You Can't Separate The Food System From Politics

I'm very interested in food system reform because I feel like it's sort of central to a lot of our problems. It's sort of central to a lot of the economic stress we're seeing. It's central to the chronic disease stress. It threatens national security, which we'll talk about in terms of the military. It affects our kids' ability to learn in school. It affects the environment and loss of biodiversity, climate change. These are all massive issues that are in some way or another connected to food, some more than others. And we need to shift that. How do you see that kind of reform happening and how do we get leadership to get that this is an issue? Maybe they do get it and they just are so entrenched that they're not able to actually do anything about it.

Well, I think it's a classic problem of a big, complex interactive social system. And when you draw a circle around it and you say it's the food system, that's just for purposes of discussion. I mean, you can't separate the food system from politics. You can't separate the food system from economics. So the first step is to have great respect for the complexity of a system like that and what it takes to change it. I think the first step, and I think your work is promoting this, is you've got to build the foundation for a broad social movement. You've got to educate, engage, empower individuals these amazing people in our country who will do things that Mark Heim and John Grosenbacher never thought of. But that's the foundation. Now, the harder part, I think, for us, and it's why so many reform efforts fail, system reforms, is you gotta have enough people who can step back and say now, and study, and I'll even say, admire this system. Because if you don't begin to understand how it works as a system, then you can't make the changes, make changes that'll last.