Real Experts on Hunger

In a rare series of events on Capitol Hill yesterday, and continuing today, America’s real experts on hunger in America met with senior members of Congress and their staffs.

Five members of the SNAP Alumni network organized by Participant Media and The Marcus Foundation (with additional support from The Ford Foundation) in conjunction with the release of A Place at The Table, spoke to senior members of the House including Steny Hoyer (MD), Ted Deutch (FL), Jan Schakowsky (IL), John Conyors MI), Rosa DeLauro(CT), Bobby Scott (VA), and David Cicilene (RI).

Members of the Congressional Caucus on Poverty (right)
meeting with A Place at the Table Directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson
along with Tom Colicchio and others (left)

Excerpts from the movie were shown both to individual members and staff and during an evening screening. As continues to be the case in commercial theatres nationwide, and in more than one hundred community screenings, the movie stops people in their tracks. And key to that storytelling so beautifully rendered by directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson are the stories of real people struggling with not knowing how they will put food on their table.

Steny Hoyer, House Minority Whip, watching A Place at The Table

One of those individuals from the movie, Leslie Nichols, a teacher in Collbran, CO, came with us to the Capitol and fought back tears while recalling her story of being on food stamps as a child and how she nonetheless fulfilled her dream of becoming a teacher. Equally powerful testimony was provided by:

• Jennifer Tracy, Executive Director of San Diego Hunger Coalition

• Okiima Pickett, Security Architect with IBM & DC Divas and Team USA, Running Back

• Nikki Johnston-Huston, 2012 Eisenhower Fellow and Tax Attorney

• Dr. Trish Henley, Professor of English Literature at University of Cincinnati

In facilitating the discussion that featured not only these dynamic and powerful women, but also Top Chef Tom Colicchio and Representative Jim McGovern, I urged members of Congress to honor the courage of the SNAP Alumni as they debate and mark-up the Farm Bill this week and next. Providing temporary, short-term and very modest support to Americans in need is not an expense of the US government; it is an investment in people who are the backbone of our nation. Learn more about the SNAP Alumni network at www.takepart.com/table.

Full disclosure: I am a trustee of The Marcus Foundation which has provided funding to Participant Media.

A Place at the Table - Trailer

Yes… But…

Rich and deep conversations are the hallmark of CERES conferences and this year in San Francisco was no exception, as CERES looks forward to its 25th anniversary in 2014. During the conference the newly released CERES report on fracking and water stress was covered in the New York Times. And General Motors signed the Climate Change declaration.

At the conference, Bill McKibben sounded yet another eloquent call for urgent action, warning the more than 500 participants that getting this done “over time” is no longer an option. On the global freshwater crisis, Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute similarly observed that we have already passed the point of “peak water” and that unlike peak oil there are no substitutes for water.

Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, noted that measured along a very much shorter time-frame he has never been asked a question about sustainability on any of his quarterly earnings calls. At the other end of the spectrum Heidi Cullen, Chief Climatologist for Climate Central, reminded everyone that when the Dutch government vowed in the mid-20th century to protect its people from massive flooding, it opted not to prepare for a one in a hundred-year storm but rather adopted an 800-year time-horizon.

Although the redwood groves in Muir Woods, a mere 16 miles north of the conference site, are heirs to the tree-like ferns that appeared on earth 300 million years ago (the fossilized remains of which are today’s fossil fuels), who among us can think out anywhere close to 800 years?

But, on the other hand, who among us wants to predict when the companies we work for, or buy products from, will cease to exist? While no executive will admit to planning for the closure of his or her businesses, lack of longer-term thinking is essentially exactly that. If we are not implementing sustainability practices now -- managing resources such as water and soil health and biodiversity and atmospheric capacity for carbon absorption -- then we are failing in our fiduciary duties to preserve and generate value for stockholders and stakeholders.

Yes, but as much as we need to deepen the capacity of our species to think long-term we need to ‘scale’ urgently not ‘over-time.’ As David Blood from Generation Investment made very clear, longer-term business thinking about sustainability also yields near-term results: risk mitigation, cost reductions from greater environmental efficiencies, employee retention, and lower cost of capital.

But how do we scale, accelerating business change such that it is in synch with what science tells us are the outer limits of time and temperature before the fragile window closes that has allowed our species to develop over about 200,000 years – which is either a very long time for an earnings analyst or a mere blip in geologic time.

The answer often proposed, taking things to scale, may be right. But scale may not mean bigger. Scale might not mean building acres upon acres of solar panels far away from electricity users. Rather it might mean small solar clips we can attach to our cell phones. In America alone, with an estimated 328 million phones dispersed among a population of 314 million people this might not be such a small achievement. A different kind of scaling.

But could such a device be invented and marketed by a company if in its development it has the same RoI hurdle rates as all other corporate undertakings? Would investors and analysts on those quarterly earnings calls have the stomach for it? Seems like the Dutch did after the Great North Sea Flood of 1953. Was hurricane Sandy enough to galvanize Americans?

