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).