What are the Ingredients of Trust?

Trust and the American Food System is the theme of this week’s annual James Beard Foundation conference in New York: A Crisis in Confidence: Creating a Better, More Sustainable Food World We Can Trust(link is external). I moderate a panel Thursday morning with Sam Kass(link is external) from The White House and Eric Goldstein(link is external), Chief Executive of the New York City Office of School Support Services. While our focus will be trust and leadership in the public sector, other panels will look at GMOs, milk, and transparency.

Download a PDF of the complete agenda(link is external) for the two days of the conference. Visit the James Beard Foundation’s website(link is external) on October 17 and 18 to watch live streaming video of the Conference. (For video of my presentations from last year's conference, see How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats.)

Threaded through all these diverse discussions (with active participation from an audience of leading chefs, businesspeople, and thought leaders in the food sector) are fundamental issues of how to maintain or build trust in a system that spans the globe.

If you know your farmer and eat locally is that the recipe for trust? Perhaps, unless you are the farmer raising your own chickens in Brooklyn and finds high amounts of lead in the eggs. Is organic the answer? Perhaps unless you believe the Stanford University study recently released (and more recently roundly criticized for methodological flaws).

Can we produce food sustainably for a global market that weaves together hundreds of thousands of small farmers, vast transportation networks, and consumers increasingly out of touch with the natural rhythms of both the growing seasons and critical soil nutrients?

Wendell Berry(link is external) (farmer, poet, writer), Tensie Whelan(link is external) (Rainforest Alliance), Marcus Samuelsson(link is external) (Red Rooster), Jenifer Phalen(link is external) (Edelmen) and others will tussle with these questions.