When you hear university dining, you likely have images in your mind of college students with trays and hand waiting in a line for a meal in a dining hall. You may even think of a food court or a trendy food hall in the cool part of town. But there is so much more happening behind the scenes. Today we will learn about Menus of Change University Research Collaborative, MCURC for short, which is a nationwide network of colleges and universities using campus dining halls as living laboratories for behavior change. The Collaborative's goals are to move people towards healthier, more sustainable and delicious foods using evidence-based research, education and innovation. Our guest today is the Collaborative's co-founder and co-director, Stanford University's Sophie Egan.  Interview Summary I'd like you to tell our listeners a little bit more about the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative. What is it and how does it actually work? The Menus of Change University Research Collaborative was co-founded by the Culinary Institute of America and Stanford University, two divisions there, the Stanford Prevention Research Center and the School of Medicine, and Residential and Dining Enterprises. And that should tell you something is different in our vision, which is that first and foremost, we wanted to break down silos that exist on campuses between experts in food who work in academic realms. So, researchers, faculty who may be studying food, either from one certain discipline or ideally some cases transdisciplinarily, and those who actually feed students, the experts in the dining programs on campus. And Stanford was a good place to co-found this because of this great partnership that already existed between the dining program and between Dr. Christopher Gardner at the School of Medicine. But that model has actually now been replicated. We are at 70 plus institutions, not only across the U.S., but actually increasingly internationally. In addition to fostering that collaboration and breaking down those silos on a given campus, we really wanted to foster collaboration between universities to take what we consider kind of a plug-and-play research protocol. You know, a given design of a study that, as you said, uses campus dining halls as living laboratories and actually replicate research. So that's what we've done. It's been incredibly fun to be part of it from the beginning, and it's been incredibly exciting and impactful because of the approach that we take. We really democratize even what it means to be a researcher, to be involved in research. We have involvement in the collaborative and in research projects from students, faculty, of course, who are critical in their expertise, but also executive chefs, nutrition and sustainability experts. And many other research collaborators who are mission aligned organizations like EAT and REFED and Food for Climate League, who bring their own kind of comparable expertise. And we all work together to shape these living lab studies and then to test those at multiple sites to see if this a more generalizable effect? Or is that something just those west coast schools work for? Or is this only something that, you know, more elite schools where students of a certain demographic really respond? But that's also the beauty is the diversity of the institutions that we have. Geographically, public private, small and large. And we're really brought together by the kind of common language of what's also in our name, Menus of Change. And these are these principles of optimizing both human and planetary health through the food on our plates. And for us really, especially through students, changing that trajectory and cultivating the long term wellbeing of all people in the planet, one student, one meal at a time. Wow. This sounds like a really amazing program. And I love the fact that you're working across different types of universities across the U.S. and even outside. And it does make me believe that the findings that you have are applicable in a broader setting than if one institution does it. I can appreciate the power of the Collaborative. I want to know a little bit more about the impact of the collaborative. What has it been up to this point and in what ways have you seen this collaborative generate new ideas or new research findings? Yes. So, we've got about six peer reviewed publications under our belt with more on the way. Our latest is called the University Procurement and Planetary Health Study led by Dr. Jackie Bertoldo, who was at the Johns Hopkins University and also Stanford Food Institute. But we have a number of academic publications also in the works. And then importantly, we actually have produced 13 operational publications and reports. So, what that illustrates is that we've come to realize that those that are collaborating have different currencies. Publishing in a peer reviewed journal, that's what motivates academic researchers, right? That's what's going to enable them to invest time and resources. Fundamentally, this is primarily something that people do,  in their free time, right? It's a volunteer-based network of over 300 members. But if they're going to work on a project, it has to have some value to their own work. But what has value to those in dining operations is implementable, real, tangible strategies, recommendations, and guidelines that translate 'these are the findings of a certain study into what do you want me to do about it? How do you want me to change my menu, sourcing, the design of the dining hall, the choice architecture, right? The food environment itself. How do you want me to change something in the operational setup?' Maybe, if it has to do with food waste. All of these resources are on our website. We also have three really exciting new projects in the pipeline. So that's our research and publication impact to date. But I should say that importantly, it's much more meaningful to us who take those resources and acts upon them. We know that universities are unique places to conduct research, but our research is not aimed only at the campus dining sector. It's actually offered open source to inform and shape the entire food service industry. We have been thrilled, for example, one of our kind of flagship publications called the Edgy Veggies Toolkit has been implemented and adopted by some of the largest food service companies in the world. Think of Sodexo, Aramark, Compass, who are phenomenal members of the collaborative. Think of corporate dining programs, hospitals, hotels, elsewhere. K 12 environments. And that's, to us, the most important kind of reach is to know that those toolkits, those resources. Edgy Veggies was about how you could simply change the way you describe vegetable-based dishes on a menu, to use more taste focused language, to increase the appeal. We actually demonstrated you can measurably increase selection and consumption of vegetables. So, you can imagine that has applications in public health in countless settings. Even those of us trying to feed our kids. Hey, if I call tonight's broccoli, you know, zesty orange broccoli versus just broccoli, maybe my kid will eat more of it, right? So, it has applications in countless different contexts. Another really big area for us is our collective purchasing power. So, we learned at some point that it's not only that these organizations, the institutions that are part of the collaborative are brought together by a desire to co create research, but it's really that alignment on healthy, sustainable, plant forward future for the food service industry. And so we've actually created this collective impact initiative where it's our combined purchasing power. We've now measurably reduced our combined food-related greenhouse gas emissions. By 24 percent just between 2019 and 2022, and that's across 30 institutions, 90 million pounds of food. I mean, this is a huge outcome for us, and we're not stopping there. We had a goal to reduce by 25 percent by 2030, and now reaching that, we're A, enhancing the target to a 40 percent reduction by 2030. But importantly, we're actually measuring now the uptick in diet quality. So, because human health is equally important to that sustainability part, that University Procurement for Planetary Health study that I mentioned, we're actually able to see that if we are aligning our procurement, meaning what do we buy in the total pounds of an institution and then in the aggregate, right? How plant forward, how healthy and sustainable is that kind of portfolio, that total mix of foods that we're purchasing? And we can actually really increase the diet quality and that kind of average health profile at the same time. So, getting that data layer is really key. And it's the kind of area of impact that has so much momentum and will only continue into the future. Also, lastly, just to say our student engagement numbers have really grown, and that's critically important because educating and cultivating the next generation of food systems leaders. is also core to our work. We have our MCRC Fellows program and that has really grown to have about 30 fellows from a number of institutions all around the country. That's another great way that anyone interested can get involved in. Students are a reason for being. So, it's key that they see these ways to make an impact through their work as well. I am really impressed with the improvements in lowering greenhouse gas emissions or improving sustainability of the dining facilities. How actually did you all do that? I mean, it sounds like you're asking people to report and through that reporting, you see reduction? Can you explain? Coming soon is our 2.0 learnings report that will answer that exact question, but we do have a 2020 version. We call it the early learnings report that shares what it sounds, you know, the early learnings of what works, what doesn't. But what I can tell you can have been kind of the big keys to that success. First, collective target setting. We have been able to welcome institutions that really don't necessarily have the political support, the kind of stakeholder buy in, to make a big public commitment. Some schools do, some institutions do, and that's great. And others, they can sort of take cover, so to speak, in contributing to something where, you know. Their pace of change may be different. And so, it's really kind of contributing to something larger than only their institution, but also having the comfort that it's going to be fits and starts. It may not be linear. It may not be all forward. It might be a little bit backward in terms of the progress trajectory. So that's been really key to having a real diversity of schools where it's not only those that are at the very leading edge. And it's in again, places that aren't as comfortable coming out with a big splashy public wedge. The other big thing that's been key is that we have created a very streamlined framework for data collection. Instead of kind of saying you must submit your data for every single item you've ever purchased, we've on a smaller subset of food categories, where it's easier for them to track, we've created a streamlined and standardized template for them to submit the data, and we also provide individualized reports back to that university. It's confidential. They are the only one who gets it. And that's very motivating because a lot of institutions don't have that resource or that expertise to conduct that analysis to track their emissions year over year. It's almost like getting kind of a free consultancy. But it's what creates that reciprocity where we need their data. We need their collective contribution to the collective effort. And they're getting something out of it because they do have to take the time to find the data and to submit it to us. And then the other thing I think has really been key is, and this was kind of the core concept of collective impact, is continuously iterating. Every year we're listening to those involved in tweaking, you know, how we're asking for the data, how frequently we used to ask for it twice a year, and now it's annually, for example. So always kind of iterating, testing and iterating to make the processes mutually beneficial as possible. And then also keeping the door open for those other institutions to join. It's kind of a cohort effect where we have some institutions that have been part of it from the beginning and others that have only been submitting data for a year and everyone is playing a role. Great. Thank you for sharing that. I want to ask you a little bit more about your other work that you're doing because you're the co-director of the collaborative. You're also the co-director of the Stanford Food Institute. Can you tell our listeners more about that institute and what you're working on there? The Stanford Food Institute was founded by our visionary leader, Dr. Shirley Everett, who's Senior Vice Provost for Residential Dining Enterprises at Stanford. And she really had this vision to bring together an entire community of people to shape a better future of food for the benefit of all humanity and, and really embracing how much food is happening on the Stanford campus. To have the Stanford Food Institute be really this hub and this home for what belovedly we say at Stanford, it's a very decentralized place. There's a ton of entrepreneurial spirit and that's fantastic and should be, but often we don't know what everyone else is doing. So, it's a great opportunity for the Stanford Food Institute to be that magnet and say, come one, come all, whatever student led group, research project, course, event, you know, we want to work with you. So, in practice, what we really do is we work across research, education and innovation to bring together that community and work on this better future. We have a really strong focus on racial equity in the food system, as well as bold climate action. Those are kind of some cross-cutting themes. Our R&DE (research, development, education) core values that have to do with excellence and students first, sustainability, health, deliciousness. All of those things are kind of foundational at the same time. So we actually collaborate with faculty in all seven schools, which is for me super fun because I get to learn about the business dimensions of food and the psychology and social sciences. We have the new Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability that is a very active partner. We have phenomenal partners in the School of Medicine. And when possible, of course, we bring them all together. One really phenomenal culmination of all of those different research efforts is we host something called the Stanford Food Institute Food Systems Symposium, where every year, I like to explain it as a food systems science fair. It's a kind of exhibition style showcase. Researchers get really creative with how they show their work. We had over a hundred researchers at our latest symposium. And it demonstrates that real diversity of disciplines and topics that, that touch food because that's what's so exciting about food. It touches all parts of society. That's one big example. And then we have a number of community partnerships in the Bay Area. One is with the nonprofit Farms to Grow and we're really committed long term to helping support black farmers, not only in California, but sharing our model for increasing supplier diversity and equitable supply chains with other institutions. So those are just two examples, but it's really such a pleasure and an honor to lead the Stanford Food Institute. And as you can likely gather, it's really quite complimentary to the menus of change university research collaborative as well. I am really excited to learn about this symposium. And I got to say, I've worked in land grant institutions before, and I studied at land grant institutions. And so it's interesting to hear of a school like Stanford that is not a land grant. That doesn't have a tradition of agriculture in a narrowly defined sense engaging in this work. I mean, how is it that you're able to find that many people? You said a hundred folks were working on different projects related to the food system. Is it just happening, and people don't necessarily know that it's happening and you're able to bring them together? What's going on there? That's a good question. I don't have a scientific answer. I have a hunch. Anecdotal evidence. We're talking about research here. So, I’ve got to be clear on my methods for answering. I'll tell you, Norbert, so before I was in this role, one of the things I did was I taught a class at Stanford in the School of Design that was all about food systems careers. And it was essentially a stopgap because there was so much interest from undergraduate students in careers in food systems. But they didn't know what on earth they were going to do to make money, to make a living. How were they going to tell their parents I'm going to use all this money you spent on my degree to do what exactly? There also was just not a clear sense of even what the role types were. What's out there? What's possible? How can I make a difference? And so that class that we co-taught for several years. And I say that because that was just an interesting signal of how many students were interested, sort of, you know, poking at the edges. But a lot of them, to be honest, I call it off ramping. They didn't see the path. They just went the path that was more clear cut. They went to law school or they went to med school. And then they said, ‘well, I'll just like cook at home as a side hobby instead. Because maybe my passion for food doesn't need to be my career.’ And so I think what we're really doing with the Food Institute, and there's a number of other kind of similar initiatives, is trying to say, let's try to, you know, address this in a more root cause kind of way. We have something now called the Stanford Food Systems Community, which is just a list serve. And in the fall, we host an event right at the beginning of the year where it's, it's kind of a, again, a come one, come all. We come to the farm, the actual farm at Stanford and have a pizza party and get to know all the different events and things on campus. I think to me, it's, it's a groundswell that's happening nationwide. So, I'm also an author and I've spoken for my books at a lot of universities. And I will often get asked to speak to the career services department. They'll ask me, can you talk about careers in food systems? I've seen this groundswell of interest from students. And then I think a lot of faculty also are really seeing how maybe they study law or a certain dimension. But its kind of either like backs into food or stumbles upon food, maybe. You know, we don't have, like you're saying, we don't have a department in nutrition. I mean, we don't have a specifically food kind of academic framework. But it's more those inherent intersectionalities with food where it's almost in, I think, inescapable to faculty. And then it's really kind of bolstered by how many students are expressing interest. It's something I'm really excited to see where we're in conversations with faculty to do even more to just make students aware of how many classes there are. Because I think sometimes that is the challenge that it's there, but they just don't know how to access it. Right. Thank you for sharing that. And I got to say, I've been taking notes, so I may follow up with you some more later. You've been working with campus food leaders for over a decade now. And you talked about that even in, I guess, in referencing the class as well. What is it about colleges and universities that excite you when it comes to making positive changes in the food system? And you've given me a little bit about that. I'm intrigued to see what else are you seeing? You know, it's surprising. It's the longest I've done something, like a certain one specific role is, is co leading this collaborative. Because I actually co-founded it when I was with the Culinary Institute of America on the other side of the partnership. And I think I have just a deep appreciation, and maybe I like to describe myself as an I realist, idealist mixed with a realist. A realistic view of the potential for universities to be change agents in society. Does it mean they always use that potential? No, but it's there. It's everything from the incubators of new knowledge. They're where new ideas emerge, right? I remember when I first went to the University of Bologna, and it's been there for a thousand years. That's just incredible, right? But it's also a place of growth and expanding your mind for students. Many of these higher education institutions are what's been referred to as anchor institutions. They are huge employers in a region. They are huge thought leaders in a region. They're places of opportunity for all kinds of different things. Whether it's collaborations with private sector and industry, whether it's international kind of tourism and exposure, I mean, so many different possibilities there. And I think the other big thing is that, and I should just say on the anchor institution point, it's the, all that purchasing power too, that I mentioned right there. Very streamlined, fairly agile decision making. I'm sure someone on the podcast is going to say, you think Higher Ed is agile, you know. There's bureaucracy, I know, but I just mean compared to some other food service companies or industries where it's really hard to make changes within campus dining, in particular, you do have a fairly sizable, you know, amount of purchasing power that can have fairly quick, they can be early adopters and they're known as early adopters. The food service industry really looks at what's campus dining doing. That's the tip of the spear. That's a signal of the trends to come. That's a signal of what are going to be the new norms. And the last thing is that we really embrace the fact that students in college, this is this unique period of identity formation. They're figuring out their relationships to food. What is the role that food is going to play in their lives? What do they value? How does that get reflected through food? How does that make them feel? How do they perform academically, physically, et cetera? And of course, for community and belonging, coming together, breaking bread, et cetera. We really love this stat where we've seen that in a given year, we have 4 million meals across the collaborative. But it's not just the meals that these students eat when they're on our campuses. It's the billions of meals they will go on to consume in their collective lifetimes, and when they go on to be decision makers and parents and in the other future realms. And again, that shaping formative opportunity. There are many reasons, I guess, that I've been motivated and I think the potential is still just tremendous. I'm excited for all that's ahead. This is great. And I love the idea and the recognition that this is this formative time for students. That their taste, which may have been shaped, of course, from home, but are being transformed in the dining halls. The place where they're learning to step out and make decisions about food in a way that they couldn't even in high school. I really appreciate this idea and this opportunity. And I appreciate the sort of seriousness that you take at approaching this issue. I have to say, as someone who's related to or connected to a policy center, I am intrigued to think about what kind of policy initiatives, federal, state, even university, do you see coming out of the work of the collaborative? Well, you know, it's really exciting when there is, again, I mentioned that our schools are both public and private, right? So, policy has so many opportunities to kind of shape, again, that social or political will that the decision makers administrators, dining directors may have to pursue something. So, you know, the University of California has been part of the collaborative, most of their campuses have been part for a very long time. And it just is a good example, I think to me, where in that state, there is so much support from the governor's office for farm to fork, local procurement, direct procurement, supplier diversity, regenerative agriculture, climate friendly and plant forward meals in public schools, in K 12. It's that sort of enabling environment, I think, that policy can create and also learn from. So, if it sees constellation of institutions, making a bold move or all aligning on the same kind of, you know, targets or metrics, that can give them the wind at their backs to pass something that maybe applies to all publicly run institutions. Or all food vendors in their state. For example, I would love to see more policy efforts on data and reporting. As I shared with you about collective impact, we're really proud of what we've done, but this is all voluntary, right? We're just choosing to measure this and hold ourselves accountable and keep striving. But I think at some point if it becomes required, you could have more resources in these institutions being brought to do that hard work that is required. I mean, it's not only, you know, sharing with us, but then it's analyzing your menu. What were the strategies that led to that biggest reduction? How did the student feedback go? Working with suppliers is a huge area that Stanford's really excited to have begun, but it takes time. It's, and we need more support, more capacity to do that. I could envision that if there were more requirements kind of coming from policy for some of that tracking and disclosing. And an example that gives me reason to think that's possible is again in California. Something called SB 1383 requires Institutions like ours and all others to disclose their food donation amounts. And I think that's a really interesting example again of measuring something. Bring a measurement requirement from policy to something that maybe everyone's already been doing because it was just best practice, or something that they wanted to know for themselves again that more voluntary. I think there's a lot of opportunities to do more of that. And I would love to see more of those state and regional policies, but also some of these kind of best practices emerge from some of these states and counties that become perhaps nationwide. You know the old saying, if you don't measure it, you can't change it because you don't know. And I love the fact that the collaborative sees itself as a place to prototype, to figure out how do we collect these data. How do we make it less burdensome? Because if you can figure those things out, then I can imagine allowing others to replicate that. This is a great test bed for what policies could look like by the work that you all are doing, it sounds like. And I think that's a really important point because I think the fear would be that policies get created in a vacuum, right? Where you just say, we're going to require you to disclose XYZ crazy detailed things that either an entity doesn't know how to get, can't get, or it costs them thousands and thousands of dollars to collect, or something along those lines. And so, really marrying feasibility, sort of what measurement tools exist how is the kind of dynamic between humans in your environments and those technology tools? I mean, food waste measurement right now is an area that we're really focusing on that because AI and there's a huge opportunity to kind of reduce the burden on staff. But so far, it's been difficult for pretty much every food service operation, including campuses, to get really high-quality food waste data. Even though they may have these tools. And it often has to do with how difficult, how much time it requires staff. I think it's really key that policymakers really, yeah, work with institutions like ours. We love to be, as you said, that kind of prototyping place to find the right balance of rigor and frequency and volume of data with, again, kind of labor and financial constraints and operational realities. And for us, it's also critically important to keep in mind the student experience. How do we not do so many research projects in a four walled space so that we forget this is their home. This is where students eat and live every day. It can't only be about us getting as much data as possible, of course. It's just really accounting for all those variables in the equation. I appreciate this. And I swear, Sophie, we could talk forever. Let me ask you one last question. And I think this is a good place for us to come to an end. What are the different ways people can get involved in the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative? Excellent. Well, please do. So first, the easiest thing is just check out our website. Everything that we create is open source. As I mentioned, it for sure can be applied in university settings, but it pretty much across the board can be applied in a number of other settings. Food service, for sure, but also there's a lot of, whether it's prepared foods at retails, other settings in general. Check out moccollaborative. org in particular, our resources and research. The other way is if you're affiliated with an institution, if you're an academic researcher, and you can get in touch with us to find out about. Or you can become what we call a member institution where dining services and at least one academic researcher are involved. Then you're actually part of all that data collection kind of effort. I think the other biggest area is if you have students who are interested, if once you become a member institution, as I mentioned, there's tons of opportunities to get involved in shaping research. But also in the educational side, which is through our MCRC student fellows program. So those would be some of the big ones, and we always love feedback, too. Tell us how you're utilizing the resources and how we can continue to identify gaps in the research agenda that we are uniquely positioned to help fill. BIO Sophie Egan, MPH is the Director of the Stanford Food Institute and Sustainable Food Systems at R&DE Stanford Dining, Hospitality & Auxiliaries, where she is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative. She is also the author of How to Be a Conscious Eater (Workman, 2020)—named one of Bon Appétit’s “Favorite New Books for Climate-Friendly Cooking and Life”—and the founder of Full Table Solutions, a consulting practice that’s a catalyst for food systems transformation. An internationally recognized leader at the intersection of food, health, and climate, Sophie is also a contributor to The New York Times Health section and Director of Strategy for Food for Climate League. Previously, Sophie served as the Director of Health and Sustainability Leadership/Editorial Director for The Culinary Institute of America’s Strategic Initiatives Group. Sophie’s writing has been featured in The Washington Post, TIME, Parents, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, WIRED, EatingWell, Edible San Francisco, FoodTank, and Sunset. She is a member of the Food System 6 Advisory Board, James Beard Foundation Sustainability Advisory Council, and the Food Tank Academic Working Group. She holds a BA with honors in history from Stanford University; an MPH with a focus on health and social behavior from UC Berkeley; and a certificate from the Harvard Executive Education in Sustainability Leadership program.

Today we discuss a new and provocatively titled book written by Southwestern Law School professor Andrea Freeman, an expert on issues of race, food policy, and health from both legal and policy perspectives. The book's title, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground, the Politics of Food in the United States from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, has been called the first and definitive history of the use of food in the United States law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control. Freeman argues that the U. S. food law and policy process has both created and maintained racial and social inequity. She documents governmental policies from colonization to slavery; to the commodities supplied to Native American reservations. She argues that the long-standing alliance between government and the food industry has produced racial health disparities to this day. Interview Summary Let's talk about the title of your book. What are you trying to communicate? So 'ruin their crops on the ground' is a paraphrase of what George Washington ordered his troops to do, to try to displace Indigenous people and take over their land. That's a pretty powerful image to think about that. So, in your book, you use the term food oppression. Can you explain what you mean? Yes. So I originally started writing about food oppression as the alliance between corporations, the food and agricultural industries, and the government that [00:02:00] create stark health disparities on a racial basis, sometimes gender and class. And as I've come through thinking about this over the years, I'm also using it to describe the way that food has always been used as a tool of subordination by the U.S. Government in history. An interaction between the industry and government isn't inherently oppressive. How does it come to be that way? I mean, it could be good, good for the public, it could be bad, but why does it, how does it become oppressive?​ Yeah, I agree that the problem with the food industry is that the desire to make profits is in conflict with the nutritional needs of people that the U.S., Government programs focus on nutrition are supposed to be serving. Let's go back to some of the earlier times. You've written about the role that food played in slavery. Could you explain? Absolutely. So, enslavers were very careful about the portions and the type of food that they gave to people. the people that they enslaved. And they would write pamphlets and advise each other. Hoping to find a balance to give enslaved people enough food to be able to work and be alive, but not enough to give them the energy to revolt or perform acts of resistance that they inevitably did. And then food was used to create hierarchies within enslaved peoples. It was used to, I don't know, take away pleasure, really, from life to oppress people in so many ways. And so, not just from the content of the food, but even the way that food was delivered. So, instead of eating on plates, food might be poured into a pig trough or scattered on the ground, right? There are so many ways that enslavers used food to try to degrade and subordinate people through either the portions or the content or the delivery. Food is such a fundamental and kind of elementary form of reinforcement. You could imagine it being used to punish particular individuals and reward others. Absolutely. And the law backed up the way that enslavers used food. And even when enslaved people wanted to grow their own food, and perhaps sell it to gain some advantage, the law prevented that. Enslavers might just take over those gardens. Steal the food. Use it for their own purposes. That was all perfectly legal. And the law tried to protect other enslavers from having enslaved people come and steal their food by having some laws in place that said, you must give adequate provisions, which looked like something that might protect enslaved people, but in fact was only to protect other enslavers. Going back to the title of your book, it makes reference to the Trail of Tears. And people have highly varying levels of knowledge of what the Trail of Tears refers to. In North Carolina, it's a really important and tragic part of the state's history for the native individuals living in the western part of the state. But could you tell us more about how food figured into this, what it was and how food figured in? Of course. So the United States wanted the land that Indigenous people were living on. And they designated a part of the country that covers Oklahoma and some states around there and called it the Indian Country or Indian Territory. And to try to force indigenous people to move to that land and to make a journey across the country that was so dangerous, and ended up killing maybe half of the people who made that journey, they destroyed the food sources of people. They had no choice at all. They were starving. They either had to go or die there with no food. And food played into the promises that were made by the United States government of rations that would be given along the way and when people arrived. However, in reality, the rations were gone by the time many people arrived. Or they were bad meat or they were just inedible. And so, they caused not only people to move, but then once they arrived, caused many more deaths. Either along the way or once they were there. A lot of it was unfamiliar food that couldn't be cooked or digested. Food played a major role in the Trail of Tears and what happened both before and after that journey. And the quality of the land for agriculture that they were forced to settle on was part of the picture too, wasn't it?  Yes. Some of it was good and some of it was absolutely terrible. And people were given no choice about where they were going to end up. Let's fast forward to more current times. The U. S. Department of Agriculture has created several very important nutrition programs with the stated aim of improving nutrition. But you've raised some concerns. Please tell us why? Yes. If we just think about that journey that began with the Trail of Tears and with George Washington's order. And then the role that food rations have played in the relationship between the United States and Indigenous people. The rations that were first introduced in trying to force that move, then played a role in many elements of this policy. For example, rations were taken away if parents would not give up their children to the federal Indian boarding schools. They were taken away as a punishment if Indigenous people engage in their own cultural and kinship practices under the Code of Indian Offences. And so, rations played a huge role, and they continue to do so. They have now transformed into what is the food distribution program for Indian reservations. Which is another system whereby the United States is providing food to Indigenous people who are living on reservations, do not have access to many food sources at all, and so, are in need of nutrition. But the contents of the food that are given out through this program don't reflect the needs of the people who are receiving it. They reflect the needs of the agricultural industries and the surpluses that the USDA is responsible for getting rid of because of federal subsidies through the Farm Bill. You've written as well about food marketing. Tell us what your thoughts are on that? Food marketing is so important because it really defines in our society who eats what. It tells us a story that is rife with racial stereotypes and kind of propaganda about food. And it also determines the food landscape in many ways. When I think about race and marketing, marketing first of food really just employed a lot of racist tropes. Because marketing was directed only to white people. And, you know, racism was something that sold. We've seen that change and become more subtle over the years to the present where we even see food marketing taking on anti-racism as a form of what's called woke washing, to try to gain consumer dollars by adopting a certain political position. The issue of who is targeted by marketing is enormously interesting, complex, and highly important. I'm glad to see you addressing that in your book. Let me ask one final question before we wrap up. How is the U. S. Constitution involved in this? I have a theory as a constitutional law professor that the way that the United States has dealt with food in a way that creates racially disparate outcomes violates both the 13th amendment and the 14th amendment. So, let me explain. The 13th Amendment says that anything that comes out of slavery as a vestige, or a badge or a marker of slavery is not allowed. And that means that policies that began back then, that continued today with discriminatory harm are prohibited under the13th Amendment. I talked a little bit about how during slavery food was used to oppress and subordinate. And that caused health problems. Very racially disparate health problems where enslaved people suffered from illnesses and conditions and deaths associated with food and malnutrition at much higher rates than white people. That was explained away by constitution and genetics, but that was all lies. In the present, we still have those disparities and they're still due to deliberate policies that create this oppression, the food oppression that I talked about in the beginning. The 13th amendment should not allow that kind of food discrimination in the same way that it doesn't allow housing discrimination. Now, under the 14th amendment, all people should be treated equally by the government. But what we have is food policy that treats people differently based on their race. In the case of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), that's quite clear. In some other cases, like public school lunches, you have to kind of take a step back to understand how there are racially disparate effects. But the same commodities that the USDA is responsible for getting rid of, that they do through the Indian reservation program are being sent to schools. And these are public schools where in many districts, there are many more Black, Latina, indigenous students than white students. For example, where I am in LA, that's 94 percent of the public-school population. And the government is using that program to get rid of very unhealthy food that is making kids who go to public schools sick. And that is unequal treatment under the law. It should violate the 14th Amendment. You know, I'm not an expert on constitutional law, but this is the first time I've heard this argument made and it's really an interesting one. Do you think there would be a day when we would see legal action based on this theory? I think it's possible. I don't think that legal action would be successful in our present moment of jurisprudence. But I think that framing is really important for people to think about and to understand what is happening. And I think that sometimes thinking about things as unconstitutional can provoke social action. Social movement. It can allow people to think about injustice in a certain way that creates resistance. So, I think it's important, even if we can't bring a case today, on that basis. BIO Andrea Freeman is a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. She is a national and international expert on the intersections between critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit. She is the author of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan 2024) and Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice (Stanford University Press 2019), in addition to book chapters, law review articles, and op-eds. Skimmed is currently in development for a documentary with Topic Pictures. Her work has been featured in publications including the Washington Post, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Huffington Post, USA Today, The Root, Yahoo! News, The Atlantic, NPR Shots Blog, Pacific Standard, The Conversation, Medium, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and National Library of Medicine, and she has done interviews with news outlets and programs including CBS News, PBS News Hour, The Takeaway, Here & Now, Point of Origin, Newstalk Irish National Radio, Heritage Radio Network, The Electorette, Hawaii Public Radio. She studied food inequality in the UK as the 2020-21 Fulbright King's College London U.S. Scholar.

