If you’re going to host a summit about sustainable food using sponsorship dollars from Dole, Coca Cola, Dupont, and the Council for Biotechnology Information, you might also be prepared to field some tough questions.

And yet – if you were watching the live stream of The Atlantic's Food Summit today, which took place in Washington, D.C. – you would have noticed that the audience was fairly quiet; they had very few questions, and the ones that came did little to challenge participants.

Twitter, however, was another story, as bloggers, advocates, and chefs tuning in from around the country piped up to respond to what they saw.

And here’s what they did see: The CEO of the American Beverage Association and a senior vice president at Dole (the largest producer and marketer of industrially produced fruit and vegetables) spoke about the obesity epidemic.

Nina V. Federoff, who has served as the State Department's chief science advisor and a member of the scientific advisory board for agriculture biotech firm Evogene, was brought in to speak about “Sustainable Agriculture.”

Meanwhile representatives from CropLife, the largest trade association of pesticide and herbicide producers, were in the audience and executives from the sponsoring companies spent time in a special lounge.

Here’s small sample of the tweets that appeared this morning:

“File under What Were They THINKING?! #atlanticfood's sustainable ag panel is anything but” – Bonnie Powell, @ethicurean

#mediafail when big industry is brought in to underwrite "sustainable" food discussions #atlanticfood – Paula Crossfield, @civileater

Truly incredulous @ #atlanticfood panelists. Should be called Food Industry Spokesperson Summit (& Alice Waters) – Tom Philpott, @tomphilpott

On the other side of the ring? Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, a man who is often lauded for his efforts to maintain Stonyfield’s core values after a buy-out by France-based multinational Groupe Danone.

And – of course – Alice Waters, who stepped up to the plate to ask, in the middle of her keynote about the Edible Schoolyard to ask: “Why are there no farmers in the room?” Earlier she had tweeted, “The true elitism is a food system controlled by a handful of corporations.”

Meanwhile food politics bloggers from around the Twittersphere wondered, was this conference the brainchild of the event host, Atlantic food editor Corby Kummer? Or was it a top-down decision from publishers looking to make a buck. The latter would be a sign that the same market forces shaping the food system can make or break today’s media landscape.

And in the end, Atlantic Summit observers are left wondering which is the more daunting task in 2011: preventing greenwashing in the sustainable food discussion or staying afloat as an independent magazine publisher.