The Olympics kick off next week, and the games’ corporate sponsors are gearing up to cash in on their investments. Most notably, McDonald’s has finagled a french fry monopoly, in which no other vendor can sell “chips” unless they’re sold with fish (Huff Post).

IIN alumni in the news: 2003 grad Alex Jamieson promotes the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food on CNN, while 2005 grad Dawn Lerman continues her New York Times Wellblog series with “Weekends in the Kitchen with My Fat Dad”.

Marion Nestle clues us into two hot topics in food politics: an unexplained 18-month delay in issuing food safety regulations authorized by Congress in 2010 and the  pitiful state of the House's current draft of the Food and Farm Bill.

We’re getting pretty excited about the optimistic future of local farms, not least of all due to Farmhopping, an international, crowd-funded model that seeks to integrate consumer investment (Good).

Things are looking rough lately for poultry producers. Last week, The Atlantic reported that chicken may be linked to a growing UTI “epidemic”; this week the Huffington Post cites the presence of “poop in our chicken meat”.

The school lunch debate heats up once again, this time, due to an increased investment of chains in school cafeterias – from Jamba Juice in the US to Subway in the UK (New York Magazine). NYMag also reports that while Bloomberg’s “Soda Ban” has been somewhat controversial, his five-year-old trans-fats ban has proved a definitive success.

GMO-labeling is coming to the forefront in the field of consumer rights, as one million California voters signed a petition to have a GMO-labeling initiative added to the state’s November 2012 ballot (Mother Jones). It’s a step in the right direction, but reforms could take years to implement. In the meantime, here are some tips on how to find Non-GMO products (Health Castle).

Once considered uniquely an American problem, physical inactivity has become a “global pandemic.” What’s shocking is that recent research suggests that lack of exercise is as deadly as smoking – causing as many as 1 in 10 premature deaths per year (Time Healthland).