Empowering Women in AgriFood Tech: A Conversation with Amy Wu of From Farms to Incubators - In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, host Norbert Wilson speaks with Amy Wu, the creator and content director of From Farms to Incubators. Amy shares her inspiring journey in highlighting and supporting women, particularly women of color, in the agri-food tech industry. Learn about the origins of her groundbreaking documentary and book, her vision for a vibrant community of women innovators, and the crucial role of education, mentorship, and policy in advancing women's roles in this sector. Interview Summary I have a great set of questions for you. So, the first thing, could you just tell our listeners a little bit more about From Farms to Incubators? Sure. From Farms to Incubators is a special initiative and project that tells the stories of women in this fast-growing field known as ag tech, sometimes interchangeably used as Agri food tech as well. The mission of it is really to get more women involved in ag tech through storytelling, through resources, and also through education and training. I also would describe it as a multimedia content platform. I actually came to this as a journalist and as a storyteller that uses storytelling to amplify the voices of women leaders and entrepreneurs in this field. It's also a documentary and a book and also a website where we archive their stories and their biographies as well. Thanks for that overview, and you just talked about the book and the documentary From Farms to Incubators: women innovators revolutionizing how our food is grown, which uses storytelling to highlight women innovators and how women innovators in the Agri food tech are doing their best. But there's also a movement and the community and this multimedia platform. Why did you expand from the book and documentary into this larger network? That's a really good question. Briefly, as some context, I kind of fell into this project. It was a bit of serendipity. I was a reporter in Salinas, California, which is the vegetable salad bowl of the world. Ag is a huge industry, a 10 billion industry. And I was covering government and agriculture. And I observed that there were not a lot of women at the helm of the table, whether it be at farms or also in this growing field of ag tech as well. So it started off as a documentary. I got a grant from the International Center for Journalists, and then ultimately I got another grant from the International Media Women's Foundation to do a short documentary to profile three women who are entrepreneurs in ag tech. It was great. It was at the time in 2016, which now was ages ago, I guess. It was really hard to find women in ag, in this field of ag tech, women creating the innovations to tackle some of the biggest challenges that farmers are facing, especially under climate change. So, it could have ended there because the documentary turned out to be very, very well received. It's screened at hundreds of places, and I would have panels and discussions and the women would look at each other like, 'my gosh, I didn't know there were other women doing this too. Can you connect us? We'd love to convene further.' And then educators, community leaders, agribusinesses, investors just didn't know they existed as well. So, what happened was the stories kind of multiplied and multiplied as the more that I collected them. And then I decided to put it into a book profiling about 30 women in this growing field. And to answer your question, Norbert, why is it continuing is that I saw a real need for women to have a community, women in agriculture and innovation and food systems to have a community to connect with one another, to potentially build friendship, build collaboration, build partnership, creating a collective vision sometimes and a place for them. I didn't plan on it. So, I guess the storytelling connects them. We've also have resources like a database that connects them and the goal is really so that they can have a community where they can build more. They can either build out their own startups. They can build their careers, build their professions. And then it kind of grew more legs. Now we're also extending into the area of education and training to try to get younger women, young people, youth. To see that agriculture, hey, may not be traditionally sexy. I mean, tractors and overalls are still what a lot of people think about it, but there are so many other opportunities in the food system for young people as well, especially since we all have to eat. So, how are farmers going to be producing the food for 10 billion people in 2050, right? Who's going to produce the food? How are we going to do it? Especially under the auspices of climate change, the weather's getting crazier and crazier. That's sort of why it has expanded from the stories all the way to what it is today. This is a great story and I would love to hear a little bit more about some of the women and their innovations. And if I may, I would like for you to actually even explain a little bit about what you mean by the ag food tech or Agri food tech as you're talking about these women. Broadly defined, is any kind of innovation that makes it easier, frankly, for farmers to do their work, to grow more efficiently, and to also increase [00:06:00] their yield. I can give some examples of what innovation is. Blockchain addresses food safety, really. It traces everything from the seed to all the way on the shelf, right? So if there's any safety issues, it's used to trace back, where did that seed come from? Where was it grown? What field was it in? And that really helps everybody in the food systems a lot more, right? We have sensors connected with drones. I forgot to mention robotics as well, which is a fast-growing area of ag tech. Everything from self-driving tractors to laser scarecrows to another level of robots that are picking specific kinds of fruits and vegetables that's tackling labor challenges. I don't foresee that ag tech necessarily is a replacement by the way of people. It's actually offering more opportunities because we need people who are very knowledgeable that kind of innovation. And then you also asked a bit about the stories of the women in ag tech, for example, in the film and in the book and so forth. Soil sampling is a fast-growing area of ag tech. There's the story that I have in the book and also in the movie of two young women who are Stanford PhD graduates. Who created a soil testing kit that makes it easy for farmers to just test their soil for diseases, for pests, and soil testing is traditionally, you know, very, very expensive for most farmers actually. Not easy for farmers to get access to it and to get the data, but the soil testing kit that they created makes it a lot easier for farmers, small farmers even, to access it. And why is that important is because the more knowledge, the more data that, and analytics that farmers can get, the more that they can make smart decisions about how much to fertilize, how much to irrigate. And that connects with the yield and their success. You know, another company that I can think about, another amazing woman. I just like her story, the story of AgTools and the story of Martha Montoya, who was actually an award-winning cartoonist. And she doesn't come from agriculture at all, and that's actually something that I want to highlight is a lot of these women are not farmers and don't come from agriculture. But she was a award winning cartoonist. I believe she was also a librarian and she fell into the food industry, and saw a need for having more data, offering more data and analytics to farmers. She created a system a little bit like a Bloomberg for farmers, where they can get real time data immediately on their phones, on their watches, so that they can get second by second data to make decisions on specific crops. Those are a couple of the stories that are in the book, but really what I want to highlight is that all of the innovation that they are creating addresses some of the biggest challenges that farmers are facing, whether it be labor issues,lack of water, some areas of our country are becoming more wet, others are becoming more dry, drones that are actually doing the irrigation now or drones taking photos to give more data to farmers as well on what is their land look like. You know, it could also be human resources related as well to manage staff. So mobile apps to manage staff on cattle farms. I mean, how big are the cattle farms sometimes, you know, 50,000 acres. So, it's really to save money and to create efficiency for farmers. If farmers are able to do their work more efficiently, they're able to generate greater profits, but it also allows for food prices not to rise. This has really big implications. Thank you for sharing those stories. And I love hearing about some of the individuals, but here's the question. I mean, why focus on women? What's important about what women contribute to this? And also, why are you also considering race as an important lens in this sector? Well, I would say, why not women? Because women have already been contributing to the global food system, whether in the production end or the decision makers at the head of the dinner table for thousands of thousands of years, arguably. So what I discovered is that their stories, their contributions, existing contributions were not being celebrated and were not being amplified. And I actually discovered that a lot of the women that I connected with were a bit shy about even telling their story and sharing it like kind of like, 'what is my contribution?' And I'm like, 'well, why aren't you sharing your story more?' So the goal of it really is to document and celebrate their contributions, but also to inspire. As I said, young women, next generation, all of us have daughters, nieces, granddaughters, you know, and then future generations to consider opportunities in a field where we need people. We need people who are smart and you don't have to be from a generation of farmers. You could be in science, engineering, technology, and math. You could just be passionate about it and you could be in the field. So that's the first aspect of it. And in terms of the lens of gender and race, there are not enough women in terms of just the startups in ag tech right now, only 2 percent of the billions of dollars being invested in ag tech startups. Only 2 percent are going into women led companies. It is very, very little. It is a problem that is deep rooted. And it starts with [00:12:00] funding. One problem is where is the funding coming from. Venture capitalists, traditional avenues of funding, where it is traditionally male dominated. So, there are many studies that show that investors will invest in companies where they connect with those who are leading the companies, right? So similar gender, similar backgrounds, similar stories. So, we're really looking to have a paradigm shift and move the needle of sorts and say that if there are more investors, there are more board members who are from a diversity backgrounds, then there will be more funding for women and those who are traditionally not leading agriculture, not in the leadership positions, not in the decision-making roles, right? There is a problem. There is a, what is a grass ceiling, not just glass ceiling, but grass ceiling. I hear you. I hear you. Now this is really fascinating. I know from colleagues who are in agriculture that there is this demand for more agricultural workers throughout the Agri food system. And if there is a demand, we're saying that our colleges that produce the potential workers aren't meeting those demands. One of the ways we can see that change is by having more women and more people of color join in. And so, this is a critical thing. And I would imagine also the experiences that people bring may be a critical part of coming up with new innovations. Diversity can do that. This is exciting that you're exploring this. I love what you're saying Norbert. I know I wanted to touch upon that about what you just noted is that it's also to create a pipeline, right? Education training is just so critical. And it makes me so happy to see that there are more and more programs at universities and colleges that are addressing programs in food systems, in agriculture, and increasingly in ag tech. So, whether it be courses or programs or certificates or eventually minors and majors, developing the pipeline of talent is really important and having mentors and mentees, which is something that now we're working on. This fall we'll have launched a menteeship program for women and for young people interested in ag tech and the first collaborator is the UC Merced in California. So, thanks for bringing that up. We have a couple of young people ready at the starting gates. Really excited. I will say just on a personal note, I was active in 4 H for most of my youth and that's the way I got involved in agriculture. So, touching or reaching out to folks in their youth is critical to get them excited and help them to make the connection so that they can do that work further. I'm glad to hear this work. In your view, what are some of the ongoing challenges and opportunities that women face in the ag tech sector or the Agri food sector? What are some of the things you're observing? Well, a continued challenge is having a place at the table, meaning at the leadership and decision-making level. And actually, as I noted earlier, the access to funding and not just the money, but the access to resources, meaning could be legal operational. Just how to get their startups or get their ideas out there. One example that I'm seeing that's again positive is that there's a growing number of incubators and accelerators specifically in food tech or ag tech that are is actually looking for candidates who are women or who are from underrepresented communities. The first thing is that they have a great innovation, of course, but the next thing that the incubators and accelerators are looking for is to have a diversity of perspectives. And to have representation, so seeing a lot more of that, whether it be. Individual accelerators, or even once at the university, right? Universities and colleges and the governmental level. The other challenge is access to farmers and connecting them with the farmers themselves. Cause farmers are very, very busy and that's highlighted and bolded. Increasingly just dealing with this chess game that's very hard to play with the weather, but also with their own resources. It's expensive being a farmer, equipment, labor. They don't often have the time, frankly, to beta test some of the innovations coming out. So how best to connect innovators with the farmers and to have them communicate with each other: like this is the innovation. This is how it's going to help your problem. Educating the farmers and allowing them to see that this is how it's going to address the problem that I have. So, the two are still kind of separate and access to each other is still, I would say, a major challenge. But right now, some of the solutions are, as I've noted, networking at conferences and convenings. Also, under the grant programs sometimes under the National Science Foundation or USDA, they are allowing more collaborative initiatives where you have educators, where you have policy, where you have the innovators, where you have the young people. Increasingly, seeing more and more of those kinds of projects and initiatives happen. So hopefully everybody will have a seat at the table and that would help women out a lot in the field as well. Awesome. Thank you for sharing those. And I love the fact that you're looking at not just identifying issues, but also trying to find ways of connecting folks to help overcome those challenges that women and women of color are facing in the marketplace. And it's the connections that are really critical. I appreciate you highlighting that. So, what is your ideal vision? Oh, one more thing I forgot to note is that in terms of connecting, there's also a database - a women in Agri food tech database, and I, and at least four or five other women in the field have been working on for at least four or five years now. We now have more than a thousand members. It's an open-source database where you can click on a form, put your name there and information takes a few minutes and then you're added to this database where the women can be connected to each other as well. So that's another resource. Yeah. And I mean, even just having peer mentors, not just mentors who are above you and they've like solved all the problems, but having people to go along with you as you're developing and as they are developing can be a critical part. I know as an academic, that's important for me and has been important for me. And I can imagine the same is true in this space as well. So, I'm so grateful to hear about this work. Yeah. What is your ideal vision for women in Agri food tech in the next, say, five years? And how will the digital network for from farms to incubators play a role in achieving that goal or those goals? So, my dream - it always starts, I think, in the dreaming phase and then connecting that with also resources along the way. But if I could wave my magic wand, I would say that. We would have a lot more women in leadership and thought decision making positions in ag tech to the point where maybe we won't even need something like From Farms to Incubators anymore because they'll be already equal. The stories will be out there. So, it might be questionable as to why we have a special subgroup or network for this now. How to get to that vision, I think is the three components of increasingly having more stories, and the women tell their stories at public outreach. You know, it could be at conferences, it could be in their own communities, sharing their story out to the community of farmers, of local government, of schools, local schools and colleges and universities, gardening clubs. The second component is education and training, building a pipeline. A vision that I have is actually having a campus. A virtual, and also in-person campus where women, especially from women in underprivileged communities will have the opportunity to have training and to be connected with mentors and the rock stars in the ag tech and Agri food tech field. Where they will also be able to have a project and initiative and test it out and have something to add to their portfolio. To have classes and people who are teaching those courses as well, ultimately. And then also to just build up a hub of resources. Like I mentioned the database. I mentioned that we'd like to extend it to having resources where folks can easily access internships, fellowships, granteeships, where they can be connected to funding. If they need help with legal, HR, just all components of everything that's needed to have a successful organization. And it doesn't have to just be their own startup. It could be a job database of where we have larger organizations and companies that are building up their own ag innovation or food innovation center as well. So that is the vision. It's a big vision. It's a big dream. So we're going to have to kind of break it down into components. But I think taking it step by step is the way to go kind of like climbing Everest or doing a long distance swim. Yes, I can see where you're trying to go in this vision and I'm interested to know what, if any role policy could play and help advance that vision. Yeah, so what role could policy play in advancing this vision? Currently, when it comes to diversity inclusion in the ag tech field or even in agriculture, there is somewhat a lack of policy in a way. But then also with individual organizations and corporations, obviously, there is the movement of diversity inclusion. But also, I think it's very much with the hiring practices with HR. I think it's up to individual organizations, whether they be small, larger ones, governmental, to look at their own hiring practices. To look at who they are, how are they crafting the language when they look for a job, when they look at their leadership team, are there ways to further diversify it and when it comes to, gender, ethnicities, people who come from a rural area, urban. I mean, we all come with, from a diversity of perspectives and stories. I think a lot of it will come down to hiring practices and advancing this vision and with the individuals who are already working at those organizations to be more thoughtful and conscious about giving those who don't have a place at the table, a place and a voice at the table, giving everybody a chance. Because we have some amazingly talented and knowledgeable people who just traditionally in agriculture don't have families and generations who come from an ag background. But they do come with so much that they could offer. I would say that those are a couple of examples of that as well. And maybe, more discussion about policy is really needed on a larger level when it comes to farmers, when it comes to government leaders, when it comes to innovation leaders as well. And when it comes to educators and schools. I think the more the merrier when it comes to bringing folks at the table to open it up for discussion on solutions. I appreciate this. And, this idea of not just welcoming people so that they get in the door, but also creating change. Environments and spaces where people are actually welcomed once they're there. That it becomes a place where folks can be themselves and bring all of who they are to the work that they're doing. This is critical. Yes, absolutely. I want to touch upon that. My own story is I don't have an agricultural background myself. But when I first , landed in a place like Salinas, very much sort of an outsider because I'm not from there anyway, but also not in agriculture and then being a woman and being, you know, a Chinese American woman too, you know, I, I did feel that there was a challenge to kind of break into certain circles and to be welcome. Even despite my passion and enthusiasm, there was a little bit like, 'what is she? Why? Why? What? She, she doesn't know anything.' But I felt like it was the people who in the beginning, it was just a couple of people who were like, 'Hey, this is somebody who really wants to tell the story of what we're doing. Give her a chance.' You know, having advocates, frontline advocates made a huge difference. So that's what I'm hoping for, more frontline advocates. Amy, I want to pick up on a personal story out of this. I did my graduate training out at UC Davis, at University of California, Davis. And I worked on dairy policy, which I do not have a dairy background. And it was great to have a mentor who actually helped me. Who introduced me to a number of folks and working through extension and the California Department of Food and Ag. Folks made space for me, and they understood that I was interested in this particular policy and trying to understand what it meant. And I actually got to learn so much. It was because people just said, okay, we'll give you a try. And I did the best I could. I'm grateful for that. Creating these spaces is not hard. It's not impossible. It can be done. I'm really appreciative of your efforts to keep furthering that story. I love that story. And indeed Norbert it's like what you said, creating the space and even, even in the beginning and just having a couple of folks just to make space. And then I think the space is going to grow from there. I fully agree. I've got one last question for you. And it's, sort of related to the vision, but just also thinking long term. What impact do you hope your work will ultimately have on society. I hope that my work will create a bit of a shift ultimately. I mean, that's a rather large goal, but it's not just myself. As this project has grown and extended and expanded. It's really a joint team effort. I mean, along this journey, I've met folks who are mission aligned. And they also see the value in this, and they believe in something similar. Whether it be that they contribute their story, whether it be that they help write the stories, whether it be that they come be a guest speaker, and they share their career, and then they end up connecting with the younger person, every person counts in this. In making a shift. And it might take generations to completely have a paradigm shift, but I think that just moving the needle a bit is ultimately the goal, certainly. And in terms of the bigger picture of things, I'm hoping that it will continue to spark a discussion and ongoing conversation about the importance and the value of bringing different voices and people who traditionally were not given a space at the table when it comes to the food systems and agriculture. But who brings so much talent, so much to the table already. How we can make greater space for them as well, and how we can incorporate their talent and create a better food system for everybody. We all eat and we're looking at 10 billion people in 2050. So, looking at the people who are making those contributions and telling their stories and especially for those who traditionally have not had their voices told, I think is really, really important. I just keep the fire going, I guess. BIO Amy Wu is an award-winning writer for the women’s Ag and Agtech movement. She is the creator and chief content director of From Farms to Incubators, a multimedia platform that uses documentary, video, photography, and the written word to tell the stories of women leaders and innovators in Agtech. It has a mission of highlighting women in food, farming, and farmtech, especially women of color. From Farms to Incubators includes a documentary and a book that spotlights women leaders in Ag and Agtech. The documentary and stories have been screened and presented at SXSW and Techonomy. The initiative was awarded grants from the International Center for Journalists and International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G. Buffett Fund. Amy was named on Worth magazine’s “Groundbreakers 2020 list of 50 Women Changing the World” list. Since 2018 she has served as the communications manager at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub in Hurley NY where she runs the website, digital newsletter, and social media. Prior to starting From Farms to Incubators, Amy spent over two decades as an investigative reporter at media outlets including the USA Today Network where she reported on agriculture and Agtech for The Salinas Californian. She’s also worked at Time magazine, The Deal and contributed to The New York Times, The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history from New York University, and master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

In today's discussion, we will explore the application of debt relief to large investments in environmental sustainability, which can also support local development, including more resilient food systems. This is particularly timely, given the juxtaposition of enormous debt burdens with increasing environmental commitments by developing countries. Debt for relief swaps, such as financial forgiveness for cash strapped countries if they invest those funds to support global environmental goods, have been around since the 1980s. However, they haven't achieved their full economic or environmental potential, says Duke University Economic and Environmental Policy Professor Alex Pfaff. Smart reforms to improve debt relief programs can allow nations to help themselves and fulfill commitments to preserve the planet. Pfaff and colleagues described needed reforms in a recent analysis in a policy forum for the journal Science, also summarized in Foreign Policy magazine. His co-authors are sustainability expert Elizabeth Losos and conservation professor Stuart Pimm from Duke University. They note that global society has now learned lessons, not only from past debt for nature swaps, but also decades of evaluation of climate change of environmental and development policies. Interview Summary I have to say, having read particularly the Science piece, it is clear and it's very straightforward and accessible. But the other thing, it's hopeful. And I think in this moment of climate concerns, it's great to know that there's some ways to possibly move forward. I'd love to hear some more about this. If you don't mind, would you just describe a debt for nature swap? I gave a little bit, but I'd love to hear your consideration of it. What you said is right. And I'll just agree with you first that we're definitely in a time when doing the right things could help a lot. One of my motivations is a little bit of fear in there, which is, if we don't take the opportunity we look back later and regret it. Which is one of the reasons why we're out there trying to bother people to do what we think would be more effective. So, coming to the definition. A debt for nature swap, as you said is like it sounds. It's an agreement to forgive debt that countries owe on one condition - that they invest part of that money in some form of investment in nature. It's often been conservation. That was often thought of in terms of species or biodiversity at the time. But nowadays that would include thinking about storing carbon because of climate concerns, and then linking to your use of the term resilience in agriculture - for sure this also could be thinking about a climate adaptation. Can you give us some examples of countries that have done this? What does this look like on the ground? Yes, and the history, as you say, is that it started in the 1980s. And we really want to tip our cap to Tom Lovejoy who invented this at a time when, again, as you laid out, but it, at that time, was also true. There was huge amounts of debt and huge concerns about conservation, and it was a pretty simple idea. That it is a potential source of money to invest where the countries can help themselves, as you said, by getting rid of really quite crippling debt - tremendous amounts of interest are being paid on those debts - but also be helping the globe by investing in nature. So countries recently done, for instance, Ecuador has done a very big one recently. Belize has done one that's quite well spoken of. Those are different sized countries, different sized problems, which, as you can imagine from your own work, the institutions matter a lot. But there's been a long string and a long history of willingness to try. And I guess the last thing is that willingness started to go down when, as you summarized, it wasn't really working for the debtors who weren't really getting that much relief in their point of view for a lot of time bargaining. And it wasn't really working perhaps for nature. It wasn't having necessarily the impacts that one might have hoped. So, I think the question now is can we reform them? Because we do still have a big debt problem and we have some big nature problems. Thank you for sharing that. And it's really fascinating to know that this is not a new idea. It's been around since the 80s. And this hope that I mentioned earlier suggests that there can be ways to make this debt for nature swap work better. I would love to understand what you want readers to take away from the reforms that you all suggest in the article. Yes, and the punch line at the high level is it makes sense. It hasn't worked as done to first order. Of course, some things have worked. But simple reforms based on things that we have learned over the last few decades could make them work a lot better. So that's the high level. To get a little more detail the four things we say in those articles are the following. You gotta raise the scale. It has to be consequential relative to the scale of debt. Otherwise, it's not worth it for those countries. I think, and we think, and I'll give you the third condition in a moment, but I think for those countries also you have to emphasize local choice and sovereignty. Because there's a real sense of, geez, why are these conservation NGOs coming in telling us what to do in our country? I think there's clear gains to be had from letting local actors decide how to achieve global goals. Now, the next thing you say is why if they are choosing, well how are they going to be oriented towards achieving global goals? So that's our third condition. You actually have clear measures of outcomes, and you only give relief conditional on measured improvements. That's a huge difference. That really has been more of a process bargain in the past. You will allocate some money to protected areas. Okay, that's fine, but there's actually a very famous fund which allocated money to Brazil. People have shown that Brazil just pulled the money out and spent it on other things that they were spending and just replaced it with the external money. So, then funding [for nature conservation] didn't go up. Or you could say, draw many new protected area circles on a map. Okay, but drawing things on a map doesn't really necessarily get you anything at all. And even defending a place that wasn't going to disappear doesn't get you anything because it wasn't going to disappear. So, there are many stories that in evaluations like I do of environment and development policy, we’ve seen a lot of things that sound sensible but don't really do that much in the end. Great, fine, here's a nice combination. We're going to measure the outcomes. But then you can do whatever you want, right? You can do whatever you want. If for you, you want to expand energy access, but you want to invest in renewable energy, great. A different country wants to stop using agriculture in a particular area and move it to another area, right? Another country wants to intensify agriculture and raise productivity even while leaving space for forests, and the knowledge, the preferences and the right to choose that I think and we think are naturally left with the countries in question who 1) has more information, and 2) are probably the right source of priorities for what matters locally, and if they don't find it interesting. These deals aren't going to happen again. You might then say, why are we just doing what they want? Because you're only giving relief when you measure actual global goals. Once you do that, once you switch to measuring outcomes, you should let people choose what's sensible for them. Last thing, once you're measuring, as I've mentioned, there's a bunch of different goals you could imagine, right? If I get two NGOs, they don't even have the same goals for species. Forget climate change, forget climate adaptation. There are all these things that people would like to be helpful with. So take, for instance, a project that might save old forests. That probably helps with water quality downstream. It probably provides habitat for species, it definitely stores carbon, and when blocking rainfall that comes torrentially with climate change, it probably helps resilience and washing out of soil for agriculture. What's our last point? When you're counting outcomes, add together all the good ones, because then a project like forest gets points for all four of those. And you do this stuff that's efficient on multiple fronts instead of going left hand, right hand in an uncoordinated fashion. So those are our four suggestions. That's really helpful. And having spent time with international trade and issues on regulations, one of the things that I've learned is permitting or allowing sovereignty and allowing nations to make decisions, one is politically important, but on the sort of economic side of it, there is something critical about countries knowing their own costs and own, if you will, demands. And allowing them to make those determinations is critical for an efficient and actually politically feasible approach. Is that a fair assessment? I agree completely. You know agriculture much better than I do. But that description to me fits perfectly. You can come in and say you've got all sorts of good ideas. And even things that are good ideas won't go across because you came in and said them in an annoying way. And then, as you said, [local] folks have better information on what their costs are, better information on local benefits, they could probably design a locally incentive compatible version of what you thought you knew was good. It might have been kind of good but with the local information and interest, it becomes better and then thus more likely to happen. And that's better for the globe as well. I completely agree. This is great. You've mentioned agriculture a couple of times, and I'd like to hear a little bit more about how you think debt for nature swaps can affect the food and agricultural systems in a country. Especially given the agricultural practices have some significant impacts on the environment and or can be affected by the environment, and particularly climate change. Completely. Yes, I think it's because of that. Exactly. So, if I had to think of why this environmental resource paper is a fit in agriculture, it's because of what you said. That agriculture bumps up against the environment, so to speak, makes use of nutrients in the soil, sometimes involves the clearing of the land, and bumps up against the public. As climate changes, it really changes the ability to do agriculture in terms of temperature, rainfall, all those things. So, I think just for instance, if we go across all the World Bank labeled low-income countries of the world, the priority on climate adaptation under rainfall shifts versus climate expansion into forests, which could be replaced by climate intensification through more fertilizing and more pesticide use, so that agriculture takes less room but has higher yield. Those priorities are going to vary massively. I think agriculture is a fantastic sector, and it's not been a surprise that you said the things you did to think about the value of measuring the global goal and allowing the local choice. In some places over fertilization is a huge problem. Not only do you not get more productivity, but you waste money, and you ruin water supply. Some places, pesticide use is an issue and is drifting across and killing plants and other fields. Some places, it's not. And who's the expert on that? Probably the local agricultural extension agents, right? And the local ag agency. So, to me, agriculture is a fantastic, illustrative sector. Not the only one, but an important one. Where the kind of things you said about the value of local information and choice come through in making a big financial swap like this potentially work for everybody. Thanks for this example. It is great to hear this piece that did have a clear environmental focus, recognize that there is a place for the food system to be a part of that conversation. So, thank you for sharing that. You know, the debt for nature swap is a useful financial tool to support environmental causes, as I just said. And as an environmental economist, how do you use a market-based approach to address environmental challenges? And what, if any, drawbacks do you see to this approach? In a way this is a form of market-based approach. I agree with you. It's certainly about prices and incentives. And looking around the world, I'm not sure if this is why I'm an economist, but I certainly do think people respond to incentives and that's important. That said and you said drawback. First, I'll just go with alternative to start. Prices are not the only thing people respond to, right? Institutions matter a huge deal. Even the set of opportunities that are available tend to be constructed in ways that are not price or market driven. You know, prices are wonderful. If you have a hundred identical firms and you're trying to figure out who has the lowest marginal cost of reducing carbon emissions. Fab, let them figure it out. Market will do well. Maybe not as fabulous in thinking about the distribution of rights locally between indigenous groups, small farmers, and large multinational corporations, right? Maybe that's not really a market price thing. And we might even get around to values. There are times when people don't really want to operate in a price space. And they're going to have to deal with incentives. But think about preexisting values on conservation, and when those are achieving the same goals as a price would, you don't have to try to wander in with a new market. I think that's fair as well. I think of incentives as one super important tool. Far from the only one and somewhat in the spirit of our discussion of local knowledge. The right tool blend is an important part of the story as well. Alex, I have to say, you've ventured in some spaces I'm really happy to hear you talk about. This idea of incorporating values and recognizing that the local knowledge matters - this is not something that we, as economists in our modeling world alone can solve the problem. It is going to take talking to people and learning their needs and learning even the bits about their culture to say what works for them in this moment. So, thank you for sharing that. You're welcome for that. In your analysis, in the team's analysis, you all argue for key reforms for debt for nature swaps. What other approaches would you consider to address these large environmental concerns? I think ‘other’ but also complimentary. I'm in the sense that these are very high-level transfers, right? Here's a bunch of money. Please do something right. And as I said earlier, if we tell them what to do, we don't have a great track record. So, now we're going to maybe measure, right? One of our suggestions is to measure the outcomes. How are they going to get to those outcomes, right? So, there's a whole bunch of tools on the environment and the development policy side, which are also part of the source of learning over the last three or four decades. There's been a real push in a lot of fields, not necessarily to only be like medicine and do randomized control trials, etc., but there is some of that. But also just collect some data on what happened. Please try to figure out if when you do a policy, it actually achieves something. Besides values, my meta story these days is we have to allow that learning is a good thing. There's a lot of people who seem to not want to even want to ask whether what they did worked because somehow, it's embarrassing. And I feel like we have to move as a world to the humility of learning by doing. And that's just what everybody does. And that means when I did something, half of them worked and half of them didn't. It's a really good idea to learn as fast as you can which ones didn't. So that's a super general speech, not quite to what you asked, but it applies to every tool I've ever known. So, regarding protected areas - do they always have impact? No. I have a lot of work on that. Can we start to, over 30 years point, to where they have impact? Yes. Could we have measured outcomes? We could have, but we didn't back then. So, could we still use traditional tools like use a protected area, but look at past studies of when they had impact and start to see that it makes sense when they did and when they didn't? Yes. Same thing for payments for ecosystem services and any number of other tools. BIO Alexander Pfaff is a Professor of Public Policy, Economics and the Environment at Duke University. He studies how economic development interacts with natural resources and the environment. His focus is designing environment and development policies to support choices by individuals and groups that protect nature, reduce damaging environmental exposures, and improve livelihoods.

