I studied international relations, security, and warfare for four years, but it wasn’t until I left college that I made the connection between hunger and terrorism. Let’s backtrack a bit for some context: In the early fall of 2001, I was in my senior year at Columbia University as a political science major with a focus on global security policy. Specifically, I had become interested in the way the U.S. and the world work to avoid war, and ensure security in the modern world.

Yes, it's a superfood, but a little-known fact is that the American Kale Association also hired a supercool PR firm to help the leafy green's reputation grow.

It's back on our plates and palates ... and new science suggests it's not as bad for you as everyone thought.

For years, butter—along with other types of full-fat dairy and meat—has been taboo for health-conscious eaters. With diligence, we’ve spooned our fat-free yogurt, sipped our skinny flavored lattes and booted steak from our plates, believing that saturated fat would make us fat and put us on track for heart disease.

Our flawed food system has led to dual epidemics: hunger and obesity. In the past 30 years, we've seen the repercussions of global changes, and they aren't pretty. We're closing in on 1 billion people going hungry—and an even greater number are already overweight. As a nation, we've traditionally focused on making food fast, convenient, and widely available rather than good for us.

Our global food system is a pretty powerful thing. The system produces enough calories to feed every person on the planet more than each of us needs, and many of us have more diverse food options than our grandparents could have ever imagined.

Three years ago, I was working as a U.S. Spokesperson for the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) and met Lauren Bush, a Princeton student, who designed a bag that would feed kids around the world in school. In February 2007, Lauren and I co-founded FEED Projects, a small (ahem, two-person) company with the mission of selling these "FEED" bags to support WFP's international school feeding efforts.

With all the dialogue and commentary on Mayor Bloomberg's proposed health code amendment to limit portion sizes, it seems an important argument in the Mayor's favor has been missing -- that this ban might actually help to put us back on track for a truly free market in our food supply. Yes, that's right -- "anti-consumer freedom socialists" and "the food police" might want to put down their victory flags.

• 49 million Americans are still food insecure as food stamps are cut.
• Fosters Farm chicken linked to a salmonella outbreak.
• Diet soda consumption is falling and all soda consumption down.
• Close to 40 percent of food is wasted worldwide.
• Violence continues in the Horn of Africa where millions of the 850 million hungry people around the world live.

If I had a dollar for every time someone said that they don't buy fruits and vegetables or "healthy food" because it's too expensive, I could feed a small town all organic food for years! But, of course, it's true -- when you look at the prices of so-called "conventional" junk food compared with local, organic fruits and veggies, on a calorie per dollar basis, the junk often wins. Many people assume that it's the produce or organic foods that "cost more" than highly processed, shelf-stable ubiquitous and cheap junk food, but what if the price tags that we see don't tell the whole story?

When I was a kid in the 80s, my Mom would tell me to eat everything on my plate – because kids were starving in Ethiopia. There came a time when that argument started to seem ridiculous because my understanding of global geography was wide enough to know that my left-over food was never going to feed Ethiopia’s hungry children.