Buses and Sustainability

I have buses on my mind – lots and lots of school buses sitting in parking lots all over the world. In the United States about 480,000 yellow school buses take kids to and from school, and on fields trips. And are then parked.

What I have come to like about buses is that they are a form of sharing. Whether in public or private use, buses embody the notion of a shared need – a common route. They are thus aggregators, of commuters or students, or in innovative settings much more. But in aggregating, they also preserve an individuals particular need.

Verizon, for example, now uses buses to deploy technicians in New York City, in addition to individual trucks and vans. The buses are packed with equipment, some mobile and some fixed, and drop technical staff where they are needed to address customer problems and then pick them up when they are done. Saves a lot of time (looking for parking spaces, fuel, vehicle maintenance and so forth). In retrospect, seems like a no-brainer.

In the national capitol region around Washington, DC, another bus has been repurposed as a green market. Run by Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food & Agriculture, it also follows a set route but this repurposed bus collects fresh produce and meats from area farmers and delivers them to underserved neighborhoods. Customers can use government SNAP, WIC, and SFMNP funds to buy healthy, local, fresh food. Another no-brainer, in hindsight.

As I head to the CERES conference “Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability”, I wonder how we can more effectively use such underutilized assets: school buses that spend more than half their useful lives parked, offices that are empty for as many hours as they are occupied, and school kitchens and lunch rooms deserted after students go home.

Enough Defining

Implementation, not definition, is the challenge for sustainability today. Despite much harrumphing and navel-gazing about what exactly sustainability means, the core is clearly understood. As we have explained it to young students at Mundo Verde, sustainability means taking only what you need now and saving the rest to share with others. One can quibble over that simplification, but at core it is correct. And around that core are many facets that both enable and challenge people grappling with how to ‘do’ sustainability.

As movingly captured last evening at the premiere of La Expedición at the Josephine Butler Center in Washington, DC, the Mundo Verde community works on three facets of sustainability, nurturing children to become future leaders. I facilitated the discussion afterwards with invited parents, education thought leaders, faculty, and community leaders. 

The public premiere is Saturday, April 20 at 5:30pm at North Columbia Heights Green in the alley off 11th Street NW between Park Road & Lamont Street 6:30 pm-8:30pm (Facebook event page). This event is free and open to the public. (Special thanks to Meridian Hill Pictures and Washington Parks & People.) Questions? Contact: communications [at] mundoverdepcs.org

Mundo Verde is a bilingual school, ensuring that the leaders of tomorrow have skills to navigate and collaborate in a multicultural world. Second, students learn both in the classroom and even more fundamentally outside through carefully developed learning expeditions. And third, sustainability is both explicitly taught and modeled through the schools work with vendors. The outdoors thus becomes a classroom while the classroom becomes a teaching tool.

While the food provided by James-Beard Foundation award-winning chef Todd Gray and Ellen Kassoff, partners in Equinox, for the premiere of La Expedición provided a lovely backdrop to this event, agriculture and the global food system was the central focus of last week’s Sustainable Food Laboratory summit where I presented the results of research undertaken for Unilever. With Molly Jahn from the University of Wisconsin, I urged leaders from leading companies (PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Cargill and others) and NGOs (Oxfam, Eco-Agriculture Partners, Conservation International, BSR and others) to build on the current farm-level certification systems and embrace landscape-level monitoring.

And on the flip side, hunger too is part of the sustainability equation. How can we have a sustainable world with nearly 2 billion people malnourished – roughly a billion of them from hunger and the other half from obesity? A Place at the Table opened last month in thirty-two markets and the digital mosaic we created of successful Americans who were once on food stamps continues to draw people in to an expanding national conversation and policy debate on ending hunger in America.

Stay tuned for more news from Mundo Verde and A Place at The Table, as I am also en route shortly to the CERES conference in San Francisco – where the focus will surely be more on the doing than on the defining.

On Hunger and Respect in America

As Representative Jim McGovern said from the floor of the House of Representatives a few days before president Obama’s State of the Union last evening, “Hunger is a political condition.”  (Transcript)

50,000,000 Americans are not on SNAP (formerly food stamps) because of a lack of food in America. Nor do they suffer the indignities of this program – which often last a lifetime – as a means of defrauding the government of what is on average a meager $4 per day.

With the head of the state office that issues food stamps in Colorado in the audience, with representatives of the Governor’s office present, and with Representative Dominick Moreno at her side, Leslie Nichols spoke eloquently through tears as she recounted her experience growing-up with an empty refrigerator and wondering where she would find her next meal. A teacher in Collbran, CO, Leslie now delivers food to hungry families. Her poignant and powerful relationship with Rosie, a fifth grade student of hers, is movingly portrayed in A Place at the Table -- which opens in theatres nationwide on March 1.

I had the honor last evening in Denver to introduce the film and moderate a panel with Leslie, film director Kristi Jacobson, State Representative Dominick Moreno, and Kathy Underhill from Hunger Free Colorado. Threaded throughout this conversation last evening were issues of core American values: dignity, respect, community, and trust.

In every community in this nation, we have neighbors who are hungry. And this is not the kind of hunger we all experience for having missed a meal. This is a grindingly chronic hunger that goes on day after day after day. And yet the vast majority of people receiving federal support to purchase food receive this aid for ten months or less. They do not abuse the system; they are not moochers but people who have hit a tough stretch. The majority of this 50,000,000 are employed either part- or full-time. And one of out every four children in America today is on food stamps.

We have allowed the tragedy of hunger to exist in this country – it has become the new normal – by branding the hungry as somehow less worthy, less American, and deserving of less respect than other ‘real’ Americans. But this is about to change.

In a collaboration between Participant Media, The Marcus Foundation, The Ford Foundation and major national anti-hunger organizations, successful Americans who were once on food stamps or SNAP are speaking-out about the value of the program and the dignity of the hungry. Bill Ritter, the former Governor of Colorado has had the courage to tell his story. So has Moby, the renowned electronic musician. And TV film star Debi Mazar. And Patty Murray, the four-term Senator from Washington State.

The “political condition” of hunger as Representative McGovern so precisely described it, is changing. And while change can sometimes seem agonizingly slow, when it gains critical mass – like a wave – its power should not be underestimated. Imagine 50,000,000 hungry Americans rejecting the social stigma that has silenced them and finding their political voice. Stay tuned.

“Pandora’s Promise” – Can it Be Kept?

Robert Stone has produced a provocative and important new documentary on nuclear power that was screened this week at the Sundance Film Festival. But as important as it is, Pandora’s Promise is a film that in its current configuration undermines itself.

Stone sets out to document how the dangers of our unstable climate have pushed him and a set of people featured in the film to revisit their long-held opposition to nuclear power and instead embrace fourth generation nuclear, or Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) technology. Fourth generation nuclear may indeed offer safety improvements over current operating nuclear reactors that are fundamental game changers. But the credibility of that notion is called into question by other aspects of this movie that is at once passionate and heartfelt and very unsatisfying.

The cast of characters chronicled throughout the movie are not only never identified in terms of who they are or what they do, but also engender little empathy or interest as they tell their stories. They are clearly sincere in their various professional assertions and descriptions but they lack depth. We learn almost nothing about them as people in the course of the movie; it is almost as if they are actors playing themselves rather than real people telling real stories.

And some of the assertions and scenes strain the limits of credulity. Michael Shellenberger, never identified beyond his description of himself as an environmental activist, voices what he claims is a common view -- that he was stunned to learn that background radiation exists naturally on earth and is not purely a human creation. Really? Perhaps he will say more about this during his scheduled appearance on The Colbert Report on Monday, January 28th.

And a few scenes also look like they might have been staged. Do scientists visiting the exclusion zone around Fukishima really collect radiation data wearing radiation suits with no head covering or breathing apparatus? Are they partially suited to make the point that suits aren’t really needed at all or conversely to show brave scientists doing what it takes to get important health data? Or is it just to add dramatic tension to the film?

But more important than these small items, the movie seems to cherry-pick and even distort data to about nuclear power, past and present, to make the case for its future. I posed a few questions about this. The movie claims, correctly, that Chernobyl claimed only 28 deaths due to Acute Radiation Syndrome and drums home the authenticity of this data point with a ponderous parade of acronyms over the highlighted line from the international report coordinated by WHO ("Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts"). But there is no mention made – other than to skewer Helen Caldicott – of equally well-documented facts such as the following from a WHO overview: Health Effects of The Chernobyl Accident.

• “A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident…. [And] 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children ….”

• “Recent investigations suggest a doubling of the incidence of leukemia among the most highly exposed Chernobyl liquidators.”

• “The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime.”

In the same way the film passes over these facts, it presents a compelling but fatuous claim that all the waste generated by all commercial nuclear reactors from 1958 to the present day could be stored on a single football field. I asked about this after the screening and the very vague and dodgy answer only confirmed my suspicion that this benign metaphor obfuscates more than it educates. To begin with, physical size is not the right way to measure nuclear radiation. It is like a doctor talking about big and small pills rather than doses and efficacy.

But so be it, if size is to be our unit of measure. There are 72,000 tons of commercial nuclear waste in the U.S. stored either as fuel rods immersed in water or in dry cask above-ground storage at some seventy-seven sites in thirty-five states. Leaving aside the considerable scientific debate about using short-term techniques for long-term storage, there is no way reactor waste stored in this manner can fit on a football field.

So a sleight of hand is needed to justify this claim. The calculation seems to be based on the quantity of isolated hot nuclear pellets in the abstract. In reality their intense radioactive power is only contained by surrounding them with zirconium shielding and immersing them in tanks with re-circulating water and additional chemical coolants. They exist only within this waste containment system. Thus, the actual combined footprint of the four spent fuel waste pools at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, for example, measured 48m x 31m. Waste from this one plant alone would thus stretch about two-thirds of the way across a football field and from one end- zone to midfield.

Joined on stage Thursday by two characters from the film – Gwyneth Cravens and Richard Rhodes -- Robert Stone seemed, to his credit, to be uncomfortable with they way both totally failed to answer my questions about thyroid cancer and the football metaphor. Gwyneth Cravens clearly did not want to answer the question of how the football calculations were arrived at and stumbled through a basic explanation of techniques for storing nuclear waste. And beyond waxing rhapsodic about the lofty intentions of the first prime minister of Belarus, Vyachaslaw Kyebich, Rhodes spoke not at all to the results of extensive international medical research on the health effects of Chernobyl – admittedly an area outside his considerable expertise on the history of nuclear weapons.

These serious flaws in Pandora’s Promise undercut its credibility. While it is true that fear of radiation and short-term cancer vastly exceeds documented deaths from commercial nuclear accidents, that fear has been fanned not just by environmentalists and the media – which the movie happily indicts – but by a culture of secrecy, dissembling and false assurances propagated for decades by the nuclear power industry.

We have been promised energy “too cheap too meter” since the dawn of the nuclear age. Perhaps fourth generation nuclear power is a key piece of the puzzle to ensuring climate stability for future generations. But before citizens or policymakers agree to let Pandora out, her promise is going to need to be documented with much greater credibility than is offered by the unidentified characters in this movie.

The American Table: James Beard to 7-Eleven

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.

This trend reminds me a bit of my early years running a company in the then Soviet Union where we went in a very short few years from answering quizzical questions about what exactly are you doing (strategic market research in a non-market economy), to being joined by dozens and soon hundreds of the world’s largest companies as they scrambled (and often stumbled) to find a niche in Moscow. The notion of critical mass is a relevant to social change as it is to physics.

That 7-Eleven has shifted its nationwide purchasing to now include (take a seat if you shock easily!) fresh produce sends a signal that change is indeed afoot. Fear not, the Big Gulp won’t be replaced anytime soon by Brussels sprouts. But as political revolutions don’t come about through voting, so too the sustainability revolution is upon us now and there wont be a signal conference or press release to announce its arrival. The work, however, that has been done steadily and with increasing depth and sophistication by folks like those at The Sustainable Food Lab has made a world of difference. At its summits, SFL brings together players all along the global food value chain, from local producers and farmers to global retailers and local purveyors. I will be presenting the results of recent work for Unilever at this year’s conference, grappling with the question of monitoring sustainable agriculture at a landscape- rather than farm-level.

As the push for new ways of growing food gains ground, so too the search for cures to the obesity epidemic continue. Michelle Obama’s work with the White House garden has inspired thousands of local efforts to bring nutritious food into schools. In one small example of this, and with the help of The James Beard Foundation, I have connected celebrated Chef Todd Grey and his partner Ellen Kassoff from Equinox with Mundo Verde– a DC Public Charter School on whose board I sit. And the upcoming Green Schools National Conference this winter has a renewed focus as well on food and well-being.

All of which makes it all the more peculiar to hear the CEO and founder of Whole Foods speak in an eerily detached manner about how the government’s health care reform plan recently upheld by the Supreme Court is actually more like fascism than socialism. Having lived in the Soviet Union for quite some time, and looking ahead to International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27th, I take a rather dim view of such incendiary comparisons.

I’ve no gripe with strong language, and appreciated the refreshing candor of Representative Marcia Fudge at a recent Tavis Smiley forum at George Washington University (link to CSPAN Video Library).  As part of a rich and provocative panel Smiley convened – Jonathan Kozol, Cornell West, John Graham, Newt Gingrich and others – the new head of the Congressional Black Caucus gave voice to what many of us have thought for some time. Representative Fudge shared that in shepherding legislation to the floor of the House of Representatives these days she has to deal with members who are “evil, nuts and mean.“ Such is the paralyzing result of the radicalization of the Republican Party that now eschews achievement and prioritizes obstruction.

But at The Ford Foundation screening of A Place at The Table, I was uplifted and again inspired by this compelling movie even though I know well its powerful story of how 50,000,000 Americans struggle to find food every day. I chatted again with Barbie Izquierdo and commended her for her grace and candor in responding to a tough, personal question from the audience.

Marianna Chilton, Director of the Center for Hunger Free Communities at Drexel University, is also featured in the film and participated on the Tavis Smiley panel at which she effectively challenged many of Speaker Gingrich’s smoothly spoken untruths. Beyond that, however, she quietly and movingly reminded everyone that there are many people like Barbie Izquierdo in her Witnesses to Hunger organization – people experiencing not only hunger but also poverty every single day. And she emphasized these people have a kind of innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that bespeaks a resilience and determination few of us posses.

Ponder that for a moment. The power of entrepreneurial people – 50,000,000 strong – to change our future. More soon on SNAPalumni.org and the LeagueofHungryVoters.org. Coming soon to a 7-Eleven near you?

Regulating the Playing Field

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.

In violation of the investing maxim that past results are no indication of future returns, many business leaders cling to the shibboleths of the past to secure their future. They argue vehemently against regulations, and against government spending more generally, insisting that industry can best police itself and that regulation stifles growth, innovation, and job-creation. And in the same breath these lobbyists for the past ride in elevators, work in offices, eat food, drive on roads, and use communications bandwidths regulated for the public good by none other than the government.

Businesses large and small also regularly evoke the notion of a level playing field – and insist that the only role for government in the market is to level that field. But level for one party can be decidedly sloped for another. So this is generally nothing more than a cover for seeking or maintaining competitive advantage from government support – from tax breaks in the energy sector to federal support for medical research.

From fabrics to firearms, the question of how to allocate responsibility across the value chain is central to the success both of private enterprise and governments not only in the US but also around the world. See especially “From Triangle to Tazreen: A Century of Lessons,” by Francesca Rheannon in CSRwire on the recent plant fire that killed 112 in Bangladesh, and Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times on the carnage in Connecticut (“Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?”).

Beyond these two issues, here are four more crying out for resolution – and resolution that would benefit business, people, and the national and global community.

Nanotechnology, long out of the barn, is now being chased by various regulatory agencies. Like GMOs before it, nanotechnology holds great promise but is fraught with risk, both known and unknown. Although late to the table, government can help businesses drive down that risk with a smart regulatory framework that directly addresses both short-term needs and potential long-term consequences.

Fracking, hydraulic fracturing of the earth’s deep rock formations, holds out the potential to drive down American energy costs and thus boost production and on-shore manufacturing while creating jobs and billions of dollars of revenue for private companies as well as debt-ridden governments. But the risks associated with the vast quantities of water used to crack the rock, the chemicals used in the fracking, and the global consequences of an energy independent America are poorly understood. While state governments are awakening to this opportunity/challenge, the federal government needs to engage and drive a robust discussion about what level means in the field of fracking.

The search for climate stability, of course, continues to cry out for U.S. and global leadership. As politicians dither, the ice caps melt opening new shipping routes across the Arctic, storms increase in intensity, coral reefs bleach, dustbowl conditions return to the U.S. Midwest, sea-levels inch upwards, scientific panels affirm and re-affirm that the changes are real and man-made, and yet many business leaders continue to act as if this greatest risk to their ongoing operations can be handled by committees and pronouncements. (More soon in another dispatch on the “up the middle, up the middle, up the middle” approach to climate stability.) But there are some companies (see the signatories to the Prince of Wales’ Climate Communiqués) looking forward and as leaders they also are calling on governments to step in and … level yet another playing field.

And last, it is time to again eliminate hunger in America. More than 50,000,000 people in this nation of plenty do not know from where they will get their next meal; fully 49,000,000 receive government assistance through the prodigiously named Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). While this national outrage persists, elected officials in Washington vote against the hungry and even now have begun to seek to balance the budget on the backs of these least fortunate Americans. See the Food Policy Action report card to see who voted how on key food legislation in the 112th Congress.

Hungry Americans, many of whom vote and have real reason to vote, are not even on the traditional playing field and thus have no interest in whether or not it is level. But for some of those who tend the fields on which we play, the pure pursuit of self-interest seems to be all that matters. While enlightened self-interest can be a huge and beneficial incentive, self-interest as the singular guiding principle makes for a dog-eat-dog world. It also makes predicting the future much easier; as Garrett Hardin explained in 1968, it leads with grinding certainty to the destruction of the global commons upon which we all depend.

We have some important choices to make in 2013.

Of Language, Geography and Mosaics

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.

In the region of Christ’s birth, the whine of Hamas rockets was for the first time heard by residents of Jerusalem itself. Not in Israeli land adjacent to Gaza, where more than 100 rockets were launched on November 11, three days before the Israeli attack on November 14 that killed Ahemed Jabari, second in command of the military wing of Hamas. Not in Tel Aviv where the wail of air raid sirens is neither commonplace nor unusual. But in Jerusalem, a sacred target, a place of birth and death; a city with ancient meaning and a target today because of its symbolic import for the future.

The media reporting on this latest eruption in the Middle East struggles to fit more than two thousand years of historical context into sound bites and headlines. And even the proximate cause of the conflagration, the missiles raining down on Israel from Gaza, slips out of most coverage – blown away by the images of people and houses torn apart by Israeli counter-attacks.

Some wonder why Netanyahu is poised to send troops, again, into Gaza in a powerful display of Israeli military superiority that will do nothing to resolve the problem or shift the downward spiral of hatred and animosity, nor bring the world community to any greater understanding or interest in the problems of the Jewish people or the Palestinian people.

It is an all too familiar war dance, but even riskier in the newly aligned Middle East, with the civil war in Syria, and the nuclear ambitions of Iran temporarily stymied yet defiant. What are not new are the mindsets, the fixed images we carry around, the icons of our beliefs, the self-reinforcing notions and biases and prejudices. We see the world as if looking at a mosaic, ordering all the pieces into patterns that makes sense and provide some assurance that the world makes some sense and that we can somehow fit into the picture.

We fear the moments when tired and worn bits of the mosaic fall away, when things become unstuck and our sense of clarity and purpose and place is jostled. We thought things made sense: now we are not so sure. The pieces don’t fit together as well as we thought.

While few of us are etch-a-sketch artists, and none of us can live entirely new existences devoid of our pasts and history, leaning into the uncertainty of change and risk is how we make possible what seemed impossible -- until it wasn’t.

Explaining the U.S. Presidential Election

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.

• The shifting demographics of Hispanic voters

• "Legitimate rape”

• The ground game

• Citizens United and PAC money

• Koch, Adelson, Israel, Iran

• Social media

• The secret 47% video

• Auto bailout and Anne Romney's Cadillac

• The vagaries of the electoral college

• FEMA and Hurricanes Sandy v. Katrina

• The auto plant in Janesville that closed during the Bush Administration

• Etch-a-Sketch

• Wildly exaggerated fear-mongering about voter fraud

• Tea Party overreach and the extinction of moderate republicanism

• The Romney trip to Canada with the dog on the roof of the family car

All of these were a factor. But there is an explanation at once simpler and deeper. Do you like your bank? If you don’t really love your bank, then you were never really going to like Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. Mitt and Bain remind you not of business innovation and creativity but rather of the schemes played by people with big money that pitched the nation into an economic recession. Mitt Romney and Bain Capital remind people of March 2008, when Bear Sterns was on the edge of collapse and forced into a merger with JP Morgan, loosing 90% of its value. Mitt Romney and Bain Capital bring back memories of September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed; AIG lost 90% of its value and tottered on the edge of collapse; and the Fed stepped in to protect Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley from failure. They remind people of October 2008, when the stock market crashed and lost 22% of its value and banks across Europe collapsed or are were rescued. They remind us all of November 2008, when the government stepped in to protect Citigroup.

If you see this election as one in which President Obama was running against a financial wheeler-dealer, after a period of unparalleled banking and financial recklessness, then the harder question to answer is why was it even close.

A Place at The Table

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.

Co-sponsored with Good Housekeeping magazine, this year’s dinner honored Jason Clay(link is external) (World Wildlife Fund), Tensie Whelan (Rainforest Alliance), Malik Yakini (Detroit Black Community Food Security Network), Kathleen Merrigan (Deputy Secretary of Agriculture) and acclaimed author, poet and farmer Wendell Berry.

John Besh, award-winning chef and restaurateur (chefjohnbesh.com) and master of ceremonies for the dinner, urged everyone to “please consider how you might be able to help the campaign around this film -- so all Americans can have a place at the table.” 

Placecards at the dinner contained information on A Place at The Table and the associated campaign being developed by Participant Media. (Watch the film trailer below.)

Authenticity and Empathy in the American Food System

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. Farmers, businesspeople, advocates, researchers, food processors, produce distributors, chefs of global repute and journalists grappled with a system of linked but distinct problems.

"Leadership and Trust in the Public Sector"
Panel with Sam Kass, NYC Dept of Education's Eric Goldstein
and Designing Sustainability's Jonathan Halperin

Sam Kass, Assistant White House Chef and Senior Policy Advisor, was right to observe that while change is happening within this system and its trajectory is shifting there is still no single place where one can intervene to shift the path of a food system as complex as we now have in America. And Eric Goldstein, Chief Executive of the NYC Office of School Service, was also right that these issues go way beyond ingredients to the core of how we live our lives in American today. 

But first principles, simple and enduring and profound, still obtain. James Beard articulated one many years ago when we wrote that “food is our common ground.”

James Beard

We all eat, we all must eat, we all make choices about what we eat and these choices have consequences both personal and societal. Yet, for the 50,000,000 citizens in America who go hungry that common ground seems tenuous at best, choice severely constrained and a future deeply compromised.

To draw attention to this appalling problem, hunger amidst plenty, film directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush have made a stunning and powerful movie: A Place at the Table. And the Marcus Foundation, of which I am a trustee, honored the film and the people whose story it tells so eloquently with a table at the James Beard Foundation awards dinner.

With the film backed by Participant Media, and in tandem with many others working to end hunger in America, the Marcus Foundation hopes to use the movie as a platform to jump-start a renewed discussion of hunger in America that will lead to policy change to once again eliminate hunger in a nation abundant with food. (For more information, including a trailer of the film, see my dispatch: A Place at The Table.)

With authenticity in mind, it was not lost on any of us that honoring hungry people while dining on a gourmet meal is at best ironic and at worst obscene. Tables at awards dinners in New York City are not free; money spent on a table could feed many people. Was it right, just, appropriate? Are we walking the walk or just talking the talk? Time will tell whether our efforts to address hunger indirectly though story-telling, advocacy, and communications bear fruit and reduce hunger, or on reflection our funds would have been better spent feeding hungry people directly.

Another irony of the conference, this one sweet and poignant for me, was Wendell Berry reading out a web site address so that everyone could have access to his proposed 50-year Farm Bill: www.landinstitute.org. The bill is important reading, contains much wisdom, and is much shorter than the current draft farm bill still sitting in Congress. The irony is, as Wendell Berry acknowledged, that he has no computer. (Full disclosure: I was once a happy member myself of the now defunct Lead Pencil Society – with the motto, ‘not so fast’.)

If it is possible to have numerous first principles, then Wendell Berry has penned more than might reasonably be expected of any one man. He spoke eloquently at the conference and emphasized one of nature’s first principles that our species violates repeatedly in its rush to produce more, now, faster. “Keep the ground covered” is his admonition to all of us who want to continue eating not just today but also tomorrow. And for those who from ignorance or arrogance think of themselves as disconnected to the world of soil and sun and erosion and agriculture, he reminds us “eating is an agricultural act.”

If “food is our common ground” and “eating is an agricultural act,” then we are both literally and figuratively bound together by the soil that nourishes us, our food and our spirit. “Food deserts” are thus aptly named for the multi-level deprivation they occasion. And they are now well mapped online (see the USDA's Economic Research Service 'Food Desert Locator').

How can one have faith and trust in a nation so riddled with systemic and enduring injustice; so racked by inequality across so many levels? Simran Sethi, an award-winning journalist delivered a beautiful presentation in which she identified four building blocks of trust: predictability, reciprocity, vulnerability, and value exchange. Mapping these values across the stakeholders that struggle still with the deepest wounds that still exist in America would be an honorable undertaking. How can we develop these values such that people of means feel for and act such that they are trusted by people struggling in food deserts?

Applying these to the issue of GMO’s, discussed during Day I, it is no wonder that Monsanto remains an easy target – and that the target is easy does not mean it is any less deserving. If the figure cited by Daniel Ravicher from the Public Patent Foundation is correct, Monsanto spends $3,000,000 per day on legal fees. And one can reasonably surmise that much of this is related to their efforts around GMO crops to deny responsibility, display invulnerability; control value exchange, and hide beyond a mountain of secrecy.

Malik Yakini, Executive Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and a 2012 James Beard award winner, was thus a breath of fresh air in speaking the truth about the enduring and debilitating presence of racism in America. He was right to observe that the conference room was almost all white. Yet, as a white, privileged, man I wonder if the room should be a demographic reflection of the country as Malik Yakini implied.  Or, should it be an accurate reflection of the intended audience of thought leaders in the food sector? It is another, and very important question, whether the organizers (and I am on the James Beard Foundation conference steering committee) did a good enough job finding people of color who are thought leaders in this space.

Struck by his comment that no major grocery chains have stores in Detroit, something so gripping that I repeated it to a few people within hours, I decided I better research this a bit. While he is technically correct, the core of his solid position that we all need to hear and respect and act on seems to be undercut by this assertion. It seems Detroit is not in its entirety a food desert and has sizeable grocery stores – even if not owned by the national chains. While I am sure the situation is evolving, see James Griffioen's 2011 article "Yes, There are Grocery Stores in Detroit" in Urbanophile.  Around a set of issues where great weight is given to the value of everything local, it is ironic that in depicting the great work that has been done in Detroit, locally owned supermarkets are not also considered part of the solution.

Another presenter, and one of the few celebrity chefs of color, Marcus Samuelsson spoke intensely about the work he is doing in Harlem that is an effort to “honor the past, be in the present and hint at the future.” James Beard and Wendell Berry, alongside the work of many others, can help us bridge the gap between farm and table. But looking into the future, who is going to help us answer the powerful question Marcus posed: “How do you train a server who has never dined?”

Far beyond the confines of a fine-dining restaurant, this question resonates from the devastated communities of Detroit to the glimmering office towers around Columbus Circle in New York City. How can we understand an experience we have never had? How can we cultivate empathy?

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. 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. 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 for the two days of the conference. Visit the James Beard Foundation’s website 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 (farmer, poet, writer), Tensie Whelan (Rainforest Alliance), Marcus Samuelsson (Red Rooster), Jenifer Phalen (Edelmen) and others will tussle with these questions.

What is the Modern Corporation?

Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, shared his thoughts this morning at Aspen in discussion with Joe Nocera of the New York Times. His was an impassioned, articulate, unwavering championing of the view that long-term business value is created and protected only by having a focus beyond profits. Not excluding profits – but surely not only profit.

It was a tour de force presentation mixing values and passion with hard-nosed investment and business strategy. Responding to a comment from Joe Nocera about Howard’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.

Autonomous Technology?

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. This brought me back to my days in graduate school at MIT where Langdon Winner wrote a remarkable book, “Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought.”

I questioned Schultz about this (see below) and he corrected himself, but also went on to explain that phones, in fact, do need to collect and send data beyond what users may want in order to provide GPS services and 911 calling capabilities. The question of responsibility and autonomy is central to a raft of questions: from pledges taken by many radical republicans to never raise taxes regardless of circumstance, to defining the limits and expanse of corporate responsibility for supply chain and product recycling, to the rising concern about the impact of using electronic devices on cognitive development of kids.

For video of the entire panel discussion and Q & A session,
visit the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival channel on FORA.tv.
(The exchange above appears at 44:18-45:30.)

(In another discussion with Jim Steyer, founder of CommonSense Media, we discussed what it means to be obsessed with digital devices, whether this was addictive, and what to do about it to maintain a society based around civil human interactions.)

I think a longer discussion with Schmidt would reveal that devices are designed with certain functions to meet customer, regulatory, and corporate needs. But the systems that emerge both intentionally and inadvertently from the conflation and integration of these discrete devices, entwined technical ecosystems, do grow to have biases and embedded values that are very powerful drivers of social values and culture. And who takes responsibility for these systems and their consequences?

Cities of the Future

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? 

Check out the forthcoming The Misfit Economy: Innovation on the Fringe by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips (www.misfiteconomy.com)

Capetown photo by Kyra Maya Phillips, co-author with Alexa Clay of the forthcoming
The Misfit Economy: Innovation on the Fringe

Florida has a fascinating project that seeks to assess economic development not through conventional surveys and data collection that lead to traditional computations of GDP, but rather through satellite imagery and calculations of energy use as derived from light emissions seen from space at night.

While intriguing, Florida acknowledges key shortcomings in his innovative approach. I asked him about these yesterday.

Finding North

Wow. A fabulous new documentary, Finding North, is a masterpiece of video storytelling (and part of the Film Lineup at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival)

Real people, rich context, facts and expertise interspersed without disrupting the flow, wonderful cinematography and music that adds rather than distracts. The struggle, the shame, and the complexity of hunger in America come to life on the screen. Kudos to Directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, and to Participant Media for backing another fabulous and important film.

Watch the trailer below -- and learn more about the film at https://www.participantmedia.com/films/coming_soon/finding_north.php

I really want to like Walmart, but I don’t. At least not yet

I really want to like Walmart, but I don’t – at least not yet. As I explained to C. Douglas McMillon, CEO and President of Walmart International.

Time and Money

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.

But as I articulated the dilemma at the session "Population Challenge" led by Dennis Dimick and Helen Gayle at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, I don’t think the fundamental obstacle to devising solutions to climate change, for example, is a lack of knowledge. We don’t know everything; but we know enough to act. Rather, the core obstacle is our inability to effectively debate and make policy decisions around money.

Unlike the search for the cure for cancer, we actually know what is needed to slow the inexorable path toward climatic catastrophe. We need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. And that will result in a profound shift in our energy and economic world.

While there is money to be made in new energy sectors, so too are there vast trillions to be lost in embedded infrastructure and traditional business models if we mismanage the transition.

The other fundamental impediment to embarking aggressively on this transition is that we don’t have the mental perspective or institutional tools to readily grasp the time scale of what is involved in this effort. Even as we search for new technology for carbon sequestration, we are releasing greenhouse gases in mere years and decades that have been naturally sequestered over hundreds of millions of years through photosynthesis. How do we get our heads around a time scale that spans not just a human life, not even just the existence of our species for 250,000 years but the creating of fossil fuels over hundreds of millions of years?

Farm Bill and Foreign Aid

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.

US foreign economic assistance totals roughly $40 billion annually (less than 1% of the federal budget), while the US Farm Bill currently under debate on Capitol Hill amounts to over $300 billion (of which about two-thirds goes toward nutrition assistance). How we price farm products domestically, the scale of crop subsidies, export supports and a host of other domestic policies embedded in the Farm Bill have an enormous impact of global prices, farming, and global nutrition.

With a stunningly complex web of domestic and global stakeholders, the Farm Bill is an essential component of US international aid policy -- although it often undermines market principles that we cite as essential in supporting agricultural market development elsewhere. As often happens for a host of reasons, we have traditionally divorced domestic farm policy from international agricultural policy. The time has come to fix that mistake.

Discussing the domestic and international implications of the US Farm Bill with Dan Glickman, former Secretary of Agriculture and nine-term member of the US House of Representatives