As the Thanksgiving holiday approches, food and agriculture are at the forefront of everyone's mind. Below are some of the week's best articles on Thanksgiving, agriculture, and food security.
 
This Holiday Season, 3 Farmers’ Struggles with Food Insecurity Remind Us to Give Thanks, Food Tank
While the spirit of Thanksgiving calls to mind the happiness of family and tradition, food insecurity remains a reality for many smallholder farmers in East Africa. 70% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Here, smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania tell us what it’s like to grapple with food insecurity, and share their favorite dishes to cook from the crops they grow.
 
Getting Ugly Produce onto Tables so It Stays out of Trash, New York Times
The notion that produce can be discolored or oddly formed hardly seems like a tough sell. Nevertheless, Imperfect Produce delivers boxes of ugly fruit and vegetables to people’s doorsteps—just one of the ways that entrepreneurs and environmentalists are grappling with food waste, an increasing epidemic. Ahead of Thanksgiving, Imperfect’s produce box includes turnips, pomegranates, sweet potatoes, and squash.

This Thanksgiving, What Traditions Do We Value?, The Hill
With the Syria crisis metastasizing and a catastrophic drought unfolding in the Horn of Africa, where childhood malnutrition is already at emergency levels, we can help by making US food aid more efficient and freeing aid providers to use all the tools in our toolkits so that we can reach more hungry people.

Food Stocks on the Menu for Thanksgiving Week, Reuters
There are no picky eaters on Thanksgiving—as long as the menu is hormone and antibiotic free, locally grown and convenient. That is the reality for major food producers, including companies reporting earnings, as they adapt to a more health-conscious consumer. Investors will likely sift through their earnings next week to see how the process of catering to a new type of customer is affecting the business.
 
Stuff the Food Phobia and Gobble Gratitude This Thanksgiving, Forbes
Thanksgiving is a time to bring food-related fears to the dining room, and it’s often tricky to separate the credible wheat from the internet misinformation chaff. With common food fallacies, from the alleged harms of gluten and GMOs, to the “toxicity” of high fructose corn syrup and refined white sugar running amok on social media and around dinner tables alike, let’s take a deep breath and have gratitude for our abundance as we gather to give thanks.