We've recorded a series of podcasts on the microbiome and its wide ranging impacts. But boy is this a field that moves rapidly. As soon as you think you've covered much of the territory, along comes some new and exciting findings, and this is the case today. We're going to describe research done by our guest, Dr. Ibrahim Javed. He has done innovative work on links between the gut microbiome and the brain, particularly focused on Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Javed is an Enterprise Fellow and National Health and Medicine Research Council Emerging Leadership Fellow in Clinical and Health Sciences at the University of South Australia. Interview Transcript So let's begin, if you wouldn't mind, with an explanation from you about what the gut brain axis is and tell us how it's important. Yep. Now we see a lot of, a lot of researchers around the globe building on investigations around the gut brain axis. But if we, if we investigate what this gut brain axis actually is, It's kind of like a bi-directional communication between two organs in our body, the gut and the brain. And when we particularly talk about gut, we have our stomach and our different portions of the intestine. What we're actually interested in is the microbiome and all those small little things living inside the gut. There are around 100 trillion microbes in the gut, which is three times more than the number of cells in our body. So, we are kind of like more microbes than, than human cells. And they communicate with different organs in our body and how they communicate with the brain that we can describe it as a, as a gut brain axis. And then this whole gut brain axis thing was somehow kind of invisible to us. We were just looking at it as a fecal material or waste coming out of our body. But now we see a lot of importance to these gut microbes. They help us in a lot of daily things that we do. They shape our behavior, our response to stress, our immune system, and then how we respond to different medicines, and how we do our daily tasks. So, they have a lot of roles in that. They help us digest food, that's their main obvious function. But now we are more. getting more and more information about them, that how they are integrated with a lot of different things in our body. So, kind of like they are partners in our life. That's a very, very nice explanation. Can you tell us about the importance of microbial diversity? Yep. So microbial diversity, we can, we can refer to, to as a composition of all those bacteria, viruses, and fungi to some extent that, that live in, in our body. Digestive track and, and in a lot of other animals as well. And this diversity is very crucial in maintaining the gut health and on overall well-being of, of humans. And, and this microbiome whole thing is like, it is obviously associated with a lot of health benefits and, and how we develop disease, but it's also right from the beginning of life they help us in developing our brains. They help us mature the brain system and the immune system. Obviously, they help us in digesting food. So, generally, we can actually divide them in two portions. One, we can call them a good gut bacterium. They help us with all these things. And then they are bad gut bacteria, which are kind of like kept within a within a bay. They are kept under control by this good gut bacteria with the help of the rest of our body. And in somehow in some conditions with the age or with the dietary habits or environmental factor or lifestyle, if they overcome and, and they take over the control in the gut, that's where the thing starts going haywire. When I was growing up, microbes were a bad thing. You didn't want to have microbes. And now, now we hear that there are good microbes and now you're talking about the balance. There are still bad ones, but good ones. And the balance of those two was a really important thing. Let's talk about how bad bacteria find their way to the brain. How do they get access? So, as we discussed, they are kept within the bay or kept under control by good bacteria and also by other different immune systems in the body. We have different checkpoints, like we have different barriers or three different compartments, the gut and the blood and the brain. And we have barriers that separate out these compartments and these barriers are very tightly controlled, very good health cells tightly integrated with each other and they police that whole things what need to go across and what does not need to go across what we need to stop it within that compartment. If we have adverse environmental factors, or poor dietary habits and these bad gut bacteria overcome, they produce a lot of different molecules to communicate with each other. And they produce a lot of different molecules to take over the good bacteria. And these molecules, they can get across those barriers, and specifically if they can get into the brain (that's what we are researching), they can do a lot of different bad things in the brain. They can do that by hijacking this gut brain axis. And this compartmental thing is one pathway that they can get from gut to the blood and then from the blood to the brain. But there is also a direct highway that connects gut to the brain and that's our enteric nervous system. These are specific nerves or neurons, for example, vagus nerve, they're quite famous. It's a direct link between the gut and brain. This nerve system helps us in a lot of different daily tasks without us even knowing about it, like digestion and heart rate and respiration, and emptying the stomach. And these are kind of like a pathway for bidirectional communication. So, a lot of molecules go up and down across these highways and the bad gut bacteria can actually hijack it and they can put their stuff into this highway and they can send it across the brain. It's a very, very nice explanation you have of a very complicated process, and I find it absolutely fascinating. So, you've spoken about how bad bacteria can be opportunistic pathogens and can trigger problems or enhance the progression of existing problems. How does all that work? So, we are investigating bad gut bacteria in connection with dementia and Alzheimer disease. We are specifically working on Pseudomonas aeruginosa and E. coli and they are quite common, like a lot of school kids. They know about these bacteria. They are quite commonly studied in high school microbiology. So, these bacteria produce some molecules which help to make biofilms around them. They kind of build a castle around them to protect their colonies and for their own survival and they keep surviving then until they get an opportunity to expand their castles and build more biofilms. These molecules are quite similar in terms of their structure and in terms of how they communicate. With some proteins which are not related to bacteria anyhow, they are produced in the brain to do some normal stuff in the brain, but they also aggregate in Alzheimer disease using the same mechanism as the nature that these bacteria use for these proteins to make their biofilms. Based on this common similarity, if they can somehow see each other, or if those gut bacteria can send those proteins or aggregate of those proteins across the brain through using those highways. They can induce the aggregation of those normal, naive, working, innocent proteins, which we have in our brain that have nothing to do with the bacteria. But if they can be accessed by those bacterial proteins, they go haywire and, and they trigger the onset of the disease, or if there is already going on, that they can actually accelerate that whole process. And this is a concept, actually, we have seen that concept before in prion disease, whereby eating infected food that have those prion particles, they can actually go from gut to the brain, and they can induce the normal prion protein in the brain to start making aggregates in a similar way. Are there interventions that can stop the pathogenic bacteria from in the gut that might in turn affect the brain? We should focus more on preventive measures. We can focus on maintaining a good diversity within the gut of having or supporting those good bacteria in that fight and keeping them healthy and alive as we age. Because as we age over the period of life, we keep losing those good bacteria. If we can have all those good things of exercise, balanced sleep, and more importantly, good food and a balanced variety of food. Then we have a lot of different varieties to support that variety of gut bacteria in the gut. So that's, I think, the most important preventive measure to keep that balance intact. But of course, in the future as a therapeutic intervention, we are moving towards developing microbiome therapies where we can modulate those compositions. If that composition is not in a very good situation, we can actually modulate that by using probiotics and prebiotic dietary factors or some microbial compositions like yogurt and a lot of other foods. We can modulate that to inoculate those bacteria which are missing in the gut and, and try to achieve that balance and, and that balance will accelerate the effectiveness of the medicine which we are taking for any other disease. The advice we've heard from some of our other guests is to eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. You know, consume things, you mentioned yogurt, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, and things like that. Sound like they're very good for enhancing the health of the microbiome. Is there anything else beyond that that might be relevant for the brain in particular? For brain health, there are some antioxidant foods. For example, we have Curcumin, and some senolytic compounds. We cannot call them drugs because they are kind of like a food supplements. They are available in any pharmacy and super stores by a lot of different names. Mostly these are polyphenolic compounds. They are usually available in green tea and in green tea extracts. They are quite well known for their healthy and antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. Research around the globe has shown that there are good effects directly on the brain by these polyphenolic compounds. So, these are green tea extracts, quercetin and, and some other galectin compounds. BIO Dr Ibrahim Javed is currently an Enterprise Fellow (Senior Lecturer) and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Clinical and Health Sciences, University of South Australia. He is also an adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland. He completed his doctoral studies at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2020 and postdoctoral research at AIBN, The University of Queensland. He joined the University of South Australia in 2023 where he is now directing the laboratory of Gut-Brain Axis, Aging and Therapeutics. Research in Javed’s lab focuses on the gut-brain axis and its implications for aging and Dementia. His research team is working to unfold the specific role of bad/pathogenic gut bacteria in the aging paradigms and Dementia associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. His team has discovered and published the molecular details of how bad bacteria in the gut can trigger a younger onset (aged under 65) and accelerate Dementia and how the brain can develop Dementia when fighting with microbial biofilms in the gut – the infectious etiology of Dementia. With this research trajectory, his vision is to develop a multifaceted therapeutic intervention for aging-associated diseases and Dementia.

Food companies market their products in a great many ways. Connecting their brands and products to sports and major sporting events is one such way and is drawing a lot of attention now. The reason is that the Summer Olympics are underway, which trains attention on the relationship between the International Olympic Committee and its longest running sponsor. Coca Cola has been a sponsor of every Olympics since 1928. So, it's intuitively obvious why sponsorships would be important to the Olympics because They get lots of money in the door and it's reliable. It's been happening since 1928. But let's talk about why this relationship is so important to companies, Coca Cola in particular, and what the public health impact of that might be. Today's guest, Dr. Marie Bragg, has contributed some of the key studies on this topic. She is Assistant professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she also serves as director of diversity initiatives. She holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the marketing department at the NYU Stern School of business; directs the NYU food environment and policy research coalition; and she's also a Food Leaders Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Interview Summary It's really nice to talk to you about this because it's an important issue and not a lot of science has been done on this over the years and you've contributed a lot of it. Let's talk about the issue of sports marketing and can you tell us a little bit more about what that is broadly and what's, what are some of the forms it takes? You just mentioned one of the main areas of sports marketing with sports sponsorships. And so that's where a company like Coca Cola partners with an organization like the Olympics. And really is paying for the rights to have that famous Coca Cola logo or its products to appear at sporting events or in commercials that are involving the Olympics. In terms of how much of it there is we know, for example, the world cup is one of the most watched sporting events in the world, along with things like the Olympics. The world cup, for example, has 5 million viewers. And so that's a lot of exposure for these brands, but it's not Sports sponsorship partnerships like that, there's athlete endorsements, and those dates back as far as to 1934, as one example, when baseball player Lou Gehrig first appeared on the box of Wheaties cereals. There's a special place that athletes have always had in our society, and I think it comes through with these sorts of partnerships. But if we fast forward to today, our lab has even seen these kinds of partnerships appear in video games. And so, Nintendo had M&M's a race car game a few years back, and NFL Madden, which is a popular video game even has things like the Snickers player of the game appear within the video game, just like real NFL games. What this means is that these pictures of brands and products are peppered throughout kids experiences when they're playing video games. And then finally, if, and probably for anyone who's, been in a supermarket, when there's a major sporting event going on, like the Super Bowl or March Madness, it appears on products too in supermarkets. It's peppered throughout our everyday experience in ways we might not always see or appreciate if we're not paying attention. Marie, I like to do sports trivia with some friends of mine, and you've just given me a great question about Lou Gehrig and the Wheaties box in the 1930s. So that's a nice benefit of this podcast. So aside from that, why sports? I mean, companies could attach themselves to lots of different things, but why did they choose sports and why is that such a valuable connection for them? One factor ties back into what we were saying about visibility. If there are millions of people watching a sport event, it means that there's a lot of time for brands to be able to have high visibility for whatever they're endorsing or sponsoring in that moment. On another level, I think on a deeper level, our society has a special relationship with sports and professional athletes. Professional athletes are their own sort of unique category of celebrities that people love to follow and admire. That means that when a brand associates themselves with a sports organization like the Olympics or a professional athlete, they're buying into a special idea of what it means to be cool, to be fun, and to feel good about to feel good about the brand because when people are watching sports, they're excited. If we think of other categories of life where there are maybe a high number of viewers to a specific televised event, like a presidential debate, that we don't see a lot of sponsorships around that. And maybe it doesn't evoke the same feelings that a sporting event does. I'm expecting that this kind of relationship or attachments or symbolism of the sponsorship of sports might be especially powerful for children. I know if you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, a lot of them will say they want to be a baseball player or basketball player, football player, something like that. Does that make sense? I remember reading an article once that said, a dad was playing catch with his kid, and had spent all these hours with his kid working on pitching. And the dad made the point in the article, my kid doesn't want to grow up and be me as a baseball player. He wants to grow up and be ARod. And so, this idea that we can spend all the time that we want with our kids and they still hold these celebrity athletes on such a pedestal is something that I think ties into why this is valuable for companies. It's kids who are engaged in sports or attending sporting events who are the next generation of consumers for these products. If they can get the attention and the brand loyalty of these children early on in these positive, exciting environments, it helps them secure the next generation of purchasers. We'll talk about how important brand loyalty is in a minute, but let's talk about how valuable these connections are to the company. I guess one indication of that is how much a company like Coca Cola is willing to pay to be a sponsor of something like the Olympics. What kind of numbers do you know about in that context? The companies don't usually disclose the exact numbers, but in 2008, NPR published an article that estimated that Coca Cola spent about 70 million to sponsor the Beijing Olympics. If we think about it, that's stunning given sponsoring an event is just one part of their massive advertising machine. More recently the Wall Street Journal estimated that Coca-Cola and a really large dairy company in China partnered and spent a combined, estimated $2 billion with a B, $2 billion for a 12-year Olympic sponsorship deal that will run through 2032. It's really incredible to think about that as just one slice of what they're doing, but with such a massive amount of money attached to it. It really sort of begs the question what they are get out of it and what do they see as the value. I know there are branding opportunities, and again, we'll come back to that in a minute, but there's also sort of this goodwill part of it, isn't there. The Olympics are a great thing. No reason to question that. The fact that a company like Coca Cola would sponsor a good thing probably gives them a good company glow, doesn't it? My colleague Bridget Kelly in Australia did a study on this topic of sort of the glow that sponsorship produces. In her study, she showed that about 68 percent of kids in the sample could remember the sports sponsor and thought the sponsors were cool and generous. And they wanted to sort of pay back the favor by purchasing the products of that sponsor. There is something really special to to that relationship in the minds of kids. Wow. That's an impressive finding. So, speaking of findings, you've done some research on these sports sponsorships yourself. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've done and what you found? Some of our work in this area has documented how food and beverage companies associate themselves with sports on the sponsorship side. Athletes and supermarkets with product partnerships. And in one of our studies that tied into sports sponsorships, we looked at the 10 major sports organizations that had a lot of viewers. So, things like the NFL, the NBA, and then we wanted to categorize what kinds of groupings, the sponsors belonged to an automotive brand. Ford motors was one of the largest categories. But food wasn't very far behind. We saw about 19 percent of sponsors were associated with food and beverage brands, and it was for mostly unhealthy items. In the sports sponsorships, we're not. Seeing a lot of water being featured. It's a lot of sugary beverages you know, chips and things like that. We're not seeing much fresh fruit. And then when we did the same thing with athlete endorsements, one of the things that stood out about that study, which looked at a hundred athletes to get a sense of what are they endorsing and how healthy is this stuff and how much are people seeing it. The most striking finding for me from that study was that 93 percent of the beverages that were endorsed by professional athletes were sugary drinks. And we know that athletes need to drink a lot of water to sort of fuel themselves. And maybe sometimes they do need some sort of sports drinks for long workout days, but we saw a lot of sodas in the mix too and the other thing is that most kids don't need lots of sports drinks in their diet, but that's what is sort of being promoted through these through these endorsements, and so that really stood out to me about that study. We also in a couple of these studies found that young people are often seeing more ads for this than adults. It's not even though it may be sort of targeting general audiences. A lot of times young people are really seeing a lot of these, including the forms of ads that pop up on YouTube because we know kids are really into social media. It's really across the board of all of our research. We find mostly unhealthy products being promoted through these partnerships with sports. I remember back over the years that this issue comes up in the press occasionally and athletes get called out, specific athletes will sometimes get called out for promoting these kinds of foods. And, and I remember there being a couple of cases, although I don't remember the names of the athletes involved, where they've refused to do this kind of thing and they've made public statements about that. What's your recollection about that? We were really excited one time with our athlete endorsement study that came out a couple of years later. Brita water filters issued a press release and I remember getting a lot of messages about it telling me to go and look at what was posted online. Brita had cited our study that most beverages promoted by athletes are sugary beverages. And that's why we're so excited to partner with Steph Curry to promote Brita water filters. I framed that press release and shared it with all our team members who worked on those projects because it was an example of choosing a healthy beverage over some of these sugary drinks that are so commonly promoted. So maybe there will come a day when LeBron James or athletes like that start advertising cucumbers or radishes or something. And I wish cucumber producers had the same budgets as these sugary drink brands because it's really hard for some of the healthy stuff to compete with some of these major fast food and sugary drink companies. For sure. Let's talk about the issue of branding, why a company like Coca Cola wants its brand image, that famous Coke logo out there in front of as many eyes as possible. Give me just a minute if you will. And I'd like to describe something that I've heard. Sort of observed over the years. It's my anecdotal impression that if you ask random people, are you a Coke or a Pepsi person? You'll get an immediate and definitive response. People know whether they're a Coke or a Pepsi person. But if you do research, you find that people can't very often tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. And, going back as, as long as 1949, there are scientists who have done these kinds of studies on whether consumers can distinguish those two beverages, doing blind taste tests. A typical finding is that people aren't any more accurate than chance. And there was a fascinating brain scan study done much more recently, of course. When Coke and Pepsi were given to people and they didn't know which they were receiving, the brain scan showed similar brain activity for the two beverages, again, suggesting that people can't distinguish the difference. But when people knew they were drinking either Coke or Pepsi, there was a brain activity advantage. For Coca Cola, which of course is all about more marketing, bigger company, that kind of thing, I'm assuming. So based on this, it looked like Coke hadn't won the taste war, but the branding war. So why in the heck would people feel so strongly that they can tell the difference between these beverages when they probably can't? Now my own two-bit theory on this is that no one wants to feel like they're a pawn of marketing. So, it'd be hard to admit that they favor one brand over another because then they would feel manipulated. They must believe in their own minds there's an objective difference. My theorizing aside, tell us about the power of a brand as opposed to a product and how the Olympics is such a golden opportunity for the Coca Cola brand. When we think about a brand, it's really a combination of feelings, ideas, and the emotions that we tie into what it means to be part of that brand. And as people, and especially as young people, for let's say teenagers, they’re in an identity development stage where it's important for them to be adopting brands that are important to them, in part to distinguish themselves from their parents, to fit in with peers, and to start to have a sense of who they are as a person. And one of the ways to do that is to associate with what you like for music, but another piece is brand. So, are you a Coca Cola or a Pepsi person? A Nike or Adidas person. That comes with all sorts of adjectives about what it means to be on one side or the other. When we think about Coca Cola as a brand linking up with the Olympics, it's an opportunity to potentially borrow, not only get their brand out there, but potentially borrow from the brand of the Olympics as well. In our field, there's something called brand image transfer. This is the idea that when two companies or organizations partner together, the brand feelings we have about one might bleed over into the other and vice versa. It’s one of the things that's always fascinated me about this topic, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too, is this idea that the sports may have a sort of health piece to their brand identity. So, the Olympics have people at the peak of their, their sport. And my question has always been, what does that do to the way people feel about Coke in terms of its healthfulness? And is there some brand image transfer that's happening back and forth that's particularly beneficial for Coca Cola because of the health component? You reminded me of something. Tell me if you think this is an interesting parallel. When I was a boy in public high school growing up in Indiana, I don't think there were any soft drink machines in my school, maybe one in the teacher's lounge or something that I never saw, of course, but there wasn't much. And then when my son, many decades later, was a student in a school, public high school in Connecticut, he and I walked around the school and counted the number of soft drink machines, and he was of course embarrassed to be walking around the school with his dad. But aside from that, I think we found something like 13 or 14 or 15 machines. I don't remember the exact number, but it was striking. And I've heard people speculate that the companies don't care that much about what's being sold in those machines because. It's not a huge profit center for them and they must split the profits with the school somehow, but it's all about the branding. And even the students who aren't buying anything from the machines walk past them probably many times a day. So, what's getting imprinted doesn't have much to do potentially with. A specific type of product, but it's just that company's main image. Does that make sense? And why those school sponsorships have been so important? It does, and it's really, there's really an emphasis on wanting a sort of 360 level of involvement in young people's lives because if a brand can get themselves in front of kids at school, at a sporting event, in a movie, in a video game, on social media, they're immersing themselves in a way that allows the brand to keep itself top of mind. And that's what starts to get people to be aware of it, build brand loyalty, reach for the product because it's, they, with so many ads, the ads are all competing for attention but being immersed in schools is just one aspect of that idea of having involvement in as many areas of kids’ lives as possible. I think in addition to all the machines, there were tables outside that had. Coca Cola umbrellas, and then the football stadium had a scoreboard that had Coca Cola that featured prominently on it. It was like complete corporate capture. It was amazing how many exposures the typical student in that high school in Brantford, Connecticut would have had. And that's just in school. I mean, think about all the other things added to that. That's amazing, isn't it? One of the things that interested me about this work was because when I played soccer and ran cross country and track as a kid, everything. There were so many instances where everything was sponsored. There were so many instances where unhealthy food products were linked with sport. So, we were the Snicker state champions of the state of Florida for soccer. I was a Wendy's high school nominee, not a winner. Let's be clear. And every brand. I have so many patches at home with fast food or sugary drink logos on them, right alongside. And then probably not coincidentally, I remember when I was a young kid, and we were painting a piece of wood in the backyard. And I drew the Coca Cola logo with a soccer ball and a basketball next to it. Looking back, first, what an odd kid I must have been to draw Coca Cola’s logo, but to your point, I was really immersed in it and Coke was top of mind. The kind of sports sponsorships that you talked about being exposed to when you were young. That kind of thing's happening outside the U.S. a lot too, isn't it? It is. So, the sports sponsorship outside the U.S. – one of the big ones that comes to mind if McDonald’s sponsorship of the World Cup. We see a lot of international presence with brands, whether it’s through social media, and the way they sort of take local culture and tailor it to sports marketing. I remember being on a trip to Trinidad with my family. My mom's family is from Trinidad. And there was a Coca Cola bottling plant, I think it was. And alongside the perimeter was a painted fence and it had the Coca Cola logo and the Trinny flag and then a painting of a soccer ball and steel drums. So, there was this infusion of the culture alongside the Coca Cola logo. And that really, I think, accelerated my interest in understanding how these brands are capitalizing on the good feelings that people have towards their own culture. It can be challenging to do anything about this and challenging, especially you regulate advertising in the U.S. because of protections provided for commercial speech through the first amendment. What can be done about the ads promoted through these unhealthy sports sponsorships? One of the things I think we need more research on is the extent to which these kinds of ads might be contributing to a sort of misunderstanding about the health profiles of products. And so, I think that would help us better understand for kids, do they start to really think that some of these sugary drink products are healthier than water, for example. That's just a random example but I think that will help us understand what's at stake when it comes to the impression that it's making on young people. And there's a little bit of work in this area, but more is needed. And then I think too about how as a society, there's policy regulations to it too, but that's very hard to do because of commercial speech protections. I will say one of our colleagues Nick Freudenberg has talked about how we should have an open mind with whether there's a possibility to move the needle on commercial speech protections. And so that's something I'd love to keep exploring with people on what that could look like it, and if it was possible to any extent. And then the other thing that's always been on my mind is the idea that for some products being associated with and became a public relations liability. If we think about the way professional athletes used to endorse tobacco products and would be standing in their uniform with a cigarette in their mouth. Then that sort of became uncool. Not good for their brand. Not good for their look, and they moved away from it. Will the same thing happen to sugary drinks and junk food partnerships. And I think sometimes we see glimmers of that. There was the famous video, years ago after a soccer game, when one of the world's most famous soccer players pushed away a sugary beverage and said agua in response. And it affected the market shares at that moment. I think there are instances like that, that we can think about in terms of getting some momentum behind the way athletes themselves identify with these products. In that context, do you think parents could be an important advocacy voice? Let's just say that parents rose up and said to the local high school, we don't want Coca Cola stuff blasted all over our school. And they're pushing that. Coca Cola retains the right, because of the First Amendment to market its products, but local schools would have the right not to sign contracts and therefore deprive the company of those kind of marketing opportunities. Do you think parents might ever feel mobilized enough incensed enough to do something like that? I think parents are a key factor in this issue of sports marketing to kids because companies care a lot about what parents think. Even though kids have a ton of pester power, where they nag their parents to purchase things, parents are also in many cases, especially for young kids, the gatekeepers of all these purchases. Companies know not to make parents too angry about something because of the risk of not purchasing their products. I think if parents got vocal about it, whether it's on social media or by getting involved in petitions that might be going around that's one way to get companies to start paying attention to these things because I think it getting them out of schools, for example, seems to me to be a common sense start to it and but many parents might not be thinking of this in the way, that how deeply it might be affecting their diet, their kids diets. Bio Dr. Marie Bragg is an Assistant Professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine where she also serves as the Director of Diversity Initiatives. She holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Marketing Department at the NYU Stern School of Business, and directs the NYU Food Environment and Policy Research Coalition, which includes 56 faculty who study food and sustainability across 14 departments in 8 schools at NYU. Dr. Bragg’s research examines unhealthy food marketing practices that target youth and communities of color. Her current NIH-funded grants assess how advertising on social media affects the preferences and food choices of adolescents. Dr. Bragg is a Food Leaders Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and has testified on three public policies in New York City that aimed to create a healthier food environment. Since 2008, she has mentored more than 100 students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty members. Dr. Bragg earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Yale University.

Today we're talking about who has access to full-service supermarkets in America's cities, suburbs, small towns and rural communities. According to The Reinvestment Fund's "2023 Limited Supermarket Access Analysis Report," 8.5% of people in the US live in areas with limited access to full-service supermarkets. This means that families must travel further to get fresh foods, and it creates a barrier to adequate nutrition. This is the 10th year The Reinvestment Fund has published the "Supermarket Access Report," which provides data and context about grocery store access across the country. Here to discuss the latest figures is policy and analyst Michael Norton.   Interview Summary   This is a really interesting and kind of nuanced topic, so I'm happy we can talk about it in some detail. Why don't we just start off with kind of a broad question. What do we know now about areas of limited supermarket access in the US? Kelly, I think the big thing to take away at the very beginning is that the share of people living in places that would be considered low access is roughly the same as it's been over the past 10 years. We have about 8.5% of the population living in low-access areas across the country. That's pretty consistent to what it's been for over a decade. But what's important is that how low-access areas are distributed across the country varies quite a bit. And where they exist, the density of the populations where they exist, really informs the kinds of interventions that are available for addressing these needs. These vary considerably in different parts of the country and at different geographic scales. And what I mean by that is suburban areas, rural areas, and then some of the most remote areas across the country. So we do have a sort of consistent number or share of people. The actual number has gone up a little bit because the population has continued to increase. They become distributed in different ways that follow different kinds of development patterns, on the one hand. But then also places where you end up getting patterns of residential and racial segregation in more developed parts of the country.   It's so interesting. So, given that the average has stayed essentially the same over the 10 years you've been doing the reports, have there been pressures pulling in either direction that might have changed over the years? So, for example, are there pressures that are making access to full-service supermarkets less likely? Are they pulling out of some places, for example? And might that offset by some positive developments in other areas? So, while the average stays the same, the contours look different? I think the way to think about that is that we see a lot of expansion of low-access areas in the big metro areas that are expanding the fastest. So, the biggest increases in populations living with limited access are in big state in the South and out west in places like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, where you have these large metros that are growing at a really rapid rate. And the reason for that is that oftentimes residential development will show up before commercial development. So, in those kinds of places, food retail is trailing behind residential development. And probably those places are going to be well served by the time we update this analysis again in four or five years because of what those development patterns look like, right? So, when you're building more houses in more urban and remote areas, there's still folks who are first in buying out in those places. They're still going to have to go a long way to get their groceries for a few years until supermarket identifies this as a place where there's going to be enough demand for us to put one of our Krogers or Targets or Walmarts or what have you. But we've also seen, and this is more common in urban places, is the expansion of these low-access areas that have smaller populations, right? And so these are places with between 1,000 and 5,000 residents where folks are still having to go disproportionately far to get access to a full-service grocery store. Sometimes this is because stores have pulled out in these places because of limited demand, historically. And that limited demand is mostly because folks don't have as much income to spend on their groceries, right? And we see these little areas popping up within metro areas and even in some close-in suburbs and places across the country. And so you have sort of these bigger LSA areas, which have at least 5,000 residents on the outer edges of a lot of metros and in some within the cities, but mostly within the cities. It's these smaller, limited access, low population areas. And this differentiation of the type of low-access area is something that we introduced in this update to our analysis that previously wasn't available. It provided a really nice nuance to understanding what limited access to supermarkets looks like going forward, both within urban places, suburban places, and in some of these really remote parts of the country. So, based on this research, what does it tell us about the future of insecurity in the United States? I think what it really tells us is that it depends on where you live and what kind of community you live in and what that's going to look like. I think the ability to provide a little bit more nuance around who has access and when they have limited access, what about their community is going to inform the response to ensuring that folks are able to get what they need. In places where they are these traditional sorts of limited supermarket access areas where you have at least 5,000 people, they can become pretty good candidates for operating a full-service store, right? But when you think about urban parts of the country where you've had central business districts or neighborhoods sort of hollowing out in different places and local supermarket is closed, but there aren't enough people there living to support a full-service store, different kinds of interventions are required, right? And then in these really remote parts of the country where you don't have very many residents, but you have at least a thousand, but people are living a long way away from each other, how do you serve those places? Because some of them, these are very small towns, right? And there are people who have been living there and if the grocery store closed, then they have to drive 35-40 miles to the next town, right? That becomes a real challenge for their general way of life. I think really thinking about the future of food access and food insecurity in this country really has to have a geographic nuance to it in thinking about the appropriate responses that are going to meet the needs of people living in different parts of the country. So, how does your study inform investments do address food insecurity? Reinvestment Fund has a very active retail portfolio, both on our lending side, and Reinvestment Fund is also the national fund manager for USDA's Healthy Food Finance Initiative. These two avenues through which we make loans to increase access to fresh food and through USDA's HFFI program are opportunities to innovate. The USDA's Healthy Food Finance Initiative is both a grant-making and a lending program that is designed to identify innovative responses to access to fresh food in these different types of areas. So, we're able to use the results of these analyses to identify places where you can align the kinds of programs that people are proposing. Whether that's a small format store in a city where their primary supermarket has closed, whether it's a mobile market that is serving folks who live very far distances from their nearest food retailer, or whether it's setting up a aggregation site that is not just food retail but sometimes is attached to a healthcare center or a hospital where people are also making regular trips. These become opportunities for us to support innovative approaches and also try out different things. Once you start to get some information from successful programs that are coming out of the grant program, as they become investible and scalable at a store level when you become ready to take on debt to expand your operation or open a store in a place that typical operators aren't willing to go. So, let me ask you a question about the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. With politics being so partisan these days, is this a partisan issue as well, or is there bipartisan support for things like this? This is the good news part of access to fresh food. It really is a bipartisan issue. Healthy Food Finance Initiative was created under the Obama Administration, was expanded under the Trump Administration and has been expanded even more under the Biden Administration. Each subsequent farm bill has expanded the capital available for the Healthy Food Finance Initiative, with the goal to try and figure out how do we meet the food access needs of everybody in this country in a way that provides a signal to private market operators that they can be successful in these places. That really is a bit of good news, and I'm really happy to hear that. But I also wanted to ask you, are there options aside from full-service supermarkets to help address some of these matters you're discussing? Absolutely, absolutely. And these are things like smaller format stores, almost like a corner store but that operates like a healthy food market. And these are really appropriate in places where there are limited access, low population, and sort of filling in pockets inside urban communities and close-in suburbs. There are mobile market options that are popping up in different places. Food aggregation hubs that will be cited within the center of a low-access area where people can come to a central location and having purchased food online that shows up and then people can come and pick it up. There's expanding delivery options to more remote parts of the country. So, there is a wide diversity of models that are proliferating beyond just bricks and mortar traditional grocery stores. It's really the job of HFFI to seed these initiatives, identify the ones that are doing really well, and then work with the folks who created them and then others to scale them down the road into places that are not served by food retailers. I think you've helped answer the next question I was going to ask, which is how does this research help policy makers and practitioners think about addressing food insecurity in their community? There's a fair amount of tailoring that could go on where you're trying to meet the needs of a specific community. That's right. And I think one of the things that's important to keep in mind is the role that financial institutions like Reinvestment Fund play in making this possible. So, Reinvestment Fund is a community development financial institution, which is best understood as like a nonprofit bank. And these exist across the country and are more or less active in different markets, but they're really focused on working in a very deliberate, hands-on way with our borrowers to create access to fresh food in places where it's not going to be easy, right? Because if it was easy, all the big food retailers would be there, right? So, we have to be patient. You have to find someone who's willing to take a chance operating the store, to help them develop their business plan, help them identify all of the ins and outs that go with standing up a food retail business, and then work with them throughout the process of them sort of getting access to capital and making their business work. And that work is a lot more work than what is required to finance a new grocery store that is run by Target or run by Walmart, Krogers or something like that. This is a critical role that the CDFI industry is playing and increasingly recognized at the federal level as a resource for deploying public subsidies through the private market into the hands of operators who are going to make it work in places where traditional food retailers and capital just won't go. Let me ask a big-picture question. and this is a little complicated in my own mind. So, we're sort of defaulting in a way to the idea that full-service supermarkets providing access to such things for more people is a good outcome. And from a social justice point of view, it's unquestionably true that people who live in different sets of financial circumstances should still have access to things that people in better financial circumstances have. But in terms of nutritional outcome, having access to a full-service supermarket brings a lot more than just the healthy foods. And in today's modern full-service supermarket, the highly processed, less healthy options must outnumber the healthy ones 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 50 to 1? I have no idea what the number is, but it's enormous. And so, providing government support and financial incentives for a big store to come in is providing access to a lot more than healthy foods may have adverse nutritional outcomes rather than positive ones, unless you're just sort of agnostic about the type of food that people are getting access to, that any food is better than nothing if you have food insecurity. But I wonder how one might address that. And whether one could think about providing resources that were structured differently to encourage smaller stores, for example, that focus on more healthy options and fewer of the less healthy ones. And then you might get the social justice part addressed at the same time you're having a better nutritional outcome. Kelly, that's such a good question, and one that we wrangle with all the time. Because there is actually fairly limited evidence to suggest that access to fresh food is going to lead people to make healthier choices about what they consume. One of the sort of operating assumptions is that in the absence of access, you're not going to make healthy choices. And once there is at least access, the possibility for making healthier choices increases from, zero to something, whatever it is that is going to be motivating individuals how they go about making choices for the foods that they consume. And it is a very tricky relationship that folks in the food industry grapple with all the time as well in the medical profession. I think from a grant-making standpoint and a financing standpoint, Reinvestment Fund's position is always that whoever is receiving support through our programs or from our lending capital is offering a selection that meets what you would consider healthy food retail options, right? That there is an assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh produce, fresh meats and dairy, in that also with the understanding that almost all food retailers are also going to offer less healthy options. That is a constant tension within the field. And figuring out how to encourage behavioral change by consumers is sort of beyond the ability of HFFI to move. What we can do is ensure that the organizations and the individuals who we support are offering a variety of healthy options for the patrons that are coming into their locations.   BIO   Michael Norton, Ph.D., serves as Chief Policy Analyst at Reinvestment Fund, and supports all research related to Reinvestment Fund’s organizational goals and mission. In this role Dr. Norton works closely with a range partners, including small non-profit organizations, local and national philanthropies, private companies, colleges and universities, school districts, federal, state, and city governments and agencies. His work leverages nearly a decade of experience as researcher and project director to develop data driven solutions – solutions that meet the unique needs of Reinvestment Fund and our key stakeholders in the public and private sectors. Dr. Norton completed his doctoral studies in the Sociology Department at Temple University, where his research examined the relationship between secondary mortgage market activity and neighborhood change in the Philadelphia region at the turn of the 21st century. Prior to joining Reinvestment Fund in 2015, Dr. Norton served as a Senior Research Associate at Research for Action in Philadelphia. In this role, he led and co-led a range of mixed-methods evaluations of educational reform initiatives and policies at the local and state levels.

