Michele Simon is a public health lawyer and nutrition advocate. She specializes in legal strategies and food industry tactics. Her published articles cover the National School Lunch Program, the USDA's dietary guidelines, banning obesity lawsuits, and corporate lobbying. Her law degree is from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and her master's degree in public health is from Yale University. She is the author of "Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back." Marion Nestle has made "Appetite for Profit" required reading for her nutrition students at NYU.

Judith McGeary (Judith2007 on DailyKos) is a small farmer and attorney. She has a bachelor's in Biology from Stanford University and her law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. After clerking with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, she practiced environmental law, litigation and appeals. In 2006, she founded the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance to act as a voice for small farms. She and her husband have a farm outside of Austin, with sheep, horses, cows and poultry. They focus on raising animals humanely to produce healthy food using sustainable methods.

Mark Winne is the author of "Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty" which tells the story of how we get our food: from poor people at food banks and rundown convenience stores to the more comfortable classes, who increasingly seek out organic and local products. The book is based on Winne's 35 years of community food activism which includes organizing farmers' markets, community gardens, CSA farms, city and state food policy councils, and co-founding the national Community Food Security Coalition. He was active in the recent Farm Bill debate as the Coalition's communication director.

Margaret Krome is Policy Program Director for the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in East Troy, Wisconsin. She coordinates the annual national grassroots campaign to fund federal programs supported by the sustainable agriculture movement and helps develop state programs and policies supporting environmentally sound, profitable, and socially responsible agriculture. Ms. Krome conducts workshops nationwide on grant writing and using federal programs to support sustainable agriculture. She sits on the Board of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection for the state of Wisconsin and on the National Center for Appropriate Technology's board.

Natasha Chart has been blogging about politics and the environment since 2002, mostly at PacificViews. Her writing has also appeared at MyDD, OpenLeft and the youth climate action blog, ItsGettingHotInHere.org. She spent her time in college studying biology, agroecology and agricultural policy; which areas of interest she may leverage in attempting to take over Philadelphia for urban gardening. Her hobbies include drinking coffee, arguing, reading, omphaloskepsis, roving about and search engine marketing consultation.

Jill Richardson, who blogs on DailyKos as OrangeClouds115, became interested in food policy when she spent a week working in a cardiac ICU and realized many of the patients could have prevented their illnesses by improving their eating habits. Since then, she's worked with the Netroots community to seek solutions to the problems in America's food system. She is currently working on her first book. Outside of her life as a blogger, Jill is a healthcare software geek by day and a crazy cat lady by night. She works at UCSD and is the proud mother of three cats.