americas

Find out more about the book at www.harvesting-justice.org.