Nonprofit organizations can play a very important role in building healthy communities by providing services that contribute to community stability, social mobility, public policy, and decision-making. Today we're speaking with Kathy Higgins, CEO of the Alliance for Healthier Generation. The Alliance is a nonprofit organization, a well-known one at that, that promotes healthy environments so that young people can achieve lifelong good health. Interview Summary   Kathy, it's really wonderful to reconnect that you and I interacted some when you were in North Carolina and head of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation, and then you got called upon to be the CEO of the Alliance, a really interesting position. It's really wonderful to be able to talk to you again. Let's start maybe with a little bit of the history of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Can you tell us a bit about how it got started and over the years, how it's evolved? We've existed for almost 19 years now. We celebrate our 20-year anniversary next year. And we were started by two vital public health forces: the Clinton Foundation and President Clinton and also the American Heart Association. They came together 20 years ago and began discussing childhood obesity and what could a leading public health organization do to really work in systems change across the country at a local level. It is those two organizations that we look to as our founders and who helped us advance our work. It's a time flies story because it seems like just yesterday that the Alliance was created. There was a lot of excitement at the time for it, and over the work. It's done some really interesting things. So, in today's iteration of the Alliance, what are some of the main areas of focus? As I mentioned, we are a systems change organization. What we do is take a continuous improvement approach to advancing children's health. So, we are working typically in schools or after school time and certainly in communities to work on policy and practice change that are about promoting physical activity and healthy eating. And then addressing critical child health and adolescent health issues, which as we know, were exacerbated with the pandemic. Things like food access and social connectedness are just so important. Quality sleep, which our children are not getting enough of, or other things like vaping and tobacco sensation and on time vaccinations. Another thing that we know is that the pandemic had a dramatic impact on families and children on time vaccinations. So, this is the work that we do and working with the policy and practice change so that there there can be opportunity for healthy environments for the children. I think most everybody would probably agree that the targets that you're working on, healthy diet, physical activity, smoking, vaping habits and things like that are really important. But people might be a little less familiar with what you mean by addressing systems. Could you give some examples of what you mean by that? Right. What we know is that in United States, in fact, every public school must have a wellness policy and areas that need to be addressed. But what we'll do is work with the school in making sure that those policies are best suited for the families, the community, and the school, and what they want to do to support the health of children from a collaborative and supportive role. What we know is that we can create great change when that occurs. We work with more than 56,000 schools across the United States, and one of the things that we know is that our approach is really reflected in the America's Healthiest Schools recognition program each year. It's interesting to hear you talk about schools as an example of system change. And boy, working with 56,000 schools is pretty darn impressive. And it allows for out-sized influence of an organization like yours because if you can affect things like these school wellness policies and that gets multiplied across a ton of schools, it can really affect a lot of children. Exactly. We will work school to school, but we also work in districts and that allows us then to make even a bigger impact in the number of schools that we're reaching with these changes. It also brings the community together because then they're all operating under the same principles or the same focus areas of the work that they're committed to doing. What we do see is that we're able to assist them in implementing what are typically best practices in all sorts of topic areas. Whether it's strengthening the social emotional health and learning environment for the children, but also focusing on staff wellness. The whole notion, Kelly, of putting your oxygen mask on first before assisting others is something that has been incredibly important to us. We've certainly been very supported to do that work from a variety of funders. The other area that we've been able to make great strides in is this increasing of family and community engagement, which has been really significant for us. We've been honored to have Kohl's as a major supporter of our work. Their investment and then reinvestment and then once again, another reinvestment, really helped us engage with strategies that focused on increasing family wellbeing. So really then our three-legged stool becomes the school environment, the family environment, and the community environment, which we find is just really effective. So can we talk a little bit more about the community engagement and why is it important and how do you go about making it happen and what sort of impacts do you see it having? I think I may have mentioned already that we do use a continuous improvement model that we find is just really effective for when we're working in the school or school district level. It allows us to serve in a role of being a convener and bringing people together. What we know now is certainly after COVID that schools are no longer for walls of learning. They have a central role to the health of the community because of the services that they're providing or the services that families need them to provide. So, when we're working with a school, we're able to convene the right people that are in their community. They may be in the same zip code, they may be down the street, they may be across town. But they haven't come together around the same table to start to address issues that they may have prioritized that are impacting a host of things. It could be impacting attendance rates, it could be impacting academic achievement. And we're really able to work with them to dismantle the barriers to what would lead to success. To give a couple examples in North Carolina, in fact, we work in both Bertie and Roberson County and on vaccination adherence, and also making sure that the children that may have deferred their well-child visits or their age-appropriate vaccinations during COVID that we've worked with convening just as mentioned, the right players, the right people in the community to come together. And in both those counties we've been able to have nearly 250 students that are healthy back to school and fully vaccinated as they should be and that they deserve to be and as their families wanted them to be, but the time the resources just wasn't there or convenient enough to do. And so, this really has allowed the community to have a great win. It's a great example of just the importance of sitting down together, looking at the data and thinking about how we can all make a difference. Kathy, what you've reminded me of as you've been talking about this is that there's sort of a sweet spot that you've attained. If all you paid attention to were best practices, you'd say, well, okay, everything that works in these other places is going to work in your place, which of course might only be partially true. But if you only work locally, then you'd miss the opportunity to be learning what's happening elsewhere that might help you. And you're kind of at the intersection of these things, aren't you? Thank you for saying that. That's exactly where we sit - at that intersection. Sometimes we feel in a continuous improvement model that there's a no wrong door, so to speak. And so, when we're engaging with a school, school community, a community, or even a school district, that we're able to sit with them in proximity and talk through what are the issues that they're facing, where their children are most at risk, and what is it that they are working to prioritize. Because we also know that if we can move them through a process and achieve success and really answer the question, is anyone better off? So to really be outcomes focused. Then, what we know is that there are other opportunities for improvement that we can continue that work. Part of the success here is just pausing and celebrating what good work this community is doing together. This school is doing together. Tell us if you will, a little bit about how the work of the Alliance is funded, because I know you draw support from a number of quarters. You mentioned Kohl's, but overall how is the work funded? Thanks for asking. You know, one of the things I did mention to start with is the Clinton Foundation and President Clinton, specifically with his leadership supporting the health of children and families and the Heart Association. But the significant financial supporter and strategic supporter at the time was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They really put significant resources behind the creation of Healthier Generation. But the other thing that they did is put their brightest minds and public health leadership behind the creation of why we would exist and what would be the pillars of our organization that would serve well to make a difference. So having a technology backbone, which allows us to have an action center. Meaning that any school, any teacher, any administrator, any parent can access our training and our tools for free. Through our website, we have marketing and communication that follow best practices for how to create change and how to communicate change to the audiences that we're reaching out to our subject matter expertise and then measurement and evaluation. And it's this ability that really attracted funders like Kaiser Permanente. While schools have been central to our work, this digital platform really allowed our action center to help and support this access of no cost assessment tools, trainings, resources. Kaiser Permanente has been a key supporter of our work since 2013. I mentioned Kohl's as well, as such a significant supporter allowing us to reach 10 million families since the inception of our work together with them. Del Monte Foods is another significant supportive of ours. They allow us to implement the America's Healthiest School Awards program. I would be lost if I didn't mention Mackenzie Scott. She wanted to invest in whole child health equity and we were identified as an organization that was worthy of her funding and definitely was the largest single gift from a philanthropist that we've ever received. So, we were so grateful for that, that call called. That's wonderful affirmation. No question. It's nice to hear you have such a broad base of funding because that's a sign that people are thinking you're doing things right. I'm not sure I'm in a the best position to be completely objective about this because over the years I've received funding from through Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a number of projects. But it's amazing how often their imprint comes up when you talk about organizations that are doing creative work and you go back to the beginnings and Robert Wood Johnson was often there doing these things when nobody else was. And it's really wonderful to see the long-term consequence of that investment that they made. Well, let's talk about some new work you're doing in the schools. I know that a relatively new effort of the Alliance involves the expansion of resources in terms of a playbook in the schools. Can you explain what that's all about? Oh yes. This was really born out of the pandemic environment and our need and the schools need to know better guidance on the work that we can do to create healthier environments when so many demands are being put on us. We all know what happened to the food service staff of any school. They became the food service staff of the community during the COVID years. Kohl's wanted us to partner with selected communities across the country to implement what would be really a new family engagement strategy to support children's health and developing. What we call and refer to as our Healthy at Home playbook for schools to forge stronger relationships with families. We know that when schools and the families are working together and schools are understanding what families need, and families are able to be in a position to be heard and communicate what their needs are, that together they can really make a difference. We've been pretty excited the collection of resources. They're both in English and in Spanish on topics such as nutrition, staying active, mental wellbeing, social emotional health and stress and we've been pretty excited to have that implemented. I could see how you'd be excited about that. So, let me ask a final question. The word policy has come up several times. Is it part of the purview of the alliance to argue for policy changes? You mentioned schools. So, for example, would the Alliance be in a position to argue for tighter nutrition standards in schools or even something beyond the schools, like something dealing with food marketing directed at kids or front of package labeling or really anything like that? We stay out of the advocacy and lobbying lane, but we do focus on the small P policy change in schools so that we're helping schools manage their policies. But the area where we've had success is in creating a difference. We had a great partnership many years ago with McDonald's and worked with them on changes that they were committed to making in their healthy meals. And what we know is when McDonald's makes a big shift, so goes the market. Our body of work was the removing of sugary sodas from the menu board so that you would have to opt for that versus low fat milk or water and adding the sliced apples. I think that might be one of our hallmarks of the work that we've done over the years: sliced apples, carrot sticks, the GO-GURT that was being offered. And then removing either the higher sodium or higher fat items from the leaderboards so that they have to ask for them in order to have them as part of the Happy Meal. That was some significant work that we were able to do. And the other work we did in our early years was getting the three soda manufacturers, whether Pepsi and Coke and Dr. Pepper to agree to come together and remove sugar sodas from our public schools and replace it with a better price point of water. And it's something I know President Clinton is very proud of because I think a 90% of schools were on board with that work after about a three-year period. I think it really made a difference. Bio Kathy Higgins, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, is a national expert on health care and philanthropy, having previously served as the president and CEO of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation. Higgins leads Healthier Generation’s team of nearly 100 professional staff across the nation working to make the healthy choice the easy choice for all children. Prior to taking on the role of Healthier Generation CEO in January 2019, Higgins spent more than 30 years at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, where her roles span leading public health engagement, corporate communications, community relations, and corporate affairs. In 2000, Higgins led the launch of the Blue Cross NC Foundation. As president and CEO of the Blue Cross NC Foundation, Higgins led unprecedented growth, including the strategic investment of more than $150 million into North Carolina communities through more than 1,000 grants to improve the health of vulnerable populations, support physical activity and nutrition programs, and help nonprofit groups improve their organizational capacity. Higgins was also a significant advocate in Blue Cross NC’s early adoption of Healthier Generation’s decade-long innovative insurance benefit program, designed to encourage clinicians to extend weight management and obesity prevention services to kids and families. Higgins holds a bachelor’s degree in education from West Virginia Wesleyan College and completed her master’s work in community health education from Virginia Tech. She currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina and is the mother to twin boys.

Is it possible to decarbonize agriculture and make the food system more resilient to climate change? Today, I'm speaking with agricultural policy expert Peter Lehner about his climate neutral agriculture ideas and the science, law and policy needed to achieve these ambitious goals. Lehner is an environmental lawyer at Earthjustice and directs the organization's Sustainable Food and Farming Program. Transcript How does agriculture impact the climate? And I guess as important as that question is why don't more people know about this? It's unfortunate that more people don't know about it because Congress and other policy makers only really respond to public pressure. And there isn't enough public pressure now to address agriculture's contribution to climate change. Where does it come from? Most people think about climate change as a result of burning fossil fuels, coal and oil, and the release of carbon dioxide. And there's some of that in agriculture. Think about tractors and ventilation fans and electricity used for pumps for irrigation. But most of agriculture's contribution to climate change comes from other processes that are not in the fossil fuel or the power sector. Where are those? The first is nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And it comes because most farmers around the world and in the U.S. put about twice as much nitrogen fertilizer on their crops, on the land, as the plants can absorb. That extra nitrogen goes somewhere. Some of it goes off into the water. I'm sure your listeners have heard about harmful algae outbreaks or eutrophication of areas like the Chesapeake Bay and other bays where you just get too many nutrients and too much algae and very sick ecosystem. A lot of that nitrogen, though, also goes into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. About 80% of nitrous oxide emissions in the U.S. come from agriculture. Excess fertilization of our hundreds of millions of acres of crop land. Quick question. Why would, because the farmers have to pay money for this, why do they apply twice as much as the plants can absorb? Great question. It's because of several different factors. Partly it is essentially technical or mechanical. A farmer may want to have the fertilizer on the land right at the spring when the crops are growing but the land may be a little muddy then. So they may have put it on in the fall, which is unfortunate because in the United States, in our temperate area, no plants are taking up fertilizers in the fall. Also, a plant is like you or me. They want to eat continually but a farmer may not want to apply fertilizer continuous. Every time you apply it, it takes tractor time and effort and it is more difficult. So they'll put a ton of fertilizer on at one point and then hope it lasts for a while, knowing that some of it will run off, but hopeful that some will remain to satisfy the plant. There's a lot of effort now to try to improve fertilizer application. To make sure it's applied in ways just the right amount at the right time. And perhaps with these what's called extended release fertilizers where you put it on and it will continue to release the nutrients to the plant over the next couple of weeks and not run off. But we have a long way to go. Okay, thanks. I appreciate that discussion and I'm sorry I diverted you from the track you were on talking about the overall impact of agriculture on the climate. I think what's so exciting about this area is that everyone cares about our food. We eat it three times a day or more and yet we know very little about where it comes from and its impacts on the world around us. It's wonderful to be talking about this. The second major source of climate change impact in agriculture is methane. Methane is another greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide. About 30 times more powerful over a hundred years and about 85 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Which is I think the policy relevant time period that we're looking at because we're all trying to achieve climate stability by 2050. And where does methane come from? A little bit comes from rice, but the vast majority of it comes from cows and from manure. Cows are different than you and me. They can eat grass, and their stomachs are different, and release methane. Every time they breathe out, they are essentially breathing out this potent greenhouse gas methane. This is called enteric methane and it's the largest single source of methane in the United States. Bigger than the gas industry or the oil industry. The other major source of methane is manure. Our animals are raised in what are called concentrated animal feeding operations. They're not grazing bucolically on the pasture, they are crammed into buildings where there may be thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of these animals. Those hundreds of thousands of animals produce a vast amount of manure, whether it be say pigs in North Carolina or dairies in many States, or cattle or chicken. All our meat nowadays is grown in these concentrated areas where you get concentrated manure and that is often stored in these lagoons. These big pits of poop basically. And that, as it decomposes in this liquid environment, what's called anaerobically , releases a tremendous amount of methane. That's the second largest source of methane in the country after the cows belching. So you have nitrous oxide and you have methane. And then the third way agriculture contributes to climate change, which is different say than the fossil fuel sector, is by changing the land itself. Agriculture uses a tremendous amount of land. Think about it. When you go around, what do you see? You see agriculture uses about 62% of the contiguous United States; 800 million acres of land for grazing; or almost 400 million acres of land for cropland. Healthy land before it's been used for agriculture has a tremendous amount of carbon in the soil and in the plants. Just think about a forest with all the rich soil and the rich vegetation. When that is cleared to be a cornfield, all that carbon is lost and essentially it goes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. And that soil after that can't absorb any more carbon. Healthy soil is absorbing carbon all the time and most agricultural soils are not. So that release of carbon when you convert land to agriculture and that continuing inability to sequester carbon is another major way that agriculture contributes to climate change. So these three ways: nitrous oxide, methane and carbon from soil are all important contributors to climate change that don't really fit most people's model of what drives climate change - burning coal or oil and releasing carbon dioxide. But the bottom line is if we don't address agriculture's contribution to climate change, no matter how successful we are in reducing our fossil fuel use, we are very likely to face catastrophic climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is so significant. Far more than the indicated by many figures. We can't achieve climate stability without addressing agriculture as well. Agriculture drives about a quarter or a third total green climate change. Given how important this is, why don't people know more about it? And does industry play a role in that? Industry plays a big role, as does politics. Industry - and by industry we mean the food industry. And you've covered this before. It's very concentrated industry where usually two or three or four firms control the market, whether it be for seeds or retail or beef or chicken or pesticides. It's a very, very concentrated industry with tremendous political power. They have done their best to ensure, first of all, the agriculture industry doesn't even have to report their greenhouse gas emissions. Every other industry has to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The big polluters have to report. On the other hand, agriculture was able to obtain a rider in Congress. That's an extra provision on a budget bill starting about a decade ago that prohibits EPA from requiring agricultural facilities to report greenhouse gas emissions. So unlike most areas, agriculture doesn't even have to report their emissions and industry certainly wants to keep it that way. Also, as I was explaining, agriculture contributes to climate change in a way that is different than what we normally think about. I think that added complexity has just meant it is harder for people to understand. And third, there's a tremendous amount of mythology in agriculture. People think or would like to think that their food comes from this nice family farm with a few animals and a few diversified crops on the hillside. And that in some sense was the reality 50 or 100 years ago, but now it's not the reality. While there's still lots of small farms like that by number, those produce very little of our food. Most of our food is produced in these gigantic animal factories that I mentioned earlier or in gigantic monoculture chemical-dependent agricultural operations. So, we have this disconnect between what is the mythology of agriculture and where our food comes from and the reality of it. People really don't want their myths disrupted. Given the importance of these issues, what are some of the main ways that the impact of agriculture on climate can be changed? That's another exciting part of this. That there's a lot of things that can be done to reduce the impact of agriculture's contribution to climate change. And we know this because there are a lot of producers who have piloted these programs, who've implemented these programs and these practices on their own operations to reduce the climate impact. And they've been successful. So these can be, for example, rotating crops instead of having the same crop year after year after year, which really depletes the soil. You can have different crops in different years and each crop puts a little different in the soil and takes a little different from the soil. As a result, very often you end up needing less artificial pesticide and fertilizer, both of which contribute to climate change. You can manage your animals different. You can manage your manure differently. For example, if manure is treated and handled dry, as opposed to in these wet manure lagoons, it produces very, very little methane. Instead of producing tremendous amounts of methane, it produces almost none. So, if we manage manure differently, we can significantly reduce methane emissions. And of course, there's what we think of as the demand side. In the same way that we think about LED light bulbs or more efficient cars as part of our energy transformation, we can use our land and food more efficiently. We waste a tremendous amount of food. Maybe 30-40% of the food we produce is wasted. That's crazy. It's all the effort and the greenhouse gases from producing the food are wasted if the food is wasted. Even worse, the food is dumped into a landfill for the most part where it releases more methane. And it's inefficient. We have a system that very heavily subsidizes meat production, but meat uses, particularly beef, a tremendous amount of land because cows need a lot of land the way their biology requires land and time. So we have almost 800 million or 700 million acres of land devoted to cattle grazing that could be storing carbon. Then it takes about 15 pounds of grain to get a pound of beef where people can eat the grain directly much more efficiently. So there's a lot of practices that we can do at every stage of the process to reduce the climate impact of agriculture. The challenge is that it's only on a couple percent of American cropland or very little portion of our food is produced that way. So Peter, let me ask you a question about that very point you're on. We've recorded a series of podcasts on regenerative agriculture. Some of the most interesting podcasts we've done from my point of view. And they've included scientists who've studied it, policy people who look into it, but also farmers who have done this. I'm thinking particularly, well, three names pop into mind, but there are more. So Nancy Ranney, who ran a ranch in New Mexico for cattle, Gabe Brown, a regenerative farmer in North Dakota, and Will Harris from Georgia were all people we spoke to. I got the sense in each of those cases that these people were converting to this new model of farming because of what they cared about. It was their own passions that led them to do this and belief that a different system of agriculture was going to be important for the future. They were doing it for that reason, rather than any incentives from the government or policies that were encouraging, things like that. So there will be a small number of such people who would do it because they're passionate about it. I'm assuming that number will grow, but never fast enough to really do anything to scale like we really need it. So I'm ultimately you're going to need policies in place to ensure these things happen in more and more farms. Are there particular policies that are oriented this way that you think might be especially helpful? Kelly, you are spot on. I know Nancy and Gabe and Will, and they're terrific. They are pioneers and they are showing that we know this works. We're not looking at ideas that might work. We are looking at practices that we know work because of what they and others like them have done. As you said, they're doing it because they believe it's the right thing. We'll get some farmers that way, but we need policy to move from 2% of American crop land to 92% of American crop land. So, how do we do that? One is the current farm bill is very important. The farm bill is the most important environmental law nobody's ever heard of. It dates back to the depression. It's renewed every five years. Congress is debating it right now. It was supposed to be renewed last year, but they couldn't get their act together. So they may or may not be able to reauthorize it this year. But the farm bill in one section provides a tremendous amount of money for nutrition assistance. And you've probably talked about that, what we call the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In another part of it, it provides tremendous amounts of subsidies to farmers, about $20 billion a year of subsidies to farmers. Right now, those subsidies really are not designed to encourage farmers to adopt the practices that you talked to Nancy or Gabe or Will about. These practices that I was talking about earlier and that sometimes are called regenerative, sometimes agroecological, organic farming is often a part of that. These $20 billion of subsidies though, could be redirected, reshaped somewhat and not necessarily radically, but reshaped and focused on encouraging farmers to adopt these practices that can help mitigate climate change. And importantly, the same practices, and as I'm sure the folks you've talked to said, also help them be more resilient to climate change. They can better help the producer better withstand floods and droughts and temperature extremes. So there is a tremendous upside from this. We are already spending $20 billion a year on farm subsidies. Let's start spending it more intelligently in a way that really addresses our needs. Do you see signs that things are moving in that direction? I wish I did. There are some signs that we're moving in the right direction. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed a couple of years ago, was the first time Congress ever linked agriculture and climate change. In the 2018 Farm Bill, there's no mention of climate change. And when we were working on that with members on the Hill, there was really no overt conversations about climate change. Fortunately, things have changed. So, a step forward is that we're talking about climate change. And in the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress provided $20 billion to go to programs that are established under the Farm Bill. So, 20 extra billion dollars to these Farm Bill conservation programs and required that that money be spent on practices that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, essentially help us mitigate climate change. And that, again, was the first time Congress linked agriculture and climate change. Super important. Part of what's going on now on the Hill is a fight to ensure that money that the Inflation Reduction Act provided stays. There are those in Congress that would like to raid those funds and put them to other purposes, which we think would be a big step backwards. So that was really great opportunity. As to the Farm Bill money itself, there's definitely some conversations, particularly among the Democrats, to ensure that all of the Farm Bill programs are a bit more climate-focused. But we're far from consensus on that. So, we're making a bit of progress, but right now Congress is, I think it's fair to say, not at its most functional. And so the type of policy discussions we need, and an honest discussion of how can we help American farmers shift to practices that are better for them, for the communities, upwind and downwind and around them, better for climate change resilience and climate change mitigation. We're really not yet having that conversation as robustly as we need. Hopefully we'll be able to get to a place where the politics will allow us to have that. And frankly, this podcast and other conversations are really important to educating people so we can have that conversation. When you're trying to make policy advances, having public support for it can be a real asset. Do you see signs that the public is becoming more aware of this, that they're urging their political leaders to move on this front? For sure. The public is very much concerned about climate change. Every poll shows that. And people are concerned about it both as citizens and as consumers. So, if you follow the food marketing world, what you see is that many surveys show that consumers are very interested in the climate impact of their food choices. And far more than was the case a couple of years ago. And they want to know how can I buy food? How can I eat food that is climate friendly, that helps us stabilize the climate? And industry is responding to that. Now, some industry is responding to that by deceptive advertising. You may have seen that the New York Attorney General recently sued JBS, the world's largest beef company, for misleading statements about the climate-friendliness of their beef. So some companies are talking more than they're doing, but others are trying to respond to consumers' interest in more climate-friendly food. You see a growth in plant-based foods, plant-based milks, because plant-based foods have a much, much lower climate impact than meats, particularly beef. And so consumers are interested in that, and that market is responding. And I think you'll see more of that in governmental procurement as well. Governments that are trying to think about how can we, say New York City, reduce our climate footprint while a big part of a city's climate footprint is the food it purchases, say for New York City schools. And a city can take action by trying to buy lower climate impact foods. And that would be foods produced in a way that you've talked about with regenerative practices and also lower climate impact, such as more plant based. So, I think we're seeing a lot of progress on that for sure. So Peter, related to this, what would you think about some kind of labeling system on food products that gives an environmental score, let's say? I personally like the idea of labels. I'm not an expert by any stretch. I do remember that not too long ago, New York City required restaurants to label or have on the menus the calorie content of food. And that provision was later adopted by the Affordable Care Act and now is required of chain restaurants. And Trump tried to roll that back. So we litigated to try to preserve that and get that requirement reinstated in the Affordable Care Act successfully. And during that, I learned that labels really make a difference. Calorie labeling on menus does in fact help people make more informed choices and often better choices. And there's no question, again, I'm not an expert. You probably know much more, but for example, the added sugar labels make a difference and others. So I think as a whole, labels can make a big difference. Now, environmental footprint is a complicated multifaceted issue because something may create harm to water. It may create harm through toxic, say pesticide residue, or it may have a big climate footprint. How do you put all of that into a simple label? It's a complicated question. But I do think there's interest in having particularly climate, the climate impact food be identified on the label. And perhaps we will move in that direction.   Bio Based in New York, Peter Lehner is the managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food & Farming Program, developing litigation, administrative, and legislative strategies to promote a more just and environmentally sound agricultural system and to reduce health, environmental, and climate harms from production of our food. Peter is one of the leading experts on the impact of agriculture on climate change and is the author of Farming for Our Future; the Science, Law, and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture. From 2007–2015, Peter was the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the NRDC Action Fund. Among other new initiatives, Peter shaped a clean food program with food waste, antibiotic-free meat, regional food, and climate mitigation projects. From 1999–2006, Peter served as chief of the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s office. He supervised all environmental litigation by and against the state. He developed innovative multi-state strategies targeting global warming and air pollution emissions from the nation’s largest electric utilities, spearheaded novel watershed enforcement programs, and led cases addressing invasive species, wildlife protection, and public health. Peter previously served at NRDC for five years directing the clean water program where he brought important attention to stormwater pollution. Before that, he created and led the environmental prosecution unit for New York City. Peter holds an AB in philosophy and mathematics from Harvard College and is an honors graduate of Columbia University Law School. Peter is on the boards of the Rainforest Alliance and Environmental Advocates of New York and a member of the American College of Environmental Lawyers. He helps manage two mid-sized farms and teaches a course on agriculture and environmental law at Columbia Law School.

