Blogs

From the Beard Foundation 2013 conference-planning meeting – the focus this year will be ‘appetite’ – to the screening last week at the Ford Foundation of A Place at the Table, the importance of food as central to a sustainable future is becoming ever clearer.

As Hurricane Sandy shifted the national conversation in the closing days of the U.S. 2012 presidential campaign, so too has the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School interrupted the partisan machinations over government spending and taxation. As we look forward to 2013 and beyond we thus have a rare moment to reflect and observe that these issues share a common root: the respective roles of government and business to shape our future as people and as a national community.

If Americans and Brits are “separated by a common language,” then Israelis and Palestinians are surely divided by a shared geography. Here in London, small daily protests outside the Israeli embassy brought British riot police into the streets adjacent to the new Whole Foods market in the tony Kensington region aglow with pre-Christmas displays.

As I prepare for meetings next week in London, and a presentation to Unilever, I wonder what I will be asked about the U.S. election – how to make sense of it. The explanations and interpretations are many.

As a trustee of The Marcus Foundation I am honored that we have launched a new initiative to bring renewed attention and policy change to ending hunger in America, through collaboration with Participant Media and A Place at The Table. This effort was recognized by The James Beard Foundation during its 2012 annual awards dinner this week in New York City.

Authenticity is the touchstone of trust, the defining characteristic mentioned repeatedly at this week’s James Beard Foundation conference. From Genetic modification of food to mother’s milk, from food service providers to artisan foragers, from Nashville to Portland the exploration of trust and distrust was both deep and wide in this live-streamed conference.

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. I moderate a panel Thursday morning with Sam Kass from The White House and Eric Goldstein, Chief Executive of the New York City Office of School Support Services.

Responding to a comment from Joe Nocera about Howard Schultz’s unique background, both as the company founder and a kid from Brooklyn who grew up in public housing, I reframed the question back to the link between organizational and leadership values – and perceptions of time.

In a filled tent at the Aspen Ideas Festival today, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, described smart phones as devices that “by their nature” collect information.

As I explained to C. Douglas McMillon, CEO and President of Walmart International.

The mega-cities of the nearest future are either hubs of innovation and creativity, as outlined by Richard Florida at the Aspen Ideas Festival, or overrun slums without electricity, transit access to center city, running water and the most basic urban services. Or maybe they are both?

Wow. A fabulous new documentary, Finding North, is a masterpiece of video storytelling.

I have spent a significant portion of my career managing research projects, publishing materials, devising marketing and communications strategies and consulting to bring needed information and perspectives to corporate and nonprofit decision-makers. So I would never argue against communications and education as indispensable tools in the battle to address pressing global challenges.

Discussions of US foreign aid are often divorced from discussions of the US Farm Bill. At the Aspen Ideas Festival today I asked Tom Daschle, Dan Glickman, Lauren Bush and Beth Sauerhaft to connect the two.

As an approach to resolving some of the world’s most intractable problems, embracing the “Rational Middle” sounds like a terrific concept. Who could object to bringing together people of diverse views on energy and climate policy to discuss reasonable solutions in a respectful manner?

As our civilization struggles to understand both the meaning and making of Stonehenge or Easter Island, others may some day look back and try to give meaning to the immense pie charts that seem to be scattered over the American Midwest.

Markets may well be the most finely tuned mechanism we have for allocating resources efficiently around short-term costs and prices. But absent a robust framework of social and cultural values and priorities to channel market operations these efficient markets will lead to vast inequity and depletion of critical resources.

Jeremy Rifkin stole the show at this week’s CERES 2012 Conference,” Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability.”

A conversation with Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme.

There is so much to do to “repair the world.” But we had best be sure we are asking the right questions before we put too much faith and resources in the answers.

I participated in the James Beard Foundation's Food Conference in New York on October 12 and 13, 2011. Video of my presentations is available online.

A sense of change is in the air – and not just the crispness of the Fall air in the bucolic hills of Vermont, where I presented at the Dana Meadows Sustainability Institute.

In Vermont at the Dana Meadows Sustainability Institute; looking forward to the James Beard Foundation Food Conference in New York.

In my closing remarks at the Sustainable Food Laboratory Summit I explained that I did not think sustainability was a goal, a metric, or even an approach to doing business. Rather, it is a principle. And it has at its core a fundamental rethinking of space and time.

It became clear in talking with farmers, ranchers, businesspeople, chefs and public advocates during the Sustainable Food Laboratory summit that there is a ‘goodness’ premium associated with these three linked terms. It was equally clear that few people have a clear sense of what these terms mean, beyond an evocation of being different and somehow better than conventional produce.

At meeting after meeting, the conversation almost always turns to metrics and data. And while we need better data and better metrics - knowing of course that we do what we measure - we also need to remember for what reasons we are collecting data. Measurement alone is not the goal.

While I was out-West last week at the Sustainable Food Laboratory Summit and Aspen Ideas Festival back East in Washington, DC, a project I have been supporting for some years marked an important milestone. GreenSpace marked the opening of its new headquarters and turnkey knowledge center at Nationals Ballpark.

Power generated from the sun streaming down on the earth today is what we have come to call solar power. But what we forget at our peril is the fossil part of fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal are also forms of solar power; the sun just created them a very long time ago.

Amidst a host of rich and deep discussions at the Sustainable Food Laboratory summit this week in Oregon, we kept coming back again and again to a few underlying themes. The complex relationships among commodities, organic produce, price, and brand value was one of these touchstone issues.

Having heard President Clinton speak a few times while he was President, it was inspiring to have a conversation with him on Saturday (July 2) after his unscheduled presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival.