Photo composite: Jane Bruce, courtesy of The Daily Meal

What did you eat for lunch today? Was it your work’s cafeteria fare, maybe? Was it organic? A frozen meal? Did you brown bag leftovers from that trendy Japanese place you visited last night? Did you make a Rachel Ray recipe (we won’t judge)?

I suppose what I’m getting at is this: maybe you chose what to eat for lunch today, but you were helped. Maybe you bought it at a store beginning to emphasize organic produce, or maybe you went with something processed because it was cheaper. Maybe you were inspired by a recipe you saw online, posted by an up-and-coming food blogger. Maybe your chef got into Nordic cuisine after the Noma cookbook came out. Simply put: on a larger scale, there are more powerful forces determining how America eats. Here, from The Daily Meal, are fifty of them.

The site’s list of the fifty most powerful figures in food is wide-ranging and surprising. Topping the list is the president of the Food Network — ranked one spot above the Secretary of Agriculture. The rankings include the biggest names in fast food (#6 is the CEO of McDonald’s) and the most stalwart proponents of food reform (#36 is Michael Pollan). There are chefs and activists, businessmen and food writers. It’s truly a big picture snapshot of food in America. To learn more, we spoke to Colman Andrews — the editorial director of The Daily Meal and a James Beard Award winner — about where the food industry is now, and what we’ll be eating in 2012.

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PRK: Considering how expansive the world of food is, how do you narrow this list down to fifty people?

CA: It wasn’t easy. I mean, we got a good head start last year, this was the second year that we’ve done this…. What we had basically done – and when I say we I mean it was very much a collective project among all the editors at The Daily Meal – we broke down different areas, like media, agriculture, politics, chefs and restaurateurs and etcetera, and so we had some categories and we asked ourselves, who are the people who really exercise power… who have really changed … the way we eat, or the way we buy food, or the way we grow food. So we made a list of these categories, and the really tough part, of course, is determining who is more important than whom. But it was all done collectively, a lot of research went into it…

We had reasons for everything. The research would say, for this particular person, though they were important last year, not much new has gone on, so maybe they go down or go off the list. And then, who are the new factors that should be considered. I think a good example of that is Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp, which really just in the past year’s time or so has become the go-to source for restaurant reviews for a vast part of the population.

PRK: He was ranked number 3 – he was so far above any food critic. Do you think Yelp has replaced the traditional food critic?

CA: I think it has to a large extent and I think it will continue to do that more and more. You know, the pioneers in this area were Tim and Nina Zagat, and they were on the list but dropped off because it was not clear what their position was going to be now that [the company was] bought by Google. Long before the Internet was being used for things like this, they pioneered the idea of crowd-sourced reviews – the idea that not professional critics but your friends and your colleagues and people like you, a veritable city’s worth of people could judge restaurants. […]

PRK: Since last year, has there been any change in the way the big executives at the top of your list – like the CEOs of Walmart and PepsiCo – have thought about food policy?

CA: Well, I don’t know. We have to go by their press release or what’s reported. But… Walmart and other big-scale retail operations are giving much more attention to organic products and sustainable products. They know where the trend is going, they see that people are concerned about this.

I’m sure they’re not doing it out of some sense of moral goodness – they’re doing it out of a profit motive. But that’s okay.  It’s demand. If we all starting ask for things that are grown and raised in better conditions, with more humane treatment of animals – and for that matter, more humane treatment of farm workers – and raised without a bunch of chemicals, pesticides and herbicides – the big players, like the Walmarts of the world, the Costcos, are going to pay attention to that.

PRK:  Have you noticed any trends on the list this year? How has the composition changed?

CA: […] Chefs or restaurateurs appear, but they’re not in the top ten… it used to be that there were lots of celebrity chefs, and if they said, “I’m going to make pizza with goat cheese,” a lot of people started to make pizza with goat cheese… I don’t think that has changed, but what has changed is that there are many, many more celebrity chefs than there used to be. Because it used to be that to become a celebrity chef, you had to have a restaurant… and get good reviews, and you’d end up on television a little bit and people would write about you… This is how Thomas Keller or even Mario Batali got their fame.

Now, people become famous and I don’t even know all their names, because they won Iron Chef or they won Top Chef or won some food TV show, and that’s why we put Brooke Johnson, the president of the Food Network, as the number 1 most powerful person – because what she presides over and what she created has changed the way people think about food. It invented food as entertainment and food as competition. Even shows that are not on the Food Network, like Top Chef or The Chew… really would not exist without the Food Network.