The first nutrition labels mandated by the Food and Drug Administration appeared on food packages in 1994. A key update occurred in 2016, informed by new science on the link between diet and chronic disease. Along the way, things like trans fats and added sugars were required, but all along, the labels have been laden with numbers and appear on the back or side of packages. There has long been interest in more succinct and consumer-friendly labeling systems that might appear on the front of packages. Such systems exist outside the US, but for political reasons and lobbying by the food industry, have been blocked in the United States. There's new hope, however, described in a recent opinion piece by Christina Roberto, Alyssa Moran, and Kelly Brownell in the Washington Post. Today, we welcome Dr. Christina Roberto, lead author of that piece. She is the Mitchell J. Blutt and Margot Krody Blutt Presidential Associate Professor of Health Policy in the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Interview Summary This is a really important topic, and if the nation gets this right, it really could make a difference in the way people make product decisions as they're in the supermarket. So, let's talk first about the importance of labeling on the front of the package. Why is that important when all the information is somewhere else, namely on the side or the back? I think there's a couple of key reasons why it's good to do front of packaging food labeling specifically. So, as you mentioned, it was a huge deal in 1994 to get this information mandated to be on food packaging to begin with, right? All of a sudden, there was much more transparency about what's in our food supply, but that being said, when you think about the nutrition facts label, it's pretty dense. There's a lot of percentages, there's a lot of numbers, there's a lot of information to process. And when people are actually in the supermarket shopping, they're making these split-second decisions, right? So, it's not to say that some consumers are turning it around and inspecting that packaging, but the reality is, for most people, it's a very habitual behavior. And so, we want to be in a place where that information is prominent, it's easily accessible, and it's easy to understand so that when you're making those snap judgements, they can be informed judgments. So, you're not talking about taking what's on the back and just moving it to the front. You're talking about a different set of information and symbols that might be available? That's right. Yeah. What front of package labeling is designed to do is just take some of the key bits of information that we know from science is going to be most important for consumers to base their nutritional decisions on. That's things like saturated fat, sodium, added sugars, right? And moving that to the front of the package and communicating about it in a very simple, clear way. So, no numbers, no percentages, just very straightforward language. And ideally some sort of icon, like an exclamation point, that would draw attention to that symbol and just quickly let consumers know that this product is high in those nutrients that you need to be concerned about and you need to try to limit. Why is it an important time to be thinking about this issue in the US? It's an important and it's an exciting time because the FDA right now is highly interested in actually moving forward on a policy that would require these types of front of package labels. And that hasn't been true, as you noted, for about a decade. But last year, the White House convened a very significant conference that hadn't happened in 50 years about nutrition, health, and hunger. And front of package labeling actually made it into their report in that conference as a key objective for this country in terms of a food policy that, under the Biden administration, they want to achieve. What we're seeing the FDA do now is actually undertake a series of research studies to try to understand what should this label look like, and how should it be designed to be consumer friendly. With the hope that actually we'll get a proposed rule on this potentially by June, and even if not by June. There's clear momentum that it looks like this is going to be happening in the near future. In a few minutes, I'd like to ask you about what's taken place in other countries, but what's been the history of this in the US? Front of package labeling really came to a head back in 2009. And it's actually quite a delight to share this with you, Kelly, because you and I were doing some research around it at the time. So, what played out then is a labeling system was introduced called Smart Choices. At its face, it seemed to make sense, right? It was going to be a check mark that was going to be put on products that were deemed to be healthy as a smart choice. So, a consumer could look at that and select something they wanted to eat that was relatively healthy. The reality is when that labeling system came out, it was on Fudgesicles and it was on Cookie Crisp cereal, and there was a lot of kind of concern about whether this type of labeling system was systematically problematic and was going to mislead consumers. And at that time, Kelly, I was a grad student at the Rudd Center and you really taught me quite a bit about how to make things happen and how to have a public health impact. Because we were quite concerned about that system, we actually did a study where we randomly sampled 100 products from Smart Choices and we applied an objective nutrition standard - an algorithm to score those products. What we found is that 64% of those Smart Choices products would not meet healthy by this objective nutrition standard. And so, you had the vision to reach out to the New York Times and alert the media to this. And we started to see a lot of kind of concerning reports in the media, like Smart Choices, what's going on? This doesn't seem very smart. We had done this little bit of science, and then at the Rudd Center, you had reached out to the attorney general of Connecticut at the time, Dick Blumenthal, who was quite interested in consumer protection issues and worked a lot on tobacco. And he took this up as a real public health champion to say this is concerning, we have some of this science, and he came out and threatened legal investigation into that program. What was so remarkable to see in that story, particularly for me as a grad student, was wow you can get these different actors coming together, right? Some of that media attention, science playing the role it needs to play, a public health champion who can really make a difference in the attorney general, and all of that can come together and this program literally halted, they stopped it. And I should say, that was a great public health victory. But immediately after that, the Institute of Medicine, so now the National Academy of Medicine, was charged with writing two reports on front of package labeling. And they came out with one that was focused on the nutrition criteria that should underlie a system like that, and one about the design of the label. And they had some great recommendations, very consistent with what you and I have seen in the science, right? It needs to be accessible, simple, easy to understand. Well, what ended up happening is not much. The industry at that point then released their voluntary labeling system that they call Facts Up Front, which is what we have to this day. And as you might imagine, it has percentages and it has grams and milligrams and it's confusing, and they can also highlight positive nutrients on there. So you can have a Cookie Crisp cereal that's also touting the amount of fiber, the amount of protein. And so that's really what we've been stuck with. It's now only over a decade later that we are at this moment where we're finally seeing this progress, and we're at a place where we might get a labeling system that does a really good job of communicating this information to the consumer. I guess one sort of ironic form of evidence that such a system is likely to really help consumers make decisions is how hard the industry has fought against having such a system. And not to mention the science that exists suggesting that these things might be helpful. A lot of activity has occurred outside the US. Can you describe some of that? Over 40 countries have front of package labeling systems. Now, some are mandatory, some are voluntary. The mandatory ones, as you might imagine, produce better effects. They range. And many of them are designed really well. So, let's take some of the best examples. Chile, for example, has warning labels that alert consumers to whether products are high in saturated fat, sugars, sodium, and calories, and those symbols are designed in a very intuitive way. They're stop sign shaped, so they really leverage the automatic associations consumers have. They're prominent, they're black, they stand out from the packaging. And these well-designed labels, we now have evidence from scientific evaluations that they're producing effects, right? They're leading consumers to purchase less of these unhealthy nutrients. They're also leading to some reformulation. And by that, I mean the industry is trying to figure out, 'well, can we lower the sodium, so we don't get one of those labels?' The other thing that I think is often overlooked with labeling but is so important is once you decide to label the food supply and you have an agreed upon system, that can support other policies. And that's what we see in Chile as well. Now all of a sudden, you can't market foods with these warning labels to kids, right? And you can't sell those foods with these warning labels to kids in schools. So, it really has even a broader impact than just the behavior change you see from the labeling, and so many other countries have followed suit. Mexico has a very similar labeling system. One thing that they've learned from Chile is, and this is a concern, that as the industry brings down the levels of sugar, for example, in foods in response to labeling, they're increasing the levels of non-sugar sweeteners, right? Things like Sucralose or Stevia or monk fruit, and so that's a worry. Mexico has, in addition, also labeled those non-sugar sweeteners on the food packaging. And then you see other examples. France has a really nice system. It's called Nutri-Score. Very intuitive. There are letter grades. I myself had the chance to go to France. I was trying to buy some turkey for my son. I don't speak a bit of French, and I'm standing in the supermarket and I just see the letter grade A and I think, oh, okay, I'll pick that one.   Great, great example. Yes, very intuitive systems around the world. So, are there studies showing which of these systems work and what sort of effects they have? And I know you've done additional work beyond what you mentioned earlier. Absolutely, and there are a whole range of studies, whether they're randomized controlled trials, lab studies, or online experiments. And then the more compelling, convincing evidence, which comes from natural experiments that are done around the globe, or even research we have from stores that have voluntary implemented these labels and we can look at changes in sales data. And what all that boils down to is labeling will produce behavioral effects. They will get people to purchase healthier foods, they will get people to purchase less of the unhealthy foods. Labels inform consumers, which I think is kind of the first order goal, right? Like let's just make sure people understand what's in the food supply, and then we see this reformulation. And that's been true, even if you look back to trans fat labeling, like requiring trans fat on the labels was also associated with trans fat coming out of the food supply. So, I think we can feel really good and solid that labeling can help people make healthier choices. And as anyone who's worked on issues related to chronic diseases, we're going to need a suite of policies, right? Labels are never going to be the silver bullet. They're not designed to be, but it's a policy that makes a lot of sense. It's a very cost effective policy. It's not very expensive to do labeling, and it can help support many other policies that might produce bigger effects. So, given the different options, the different kind of systems that have been proposed or are out there in use, do you have a sense of what ultimately might be the best system? I think the FDA has some good options in front of them. Now, if I were to wave a magic wand, I would do warning labels. I would make them more similar to what's done in Chile, just because we have good evidence that warnings in particular, and these kinds of symbols like a stop sign, are probably going to be more effective at educating consumers and shaping behavior. Now, that being said, we have some unique legal challenges in the US for getting a system like that. The FDA is proposing, I think, a totally reasonable, science-based label that essentially would have what it's high in and then indicate whether it's high in added sugar or saturated fat or sodium. I would love to see that label also have some sort of icons, some eye-catching exclamation point or something like that, but that label is great, it's a great option. Let's compare it now to what the industry is pushing for, which is basically what we have now, facts upfront. And as I said earlier, this is a label that has percent daily values, that has grams, that has milligrams, that can highlight positive nutrients that are going to appear on unhealthy foods. I think when you look at those two options, it's just a no-brainer to go with this very simple, very straightforward, high-end label that lists the nutrients and let's put some sort of icon on it. So are you optimistic about where things might go? Well, I'm a glass half full kind of person. I would say yes, I try to be very optimistic, but I think there's reason to be. I think we have some good options on the table, FDA is moving forward, research is being done, scientists and others are highly engaged in this process and giving feedback to FDA. And so many other countries have done this. So yes, I am feeling optimistic. So at the end of the day, a lot of this will come down to how much the FDA can resist pressure from the food industry. Right, so many things in food policy do come down to that. That's really true. So true. It's interesting, one of the things that you highlighted, but I'd like to even bring a little more attention to is the issue of the industry reformulating its products so that they don't have to show these negative labels. That's such a potentially powerful public health consequence of this, that it needs to be focused on even more. I'm hoping the valuations are being done of the impact of that on public health. Because you can make an argument, couldn't you, that if these labels don't affect the purchasing behavior of a single individual, they still could have enormous public health benefit just because of the reformulation, do you agree? Oh, 100%. Yes, absolutely. I would even argue that we have very few mechanisms to hold industry accountable, and to me is just a fundamental right of consumers. Like they have the right to know, there needs to be transparency, and great that they are likely to produce behavior change and great that they are likely to make the industry reformulate, but I just feel like that there's so many reasons to do labeling that it just feels like an obvious policy to pursue. Hopefully, any system that comes into place can be nimble as much as they can be in these government regulations to take into account new science that occurs. Like at some point, maybe a symbol that notes whether a product is ultra processed would be in order, or as you said, in France, I think it was, where they've labeled the addition of the artificial sweeteners. Was it France or was it another place? Mexico. Yes. That's right. Okay. Yeah, thanks for clearing that up. Something like that might enter the system, so having a system that can adjust to the science as it goes forward would be really important too. Kelly, it's such an important point. I think part of any labeling strategy needs to be monitoring and evaluation, and particularly with the non-sugar substitutes. Like right now, we don't know, it's a very hard thing to track. It's only on the ingredient list. We can't quantify how much is in the food supply. And so I would love to see coupled with labeling some way that that gets disclosed so we can really monitor and ensure how that might be changing in the food supply over time and evaluate, to your point, what's happening in terms of reformulation. As an aside, we've done a cluster of podcasts on the influence of these artificial sweeteners and the sugar substitutes and the available science on this, on what goes on in the brain, what happens to the microbiome, the impact of health overall is really concerning, so I totally agree with you that having that information disclosed could be really helpful. Yes, 100%.     BIO Christina A. Roberto, PhD is the Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Associate Professor of Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also an Associate Director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) at Penn. Dr. Roberto is a psychologist and epidemiologist who studies policies and interventions to promote healthy eating habits and help create a more equitable and just food system. In her work, she draws upon the fields of psychology, behavioral economics, epidemiology, and public health to answer research questions that provide policymakers and institutions with science-based guidance. Dr. Roberto earned a joint-PhD at Yale University in Clinical psychology and Chronic Disease Epidemiology. Dr. Roberto completed her clinical internship at the Yale School of Medicine and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Traditional clinical weight loss interventions can be costly, time consuming, and inaccessible to low-income populations and people without adequate health insurance. Today's guest, Dr. Gary Bennett, has developed an Interactive Obesity Treatment Approach, or iOTA for short, that represents a real advance in this area. Dr. Bennett is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Medicine and Global Health at Duke University, where he is also Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Interview Summary You know, in this time when people are talking about more expensive, and kind of more intrusive interventions, like the big weight loss drugs, it's nice to know that there may be alternatives that could be accessible to more people. Could we start off with you telling our listeners what the iOTA approach is and how it works? Sure. This is an approach for weight management. It's useful for weight loss or preventing weight gain or maintaining one's weight after you've lost weight. The idea here is that it's a technology that's designed to be highly accessible, and useful for a range of different types of populations. So, as you described, we have developed and tested this primarily for folks who are medically vulnerable, who are low income, who are racial, ethnic minority, who live in rural communities, and where we have traditionally had real difficulty reaching populations with effective weight loss tools. So, iOTA is a fully digital approach. It uses technologies smartphone apps, but it can also use text messaging, interactive voice response, those are like robocalls, automated telephone calls, websites. We've tested this on a wide range of different types of technology platforms, and we've tested it in a range of different types of populations all over the country and indeed even in other countries. So, give us some examples of what kind of information people might be receiving through these various forms of media. The underlying kind of technology, the underlying approach, I should say, for iOTA is actually reasonably simple. It operates from the perspective that creating weight loss is really about making an energy deficit. That is to say, helping people to consume fewer calories than they are expending. The realization we had years ago is that you can get there, you can create that calorie deficit in a whole host of different ways. Some people diet, some people try to get more active, there are limitations around that kind of approach. But fundamentally, you can also just get there by asking people to do some reasonably straightforward behaviors. Like not consuming sugary beverages, or consuming fewer chips, cookies and candies. Or changing the amount of red meat that they put on the plate. And, if you frame those things out as goals, then you can prescribe those goals to people in ways that make sense to them personally. The trick though is actually in the idea of personalizing those goals to the given individual. And that's where technology comes in and gets very helpful. The case is, if you have a large library of these goals, you'd want to try to provide these in a highly personalized way. That really are aligned with what people's needs are and noting that those needs may change over time. So, what we do with iOTA is deliver a very short survey. That survey then helps us to be able to look into our library of goals and pick the ones that are most useful for our users. We prescribe those goals, and then we ask folks to self-monitor those goals. Self-monitoring or tracking is an extraordinarily powerful part of behavior change science. And so, we ask them to track using one of our technologies: the chat bot or the text message or interactive voice response or the smartphone app. Every time that we receive data from one of our users, we give them highly personalized feedback that is designed around principles of behavior change science. And then over time we also give them support. We do support sometimes from a coach or sometimes from a layperson, sometimes it's even from a physician. And over time what we find is that this kind of an iOTA approach helps people to lose weight, prevent weight gain, have weight loss maintenance, but it also has a cascade of other types of effects, some of which we didn't really even anticipate producing. This reminds me of something that I've fought for years, that nutrition and weight control can get incredibly complicated and down on the weeds in a fascinating way from a academic point of view. But that you can get to the goal line with just a few simple things. You might be 80% to the goal line just by eating less junk food and eating more fruits and vegetables and getting mired in that last 20% becomes confusing. It sounds like that's exactly what you're doing. That you kind of picked some of the big things that people can do, establish goals around them, and then provide a behavioral path for getting to those goals. That's precisely our thinking. And the thing I'd add to that is part of the challenge in weight control is making those types of changes for long amount period of time that it takes to produce and sustain weight losses. One of the things we know is that any kind of behavior change, but particularly behavior change for weight control purposes just requires an extraordinary amount of engagement over a very, very long time. So, I'm fond of saying to our teams and to others I'm really much less concerned with strategies that produce weight changes at a month or two months. Because the real question for us is how do we create technologies that can support users as they enter the 10th month or the 12th month? Fundamentally, what we're really after here. It's not really weight loss, but it's really the changes in a whole range of health parameters. So cardiometabolic function, the indicators of the development of various cancers, diabetes parameters, those kinds of things. And it takes time and effort to produce those changes via the weight control, changes that we're hoping to produce with these technologies. What kind of results are you getting from this and does the iOTA program in fact make it easier for people to stay on track with their health goals? Yes, it's a really interesting set of findings over more than a half dozen trials in the last bunch of years. If I were to summarize, I'd say we get pretty modest weight losses relative to say, what you might get with a very intensive weight loss intervention or with a drug or certainly with surgery. But what's different is that those weight changes do tend to be sustained over time. So, they're modest, but they last. And the really interesting finding for us is that people stay very engaged with these technologies. On average, people tend to use new apps pretty feverishly in the first month after they downloaded, or they put it on their phone one way or another. And then most people, about 70% of the time, people move away from those apps, they disengage. When we look back about a year after people started using iOTA, it's very, very common for people to be engaged with our technologies 80-85% of the time. That is to say, they're still tracking their goals at about 80% fidelity after a year. That's really terrific. and it's one of the reasons I think that we're able to see sustained losses, even though those losses aren't very large. And again, my goal here is much less - this is a public health approach - I'm much less interested here in trying to produce large weight losses for cosmetic reasons and those kinds of things. This is really an effort to try to create a very highly disseminatable, inexpensive treatment that is accessible to large numbers of folks. In trials, we certainly have seen changes in blood pressure and various cardiometabolic parameters like lipids. Those changes tend to be larger in certain populations. When we tested this in China, we saw very, very large dips in lipids. And those too also do tend to be sustained. The biggest surprise for us over the years has been a relatively consistent set of findings that suggest that people have improved wellbeing on the backend of participating in one of these kinds of treatments. They tend to feel less stressed, have more energy, and have better quality of life. In fact, we've seen very, very large reductions in depressive symptoms in study after study. I'll just add tangentially that's notable for us in the populations in which we work, because these are not populations for whom weight is very closely tied with one's emotional state. That is to say, the patient populations in which we work tend to have more tolerance for heavier body weights compared to other populations. So, when we see weight loss in our trials, we don't often expect to see that accompanied by improvements in depressive symptoms. But we see it in study after study after study. So, we've been really pleased with this broad array of impacts that this technology seems to produce. It's nice to hear the positive results. And I also like your aspirations because a smaller weight loss, better maintained is a much better outcome than a larger weight loss regain, which is typically the case. And the fact that you're getting these corollary effects in other areas of life, like mental health and things like that is very impressive. Are there other stories you could tell from people that have been on the program that might be illustrative? Oh yes. What happens most often in our studies is that at some point one of our patients approaches me and says, "You know, I've tried everything. I've tried dieting, tried this app and that app and this is just so easy. I've been able to stick with it for a long time." That happens a lot. And it always, always pleases me greatly because at the end of the day we're really trying to create these technologies for real people to use over a very, very long period of time. I find that exciting. We've had a number of people over the years who have gotten off their hypertension medications or have had seen changes in their diabetes, their A1Cs as a measure of diabetes. And it's just really exciting because then it's one of the things that I think gets us up in the mornings to do this work. That is exciting. How has it been especially influential among people who otherwise have limited access to care? We really started this work because of a series of observations that I made early in my career when I started working in community health centers. Community health centers are often primary care units in many major metropolitan areas, and often in rural settings as well. Their primary intention is to serve patients who are medically vulnerable, and often patients who are poor. On those settings, the providers in those settings are just doing extraordinary work. And I started to spend time there and was trying to understand how we might think about situating this kind of technology and these kinds of public health style interventions within those care settings. And the observation I made over and over and over again was that, even in these care settings that are really designed to serve patients who have low income or come from limited income backgrounds, weight control and behavior change in general was just not the highest priority. These physicians are dealing with all manner of acute and chronic health crises. And they just didn't feel that managing a patient's weight was the best use of their limited clinical time and attention with patients. The challenge of that, of course, is that, for patients who have obesity, that can be a primary cause of many of the acute and chronic conditions that my physician colleagues were treating. And so what I began to observe was that patients who have the greatest need for comprehensive obesity care are often the least likely to receive it. And this is borne out by national data, which suggests that if you're a person from a medically vulnerable background and you have obesity, you're dramatically less likely to receive high quality care from the health system. And then there are a whole range of financial constraints that limit your ability to be able to acquire that care in the commercial market. And so there are really many, many people, really, tens of millions of folks out there without options. So, that's really why we started developing these tools. And I'm very pleased to say that the underlying approach that we develop with iOTA has been leveraged in a variety of weight control interventions that are being used in other places. The next frontier for us is to really think about how to disseminate this in a more widely accessible way. We've begun having conversations with metropolitan areas. Cities where health departments are thinking about doing these kinds of things. Some of these technologies have found their way into other systems. And increasingly as we have begun to test these approaches in clinical care settings, we certainly have seen ongoing use of these technologies in the community health centers where we originally came up with some of these ideas. So, much more work there to be done but I'm hopeful. Do you see a role for this approach in conjunction with or as a companion to the weight loss medications that are getting so much attention now? Yes, I do. One of the things that's notable about this generation of weight loss medications is that they do not have an indication that they should be accompanied with a behavior change intervention. So, the other way to say that is that most weight loss drugs that we've seen in years past have received FDA approval, contingent on their combination, their use, alongside a behavior change intervention. And the GLPs, the ones that are most recently emerged, don't have that indication. Nevertheless, we know a couple of things. One is that these are medications that are designed to be used for very long time in order for fat, weight loss to be sustained. And there are a number of people who increasingly are interested in transitioning off of these medications and beginning to engage weight control on their own. So, my sense is that technologies like iOTA can be very useful in helping people make those transitions off of drug. I think the technologies we've created can be very, very useful as an adjunct to try to help to maintain motivation for weight loss. And to think about addressing some of the related behaviors that can help people to experience an overall improvement in their health. So, becoming more physically active and making changes in stress and wellbeing as an adjunct to the weight loss that's being produced by the drugs. I have to tell you, I'm very, very concerned about the cost of these medications. I'm very pleased by their efficacy, but I'm extraordinarily concerned about their cost and their limited accessibility. I expect that will change. But during this period of time, I'm very concerned about the creation of additional disparities, patient's ability to seek really high-quality care. I'm glad you raised that point. So, where do you see the work going next with IOTA? Well, I see it going in two directions. One, we are thinking about dissemination. Where can you embed this kind of approach inexpensively in ways that allow the greatest number of users. The emergence of artificial intelligence technologies, notably the large language models, really help in that regard because they allow us to deliver that kind of core iOTA special sauce more flexibly in a range of different technologies. And even more inexpensively than we can do right now. iOTA is extremely cost effective and with AI delivery it could be even more so. And then the other path I see is really what you asked before. And it's how do we think about using these technologies as an adjunct to medication treatment, which I think will become even more common over the next couple of years. I hope that it becomes a more common approach that's used to treat the patients who have the highest risk of obesity and all of the chronic health conditions that travel along with it. Bio Gary Bennett, a professor in the department of Psychology & Neuroscience who also holds appointments in Global Health, Medicine and Nursing, is the founding director of the Duke Digital Health Science Center. For 20 years, he has been studying how incorporating digital strategies into clinical treatment of obesity can improve health outcomes. His development of the Interactive Obesity Treatment Approach (iOTA) has been supported by over $20 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Fast food is part of American life. As much a part of our background as the sky and the clouds. But it wasn't always that way, and over the decades, the fast food landscape has changed in quite profound ways. Race is a key part of that picture. A landmark exploration of this has been published by today's guest, Dr. Naa Oyo Kwate. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. Her book, recently published, is entitled White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food From Black Exclusion to Exploitation. The book has been received very positively by the field. And was recently named the best book in the field of urban affairs by the Urban Affairs Association.   Interview Summary I was so happy to see your book because people have talked about the issue of race off and on in the field, but to see this kind of scholarly treatment of it like you provided has been really a welcome addition. Let me start with a general question. Let's begin with the fast food situation today and then rewind to where it began. Are there patterns to where fast food restaurants are located and who fast food is marketed to? Absolutely. There's quite a bit of research, and you just alluded to the work that's been done in the field. There's a lot of research that shows fast food is most dense in African American communities. Not every study has the same finding, but overall that's what the accumulated evidence shows. On the one hand you have the fact that Black communities are disproportionately saturated with these outlets. Then there's also the case that apart from the physical locations of the restaurants, fast food is strongly racialized as Black in terms of how it's portrayed to the public. It [Fast Food] relies on images of Blackness and Black cultural productions such as Black music for its marketing. These sometimes these veer into racial caricature as well. One of the things I talked about in the book briefly is the TV commercial character Annie who Popeye's introduced in 2009. They basically created this Black woman that Adweek at the time was calling "feisty," but it's really just this stereotypical idea of the sassy Black woman and she's in the kitchen frying up the chicken for Popeye's. And actually, some of the language that was used in those commercials really evokes the copy on late 19th century and Aunt Jemima pancake mix packaging. It's a really strong departure from fast food's early days, the way that fast food is now relying on Blackness as part of its core marketing constructs. I'm assuming that it follows from what you've been saying that the African American community has disproportionately been targeted with the marketing of these foods. Is that true of children within that community? Research shows that in terms of fast food marketing at the point of purchase. There's more - display advertising for example at restaurants that are in Black communities. And then there's also been research to show, not in terms of the outlets themselves, but in terms of TV programming that there tends to be more commercials for fast food and other unhealthy foods during shows that are targeting Black youth. How much of the patterning of the fast food restaurants is due to income or due to the amount of fast food consumption in these areas with many restaurants? Almost none of it really. It's not income and it's not the amount of fast food that people are consuming. In fact, one of the main studies that led me to start researching this book, because I was coming to it from public health where there was a lot of research around the disproportionality of fast food restaurants. We actually did a study in New York City, some colleagues and we published it in 2009, where we looked at how fast food was distributed across New York City's five boroughs. And restaurant density, we found, was due almost entirely to racial demographics. There's very little contribution from income. So, the percentage of Black residents was what was driving it. That was the biggest predictor of where fast food was located. It wasn't income, income made very little contribution and if you compared Black neighborhoods that were higher in income to those that were lower in income, they basically had about as much fast food exposure. Then if you compare them to white neighborhoods matched in income, Black neighborhoods still had more. So, it wasn't income, it was race. There are other areas that were high in fast food density like Midtown and downtown Manhattan where you have commercial and business districts, transportation hubs, tourist destinations. So, you expect fast food to be in these really dense and kind of busy commercial areas, but the only residential space that had comparable density were Black and brown neighborhoods. The assumption that many people have is that, okay, well if it's not income, then it's probably demand. So probably fast food is just dense in those neighborhoods because Black people eat so much fast food. But again, the data do not bear that out, not just in our study, but in others. And in fact, apart from the study we did specifically on fast food, we did another study where we looked at retail redlining for a number of different kinds of retail sectors. And again, demand is not what situates, you know, where stores are or are not. And then when I got to this project, just digging through the archives, you find that until the industry really went in on targeted advertising to increase the numbers of visits that Black people were making to fast food restaurants and the average check size that they were spending, Black consumers were mostly using fast food as a quick snack, it wasn't a primary place for meals. So it's really the case that the restaurants proceeded the demand and not the inverse. It is an absolutely fascinating picture. My guess is that what you've just said will probably come as a surprise to some people who are listening to this, not that fast food isn't dense in particular neighborhoods, but that it's particularly dense in neighborhoods by race just because people generally think that fast food is popular everywhere. So, let's talk about why this occurred and dive a little more deeply into what your book does and that's to provide a historical view on how and why this evolved. So, what did the early history look like and then what happened? So, the book traces what's basically a national story, but I focus particularly on certain cities like Chicago, New York and DC. But it's tracing how fast food changed racially and spatially from the early 1900's to the present. I break out that early history into what I call first and second-generation chains. So, they opened in urban and suburban areas respectively. The birth of the first generation fast food restaurants took place in what is termed the Nader of race relations in the US from the end of the Civil War to the 1930s. So, this is a time during which you see Plessy versus Ferguson, for example, ushering in legal segregation. Lynchings are at their worst. You have the destruction of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's taking place and other notable incidents and forces that were undermining Black life at the time. It's during that context that the first generation restaurants are born. And so, these are burger chains like White Castle, that was the first actually big burger chain. People often assume it's McDonald's, but it's actually White Castle in 1921. And then there are knockoffs of White Castle, like White Tower and Little Tavern, which was an East coast brand. And then there were also other restaurants that were not burger chains, but more like hot shops was more of a sit-down restaurant. And then you had Horn and Hardart, the outlets where they had auto mats. So, you know, this was kind of high tech at the time, but you would go in and the food was behind little glass compartments and you would put in your requisite number of nickels and then take out your little plate of food. These were all the restaurants that I'm calling first generation restaurants. So, you had quite a bit of diversity in terms of what they were serving, but they were all in urban centers. They were not franchised. They were corporate owned outlets and most importantly everything about them was white, whether figuratively in terms of who dined and worked there or literally in the architecture and the design and the name like White Castle. That veneer of whiteness was doing two things. On the one hand, trying to offer the promise of pristine sanitary conditions because this is a time when food production was rife with concerns. And then also it's trying to promise a kind of unsullied social whiteness in the dining experience. So, first generation then leads to second generation fast food, which begins in the suburbs instead of the urban centers. Second generation fast food starts to grow in the early 1950s. These are the brand names that are most synonymous with fast food today: KFC, Burger King, McDonald's. So, for example, Ray Crock launches McDonald's as a franchise in the all white suburb of Des Plaines outside Chicago near O'Hare airport. And he set to fly over prospective sites looking for church steeples and schools, which to him were an indication of a middle class and stable community, but of course, racializing that as white. Because you could have Black neighborhoods with church steeples, but that was not where the restaurants were going. So, what ends up happening with second generation fast food is that it takes this theme of purity and shifts so that it's not just the purity of simple kind of fuel for the working man, but instead the purity of white domestic space. And where first-generation restaurants targeted working adults, the second went after families and children. Fast food then becomes more than just food - it's about fun. Those are the two key ways to think about the early history. One could obviously find many, many, many examples of different racial groups being excluded from the economic mainstream of the country. For example, areas of employment, and my guess is that being excluded from the marketing applied to consumer goods and lots of other things. But do you think there's something special about food in this context? Oh, that's a good question. It's interesting because fast food. It's food, but it's more than that the way that fast food initially excluded Black people. One of the things I talk about in the early part of the book is James Baldwin going to a restaurant and trying to order a burger and being rejected and facing discrimination. And the idea that it's not just that you can't get a burger, it's not the same thing as if you try to buy, I don't know, a ham sandwich or something. But like what burger means something more than that, right? It's bigger than a burger is Ella Baker said. Fast food is kind of like the closest thing we have to a national meal. It sort of occupies a special place in the heart of America and is symbolic of this quintessential all-American meal. And the notions of a good and simple life that we purportedly have in this country. So, it means more I think the way that fast food was positioned as something that was totally wrapped up in this exclusionary whiteness. Your book traces the long pathway that fast food traveled going from exclusion in the beginning and then later exploitation. Can you describe a couple of the key turning points? Well I would say that it wasn't like a light sort of got switched on that caused fast food to shift abruptly from utterly excluding Black people to then pursuing them full throttle the next day. It was quite a long and bumpy pathway and really American retailers in general have continually had to discover Black consumers and the fact that they exist over and over. And then sort of trying to think like, oh, how do we reach them? We don't understand them, like they're this enigma kind of thing. Fast food was doing the same kind of thing. There was both what the industry was doing and then there were also pull factors that were causing fast food to be drawn into Black communities as well. There are a lot of turning points, but I would say if you start fairly early in the history, a key one was after second generation fast food got going. Where suburban fast food right, is trying to position itself as this white utopia. But almost immediately that notion was fraught and unstable because concerns quickly arose around teenagers. They were money makers but they were also rowdy. Their behavior, hot rodding and goofing off in the parking lot and so on, was off-putting to the adult diners. So, it became this difficult kind of needle to thread of like how are we going to track this consumer segment that's foundational to the enterprise but do so under conditions that would keep them in line and not mess up the other potential revenue that we have going. As the kind of nuisance of fast foods became more pitched, municipalities began introducing ordinances to control fast food or even ban it. And that made the suburbs harder to get into or to maintain a foothold in. Corporations then start looking more at the cities that they were avoiding in the first place and the Black communities there that they had excluded. So that happens fairly early and then some other key turning points occur throughout the 1960s. Here we have urban renewal, you have urban rebellions taking place and during the late 1960s when these rebellions and uprisings were taking place, this is the time period when you get the first Black franchisees. Into the 1970s you have oil crises, then you have the burger and chicken wars as the industry called them in the 1980s. And this was referring to corporations battling each other for market share. So, all throughout the history there were different turning points that either accelerated the proliferation of fast food or sort of change the way the industry was looking at Black consumers and so on. Now in some discussions I've heard of this issue off and on over the years from people who have looked at the issue of targeted marketing who have talked about how there was a period of time and you made this clear, when Blacks were excluded from the marketing and they just weren't part of the overall picture of these restaurants. Then there was a movement for Blacks to be included more in the mainstream of American culture so that it was almost seen as an advance when they became included in the marketing. Black individuals were shown in the marketing and part of the iconic part of these restaurants. So that was seen as somewhat of a victory. What do you think of that? It's true and not true. I mean when fast food decided to finally start actually representing Black people in its marketing, I think that is important. I do think that the fact that they were finally making ads and conceiving of campaigns that saw Black people as part of the actual consumer base at which they were, yes, that that is important. But it's also the case that corporations are never doing anything for altruism. It's because they wanted to shore up their bottom line. So, for example, Burrell Advertising is the biggest African American ad shop based in Chicago. They get the McDonald's account and so they're the first ones to have a fast food restaurant account. They begin their campaign in 1971 and at that time, their advertising actually positioned Black families as regular people doing everything everybody else does and going to the restaurant and enjoying time together as a family and so on. And I think those kinds of images were important that they were creating them, but again, at the same time it was only the context in which Burrell got that account. The reasons why McDonald's was reaching out to Black consumers was because, again, in the early 1970s white suburbs were becoming more saturated, and McDonald's needing to expand. Then you have the oil crisis in which people are not driving as much, and Black people because of racism are centered in urban centers and not in the suburbs. So that makes a logical place for them to go and so on. So, it's not without its vexed context that those new advertising images and opportunities were taking place. Okay, thanks. I know that's a complicated topic, so I appreciate you addressing that. You know, something you mentioned just a few moments ago was that when Blacks started to become owners of franchises, can you expand on that a little bit and say what was the significance? Yes. First of all, cities were changing at that time. White residents were moving to the suburbs, multiple public and private policies were keeping the suburbs white and white residents were moving to white suburbs. So, Central City was changing, right? The neighborhoods that had been white before were now changing to become predominantly Black. And so, the fast food outlets that were located in those neighborhoods found their client base changing around them. And many of those operators, and indeed their corporate superiors, were uninterested in and uninformed about a Black consumer base at best and outwardly hostile at worst. You end up with as neighborhood racial transitions are taking place, white operators are now in communities they never meant to serve. Som as urban uprisings rack one city after another, Black franchisees are brought on kind of as a public face in these changing urban areas. The primary goal was to really have Black franchisees manage the racial risks that corporate was finding untenable. They realized that it wouldn't do to have white managers or franchise owners in these neighborhoods. So, they bring in Black franchisees to start making that transition. And then after fast food becomes more interested in trying to deliberately capture more Black spending, Black franchisees become even more important in that regard. For their part, the Black franchisees were seeking out fast food outlets as a financial instrument, right? This was a way to contest and break down unfair and pervasive exclusion from the country's resources. So, it was never about how much fast food we can possibly eat, right? Again, with the demand issue. So, Black franchisees are basically trying to get their part of the pie and then the federal government is heavily involved at this point because they start creating these different minority enterprise initiatives to grow Black small business. And so, it wasn't only the Black franchisees, but also Black franchisors who were starting their own chains. So, for example, former NFL Player Brady Keys started All Pro Chicken, as just one example. So, this idea of expanding fast food franchising to Black entrepreneurs who had been shut out on its face, seems like a laudable initiative. But again, it's like this is not just altruism and also the way that franchises were positioned in this kind of like you can get into business and do so in a way that's low risk because you know you don't have to start from scratch. You're buying into a thriving concern with name recognition and corporate support and all that. And all of that sounds good except you realize that in fact the franchisees are the ones who have to bear all the risk, not corporate. That's what the government was doing in terms of trying to put in all this money into franchising is really. It's like that's the response to the real life and death failures, for example, around policing, which was always at the heart of these uprisings. You have these real life and death concerns and then the government's responding with giving people access to fried chicken and burger outlets, which nobody was asking for really. Not only was the method problematic, but the execution as well. Just because Black people had more access to the franchises doesn't mean that the rest of the racism that was present, suddenly disappeared, right? The theoretical safety of a franchise didn't bear out in practice. Because of course they still couldn't get access to credit from lending institutions to launch their restaurants because they still didn't get support they needed from corporate, which in fact there are still lawsuits to this day by Black franchisees because the communities in which they're operating were still contending with deep inequality. All of that meant that that whole project was not likely to work very well. And you know, it's no surprise that it didn't. You mentioned chicken several times. In fact, there's a chapter in your book entitled Criminal Chickens. Can you tell us more? Yes, Criminal chicken is towards the end of the book. So, the book is organized in three parts. Part one is white utopias, part two is racial turnover, and part three is Black catastrophe. In each of those you see how Blackness is problematic, but in different ways. So Criminal Chicken is really dealing with the fact that by the 1990s, fast food had become pervasive in Black space and was thoroughly racialized as Black. And so, since fast food has saturated these neighborhoods, of course Black residents began to consume it more. With that, a program reigns down from the dominant society over Black people's alleged failure to control themselves and an assumed deviant predilection for unhealthy dietary behaviors, whether fast food, but also the same kind of discourse circulated around soul food. And the tenor of the discourse really raises W.E.B. DuBois's age-old question, which is how does it feel to be a problem? That was really the tenor of the conversation around fast food at that time. The chapters about the ways in which Black people's consumption was frequently characterized as deviant and interrogating the paradoxes around the symbolic meanings of fast food. Because like what we talked about earlier, Black people are basically being criticized for eating something that's supposedly at the heart of Americana. It's a kind of a no-win situation. On the one hand, certainly overseas, fast food continues to enjoy this kind of iconic status of America and American Burger and so on. Even within the country's borders it still retains some of that allure as something emblematic of American culture. But it's also now more fraught because, you know, we're in a moment where local and organic foods and so on are held in high esteem and fast food is the antithesis of that and it's industrial and mass produced and homogenized and has all these nutritional liabilities. So, basically, it's looking at the changing ideas around fast food and race and how that intersected with Black consumption. That's so interesting. I'd like to wrap up with a question, but I'd like to lead into that by reading two quotes from your book that I think are especially interesting. Here's the first. It is painfully logical that Black communities would first be excluded from a neighborhood resource when it was desirable and then become a repository once it was shunned. And then the second quote is this. The story of fast foods relationship to Black folks is a story about America itself. So, here's the question, are there ways that you can think of that fast food and food systems could be reconceptualized to help address issues of justice and equity? I would say that addressing justice inequity in food systems of which fast food is a part, is really about dealing with the other systems that govern our daily lives. Meaning, it's not an issue of trying to fix fast food, right? So, that is a discreet industry it behaves more equitably with communities because what it has done over the history that I trace in the book is it's not so unique in its practices and it also can't have taken the trajectory it did without intersecting with other institutional concerns. So, for example, housing is instructive because you know, of course you can't exploitatively target Black consumers unless residential segregation exists to concentrate them in space. And to do that, obviously you need a lot of different institutional policies and practices at play to produce that. And in a similar way, housing went from exclusion in the form of rank discrimination, resource hoarding, redlining, the denial of mortgages, all of that, to exploitation in the form of subprime lending. And Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks about predatory inclusion and I type that in the book because I think it's also a useful way to think about fast food as well. So, if you're thinking about equity in food systems, then you have to think about why is it that resources including food, but also beyond food, in this country are distributed the way that they are. And I think you can't get at the issues of justice that play out for fast food or injustice without addressing the key issues that reverberate through it. And so that's false scarcities that are created by capitalism, the racism that undergirds urban policies around land use, around segregation, deeply ingrained ideas in the American psyche about race and but also about other things. So, for me really, reconceptualizing fast food is really reconceptualizing how we live in America.   Bio   Naa Oyo A. Kwate is Associate Professor, jointly appointed in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers. A psychologist by training, she has wide ranging interests in racial inequality and African American health. Her research has centered primarily on the ways in which urban built environments reflect racial inequalities in the United States, and how racism directly and indirectly affects African American health. Kwate’s research has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and by fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Prior to her first major book, White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation, she published the short work Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now, which examines restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture; and edited The Street: A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality, a visual taxonomy of inequality using Camden, NJ as a case study. Kwate has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library, and has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the European Institutes for Advanced Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a book investigating the impact of corner liquor stores in Black communities from 1950 to date.

