Island Press Field Notes

With spring finally starting to show its face, we're thinking about everything that's green and growing. But as Yvonne Baskin shows in Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World, we'd be nowhere without that most overlooked of substances: dirt. In the first chapter, she introduces an amazing world that holds two-thirds of the planet's biodiversity, from gigantic fungi to ancient microbes that can live in boiling hot springs or under sheathes of polar ice.

Author Darrin Nordahl's food blog Today is...Fava Beans highlights a different food everyday along with a creative way to easily add it to our everyday diet. Today's food changed the way I think about food, nutrition, and the environment. It is my epiphany food. And it is a pernicious, detestable weed. Today is purslane.

This week's #forewordFriday selection is from Michael Kugelman's new book, The Global Farms Race. Did you know that Brazil has plans to take over 6 million hectares of land in Mozambique (that's more than 12 million acres)? All for food security. Enjoy!

The soda wars are afizz again in two California communities. Voters in Richmond and El Monte will soon decide whether a penny-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks is an appropriate municipal policy to help combat obesity.