Change: It all starts—on Monday—with your fork.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Call it Earth Day for food activists. On Monday October 24, after a 34-year hiatus, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is reviving "Food Day," a day for raising awareness about the industrialization of the American food supply, the declining quality of our diets, and the potential for a more sustainable, health-promoting food system.

"We wanted to focus on the characteristic problems of our food system," says Michael Jacobsen, CSPI's executive director, which, interestingly, were pretty much the same on the first Food Day 34 years ago. How little, yet how much, times change. "There's so much more interest in food now," he adds, "particularly at colleges and local health departments. And there was no organic food industry in the '70s."

A matter of principles

To nail down the massive problems with our food supply—"a complete list would never end," Jacobsen says—CSPI came up with six "guiding principles":

1. Reduce diet-related disease by promoting safe, healthy foods

2. Support sustainable farms and limit subsidies to big agribusiness

3. Expand access to food and alleviate hunger

4. Protect the environment and animals by reforming factory farms

5. Promote health by curbing junk-food marketing to kids

6. Support fair conditions for food and farm workers

"CSPI does a lot of work on food safety, but that causes fewer deaths than heart disease and cancer related to diet," he says. "And we thought it was important to bring in food justice issues. When you think about our food system, it's really made possible by the animals that are living in misery and the farmworkers who work in miserable conditions with low pay. Workers especially in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants—dangerous, dangerous places—are usually not unionized."

How can you get involved?

More than 2,000 Food Day events will take place on Monday to help bring attention to these six issues. For instance, in Bentonville, AR, (home of Walmart world headquarters), students at a local elementary school will build a "Junk Food Hall of Shame." Kids are being asked to bring in junk foods that will be molded into sculptures by art students. To find out if anything is going on in your area, visit the interactive map at foodday.org.

Whole Foods is hosting Food Day–related events at many of its stores, and is even sponsoring a contest along with the website Epicurious.com. Host a Food Day potluck supper or dinner party to raise donations for a local food bank or another group fighting hunger, then post pictures of your event on the Epicurious Facebook page. Whole Foods and Epicurious will award small prizes, such as gift cards, to the first 50 people who post their pics, and the three people with the best photos will win up to $1,000 to donate to their chosen charity. For potluck or dinner party recipe ideas, visit foodday.org/why-eat-real/recipes.php.

Jacobsen also encourages people to use the day to form a local "food policy council." There are more than 100 such councils around the country, he says, run either by individual citizens or city governments, and their purpose is to improve government procurement policies (for instance, encourage use of locally grown food or low-salt, no-trans-fat foods in meals at public schools, prisons, and other government institutions), develop programs to install community gardens, and initiate other programs that allow greater community access to organic, local, healthy food. "Food policy councils can provide guidance for city government on a lot of these issues," he says.

Jacobsen himself plans to attend the flagship Food Day event in New York City's Times Square, where he'll be joined by the likes of Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame, celebrity chef Mario Batali, and Food Network star Ellie Krieger. "There are going to be 50 people at a long lawn table, representing what Food Day is about: having a healthy, delicious meal with mostly locally grown foods that were produced in a sustainable way, eating with friends."

For more details on Food Day, visit foodday.org.

Watch Morgan Spurlock from "Super Size Me" talk about why he got involved in Food Day