A growing number of research studies show that the cognitive and brain development of low-income children differs from that of children in higher income families. For any family, that is a concerning statement. Today's podcast features a project called Baby's First Years, a multi-year effort to test the connections between poverty reduction and brain development among very young children. Here to talk about what the study has revealed so far is Dr. Lisa Gennetian from Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin from the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Transcript Sarah, let's start with you. What is the Baby's First Years study?  Sarah - So the Baby's First Years study is a study of how having additional income matters for children's development and for family life in families that had incomes around the federal poverty line when they had a child. And so, it includes two main components. The first is a randomized control trial that tests the effects of families receiving either a large or a small monthly cash gift each month, families get either $333 or $20 each month on a debit card from the time their child was born until just after the child's sixth birthday. Lisa and our colleagues, Katherine Magnuson, Kimberly Noble, Greg Duncan, Hiro Yoshikawa, and Nathan Fox lead this part of the study. They've been following mothers and children from a thousand families over the past six years. The other part of the study is a qualitative study in which we do in-depth interviews with a subset of those families because we want to learn more about how they think, about making financial decisions, the values and dreams for their children that guide their parenting and how they think about their money they're getting from Baby's First Years each month. This study is complex and would require time to observe change. Can you tell me about the length of time your team has been doing this intervention? Sarah - So the first families started the study in 2018. Lisa - One thing that's unique about this intervention is its length. As Sarah mentioned, it's starts at the time of birth and it's monthly. And families will be receiving this cash for 76 months. So, they'll be receiving it through the first six years of their child's life. Thank you for that detail. Lisa, what is the landscape for food programs and assistance in the United States, particularly for families with infants and young children? Lisa - There are two major programs that are federally funded in the US that are particularly targeted for families with infants and children. One of them is called the Women, Infant, and Children's Program, or WIC for short. The WIC program, let's see, in 2022, served about 6.3 million participants, but it provides a mix of core nutritional needs, breastfeeding support, information and referrals. And the second big safety net program in the US around food is called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This one's broader and has served over 40 million people in 2022. And together both these programs have been pretty core to providing food and nutritional support to families, including those with young children. Thanks for that context. So now, how does the cash gift intervention differ from, or fit with other food assistance programs that these families may participate in? Lisa - The thing that cash can add above and beyond that, so thinking about how this Baby's First Year study might help supplement resources is in two ways. One is thinking about how money that might have been spent on the foods that are provided by these programs are now being taken care of through these food subsidies. One direct way that the BFY cash money can help is by increasing those net resources available for other types of food or for other things in the household. It's a real compliment to these what we call in kind or conditioned kind of food subsidy programs. The second is that there are no conditions. And so, what WIC and SNAP provide, which is really formative and really important for a lot of families, is also has some real parameters on what could be purchased. And so having extra cash means sort more flexibility around direct food resources. And that's actually something we start to see a little bit in the Baby's First Year study. Wow, Lisa, thank you for that. Given that these are means-tested programs, the cash infusion from Baby's First Year's project could influence participants' eligibility for other programs, right? How did you deal with that? Lisa - Oh yes, it's a really great question. Thanks for asking that. For the purposes of this study, we, for several years, worked closely with all layers of government, federal, state, and local to think hard about how to protect the families receiving this cash gift from losing eligibility for these other programs because as you say, right, we're increasing their income implicitly through this cash gift. And so, we did that through some administrative rulings, meaning states agreed that the families would be exempt and to the states, we had legislation passed to protect these families from their eligibility being affected by receipt of the cash gift. We did that as comprehensively as possible. There are some exceptions, but we think that it's been pretty effective kind of strategy we use to ensure that families, when they get this cash gift, that they're not mechanically losing eligibility for these other programs. So, the way to think about this cash and supplementing people's lives and supplementing and accompanying everything else, is also helping how families might think about access to these other programs and choices around that in ways that they might not have had before. That sounds like a large undertaking, and it took extensive planning to get to that point. I imagine you wouldn't want families to lose their benefits because they participated in this study. Sarah, I want to come back to you. What are families’ experiences with Baby's First Year and with government-provided food assistance programs in the United States? Sarah - So families in both gift groups are appreciative of having extra money every month. That's even more so the case for those in the high gift group mothers not surprisingly, some mothers in Baby's First Year struggle to make ends meet, for others, even if they can cover their bills every month, having just that little bit extra breathing room is pretty welcome. Like Lisa was talking about across the country, in Baby's First Years, the vast majority of families have experience with food assistance programs, either currently or in the past. It's pretty rare for them not to, relatively speaking, while families often receive WIC, that's the Women, Infants and Children program that Lisa mentioned, when they have babies, many stop getting WIC after their babies turn one, despite the fact that they remain income eligible for that. Most families also receive some benefits from SNAP. And in some qualitative work that I did with my colleagues, Carolyn Barnes and Jill Hoiding, we heard from families about how they thought about engaging with the WIC program. They thought about the value of the benefits they could get from doing so, but also the costs of doing that, like how hard it is to make it to appointments, to fill out the paperwork to use those benefits once you're at the grocery store. And they weighed those costs and benefits as their children grew up when they were thinking about whether or not to pursue those benefits. So Lisa, what are you learning from the Baby's First Year study about where and how families and children are getting food? Lisa - So Sarah has talked about the richness of speaking to moms directly at holistic types of interviews. Alongside that, we've annually been going back and speaking to mothers and collecting information about them and their children. And part of our, so these are our annual surveys, they are in or near the children's birthdate, and we ask them a bunch of questions about how life is going, about their spending, what's happening with income and employment and childcare, their own health, their mental health. One of the areas that we focus on is around food. And one of those food items is called a food security scale. This is a six item, a USDA-approved scale. It asks questions like not having enough money to buy food, questions about hunger, questions about eating balanced meals. It includes a set of items that we would call pretty subjective. For example, the question on balanced meals, but also less subjective. Is there literally enough money to buy enough food for the household? And so, we're learning some really interesting things. First, we're learning that there is very high connection to this food safety net that we were just talking about. So, far majority of the families are connected either to WIC or the food assistance program called SNAP. And that's pretty consistent. Sarah just talked about a little bit of the drop off of WIC, but we certainly see consistent connections to SNAP, all the way through the first three years of the child's life. We see that generally as sort of a kind of good news story. So, these are families who are eligible for these programs, their family's drawn from four very different dates and sites. They're very diverse in their racial ethnic composition and whether they've been born or not in the US in terms of the moms. The fact that there is very high connection to a food safety net system while raising young children, we think is a really positive signal of the food safety net system potentially working pretty well. And then we're not seeing big differences between the high cash gift group and the low cash gift group on this food security measure. In fact, we're seeing pretty high food security amongst these families with very young children on the scale. That doesn't mean that any one of these items, we're not seeing high reports of things like scarcity. So even though the families are very low in food insecurity, we do see that about a third of them are reporting some kind of food scarcity. So, 31% report that the food they bought did not last and they sometimes often didn't have money to get more. For example, we're also hearing from families, they're relying on free meals from non-federal sources. We haven't talked yet about the importance of the faith-based kind of system and support and informal networks in providing food. We ask families this when their children were about three years old, and roughly 10% report some receipt of free meals from other sources. We are inevitably also seeing, as you might expect, some variation across these sites. So that's sort of a hint on what we're seeing around food security and connections to the safety net. We also ask about spending, and we're not seeing overall differences in how much money is being spent on food with one very interesting exception. That's on money, on food spent eating out. We don't ask a whole bunch of information about nutrition, but when the children were toddlers, moms do report, who are receiving the high cash gift, they do report higher consumption of fruits and vegetables among their toddlers. It is a very sort of unique and narrow question, but positive, so more fruits and vegetables and not more of other things like salty treats, flavored drinks, sodas, sugary sweets. And we're looking forward to continuing to follow up on items of nutrition when the children are four. This is fascinating, and I'm so grateful that your team is paying attention to these families' experiences and engagement with the social safety net and the charitable food sector. Sarah, we often understand food, particularly healthy food, as a way to deliver nutrition that promotes health and development. Of course, food provides much more than nutrition. What, if anything, are you learning from the study about the social meaning of food and what it represents to families? Sarah - I really appreciate this question because it's something we've been looking at and thinking about a lot in our research, in the research other people have done before, and in our own study we really hear a lot about the role that food plays in families, beyond nutrition. In so many cultures, food plays a really core role in social time and in family time. This can be things like turning family movie night into something a little more special by microwaving popcorn. It can be having special mom and me time with mom taking a child out to go get a cake pop at a coffee shop. It can be eating a meal at a sit-down restaurant to celebrate a special occasion, a child's middle school graduation, for some of these purchases, you can't use food assistance. And so having cash on hand is really essential to engaging in these kinds of special rituals and family time. Like your question implies, it turns our attention to the role that food plays in family bonding and in socializing. We really want to think about the multiple roles that food serves in our lives and how having this kind of extra income on hand for families who are often income constrained, can change these opportunities for those special family times around food.   Bios   Dr. Lisa Gennetian is an applied economist, Professor of Public Policy, and the Pritzker Professor of Early Learning Policy Studies at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Drawing on perspectives from the behavioral sciences, psychology, and child development, her research focuses on the economics of child development, specifically child poverty, parent engagement and decision making, and policy and social investment considerations. Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin is Vaughn Bascom Professor of Children, Family, and Community in the School of Human Ecology and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty. She is a sociologist whose research focuses on family, adolescence, social policy and the welfare state, class and inequality, and qualitative methods. Her current research includes examining the role of parents’ churning (on-again/off-again) relationships in family life, exploring the experiences and financial decision-making of mothers who are receiving monthly unconditional cash gifts, and understanding how rural men make ends meet, spend their time, and make meaning while disconnected from the formal labor force.

Today's podcast is a story of one man's personal journey to making a difference by building communities. Zach Wyatt grew up caretaking an old 300-acre farm in Virginia. He went to college and ended up working in mortgage lending. And then something changed for Zack, and that's where the story gets interesting. He now leads the Carolina Farm Trust, working to strengthen local food systems in the Carolinas. The trust cultivates urban farm networks, farm apprenticeships, supports local farmers in purchasing equipment or land, making informed-decisions, and more. Interview Summary I'd like to understand a little bit more, why did you want to start the Carolina Farm Trust? Well, with a lot of things, it was just kind of by accident and circumstance. And I would say subconsciously I had agriculture in my bones, ever since I was a kid growing up in agriculture in Northern Virginia. It just kind of seeps in. We [The Family] still have that little arm reached out to being a part the DC metro area. Growing up in an urban-rural environment kind of planted, I think, a lot of the seeds in the work that was going to transpire so many decades later. But it really just kind of came down to a life event. I had a partnership that just ended in one day, which was a huge blow to us financially. We had to get on EBT and Snap and went through that process. And I was really soul searching and figuring out what were the next steps for me. Looking back on it, I think I was really grasping on to how do I do anything, to kind of just do something. I got back into reading about our food system and farms and started meeting some farmers. And once you start talking to farmers in a real way and understanding what our food system truly is, it's horrifying. It kind of came down to seeing this visual metaphor of a meteorite heading toward us every day, and either sticking your head in the sand or doing something. Circumstance just led to this next event and next event, and the next event. And eight years later, here we are. What I hear from you is this story of resiliency and it seems like that's something you also see in the food system or a need for that is that a fair assessment?   Absolutely. We just take food in agriculture for granted. And over the last 80 to 90 years, we've really given our entire means of survival pretty much away. Most people don't really look at food and agriculture and how it spins every major decision on Earth. Every social problem we typically have, every health issue we have, if you follow it all the way down to where that problem started, you go all the way back to the dirt. So, to kind of look at resilience and what do we mean by that and more importantly, building regional resilience in a global economy: I think getting supply chains a whole lot shorter, focusing on soil health and nutrition density and our farming community, is where we really have to start. I'm starting to get a sense of the big picture of the farm trust. What is the driving mission of your work? I think you're hitting on some of that, but I'd like to hear more. I'd say the vision is very clearly about building regional resilience and then using food and agriculture as a primary driver. The four main pillars we have are health and nutrition, upward mobility and equity, sustainability, and climate change. Our four action-on-the-ground pillars are first, building an urban farm network and to get people to understand where our food comes from. Why is that important? We do really need to push urban centers to be more responsible for where our food comes from and playing a role in that. Second, our farm apprentice program, workforce development. You know, the average age of our farming community right now is a little over 60. Where is this next generation of farmers coming from? Where is the land coming from? So, it is not only kind of a labor force for us, you know, but how do we make sure every community garden, every school garden is thriving? How do we create teams that can go help our rural farming community with different projects or step in when someone gets sick or an emergency? Third, when we think of food as health, what does that really mean? If we're talking about food as medicine, in my opinion, we've already missed the boat. We got to talk about food as health, we got to talk about prevention. How do community health workers get out in communities covering geographic locations, really understanding what those needs are and how do we create systems to go meet them where they are. And then our fourth pillar is our distribution platform, which is really there to give a profitable revenue stream to our farming community. How do we use economics to really push them to start their regenerative farming journey? And then how internally to create supply chains that not only can work with consumers, you know, up and down the socioeconomic ladder, but how do we make sure we can build supply chains for larger institutions to be able to participate in a local food economy because the infrastructure is just not there. I was struck by your earlier comment of if you get down to the, if you will, root cause of any problem, and forgive the pun, it seems like it's in the dirt. Right? And I'd like to hear you explain a little bit more about what you believe is what's wrong with the food system as it is today. And I got a sense it's about the lack of being local, but I want to hear it in your words and how does this guide your actions now?   Well, it's just evolution. I mean we always try to get better. We wanted to make food cheaper, so we went from hundreds of farms and rapid consolidation over the years. We have processed and now ultra-processed food, and we have to deal with slavery and reconstruction and everything that kind of came with it with such as sharecropping from a social standpoint. We're looking at nutrition density and in average produce and protein sources we're almost 30 to 6% less than what it was 100 years ago. We're looking at climate change, sustainability. Where does that come from? Look at the carbon footprint, our agriculture industry puts on the planet, look at the massive consolidation of looking at if the world gets 40% of its grain from Ukraine, and then having different political and social issues come up. I include inflation spikes. We're looking at carbon sequestration, we're looking at no-till, we're looking at all these big environmental and all these sustainability and allergies and cancers. And so, where does all that come from? It comes from our environment. Looking through all of this, you can very much see parallels of how our food system started to consolidate and get more aggregated with all the other problems I just mentioned. And if you look at 1930, 1940, and then going from there, you can very much see kind of a parallel with a lot of the challenges that we face. So, I think we really spent a lot of time trying to kind of cherry pick among all these really big problems. We're trying to cherry pick smaller problems because they seem a little bit more manageable, but we really have to go rethink the system as a whole. And that's really, really hard to do. What we're really trying to push forward is how do we just look at a region, because I really feel like you have to do this from a regional perspective. How do we get a regional model to work, really go rebuild all that infrastructure, get, buy-in, understanding what the data's telling us, and then we can replicate that going forward to really other regions around the world. This is very helpful and I appreciate the way you approach that question. Seeing that there are these large global issues and there are structural challenges when we talk about agriculture - and you're working in the region, my understanding, you're out of West Charlotte - and there's a distribution center. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing in West Charlotte, especially through this distribution center? It became very clear that our farming community needed a market. Farmer's markets are tough. As consumers, some of us love them, some of us don't pay attention to them. But for our farming community, farmer's markets are really hard. And from a wholesale standpoint, it's very hard for Carolina farmers to compete with Mexico, California, Florida. How do you compete regionally on a global market? So, we had a distribution model planned for a while and in my head, I wanted it to be in West Charlotte and it needed to be near I-85. We wanted it to be in a community because this kind of distribution facility would be an employment place and we would have a real retail concept. We wanted a meat processing butchery component. So, it was kind of putting a lot of pie in the sky visions into one parcel. But one of our strategic advisors in 2021 was at coffee, talking to a friend about Carolina Farm Trust and kind of what our needs were. One of them said, "Oh, my family has this warehouse," So we took a look at it, and it met every criterion we could have dreamed of. The only thing that was different was that I was thinking in my head we would want like 100,000, 200,000 square feet and this one was 25,000 square feet. But the moment I looked at it, I realized this is the exact size or the range that we need because of the community impact. We want more of these not one or two, you know, that are gathered around. This being in the community was such a key factor to it. So, with our wholesale operation, our commercial kitchen, the retail, the event space, the meat processing butchery component of it all, we really could start to see this framework of getting kind of an independent food system together. So, we're working on phase one, which is our wholesale operation and our 3000 square foot commercial which should come online, you know, in the next six weeks. And then we're just waiting on permitting for phase two and fundraising on phase two to get that activated. It's a really cool project and we're really excited to see it to come to fruition here in the next few weeks. This is really fascinating. You know, I haven't asked this, but I'm intrigued. Tell me a little bit about the farmers that you work with. What kinds of produce or crops are they or animals are they producing? I mean, how are you developing those relationships?   Over the course of the years we've met a lot of different farmers and we grow everything that we can grow here in the Carolinas. We're talking greens and obviously tomatoes and melons and corn. We're working with our grain farmers who are growing wheat for us and grinding flour that we're actually getting into a hotel right now in Uptown Charlotte, which is really exciting. Cattle, pork, lamb. And really looking to create markets for our farming community in any way that we can. So right now, Michael Bowling, our general manager of CFT Market, which is the name of our distribution facility, he and his team are going all over the state and finding arms that we've never heard of and getting recommendations and compiling our list. A big part of what we're trying to put together is how we can take the burden on some things like transportation, because it's such a margin killer, and such a challenge for our farming communities. How do we get amazing produce from the east, you know, into Charlotte and the West, into Charlotte. So, we're working on getting a fleet of vehicles right now to do that. So, it's really just trying to find all of the barriers that our farming community faces, and then how do we create the infrastructure systems. I want to end by asking sort of what are your hopes? Like what is the long game? Where do you see your work and the work of those who will follow you? Where does it lead? Well, I think you have to be very naive to think this way. And sometimes, being naive isn't a bad thing because if you do too much research, then you think your way out of doing what you should be doing. So really, the long game is trying to change the entire industry. But it's so much more than that because our food and Ag is health. It IS our health industry, you know, and obviously it's our food industry. But it's also going to play a huge role in saving not our planet for the planet's sake but saving the planet for our sake. You know, it's just critical. So, I mean, really we're wanting to really follow in Netflix footsteps. Netflix came in and changed the entire entertainment industry relatively quickly. We're looking at automotive legacy manufacturers that weren't getting electric vehicles fast enough. So, Tesla came in and disrupted that. Now suddenly, everybody's moving in that direction. So really at our core, we want to take market share and drive our industry partners to focus more on this work. That is really the long game. For us, it's how do we build the foundation? I know I'm never really going to see it, but how do we build this foundation for the next generation of leadership to really get it going on what we've been able to build in this short time. Bio   Zack Wyatt is the President/CEO of Carolina Farm Trust. Zack grew up tending to a 300-acre dairy farm in northern Virginia. After graduating from Coastal Carolina University in 2003 with a degree in Business Administration, he worked in home mortgage lending and IT. Zack’s passion for bringing the community together over food, his understanding of the importance of equitable food access, and his drive to improve local food systems led him to develop Carolina Farm Trust in 2015.

