IF you want to get an earful about the sins of the food industry, spend a few hours with Kelly D. Brownell. Mr. Brownell, 54, is the chairman of the psychology department at Yale University. Early in his career, he conducted clinical trials aimed at treating obesity, and issues surrounding the obesity crisis -- nutrition, portion size, the prevalence of junk food, and so on -- have long been his primary focus.

Not 10 minutes after I'd met him, Mr. Brownell was showing me the slide show he uses to accompany his standard speech about obesity. ''Can You Identify This Food?'' one slide asked, and listed 56 ingredients, most of them unpronounceable. The next slide showed the answer: a Kellogg's Pop-Tart.

He has a slide picturing baby bottles with the logos of 7Up, Pepsi and Dr Pepper. ''This is where it starts,'' he said with visible disgust. ''This is exploitation of children. Joe Camel is off the billboards, but Ronald McDonald is fine.'' He has a series of United States maps that chart the startling increase in the percentage of overweight Americans, state by state, from 1985 to 2003.

''There is plenty of nutrition education done in this country,'' Mr. Brownell said. ''It is done by the food industry. It has convinced us that fruit roll-ups are healthy, and that a cereal that is half its weight in sugar is part of a nutritious diet.'' He added, ''The increasing prevalence of obesity is like a hundred-car freight train going downhill with no brakes. And our country's response has been to stand outside the tracks and ask it to slow down.''

A year ago, in an effort to do something more than simply agitate, Mr. Brownell founded the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. Part of its mission is to fight ''weight bias'' -- that is, prejudice against overweight and obese people, which is the passion of Leslie Rudd, a California entrepreneur who gave Mr. Brownell $7.5 million to establish the center.

But Mr. Brownell also wants to use the center to ''change the world's diet.'' He hopes the center will be a place where people can dream up wholly original -- even radical -- ideas that go beyond the tried and true. Back in 1994, Mr. Brownell showed that he was willing to broach such ideas when he proposed, in The New York Times, that unhealthy food be taxed as a way of helping people change their diets. (The food industry and its allies quickly derided his proposal as the ''Twinkie tax.'') He wants the center to do persuasive, unbiased studies, and to come up with public policy ideas that can truly change the way we eat.

And here's something else the Rudd Center is doing. Mr. Brownell has begun a program called safe space, where public health advocates and food industry critics can meet privately with industry representatives, and where they can do something they don't do very often: talk. Not fight, not argue, not debate, but really talk. Listen to what the other side has to say. Search for common ground. Devise approaches and strategies that people on both sides can agree on.

Now there's an out-of-the-box idea.

WHENEVER a company or an industry finds itself under attack, its instinct is to attack right back. Think about the tobacco industry for much of its history, or General Electric dealing with the Hudson River pollution problem, or timber companies and environmentalists, or Wal-Mart and its critics. Initially, executives tend to view the critics as misguided naifs -- they don't understand the good the company does, or the complexity of the problem. As the criticism increases, these positions not only harden, they darken. The critics become the enemy.

Of course, the same thing happens on the other side. Corporations become demonized, and the activists come to see themselves as people at war with an evil industry. Not long ago, for instance, I asked a tobacco control advocate what his ultimate goal was. To my surprise, the first words out of his mouth were not ''to get fewer people to smoke''; they were ''to destroy the tobacco industry.''

Many rituals of American society only worsen the problem. Companies that concede they did something wrong will inevitably be buried in litigation. Just ask Merck, which thought it would be applauded for withdrawing Vioxx, but instead faces thousands of lawsuits. And then there's the media, which revels in conflict. ''When I'm on 'Nightline' with the head of the grocery lobby, it is going to be about debate and conflict,'' Mr. Brownell said.

Nobody, of course, is talking about destroying the food industry. ''We need the food industry to feed us,'' said David S. Ludwig, the director for the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston. And the food industry is not as monolithic as other industries; there are many companies, starting with PepsiCo, that badly want to get out in front of the obesity problem.

''As recently as five years ago, there was a temptation on the part of industry to frame the issue in terms of personal responsibility, physical activity and choice,'' said Sylvia Rowe, a consultant who formerly ran the International Food Information Council, an industry-financed group that specializes in food science and nutrition. ''But now there is a genuine recognition that they have a role and a responsibility.''