Exciting legal battles, BPA controversy, toxin investigations, and inhumane animal treatment. Triumphs for local farmers in Alabama and a CSA at the Chicago Tribune. The food world is full of drama and adventure, all collected here for your viewing pleasure.

Twice the landmass size of Phillip Island, where I’ve been for the past 10 days, French Island has comparatively few inhabitants bar a sizable koala population. In fact, there are only 60 full-time inhabitants on the island who are outnumbered by a couple of thousand (from recollection) very cute and sleepy koala bears.

Although many gardens, especially in cities, lack the six to eight hours of direct sunlight needed to grow many familiar crops, there are foods that you can cultivate in part sun, part shade, or even full shade.

Recently, I was focusing on industrial food’s claim of needing to “feed the world.” Noble idea. Pitiful performance. After all, over a billion people go hungry every day. The problem is that the world’s hungry can’t afford to do business with the agribusiness giants, e.g., Monsanto, Dupont, Kraft, Unilever and many others.

We need a nationwide renaissance where the food we eat not only sustains our bodies, but sustains our bank accounts, our car leases, our retirement accounts. Local foods enriches every community where it has a strong presence. It keeps food in the community a hundred different ways.

Tons of cool links, on factory farms, how the Iceland volcanic eruption is impacting food systems, and Earth Day.

We asked a few dozen of our friends here at Farm to Table what their predictions were for the local foods movement in 2010: What they were most excited about this market season, what trends they were watching closely, the must-have heirloom fruits or veggies to look out for, and pretty much anything else that got them motivated to head to the market early and often.

Going without meat on Mondays isn’t a round-about way of promoting a vegetarian diet. Rather, it’s a campaign designed to encourage meat-eaters to be more aware of their health, for instance, less saturated fat is better for one’s heart. It’s also a means of alerting meat-eaters to the impact factory-farming animals for human consumption has on the environment and ultimately the planet.

Today was a vexing day in the gardens for both H and myself. The last shipment of potatoes had come, and they really needed to get in the ground. Of course, so do the rest of the cabbages and a few hundred leeks. So, I loaded up all the above and thought at the very least I’d get the cabbages transplanted, the potatoes in, and the beds ready for a quick transplanting of leeks in the morning.

When it comes to snapping turtles and carpenter bees, I’m clueless. It wasn’t in any textbook of mine, nor in my backyard growing up: Nature eludes me.