If people knew how much food they threw away each week, would they change their food-wasting ways? That's a question scientists explore in the 2023 State of Food Waste in America report. The research goal was to understand why and how households waste food, and what would motivate them to prevent food waste. In today's podcast, we'll talk with MITRE scientists Laura Leets and Grace Mika, members of a team who developed and launched the MITRE Food Waste Tracker app. This is a first of its kind app for households to log information about discarded food and learn ways to save money by reducing food waste. The Food Waste in America study team includes the Gallup Survey Company, researchers from the Ohio State University, the Harvard Law and Policy Clinic, ReFED, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund. Interview Summary   Laura, let's begin with you. Can you give us a quick overview of why MITRE focused on measuring food waste at the household level and the behaviors? Laura - In a general sense, Norbert, we know the United States waste 30 to 40% of our food, yet we do not know how much is wasted at the household level. We know that waste occurs along the entire farm to table supply chain, like approximately 15% with farms, 15% at manufacturing, about 20% at stores and restaurants and about 50% in the household. So, given that half the waste happens at the household level, it's important to measure it. If you can measure it, you can do something about it. Up to this point, people have not had an easy way to estimate their amount of food waste. So, to address this gap, not only did we develop a new way to measure household food waste and Grace will share more about that, but we also provided a baseline measurement of American household food waste. I would like to really dig in a little bit more. How much food do American households waste, and do you have a sense of what kinds of foods people are wasting? Laura - Let me start with the amount first. We found that the average American household wastes somewhere from 3 to 4.5 pounds per week. And there's two ways to measure household food waste. The first is you can focus on the edible or uneaten food. And with this measure, American households waste about on average three pounds per week. Second, you can add inedible food. So, that's your food scraps, your eggshells. And if you take edible plus inedible food together, then the American households wastes on average about 4.5 pounds per week. Let me give your listeners a couple analogies to understand that impact of that 3 to 4.5 pounds of household food waste. So, let's say we combine our own household food waste with everyone else's. The crop waste is large enough to cover the states of California and New York. From a personal perspective, imagine before every meal you scrape off 40% of the food on your plate. If you imagine that in each meal, you're going to start to understand that the current food waste is massive, and we're all contributing to it. So that's the measurement piece. I'm going to pass it over to Grace to discuss the types of food we're wasting. Grace - Americans are wasting a wide variety of foods in their homes, but the number one wasted food type is your fresh produce. So, that would be your fruits and your vegetables. I think this is really important to keep in mind, not only because, of course, fruits and vegetables are perishable, but when we think about healthy diets, many people in the nutrition space are encouraging fresh fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables in general. Ao this is a really important finding, and I'm excited to know this. But it's also important for our listeners to think a little bit more about this. Grace, I would like to learn a little bit more from you. Can you tell us more about the MITRE Food Waste Tracker, the app itself? Grace - I would be happy to. The MITRE Food Waste Tracker app is meant to be a tool for households who want to understand exactly what's going uneaten in their home. If you had asked me what exactly I ate yesterday and how much of that went into my trash can, I would have a really difficult time remembering an answer to that question. And that's for just yesterday, let alone multiple days or weeks ago. Not knowing what exactly goes uneaten would make it really challenging for me to cut back on that waste. So, to solve that problem, our team designed an app which allows for food waste to be logged in real-time. So, right as you're doing your meal prep or you're clearing off the dinner dishes or emptying your leftovers out from the fridge. And the app tracks details both about the food itself, like where you got that from and the food group that it belongs to, as well as where, why, and how the food was thrown away.   And you can also track how much waste was produced, and we encourage you to use your hand as a guide to estimate the volume of that waste. So, your closed fist is about the size of a cup of food and your thumb about the size of a tablespoon. The more that you use the app to track, the more you will reveal patterns in the way that you waste. Maybe you find out that you're optimistically shopping for vegetables that your toddlers at home are just not interested in eating. Or maybe you're serving up heaping platefuls at dinner time, but then find that you're not hungry to finish that meal. So learning this will empower you to make small changes in the way that you shop for, prepare and store food to make sure that as little as possible is going to waste.   And if you're money-minded like many Americans are, you might be especially interested in an app feature which estimates the cost savings that you would experience if you cut back on your waste. So less food in the trash means more money in your wallet and the savings really add up. The average American family spends over $1,500 on wasted food each year. And tracking with the app is fast and simple. For each food that you dispose, you would simply click on the icons that best describe your waste. It would be really easy to get the whole family, even your your kids involved in tracking and thinking about the food that's going into the bin. You've already touched on a few of these key findings about sort of the top foods that we end up wasting. Are there other findings that you would like to share with us? Grace - So there are two behaviors that really stood out when it came to producing food waste. The first is simply being willing to eat your leftovers. Personally, I get really excited about leftover nights. It means I get a good home cooked meal with almost no prep work that evening. A lot of us are already doing this. About a third of Americans incorporate leftovers into new dishes and about half of us frequently eat leftovers just as a meal by themselves. Those leftovers add up. We found that households who consistently throw their leftovers away are wasting nearly four times as much as households that eat those up. We also found that households' understanding of and behavior around date labels plays a significant role in their levels of waste. A lot of us don't really understand how little date labels actually mean, and how little they're standardized. Not too long ago I was cooking with a friend, and we were making dinner together and he smelled a bag of shredded cheese and he said, "Oh, this smells kind of funky, but it's not past his date." And he added it into the dish. You should actually be doing the exact opposite of that. You should trust your senses over the date label when it seems that something is spoiling. There are some dates that are meant to be safety indications, but the majority are just a manufacturer's best guess of when food will pass its peak quality. And frequently, thrown away past date food that has no signs of spoilage so this leads to wasting over twice as much food. It can be easy to feel helpless when it comes to wasting food, but it's surprisingly simple to take control over your waste As we mentioned before, if you're curious about what sorts of behaviors are leading to waste in your own home, we have an app for that. So, our latest version of the app has new features to help you understand your waste and even get a sense of how much money you could be saving if you cut back on your waste in your home. I highly encourage you to check that out. I’ve got to say I have done some work on date labels and have found this is an important area of consideration. But also, one where the modification of those date labels may actually help reduce food waste. I'm so happy to hear you talk about the sort of broader set of things that consumers can do to actually mitigate food waste in the household. You got into some of my own personal family issues around what do we do about leftovers, and I will not report this conversation to my family. So, thank you for that, Grace. Laura, I want to go back to you and ask about a big picture question. Why should our listeners reduce their household food waste? Laura - Norbert, I believe I can make a compelling case for that. This is a rare opportunity when making a small change can have a large positive impact. Let me explain the amazing cascading ripple effect that happens when we reduce our household food waste. We had Grace reminding us with the app, and the first benefit is financial. An average American household can save at least $1,500 a year or $125 a month by reducing food waste. So just focus on that personal financial benefit, and then understand the resulting ripple effects. That first ripple effect is going to impact the ecology. Most of us don't realize significant resources go into producing food. The USDA reminds us that 50% of our land in America is used for food production and 80% of our water is used to produce that food. When we reduce our food waste, we're recognizing food as this precious resource, and we are supporting our food production industry. This is really important because America is one of the top food producers in the world.   The next ripple effect impacts food security. Food security is part of national security. When you reduce your household food waste, you are also supporting national security. Next is a societal impact. Reducing food waste allows us to optimize our food and feed more people. And, finally, there is a significant environmental benefit. The number one substance going into our landfills is food waste. As it decomposes, it emits greenhouse gases that cause this pollution blanket to surround the planet. That pollution blanket traps heat and warms the planet. So, when we reduce our food waste, it's one of the top three activities we can do to reduce warming temperatures and extreme weather events. We all have the ability to combat climate change through our household food waste. These small changes in our food waste - they're going to result in positive financial, societal, and environmental benefits. It's such a powerful, impactful decision to reassess your food waste and think about ways you can reduce it.   Bios Dr. Laura Leets is an accomplished researcher, teacher, and mentor. She brings 30 years of experience from academic and industry environments.  She currently serves as an innovation lead and senior principal scientist at MITRE. In this leadership capacity, she works with researchers to identify, shape and conduct important, transformative, and impactful projects for government sponsors and the nation. She also serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture, and Technology Program and previously spent a decade as a Professor of Communication at Stanford University.  She has been recognized with several top paper and teaching awards throughout her academic career.    Grace Mika, B.S., is a data scientist in MITRE’s Modeling & Analysis Innovation Center, where she has worked on projects for the Center of Disease Control, Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Benefits Association, and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, Acquisitions & Sustainment. She is passionate about visualizing data in a clear, accurate, and accessible way. Grace was instrumental in the design of a first-of-its-kind Food Waste Tracker App, which allows users to track waste as it occurs within their homes. Grace holds a B.S. in Applied Math and Psychology from the College of William & Mary and is currently working towards her Masters of Analytics at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dollar stores are the fastest growing food retailer in the United States, both by sheer number of stores and consumer food purchases. Just two corporations, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which also owns Family Dollar, operate more than 35,000 stores across the country. However, a growing body of research reveals that dollar stores offer limited healthy food options. Dollar stores shape the food environments of communities, especially in the South and Midwest regions and communities in rural areas with substantial shares of Black and Latin people and households with limited financial resources. What do we know about the impact dollar stores have on these communities and the overall wellbeing of community members? The Center for Science in the Public Interest conducted a national survey to understand how people perceive and actually use dollar stores. Today we will talk with lead author of this study, Senior Policy Scientist Sara John. Interview Summary My first question is what do we know about dollar stores and healthy food access? There are more than 35,000-dollar stores across the country. So, to put that large number into context for people like me who have trouble processing them, that's more dollar stores than McDonald's, Starbucks and Walmarts combined. As you also mentioned, just two companies, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, control nearly all of them. Dollar stores really play a large role in food acquisitions for households. They can be especially important for households with limited incomes and those living in rural communities. These smaller store formats are much smaller than your typical grocery store or supermarket and tend to stock fewer fresh and healthy items. So, the body of evidence is still growing and we're still trying to figure out really how dollar stores interact with the food environment, whether or not they're driving out existing or potential new grocery stores or whether they're filling important food gaps in communities that otherwise lack food access. I am really blown away by the number. I must admit I did not appreciate that they have 35,000 stores across the US. I know that there is a growing body of literature, as you suggested. One of our colleagues, Sean Cash at Tufts has been working in this space along with others in various disciplines have been thinking about the role of dollar stores. I'm interested to understand why CSPI conducted a national survey of those or perceptions, and what were some of the key findings? As I mentioned, there's a lot of outstanding questions we still don't know. There have been more than 50 communities across the country that have already passed policies at the local level to ban or improve new dollar stores in their communities. But we don't understand community perceptions, usage and just I guess more plainly what people want from dollar stores. So, CSPI really wanted to take a stance to make policy, corporate, and research recommendations on this very quickly and growing retail format. But before doing so, we wanted to really make sure that we're centering our recommendations around what community members really want from dollar stores. We decided to conduct a national survey. We ended up having over 750 respondents from across the country of people with limited financial resources that lived near a dollar store. I have to say we were pretty surprised by our findings, especially given this popular sentiment that we have seen in the news media and with a lot of the local policy action. I would say that we found overall positive dollar store perceptions that people really are relying on dollar stores for food. But I would say just as many people want them to make healthy foods more available, affordable, and accessible. Could you help me understand how did people find them beneficial? What were some of the things that you discovered, in terms of the benefits? But I'd like to also hear what were the points of contention? Where did they want some difference? Community members had overall positive perceptions. I think there was about 82% of the survey respondents said that dollar stores helped their community rather than harmed it. And a lot of the key things that came up in the qualitative responses in our survey and the focus groups that we used to inform the survey was this overarching multifaceted concept of convenience. People said things like the store proximity, that they didn't have to walk a mile within the store itself to get to milk, and just an overall quick shopping trip. They also mentioned the affordability of products there. You know, not having to say no when shopping with their kids to something that's on the shelf. And then also a selection of specialty items - a lot of like different seasonal fare and things. Even using the phrase "thinking of the dollar stores as like going on a treasure hunt." You never quite know what's going to be there on the shelves. However, as you mentioned, there was also many deterrents listed for dollar stores as well. Things they could do better. So, low quality of products, the lack of predictable product availability, sometimes having bare shelves or not enough store supervision to be able to keep those shelves stocked. And also, the store appearance, both inside and out. Things like graffiti, trash, cluttered aisles. Those are all things that people that both shopped and did not shop at dollar stores noted in the survey. And all of this also kind of leads to another key theme that I mentioned at an overarching level, that people really wanted dollar stores to do more in terms of making healthy foods more accessible to them. So, 81% of our survey respondents thought dollar stores should stock more healthy items, and nearly as many thought they should do more to market and identify healthy options. We also included a list of more specific interventions of things that dollar stores could do to make healthy products more available, accessible, and affordable and one of the top responses was to provide SNAP fruit and vegetable discounts, kind of as one might see in like a Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program at dollar stores as well. I'm really intrigued by something you all did in the survey. You looked at differences, particularly between SNAP participants and those who potentially are SNAP eligible, but non-participants. Are there any key findings you want to highlight about differences between those two groups?  Yes. Many respondents generally mentioned being able to stretch their budget at the dollar store and this included more SNAP participants purchasing more food with their SNAP benefits at dollar stores. So, this was across many healthy food categories. We also saw SNAP participants felt more strongly that dollar stores should be held more accountable for the health of their communities as well. This is really fascinating. These findings are part of what leads you to some of the key policy recommendations. I'd be interested to understand a little bit more about what are the policies that you all thought should be considered or corporate response and even research action based on these findings. I'll highlight just a few. You know the first one at the federal level is strengthening SNAP retailer stocking standards. So, the vast majority of dollar stores do participate in the SNAP program and currently SNAP authorized retailers are required to stock a small number of items. So, three varieties of items across four different categories. However, if the SNAP program did have stronger stocking standards that better aligned with nutrition promoting foods like in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, then all SNAP authorized retailers including dollar stores, would be required to stock more healthy items to participate in the program. Which is of course a huge benefit to the community. But also, a really important part of the business model of SNAP authorized retailers including dollar stores. At the local level, I already mentioned that more than 50 communities across the country have passed local policies, mostly to stop the spread of dollar stores such as through dollar store density ordinances. These look like saying a new dollar store can't locate within, let's say an existing mile, of a current dollar store. However, these policies are really only getting at new dollar stores and don't really do anything to address the existing 35,000. We also see an opportunity to strengthen and improve upon these existing policies and address what we found in the survey that community members want by requiring dollar stores to stock healthier food, make it more available, such as through healthy stocking standards or healthy food overlays in the local zoning code or even exempting dollar stores from these dispersal limits if they do stock a specific variety or number of healthy staple foods. At the corporate level, we're hopeful that this survey and its results make the business case to dollar stores for stocking healthier foods, making them more widely available. We've seen already actually both Dollar General and Dollar Tree moving in this direction. Dollar General, especially. I think about 16% of their current stores now do offer fresh produce. So, they're building out their supply chain, their distribution centers, and I would say retrofitting and redesigning stores to be able to make more fresh and healthy foods available. But we think they can do more, and especially do more in terms of prioritizing fresh food expansion in areas with lower incomes and limited food access. Many of these dollar store models started by locating in rural areas. We think if they could really leverage their ubiquity and where they're currently located to spread healthy food access to those communities especially, it could make a really big difference. We also have seen dollar stores in recent years put out public environmental social governance or ESG priorities. We think that these should be expanded and really prioritize healthy food access and nutrition goals. And one more thing I'll say around corporate recommendations is the expansion of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children or WIC authorization of dollar stores. Currently, based on our scan of the current list of WIC authorized retailers, there are no corporate dollar stores that are currently WIC authorized. By participating in WIC, and by adhering to those much more rigorous healthy stocking standards, it could do a lot to make a variety of healthy product, fresh produce, whole grains, dairy, baby food, formula more accessible to moms and kids. I have to ask this question as a researcher, what are some important questions that the survey really prompted you to think more about or would like to have others come in and support research in this area? There are so many. As I mentioned, the evidence in this space is really nascent, but is growing. So, one thing I would highlight is that we really are proud of this survey and its national scope. However, the survey doesn't reflect all communities and their desires and wishes. And so we hope that this survey could be used as a model and could be replicated in local communities to inform local policy and corporate intervention. We also think there's a lot to still do to better understand the current dollar store food environment. There have been some studies that have been done at small scale in some states and localities, but we think that current instruments could be better adapted and specifically tailored to the dollar store environment to better understand them and their variation across the country. Especially as we start to see this shift in corporate practices. There is a lot of, again, variation in terms of different dollar stores and what they're offering. We also really hope that we could see dollar store corporations, and maybe this is overly ambitious, but to collaborate with researchers to better understand what corporations already know, to better lift up what challenges are associated with increasing the stock and availability of healthier foods. We know that cost space and supply chain complexities, this is not an easy solution, and so how can researchers work together with corporate dollar stores to figure this out. Also, we'd be really interested in piloting healthy food marketing interventions, thinking about how this shift in healthy product placement, price and promotion might be impacting customer purchases, customer food consumption, and ultimately health. Wow, this is a great set of ways for a variety of researchers to come in. It sounds like not only could academics do some of this work, but it sounds like there may even be space for citizen scientists to come in and look at what's going on in the food environments where they are to help inform that conversation. I think this is really fascinating. What's next for CSPI's work on dollar stores. CSPI really hopes to be able to support efforts to advance the recommendations we've made in this report. At least one I'll highlight that we've already started to work on, is we just launched a corporate campaign; Don't Discount Families, Dollar General. Really pressuring Dollar General to improve healthy food access at their stores through these WIC expansion efforts that I referenced earlier. So, making sure that dollar stores expand their healthy food offerings by adhering to those more rigorous WIC stocking standard requirements. Making those foods both available and more accessible to moms and kids participating in WIC. You know, that includes fresh, frozen, canned produce, whole grains, dairy, healthy pantry staples, baby food and formula, but also in doing so makes healthy foods more available for any customer that walks through a WIC authorized Dollar store. I would mention that in ways that you can get involved, please feel free to reach out to me if you're doing aligned work in this space. We also have a petition that consumers can sign onto, and we already have generated over 7,000 emails to Dollar General and that number is still ticking, so please join our coordinated advocacy efforts and we also working on a sign-on letter in terms of coalition building to get organizations and researchers who are supporting healthy food access through dollar stores. So, I encourage everyone to check out our resources and again, please be in contact if you have any questions. Bio   Sara John is a Senior Policy Scientist at the Center for Science in Public Interest and leads the organization’s federal policy and private sector efforts to create a healthier, more equitable food retail environment. Prior to joining CSPI, Sara served as the Evaluation Director for SNAP incentive programs across New England and worked at the Partnership for a Healthier America. She has a PhD in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from Tufts Friedman School, an MS in Education from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS in Biology and BA in Public Policy from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

How did the Nutrition Facts label come to appear on millions of food products in the U.S.? As Auburn University historian, Xaq Frohlich, reveals in his new book, "From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age," these seemingly innocuous strips of information reveal the high stakes politics that can help determine what we eat and why. In today's podcast, Frohlich will explore popular ideas about food, diet, and responsibility for health that have influenced what goes on the Nutrition Facts panel and who gets to decide that. Interview Summary   I'm really happy to have you on today's podcast. So, why don't we just jump right in. What would you say are the key historical moves in the food policy arena with respect to labeling?   One of the things I talk about in this book is an informational turn in food politics. And what I'm specifically referring to there is a shift since the 1970s from an older way that the Food and Drug Administration approached regulating the market to its current focus on informative labeling. So, at the beginning of my book and at the beginning of the story, in the 1930s, 1940s, the FDA was trying to handle this big market full of lots of different products, especially packaged and processed foods. And under the legislation in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, authorized food standards. And the idea was that for any mass-produced food, they would hold hearings. People would say, "This is what we think the food should look like." They would then publish the standards, which would look kind of like a list of ingredients and ranges of the ingredients they could use, and then say, "Okay, all foods have to be the standard form of food. If not, we will either remove them from the market or call them imitation." And this was a system they used for decades, and it created a lot of problems. Then, late 1960s people started to get unhappy about this. There was this big turning point connected to the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health where Nixon administration brought together lots of nutrition scientists. And one of the conclusions that came out of that is we need to change the FDA's system. And so, in the early 70s, the Food and Drug Administration says, "We're going to pivot away from these food standards and start focusing on informative labels." This is when you get the requirement of ingredient labeling on all foods, including standard foods, and you also get the first voluntary nutrition information label. My book looks at this change in strategies away from standardizing foods towards standardizing information about foods and creating these kinds of consumer-oriented information labels.   I love the fact that you helped us understand this idea of the information age, because once you read that and think, "Oh, well you're talking about something about the internet," but it's even more foundational about how we communicate what is a product. I found it really fascinating to read in your book where you talked about what I perceive to be really laborious conversations around what exactly is peanut butter or some other product. I mean, it seems like that took up a lot of space. Do you think that was ultimately productive? Is that the reason why we see this information change? Or was there something important about that effort on its own?   So, there were advantages and disadvantages of the old food standards approach. One of the advantages is that everybody who wanted to raise an issue was invited to attend those hearings. This meant that you could have really colorful exchanges. There is one woman who ran a homemaker's association who would show up and she would get a lot of attention because she was very colorful in her criticisms of proposed standards. It could be a very democratic space in that sense. On the other hand, they could run on for years. And there were contentious hearings where you would have dozens of lawyers from different food companies. It was held like a kind of legal court proceedings, and there would be objections, and counterevidence, and counter-witnesses. One of the complaints in the 1970s is that this was another example of an overly burdensome centralized government agency and process that was expensive. And the switch towards using informative labels and moving away from food standards was seen to be a kind of lighter touch form of governance. The disadvantage is that now you have an even more backstage discussion about what goes on this label, and it means that consumers have even less access to who's making those decisions for them.   Can you talk a little bit more about that? What's in the backstage that we're not privy to?   I think one of the misconceptions about the food label is that it is this window into the food, right? Especially something like nutrition and ingredients. You look at packaged food and you don't know what you're seeing, and therefore if they require the company to print the ingredients and nutrition, then you can look at that and now you have the kind of answer. In practice, it's more complicated deciding what kind of information appears there, which nutrients do you want to do, how do you calibrate those in terms of the daily diet? Or how do you name the ingredients? Do you use the scientific name? Do you use the common name? Those questions are decided by people backstage. This could be FDA regulators. They could allow companies to make those decisions. And so, the label is actually a translation of those kinds of decisions. One of the arguments in my book is that you can't get away from the values of these expert communities in deciding what goes on that label.   Yes, and thank you for that. I am really intrigued by how you are talking about the role of FDA, and I want to come back to that in a moment, this sort of panel of experts, and something that we think is so foundational, foods that we eat. We should know what they are. We believe we know what they are. They're part of our larger history. But what I'm also hearing is actually government organizations mediate what we understand food is. I'm intrigued to learn some more. Given what you've learned about the history of food labeling, what do labels offer as a policy tool?   Often the way people see food labels is that is a kind of knowledge fix, especially with packaged foods. Because you don't know what's in them, there is this sense that there's a kind of uneven playing ground between the producer and the consumer, right? The producer knows how it was produced. They know what's in the food. They're selling this to consumers and there's concern that they might mislead the consumer. And so, this idea is that the label is a kind of technical solution to that market problem. And in many ways, it can work this way, but there's actually a kind of translation work involved in there. It's a more complicated story than just a knowledge fix. And in fact, a lot of studies that look at how people read ingredient labels, and especially nutrition labels, will talk about how they fail to understand this or that aspect of the nutrition label. Because consumers are dealing with decision fatigue, they're in this, what people call the attention economy, where they don't have a lot of time to look at labels. So often, reading the label is the least important part of food labels for policy. In fact, over and over again, in this history, I discovered that when the FDA was introducing changes to the food label, regulators and others would comment on how actually the biggest impact is that it would lead to companies changing the foods before. So, even if consumers aren't reading the label, they're affected by those changes because companies are reformulating the foods.   I'm really interested in that. I know that there is a body of literature that talks about this idea that by having to put the information out in the public, what you're saying is companies reformulate because they want their products to look better, or maybe they actually are making the products better. Is that a fair assessment?   I think this is where you get into the tricky aspect of what we mean by better. So, taking the example of the nutrition label, one of the problems that you get with the beginning of nutrition labeling in the 1970s is it really favors a particular idea of what is better. So, if better means more of certain nutrients like protein or vitamins, and less of other nutrients like fats, or certain bad fats and sugars, then companies might reprocess a food, right? They'll take out sugar. They'll take out fat in it. And maybe they'll add in other ingredients to make it taste good anyway. And they'll kind of game that profile. And for people who are concerned about nutritional health in this sort of sense of nutrition, this might be great. But if your idea of good for you is less processed, you know this older idea of wholesome, you have this idea that the food was made in a kind of traditional sense, now you have a less good food. One of the problems that nutrition labeling raises is that it's not that it's misleading consumers, but it's getting them to focus on certain attributes of the food and not thinking about other things that may be important for health.   That's really helpful. I'm doing some work on date labels, and I've been thinking about this idea of how far can these labels go, and helping people make the best choices possible, however we define best. And that these labels are, as you said, the beginning. They're definitely not the end of that decision or that process. So, this is a really a rich conversation. I want to ask you about misconceptions. What would you say is the biggest misconception about food labels from the point of view of consumers? You gave us a little bit of an idea about that, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.   One of the misconceptions about the food label is that it is this window into the food, right, especially something like nutrition and ingredients. When consumers receive this information label, they often take it at face value as sort of, "I now have this information about the food." And therefore, if they require the company to print the ingredients and nutrition, then you can look at that and now you have the kind of answer. In practice, it's more complicated. Deciding what kind of information appears there, which nutrients do you want to do, how do you calibrate those in terms of the daily diet? Or how do you name the ingredients? Do you use the scientific name? Do you use the common name? Those questions are getting decided by people backstage. This could be FDA regulators. They could allow companies to make those decisions. And so the label is actually a translation of those kinds of decisions.   One of my arguments is that you can't get away from the values of these expert communities in deciding what goes on that label for the informative label. And in my book, I really try to argue that it's not just a kind of conduit into the product. It's not like suddenly you have the information. Instead, you need to read these labels as kind of value and political discussions among people who often have to make compromises. My favorite example of this with the nutrition facts panel was a decision to use the 2,000-calorie amount for daily values for the average American consumer. I remember interviewing a guy at the FDA, and I asked him about that, and he said, "Well, actually that's not accurate." It's not like if you averaged out everyone's caloric needs. Even in the 1990s, based on what they knew then, it would've been 2,000. For men, it was much higher. It was like 2,350. For women, it was lower. But they settled on 2,000 as a kind of pragmatic decision for multiple reasons. One, they hoped that if it was rounded, consumers wouldn't think of it as like a precise tool and it would be easier to do math with. And also it was on the low end of what you should get. So, the idea was that this would discourage people from eating too much. So, they made all these kinds of compromises in it. But if consumers see this and they see it as a kind of science, then they tend to think it's more rational than it really is.   And that's the kind of thing I was most surprised about from doing this history was discovering that actually consumers aren't reading these labels as rational calculators. They're reading them emotionally. And the best example of this I got was interviewing Burkey Belser, who recently passed, and he was the head of the design firm that designed the nutrition box label. And he described it as a government brand. And he said, you know, "Seeing this thing everywhere, it's not just about how people read it. It's there in the background, kind of like brands and logos." And it's that emotional relationship to the information that I think policymakers really need to think about with labels, not just seeing them as a kind of rational decision-making device, but as something that is shaping consumers' emotional decisions about the food they eat.   You've raised an important point for me, because I was going to ask, what do you think policy makers may be misunderstanding about these labels? I'm wondering, do policy makers understand these labels as a brand, a government brand? Are they capturing or dealing with the things that you're just talking about, the emotional connection that consumers have with these products or these labels?   I think that one of the advantages of labeling, and I think this is why the FDA started looking at it more as an important tool in the 1970s, is that it's a lot easier to focus on the package as a kind of site where you can police market behavior. So, it's much easier to do that than to go into manufacturer's factories to kind of say, "This is good, that is bad." You can use it as a kind of accountability device. I think from the point of view of regulation in a big national and increasingly international market, that's one of its advantages. The limitations of this for reforming food systems in my opinion, is it also ends up being a kind of outsourcing of work onto consumers, right? Instead of saying, "We want to make sure foods are safe and nutritious. We want to avoid certain kinds of ingredients or discourage certain kinds of unhealthy foods." Governments are basically saying, "All right, we're going to put it on the label and let the consumer do that work." And I think that is one limitation of them. The other thing that I also think happens is it's not just outsourcing to the consumers, but it's also putting that in the market and using the market to solve those kinds of problems. And for mandatory labels, like the nutrition facts panel, this means that consumers who have the time and resources might end up adopting a healthier diet because of it. But many consumers who don't have those kinds of choices aren't going to be helped by this informative fix. For voluntary labels, and this is something I talk about at the end of the book. I call them lifestyle labels or risk labels, depending on what you're talking about. So organic, carbon footprint labels, concerned about the environment, these kinds of third-party certificate labels, it becomes this kind of opt out. Instead of reforming the political system, you're providing this kind of market upsell option for consumers to have those resources.   I'm intrigued to think about the FDA in its historical place. Your book provides a history of past FDA activities on food labeling, and you talked wonderfully about those already. How does it speak to current policy concerns at the FDA? And you were giving a little bit of an indicator of that with the front-of-pack labeling. I'm wondering are there other spaces about FDA concerns today?   I think if you're really committed to reforming the food system, then food labels are only ever just the start to that reform work. They can't be treated as the solution. And I think in the past you have had a lot of cases, particularly with public government, where the label is put forward as the kind of answer to a political problem. And then they don't think about the need for staff to keep the education up about the label or enforcement. And so, they don't treat it like the beginning of that reform work.   One of the things I find really exciting about what your book is doing, that you're a historian and you're talking about the development of this policy and it has important implications. What do you think history offers us in the current policy discourse? What do you bring to the table that we miss out by not talking with historians?   So, when I was doing this research, this event that I didn't know happened that turned out to be really important in this story was this White House conference in 1969. At the time, the impetus for this conference was the sort of sudden public awareness of ongoing hunger in America. In the 1960s, people who were involved in civil rights realized that if they could focus on the issue of hunger, they could get a broader attention to problems of poverty and disparity in America. In 1968, this became a big public issue because of widely watched TV documentary. Everyone was talking about hunger and its connection to poverty and inequalities in America. And when the Nixon administration created the White House conference, the language of poverty and the concern of poverty was central. Then, there was a kind of shift over the course of the conference. Initially it's talking about hunger and how that's a malnutrition issue related to poverty. But by the end of the conference, they're starting to focus on consumer education, better labels, better information. And in some sense, we haven't got away from that framing shift. I really saw this recently with the Biden administration. It held its own White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health in 2022, and nowhere in its report was there a mention or discussion of poverty. They were really focused on foods as a vehicle for health, improving labels instead of talking about poverty as the kind of root concerns. Again, the kind of overall framing is if we engineer better foods in this nutritional sense, or we give you better information labels, then we'll solve the health problems America's facing. I think that that policy focus is ignoring the broader context of how Americans eat and how they're making their decisions. So, I see my book as kind of providing a broader lens to think of the issues, not just historically, but also looking beyond sort of the field of nutrition or considerations of government, but looking at how these different institutions are all interacting with each other to shape policy. I think the two important things here are about what history can offer in present policy. One is that I actually think a lot of people working on these issues today have no idea where they came from. I've experienced this as I've given talks. I've had people in industry, or people who work on policies sort of say, "I didn't realize that that was where the standard for milk came from," when they were talking about recent changes in terms of the nomenclature for milk. Or "I didn't understand that," you know, "healthy, as it was defined in the 1990s, was in the context of one kind of health war, but today there's a kind of new public health concern about other types of foods." So, part of it is that I think that policymakers will really appreciate getting that older context. I often call it institutional memory because you lose that institutional memory. The other thing that's really striking is, at the beginning of my story in the 1930s and 1940s, nobody was using words like saturated fats or carbohydrates. It was a different era and people were really talking about food differently. So, it's useful. I think of it as like study abroad. You know, you go to this place, you see that people are talking very differently, and then you come back to your home country, you know, or the president, and you realize, "Oh," you know, "there's this aspect of food that I was taking for granted that has really changed in the last," you know, "five, six decades."   Bio   Xaq Frohlich is Associate Professor of History of Technology at Auburn University. He works on issues relating to food and risk at the intersections of science, law, and markets. His research focuses on the historical intersections of science, law, and markets, and how the three have shaped our modern, everyday understanding of food, risk, and responsibility. His work explores questions relating to consumerism and the changing relationships between the state, experts, and the public in the production of everyday knowledge: how do we “know” what we know about food and its relation to health? In what ways has our informational environment for food changed with the industrialization of food production and retailing? Frohlich earned his PhD in history, anthropology, and STS at MIT. He teaches courses on food and power, the intersections of science, technology and the law, and the history of business and capitalism.

In 2022, Congress established Summer EBT, the first new permanent federal food assistance program in almost 50 years. The authorization of Summer EBT represents a historic investment in the nutrition and wellbeing of almost 30 million children who will qualify for the program. But states that piloted Summer EBT, or operated Pandemic EBT programs in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic know that getting these benefits into the hands of families will involve overcoming complex challenges related to data and technology. That's why Code for America and No Kid Hungry, a campaign of Share Our Strength joined forces to create the Summer EBT Playbook, a comprehensive free resource designed to help state agencies plan for and implement a human-centered Summer EBT program. Today we will talk with Eleanor Davis, director of Government Innovation on the Safety Net team at Code for America. In her role, she helps government agencies adopt best practices for human-centered digital benefit delivery.   Interview Summary Why is Summer EBT significant? Well, I think you gave us a good intro. Summer EBT is a brand-new benefit program and it's designed to reduce childhood hunger during the summer months by providing families with a monthly grocery benefit to feed their kids when they're not receiving meals at school. So, almost 30 million kids in the US receive free or reduced-price meals at school, but during the summer many of them struggle to access nutritious food because they're not receiving those meals at school. School is out of session. Summer EBT is designed to give families $120 per child in the summer to help them buy groceries and it really has the potential to dramatically reduce childhood hunger. It's a tremendous moment because Summer EBT is the first new permanent federal food assistance program in almost 50 years. For those of us in government or in the food access space, this is really I would say, a once in a generation opportunity to shape the implementation of the program to make sure it really meets the needs of families and children. So, why did Code for America and Share Our Strength develop the Summer EBT Playbook? What was the challenge? Code for America is a 501 C3 nonprofit organization. We partner with government at all levels to make the delivery of public services more equitable, more effective, and more accessible using technology and data. And we've spent the last decade helping states deliver safety net benefit programs in more human-centered ways. The Summer EBT program, as we mentioned, has immense potential, but we also know that states are going to encounter many challenges in implementing this program in 2024 and beyond. I think standing up a brand-new benefits program is a huge undertaking generally, but Summer EBT will present some really specific challenges to states and we learned a lot about this back in 2020. So, at the start of the pandemic, Congress authorized an emergency response program called Pandemic EBT, that was very similar to Summer EBT in many ways. It was the same idea, really sort of providing families with a grocery benefit while schools are closed because of COVID-19. And so, in 2020 and 2021, Code for America worked directly with about a dozen states to help them deliver Pandemic EBT benefits. And through that process we saw very up close what made that program so hard to implement. Delivery of the program really relies on effective data and technology systems. So, really being able to find the right data in state systems and use that data to deliver benefits. And a lot of these challenges will also be true for Summer EBT, right? It's a very similar delivery process. So, states really needed help planning for Summer EBT and really designing systems and processes that will help them operationalize this brand-new program so that it can really live up to the promise spelled out in the policy. So, that's why we partnered with the No Kid Hungry Campaign. We really wanted to develop a resource that would help states design effective and human centered Summer EBT programs. And our goal was really just to sort of help as many states as possible implement this program. This is really interesting, and I would like to understand a little bit more. What challenges did states face in implementing the pandemic EBT and how do you see that showing up in the Summer EBT? I mean is it just getting the right software or is it something else? There are so many really, it's less about the software and more about the data. So fundamentally, I think some of the biggest challenges that we walk through in the playbook certainly, but that we know states are going to struggle with is really around using data to determine who is eligible for Summer EBT. So maybe just taking a step back, there are sort of two pathways for confirming who's eligible for Summer EBT. The first is called streamline certification. Basically, this means that the state uses the data that it already must determine if a family is eligible for Summer EBT and then issues those benefits automatically. So, for example, if a child is already participating in a program that should make them eligible like SNAP or in some states Medicaid, they should automatically receive Summer EBT. And similarly, if a child is in the foster system or is in a Head Start program or if a child has applied for and is therefore receiving already free and reduced-price meals at school, those children should receive Summer EBT automatically. But children who can't be certified as eligible through any of those pathways will have to apply for the Summer EBT benefits. So that's sort of the other eligibility route. States must provide a way for families to directly apply if they can't certify them through streamline certification. So, the idea is that the majority of children who are eligible for the program should actually get benefits automatically through streamline certification. And that's really fantastic, right? We should always be looking for ways to reduce the administrative burden that low-income families face when they aim to gain access to programs they're entitled to. So theoretically, if a state already has enough information to say this family is eligible for Summer EBT, they should just send that money out automatically and without the family having to do anything. That's sort of the best-case scenario. On the state side though, this is actually really complicated to do. The data that states need to use to determine that eligibility is all over the place, right? It's in Head Start programs, it's in the foster care system, it's in a state's SNAP or Medicaid eligibility system and it's in the schools, and school data presents really specific challenges for states to be able to use. So, states therefore have to identify where is all this data? What systems is it in? What agencies have this data? They then must aggregate all that data in one place that's central and usable. They have to clean and de-duplicate and match all that data across those different data sources. And then of course they have to deal with any inaccuracies or gaps in the data. So, data collection, data aggregation, data management, these are really sort of the core challenges of implementing this program. How do you collect all of this information into one place and use it to deliver benefits to families? This is really one of the core challenges that we focus on in the playbook. It's really helpful to hear how you all are helping states think through this. And I would imagine that there are some differences across states. How in the playbook have you been able to best manage the uniqueness of these different states? It's really tricky. I think we always say if you've seen one state system, you've seen one state system, no two states really look the same. And I'm using state really as a shorthand, tribal nations can implement this program, territories, US territories can also implement this program. So, there really is no one standard way that states backend infrastructure looks. And even when it comes to implementing this program, Summer EBT, different state agencies are sort of taking the lead in different states on administering this program. So, I think we're doing our best to help understand what unique challenges states are facing while also recognizing that the sort of themes, the main things, the primary challenges are going to remain the same basically across a lot of states. And so, we are really sort of in the playbook offering best practices, recommendations that we know will be universally helpful no matter really what a backend state system looks like. Can you give us a little bit of the flavor of those best practices? Absolutely. So, I want to talk about a couple here because this program gets really weedy really fast. I think the first one that we really talk about is client support. As we've been discussing, this is a really complicated program to administer. It's also brand new, right? So, families are going to need support navigating this program. They're going to have questions; they're going to be confused. Even after multiple years of Pandemic EBT, many families were still confused about why they did or did not end up receiving benefits. So, who is eligible? Can I expect these benefits? How do I get them? These are all questions that families are going to have. So, states need to be prepared to provide really consistent and clear communication to families. And they also need to have really easily accessible pathways for families to reach out and ask questions when they have them. And we can already really anticipate what a lot of those questions are going to be. One of the biggest points of confusion for families is going to be, "Do I need to apply or not?" Right? We talked earlier about the two different pathways streamline certification or filling out an application. From the state perspective it's pretty clear, but as a family, how do I know if I can expect to receive these benefits automatically or if I need to apply? And the complicated policy language here, of course you know about streamline certification, families don't understand that, right? We have to sort of really communicate clearly with families. I think one example of this is families whose children attend community eligibility provision schools or CEP schools; these are schools that serve free meals to all of their students. They're usually schools that are in low-income areas and because a certain percentage of their students are categorically eligible for free meals because they participate in other programs like SNAP or TANF, they're able to just give free meals to all of their students. So, families at CEP schools have never had to apply for school meals, their kids just get them. But because these families haven't applied for free or reduced-price meals, they're actually going to have to apply for Summer EBT. You can see how from a family perspective, this starts to get really confusing from a messaging standpoint, right? We're telling families if your income was below this level, at any point in the previous school year, you're going to be eligible for Summer EBT. But if you haven't applied to free or reduced-price meals this year, you have to apply unless you already received SNAP or TANF, in which case don't apply, you'll get benefits automatically. So, the messaging starts to get really confusing. How states communicate with families about this program and how to access it really matters. So, in the playbook we have a lot of resources on best practices for community outreach, how to talk about this program, how to leverage many methods of communication, right? Like email, text, phone calls, to really let families know about this program and give them the information they need to navigate it. Wow, that's great. And it's interesting to hear you talk about this because early on I had the impression you were really worried about the data, but you're also really concerned about how people function in the system. So, I've heard you mention this idea of human-centered design and human-centered digital benefit delivery. Can you explain a little bit more about what that really means and why it's important? Human-centered design really just means creating things that really meet people's needs and that are really easy for people to use and access. And that's really important, right? Just like the example I was just sharing with this program. It's a complicated program and if the systems aren't designed in a way that makes it easy for families to access, easy for families to interact with, they're not going to see the benefit of the program ultimately, and the program isn't going to meet its goals, which is reducing childhood hunger. So, the principles of human-centered design are really about thinking through what do families need when it comes to interacting with this program and how do we design the program in such a way that gives them those things? I think a great example of this is the application, right? We have a lot of best practices in the playbook related to the application component of the program. I mentioned that while many families will receive benefits automatically, the regulations for Summer EBT do require that many families will have to apply. So, states have to design applications and there are a lot of considerations that need to go into creating an application in a human-centered way, right? It needs to be accessible, which means it needs to be available in a lot of different languages, which can be really tough. California has 19 threshold languages that people speak. So, we need to translate this into the languages that people speak. The questions need to be written in what we call plain language, which is just conversational, the way that people actually talk so that they're really easy to understand and they need to flow in a way that makes sense to someone filling out the application. And this really matters because if the questions are hard to understand or hard to answer, it's likely that more people will answer incorrectly or submit the wrong answer. Meaning that they might not get the benefit even if they are in fact eligible. And then we also talked a lot about the importance of mobile accessibility. And this is really critical because more and more low-income families are what's called smartphone dependent, which means they don't have internet in their homes, but they do have a smartphone. So, they rely on that smartphone to do things online like fill out applications. But a lot of government websites are not built to fit the smaller screen on a mobile phone. And that makes it really hard for people to do things like fill out online applications for benefit programs. So, it's really important to make sure that the online application is designed to work on a mobile phone because that's how we know most families will be accessing it. I think the application component demonstrates a lot of the sort of thoughtful design work that's going to be required to create a program that's truly accessible for the people that need it. I'm really appreciative of this. And as I heard you talk about this, especially with mobile devices and I was thinking about younger folks, but I also know that there are grandparents or older adults who will care for young children who may be eligible. What considerations do you make for older adults or people with disabilities that may make using certain devices difficult? That's a great question. We have done a fair amount of research on this and what we found is that the sort of principles of human-centered design we really need to design for everyone. And that means designing for accessibility or ability, right? Designing for multiple languages, designing for whatever device people have access to, designing for different levels of comfort with technology. I think we really believe in the sort of principle that if you design it for the person that's going to have the most trouble accessing the program, you make it easier for everybody, right? So, we really think about the highest need population and design for that population and then really believe that we sort of make it more accessible for all populations that need to access the program. This has been really helpful for me to consider how government can work for people by using human-centered design to really move the process of applying and attaining these assets or these benefits, easier for folks. And I'm really grateful to hear the work that you all are doing with Share Our Strength. I got to ask this last question. What are your hopes for Summer EBT in 2024 and even beyond? I love this question. I have so many, I spent a lot of time so far talking about how hard this program is going to be for states to implement and it will be, I don't want to downplay the significant effort that it's going to take for states to stand up this program and deliver benefits, especially in this first year. That said, in my experience, people who work in government are incredibly resilient and resourceful and they are incredibly creative problem solvers. Pandemic EBT was really hard to implement, and states were trying to figure out how to deliver that program in the first few months of a global pandemic where everything was shut down and there was sort of historic need for benefit programs. But by the time that program ended, every single state had delivered Pandemic EBT benefits to families. So Summer EBT, especially in these first few years of its implementation, will be challenging certainly, but it won't be impossible. States have really proved that they can do this, right? States are good at this. So, I guess my greatest hope is that states are able to address many of the challenges of implementation this year in order to put benefits in the hands of families and that more states opt in, in future years, right? So that eventually all families get to benefit from this program. Ultimately a policy is only as good as its implementation, right? We have to help states design programs that are effective for them to implement, but also that work for the families that they're serving so that the Summer EBT program can live up to the promise outlined in the policy. Bio Eleanor Davis is the Program Director for Government Innovation at Code for America. In her role, she enables government agencies to adopt best practices for human-centered digital benefit delivery. She joined Code for America from Futures Without Violence, a national public health and social justice nonprofit dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence. There she worked for 6 years on the Public Education Campaigns & Programs team, developing public-facing initiatives that support the ability of frontline providers and advocates to more effectively respond to and prevent violence and trauma. Eleanor is a graduate of the University of Chicago where she studied Sociology and Performance Studies, and received a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley. Outside of work you can often find her gardening in her backyard or singing in her family band.

In 2022, more than 6 million people visited farmers markets across North Carolina. Today, we're talking with a team of people who are the driving force behind the North Carolina Farmers Market Network: Maggie Funkhouser, Catherine Elkins, and Nora Rodli. The goal of the North Carolina Farmers Market is to create and support a thriving network of marketplaces for the state's local food and farm products. The nonprofit network, which was recently awarded a USDA Farmers Market Promotion Capacity-building grant, will provide education, programming, and partnership development assistance to farmers market managers, including resources to support historically underserved populations. Interview Summary   I would like to take a moment to actually get to know you all a little bit better. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved in farmers markets. Catherine, let's start with you.   Catherine - Sure. I've been doing this for the longest, I suppose. I went with my mom many times to Amish markets in Pennsylvania where I grew up. She was not a very good gardener. But we could buy everything that she liked at the market. I also worked a bit at the Carrboro Farmers Market, and I then got an opportunity to work with the Morehead City Saturday Market, a one-year lifespan. And the Old Beaufort Farmers Market we started up the next year, that's now in its 10th year. That makes me proud. I liked that market a lot. Managed it for two years, and I'm still one of those devotees that go on vacation and have to look up the closest farmers market just to check out new stuff.   Maggie - Like most managers, I did not go to school to be a farmers market manager. It kind of found me, I guess you could say. I went to graduate school directly after undergrad for classical languages. Then when I moved back to the Triangle, I just sort of started getting involved more and more with local food. I worked in restaurants, I worked in coffee shops, and one time I worked in an artisan bakery; I managed a culinary garden, and I just kind of kept getting drawn into different parts of the community in our local food system in the Triangle. In 2019, I applied for and was offered a job at the Carrboro Farmers Market as the assistant manager. I worked there for about a year. Then in 2020, I took over as the manager, and I've been here ever since.   Nora - So, I actually come to farmers markets as a farmer. For the past 25 years, I've farmed in various places around the country, mostly New Mexico and Hawaii and now North Carolina. That has given me the ability to see and experience farmers markets in a lot of different manners, whether it be a small market or a large market, and urban versus rural settings. I feel like I am uniquely on board as a cheering squad for farmers markets.   Thank you. We all need a cheerleader on our side, so it's good to hear that. I really would love to ask each of you more questions about your past because there are some interesting connections that I hear. Catherine, the Marine Lab is in Beaufort, and I'm intrigued to know more about how those relationships develop. Maggie, I would love to talk more about your training as someone in the classics has influenced the way you think about this. I mean, this idea of food and agriculture is deeply within that literature, and so that's really fascinating. And, Nora, I just can't wait to learn more about Hawaii. But I can't do that right now. We have other things to focus on. However, if those answers come up in your other responses, please feel free. I'm intrigued to talk to you all a little bit more about the North Carolina Farmers Market Network. What is it and who does it serve?   Maggie - I'll kind of kick us off talking about the network a little bit, and maybe my colleagues can chime in. So, we incorporated this year as a 501 nonprofit under the name North Carolina Farmers Market Network. NCFMN, for short. That's our kind of alphabet-soup title that I might say really, really fast. But there had kind of been plans and thoughts to form a statewide network in North Carolina for a long time. We gained a lot of momentum in 2020 because in 2020 we started, with the help of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, the State Extension and RAFI, when the pandemic hit, we started having these weekly Zoom calls that were specifically for farmers market managers. The reason we started them in March 2020 was because we were all really, really unsure about what was happening and what was going to happen to the farmers market spaces. Many of our markets across the state were shut down. Many of them had a lot of additional regulations and policies and emergency protocols that were really hard to implement, especially if there were no permanent staff or volunteer staff or part-time staff. In my position, I'm lucky enough to be full-time, but many market managers are not. So, we started out as a rag-tag group of market managers that were just trying to stay open and operating in a really difficult time. We had weekly calls, and we went over different policies we had, different marketing techniques we were using to communicate to the public about our pandemic response. I really clung to it as a source of support during that time. Then over the next couple of years, we started meeting biweekly, then we started meeting monthly. We kind of realized that we had a lot to talk about and a lot to share. Our Zoom name was COVID-19 Calls for Farmers Markets. But what started out as COVID-19 Calls for Farmers Markets turned into resource sharing, professional development, learning things like grant writing, bookkeeping, managing conflicts. And last year we decided to make it official. So, we applied for our FMPP grant, our Farmers Market Promotion Program grant, through the USDA, and we were awarded it. And then we were on the path to nonprofit incorporation.   Maggie, that is really fascinating, and it's interesting to hear how a crisis of COVID-19 drew a lot of you together. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like it was beneficial in terms of the work you were doing. And it may have also had some personal benefits - just being connected to other people who were in the same field. And you all were able to talk about how you were managing things. Did that take place? Was there more than just sort of, "Here's how to manage your books," or "Here's how to manage conflict"?   Maggie - For sure. The camaraderie was just incredible. Farmers market managers, it's kind of a funny position, and maybe Nora can speak to this a little bit as a farmer who sells at a farmers market, and maybe a different perspective about what a market manager does or the role they occupy. But we do a lot of different things. On any given day we can be planning special events, applying for grants, communicating with vendors, communicating with our boards. And so, to have connections, especially for me being in the Triangle where we have a lot of farmers markets, I had never really met their managers or interacted with them. And now we're total pals. It really was an opportunity for me to share experiences with people who have very similar jobs, and those jobs are often singular in their workplace.   Nora, since she called you out, I'm interested, from a farmer's perspective, I would love to hear your thoughts, and, of course, Catherine, please feel free to join in.   Nora - Yes, I'd love to share. I feel like before meeting this network, and I've only been with them since April, I have to admit that as a farmer, I showed up at the farmers market and thought that's when the market began and didn't really think much beyond who was behind making it happen until I got there. And I've learned and been humbled by how much of an oversight that is. I definitely am guilty of not appreciating all of the work that goes into making sure that farmers markets happen. And I've spent the last six months learning about all the details of things that market managers deal with that farmers have no idea. And it's similar to farmers, maybe, in that way where we wear many hats. And so, I feel like I've learned, one, to appreciate them, but, two, there's not a lot of collective appreciation by anybody that goes on for farmers markets managers. And so, I think that by them grouping together every month because it can be such a siloed experience, it just seems like this really beautiful connection where, when you do your job well as a market manager, there's nothing, like no one says a thing. No complaints mean success. And so, here's a group that can give you compliments, you can empathize with one another, and know that you have each other's back. It's just a beautiful network.   Catherine - I think also what we noticed was that many times the overlap and potentially collaborative nature amongst managers is really great. These are not competitive people. They have secrets to share about what their special events might be, and not everybody has to hold Tomato Day on the same day. Or they may know people at City Hall that are the right people for this kind of permit or may as well share these things. They're all on our same perspective. And plus, that, we found that there were many other states that had networks or associations. So, we could follow them, especially during a period of crisis and near panic as COVID was. Everybody's just glued to their screens looking for information. And the states that had robust networks or associations already in place seemed to be able to help their markets succeed really well.   Thank you all for sharing this. It's really fascinating to learn about the development of this farmers market network and to know that there are other farmers market networks in other states, and it's great to hear of the learnings that you all gained from each other within the state and across states. So, this is really helpful. I've got to ask this question. I mean, it sounds like what drew you all together was the pandemic and thinking about how to navigate policies. Now that, I pray, we're through the hard part of COVID, and I say that cautiously, what are things that are on your agenda now? What do you hope to see be different?   Maggie - Catherine kind of spoke to this. Even though farmers markets are separate spaces, our market is within 20 miles of four other farmers markets. But the goal is not to compete with them. The goal is to lift up farmers markets as accessible community spaces and viable spaces for our farmers to make direct sales. So, for us, we really want to strengthen that local food ethic across the state of North Carolina. Because selling at farmers markets is an extremely viable way that small-scale farmers can succeed in North Carolina. And so, if you have a market manager that is leaving after six months because they're overwhelmed or they haven't received a lot of institutionalized knowledge or training or what have you, then that's where we can step in and say, "We have training, we can give you information, we can share resources, we can provide a network to you." Our big, impactful goal that we're working for is having a statewide nutrition incentive program, and I think Virginia calls theirs Fresh Match. Many statewide organizations have Double Bucks, Fresh Bucks, Market Match, whatever you want to call it, where they provide a dollar-for-dollar match for nutrition incentive programs like SNAP EBT or the Farmers Market Nutrition Program. And as of right now, farmers markets in North Carolina, most of them are fending for themselves. There are a few regional systems like in the western part of the state, the Triangle area farmers markets, Mecklenburg County farmers markets, that are working together. But we really want to have a statewide network where farmers markets across North Carolina can offer nutrition incentives to shopping at farmers markets.   Thank you for that. I'm really happy to hear how you all are working towards addressing policy questions and thinking about who the farmers markets can better serve by using programs like Double Up Bucks or the nutrition incentive programs, and seeing that work across the state. Because there are some significant differences in economic realities across the state. So, that's wonderful to hear you all are doing that work. I'd just like to take a step back, and I'm going to go back to you, Maggie. Can you talk to us about the role of farmers markets in communities? What role do they play?   Maggie - We talk about this a lot in the farmers market space. Because from the outside, farmers markets are spaces of commerce. They're a space where farmers can get together. Maybe you don't realize there's a level of organization behind it. But, in reality, anyone who is a regular at farmers markets knows that they are not just a space of commerce, that they are a community space. They are a third space, and an opportunity to socialize, meet your local farmers. And at our market, we were founded in the late '70's, we have customers who have been coming to our market for decades. They've known some of our farms for years, they've seen them get married and have kids, they've seen their loved ones pass away, they've seen them go through hardships, and seen them go through multiple recessions at this point. It's a really unique space, especially in this kind of era where there is an increasingly globalized economy where you can order one-day shipping for everything you need. To be able to meet the person that's growing your food or baking your bread is really unique. Many farmers markets promote the sense of community, and engagement between consumer and producer. A lot of us offer different types of community programming to kind of bolster that. So, things like kids' activities, encouraging healthy nutrition and things like senior days, educational events. Catherine named Tomato Day, which happens to be a very big day for us. And we've kind of touched on Double Bucks and food access, and that's another real priority for a farmers market. And, also, I didn't mention this when we were talking about the pandemic, but we were looped under grocery stores as essential for the state of North Carolina. And so, that kind of maybe speaks to how we feel, and I hope others in our community feel about farmers markets as well.   Wow, that's really fascinating. I didn't appreciate that farmers markets were treated like grocery stores as essential workers. That's really interesting. I'm intrigued, Nora and Catherine, what about your thoughts about the role that farmers markets may play in communities?   Catherine - Well, Nora would agree with that. The farmers are their own community, and they appreciate the opportunity to meet each other across the aisle, across the tables. "How's things going on your farm?" "Let me tell you about what's happening at my place." Farming can be a really solitary profession. There's many, many hours spent as just one person on a tractor, one person planting seeds, one person weeding. To have the camaraderie and the opportunity to meet up with your peers, that's pretty powerful on a Saturday morning. It is a lot of time sometimes to give up. The better farmers markets, of course, are the ones where you're talking directly to the farmer. How did they prepare this soil, or are they certified naturally grown? What does that mean to them on their farm? You get to actually have that conversation with a client, but only in person. So, it's a big deal for the farmer.   Nora - Yes, for sure. I can speak to that. I feel like most farmers don't have a lot of neighbors close by, and we can feel isolated in our own little work bubbles. And so, a farmers market is the social event of the week for us. Many markets that I have been a part of will have a standing lunch afterwards, and it develops into friendships that are really deep. I also wanted to just mention, from the farmer perspective, the value of meeting customers who are purchasing things from me and my farm, from others and their farms. It's not just meet your farmer, but for us it's like meet your customers. And it's a chance to explain something, like why you're excited about the diversity of such and such crops, why it matters. There's only so much you can put into website descriptions and social media, and it's just two-dimensional. Having the opportunity to meet and share space, the farmers market is so essential, I think, to not only understanding our food and where it comes from and how it's produced, but increasing our value of it in this day where it seems like food is sometimes just an afterthought of convenience.   I love the idea of the farmers market being sort of like the water cooler for farmers to get together and swap stories and share in each other's joys and probably also frustrations and pains. I can imagine how that's a wonderful space for folks. I remember watching a farmers market, I was staying in a hotel, and this is how I can say it. They were there at five in the morning, and I was like, "What's all this noise?" And it was great to see all of these farmers, one, setting up, but then I could see some of those exchanges. I had a sense of like there was a real community there. So, that's wonderful. And this makes it clear that these farmers markets can be really beneficial for farmers. I'm interested to hear a little bit more on how farmers markets are supportive, if at all, to the financial wellbeing of farmers? Or is this just a labor of love? Is it just the water cooler?   Nora - I feel like they're super economically important, and I think where I would say most importantly is as new and beginning farmers who are establishing their businesses. It is an extremely unique place to be able to try out different produce offerings and pricing. It's like you're practicing everything before you're able to have a reputation to secure accounts that might be other versions of direct or indirect marketing. And so, farmers markets offer you that opportunity to gain instant feedback: "Did that sell, yes or no?" "What were the questions?" "What were the gripes?" It gives you constant feedback to be able to refine as you grow your business and make decisions for the coming years. That's not only important as a farmer independently, I was also involved with some farmer-training programs, and we really highlighted farmers markets as giving that opportunity.   That's a great insight, that it's almost like a farmer incubator. It helps farmers test out different marketing means.   Nora - 100%, yes.   I would love to hear from some of the others. Catherine, Maggie, what are your thoughts about the financial benefit of farmers markets?   Catherine - We keep talking about it, how it's so perfect for the farmer or for the producer but think of how perfect it is also for the shopper to keep coming to a place that's always trying to reinvent itself in serving better and better and better food. My local brick-and-mortar store doesn't do that. There are different priorities.   I am an economist. I am just loving this idea of price discovery in the market and the idea that each of these markets are different and they're idiosyncratic and there's something new happening. This is actually worthy of further study, but that's another conversation for another time. So, thank you for sharing.   Catherine - I think you know probably better than most that farming is not a get-rich-quick scheme by any means. There are many examples of people, friends, who are pouring their heart and soul and muscles and fingernails into growing better and better, and they have to love it. They don't usually pay themselves terribly well.   Maggie - Many of our farmers sell at multiple markets, and it's kind of funny to hear things like: "Oh, I can always sell my cucumbers at the Carrboro farmer's market, but I can never sell them at another market." It's so funny to think about how the different farmers markets are literally different economic markets, where our customer base has like their own kind of idiosyncratic interests, and maybe they love persimmons or something like that. At our farmers market, we're definitely an incubator farmers market.   I want to ask one last question. And I say it's last, and we will see how the conversation goes. Because this has been really a delight. For market managers and farmers, what does the North Carolina Farmers Market Network have to offer them? Catherine, why don't you begin?   Catherine - Just like seeing your friendly farmer neighbors in person on Saturday morning, it's also really fun and informational, educational, all those great words, to Zoom with the managers. We have a first Thursday of the month Zoom call to the managers who are members. We have a range of topics prepared. We have space for updates on legislature. We had somebody come in from Senior WIC to help us learn what they're doing for us. How to collect data from your farmers markets is really helpful for boards and municipalities and us as the network. We're going to be asking for data. How to send out a census. What's everybody doing for the kids programs that's new, haven’t been tried before? So, that Thursday morning event has a good deal of value, we think. We also have a connection to Farmers Market Network, and we'll be able to offer discounts on insurances, I believe, as well as membership and access to their resource library, which is immense. We also wanted to make sure you knew that we were seeing other states like Virginia teach their managers best practices and have a market-management certificate, something we hope we can offer someday. We certainly will be hosting regional meetings to get to know the managers better. We have five regions around North Carolina. That'll be pretty educational. That'll have a program for it.   Nora - I would love to add to Catherine's description that in addition to being a place where farmers market managers come together, we're also a network that invites others who work in the food system and who are passionate about the same issues to become members. They're valuable voices to include in every conversation. For example, just the other week I sent out something, kind of a newsletter. I had some questions that market managers had been asking me about food-safety regulation issues for farmers markets, which comes up a lot. And in the responses, others who worked with NC State or Extension roles, piping in saying, "I have a good resource for that," or "Here's the answer." And I feel like the value of bringing together all these voices in the same room is huge.   Maggie - I love all of what Catherine and Nora were saying. You know, it occurs to me also that there are over 200 farmers markets in North Carolina.

It has been said many times that a picture is worth a thousand words. Our guest today is documentary photographer Sally Thomson, the creative genius behind the book "Homeground." She hopes her photos of 24 ranchers and land managers can broaden people's understanding of the impact conservation ranching has on the health of the land, the animals, and the people who live, work, and recreate in Southwestern and Rocky Mountain rangelands. Her book also includes rancher quotes and essays from land managers working to address challenges of climate change and diminishing resources and to find sustainable land management solutions. Interview Summary   I was especially interested in doing this podcast because we've had a lot of people on to talk about regenerative agriculture and there have been farmers and ranchers, some of whom we both know in common. There have been scientists who work on this, people who work with NGOs trying to promote this work, and even some policy makers, but never a photographer. It's going to be really interesting to hear from you and I look forward to what you have to say. So, we have spoken to chefs and filmmakers before who've used their arts to shape and change the food system. But as I say, you're the first photographer we've spoken to. Let's go back to the beginning. What got you interested in photography in the first place, and how can photography be used as a social or political statement?   Well, I didn't start out to become a photographer. I took a art class in college and that is really what first introduced me to photography. I was gifted a used cannon camera and a couple of lenses and I started experimenting with the camera. And I was immediately drawn to the medium. Especially watching the images kind of emerge in the dark room was just fascinating and kind of magical. But it never really occurred to me to consider photography as a career. I eventually went on to graduate school and I studied landscape architecture following my interest in environmental design and planning. I figured this would also give me the opportunity to incorporate photography into my creative process. I practiced landscape architecture for many years. But it wasn't until much later that I realized the power photography can have in storytelling, and raising awareness, and connecting me with people in places that, you know, I wouldn't have otherwise thought possible. So, up until about this point, I had used photography more for documenting my work. I had worked for a conservation organization in the Amazon Rainforest, and in order to communicate their message, I felt that photography was extremely useful in doing that. That's really what caused that shift in my thinking of turning to photography. In 2008, I created On Focus Photography, which was an effort to highlight the work of various underrepresented environmental cultural NGOs. I set about trying to learn everything I could about documentary photography at that point. That sort of led me to where I am today. What I do today is primarily divide my time between freelance assignment work, fine art and documentary photography.   Thanks for that background. It's really helpful to understand how you got to where you are now. So, let's turn to your book, "Homeground" brand new. Can you provide an overview of the book and what are some of the key things that you're hoping to convey?   Well, Homeground, of course, is a visual narrative. It explores the endangered rangelands of the American Southwest and the Rocky Mountains, and the people and the practices that are involved in restoring and sustaining these landscapes. I think one of the things that was kind of startling to me was the account of our rangelands, and I just wanted to talk about that briefly. Rangelands account for the largest share of the nation's land base. They cover more than one third of the land service in the continental US and that's according to USDA data. Unlike pastureland, rangelands consist of native vegetation, and they include a wide variety of different landscape types such as grasslands, desert shrub lands, and so on. They provide essential habitats for all kinds of living creatures, forage for livestock, and recreational opportunities. But in this country and elsewhere around the world, I learned that these lands are threatened due to land conversion, unmanaged grazing, invasive species, climate change, and things like that. The Nature Conservancy, in fact, says that grasslands represent the most threatened and least protected habitat on earth. Less than 2% worldwide and just 4% in the United States receive any kind of formal protection.   So, thinking about the Southwest and the Rocky Mountains, as you probably know, they connect vast areas of habitat and there are all kinds of organizations, federal, state, private and tribal ownership that form this mosaic of pattern on the land. But private individuals own more than half of the nation's range lands. The federal government manages about 40%, and state and local governments and tribal councils manage the remainder. I found these numbers were rather compelling, and it sort of put, for me, into perspective not only the scale and significance of these landscapes but point to the important role private land managers play in caring for this huge amount of land in our country.   There's a lot at stake, isn't there? Given how much land you're talking about and the importance of it to environment and everything else.   It is. And there's a map in the book that shows that distribution. It was based on data collected by USDA, but it was interpreted by Dave Merrill, who works for Bloomberg. It's just very insightful when you see that big square of rangeland and you realize how much landmass that really is. So, that really struck me and I wanted to make sure that people understood that.   Let's get back to the themes of your book, because I'm dying to hear about them. But tell me first, what inspired you to take on the issue of regenerative agriculture in particular?   I've always been deeply interested in the relationship between people and environment, and sort of how our actions can shape and impact the landscapes that we live in. When I moved to New Mexico in 2013, I'm originally from the East and went to school in North Carolina as a matter of fact. I got a job helping a local nonprofit organization called the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance here in Santa Fe, SWGLA for short. I helped them to produce a short video about how some producers were beginning to manage their animals on the land by utilizing a method called Holistic Planned Grazing. This was a term first introduced by Alan Savory, decades earlier. So, for this project, I visited six ranches spread across the states of New Mexico, and Colorado and Arizona. Traveled all around interviewing these ranchers. And through that experience, I grew a deep appreciation for these people, the men and women who managed these vast and often very remote tracks of land, and their dedication to regenerating some of the most incredible degraded landscapes that I've seen. I was inspired by their dedication and their determination, and I continued to visit and photograph over the years dozens of ranches and others who worked toward improving the ecological health of our rangelands. I guess you could say that the book "Homeground" was my pandemic project because I'd always wanted to find a way to share these images and the information that I had accumulated over the years. The lockdown kind of gave me time to sit down and think about how to organize and present what I had learned. So, around 2021, I decided that I was going to create this book and it would be titled "Homeground." Home alluding to a place of belonging and identity relating to the land. This seemed appropriate for me and the way of life that I wanted to feature.   Sally, you mentioned Alan Savory and I wanted to make a note to remind our listeners that we've recorded a podcast with Alan Savory that's part of our series on regenerative agriculture. And, the person who connected the two of us, Nancy Ranney, a rancher in New Mexico, and I know somebody you know well also has been a guest for part of our podcast series, both very impressive people. So, now let's talk a little bit more about the book and some of the choices you made in producing it. Some of the book's photographs are in black and white and some are in color, that's an interesting choice you've made. Can you share some insights about the process of selecting and capturing images, why you did some in color, some in black and white, and how did these reflect the principles of regenerative ranching?   I've had a few exhibitions that revolve around this work, and most of those were all done in black and white. When I started putting the book together, I felt because you're up close and personal looking at these images, that color would be good in moving you along the story. Also, some of the images were old, some were taken back in 2013, some were taken in 2022 and 2023. So, it was sort of a way to differentiate the flow of the work. Along with the images, there are three essays in the book that are written by well-known land managers in the region. Nancy Rainey provided one of the essays on community engagement, Bob Budd, who works in Wyoming, and Tony Berg, who has also worked in Wyoming but is now in Oregon, and he's a mentor with the Savory Institute. Each of them provided insightful personal accounts of their experiences in regenerative ranching, highlighting themes of the book, which are the importance of rangeland biodiversity, healthy soils, and community engagement. Ranchers also have some quotations in the book, but I worked quite closely with various state federal agencies and local nonprofits and academic institutions, and there's a lot happening out there in terms of all these other people that are involved in helping ranchers to manage their lands more sustainably. So, some of those are like the Covera Coalition, the Western Landowners Alliance, Holistic Management International, and of course Alan Savory Institute. It's a very complex and interesting world that is evolving and growing, fortunately.   Well, that's so true. I mean, if you go back just a few years even, there's a lot less knowledge about these sorts of approaches to ranching and agriculture, and now a lot more people are talking about it, thinking about it, studying it, writing about it, and photographing it, which is really wonderful. You mentioned that the work took place over a period of 10 years. Are there any specific stories or experiences from this journey you had that you found particularly impactful or enlightening?   Every time I set foot on a ranch, it was impactful. And it's hard to separate out just one story, but one of the most interesting experiences, I think we talk a lot about holistic grazing and how it tries to mimic the bison that roamed hundreds of years ago on the land. I had an opportunity to go out and visit one of Ted Turner's ranches in Central New Mexico where they were having a bison roundup. I rode out into this landscape, which was like actually transporting myself back 200 years where there were no cars, no telephone poles, just the land and the animals. It was pretty fascinating to see those bison, 500 of them roaming across the landscape. When I was out there also, there was a herd of antelopes and another herd of elk. So, I really felt privileged to be out on that land and to witness, almost like stepping back into history.   There are a lot of young people now that are getting involved, which is really great because there was a time when it seemed like people talked about ranching dying. And there have been organizations like the Covera Coalition that have really worked hard to get young people involved in now there's a lot of interest. And not just amongst doing ranching work, but also in the scientific and academic communities. And so, I was able to work with some scientists from the University of Colorado and they were working in robotics of all things, using these robots to monitor the ground and collect data on the temperature of the soil, the composite of the soil, all sorts of things.   Another ranch I went to in Lamar, Colorado, they had reintroduced the black-footed ferret, an endangered species, that almost went extinct in the 1980s and they were bringing back to, you know, regenerate the soil in that part of the country. So, I actually went out with a team of scientists at night because they're nocturnal animals and the only time you can see them and that they can figure out what they're doing and where they're living, and how they're living is to spot them at night. They ride around from maybe 10 or 11 o'clock at night until the early hours of the morning searching for these black-footed ferrets. They'll stick their heads up out of a hole in the ground, but they're determined. And that determination and that interest was really exciting to see.   You paint a wonderful picture of all this when you were talking about the bison and being transported 200 years in the past created this very vivid image in my mind, and I can imagine how powerful it must have been to be there and how wonderful it is that you've captured this in your photographs. It is just so important that this kind of work gets communicated. One of the reasons I'm delighted that you did your book. Let me ask you a final question. How do you envision your book contributing to the broader conversation about regenerative agriculture and ranching, and the sustainable use of land, and what do you hope readers will take away?   I think the book provides a broad understanding to a very complex issue. Sometimes those issues are difficult to understand because they're wound up in a lot of statistics, or the media is not reporting accurately, or even reporting at all on the issue. I'm hoping that a book like this that shows photographs will draw people in to want to understand more. The other thing I wanted to mention was that these land managers that I have met, they understand that ranching and healthy systems go hand in hand, and making the regenerative transition is a slow, and it's a complex process. There are no quick fixes, there's no one size fits all answers. And that's most likely true, I would say, for anyone, anywhere who's trying to make that regenerative switch. In our fast-paced world, it seems like that nothing is happening, but it just takes time. That's one thing that I can see over this 10-year period is I can see a change. That's pretty gratifying.   Grasslands in particular are very overlooked ecosystem in our country, but they play a crucial role in guarding against climate change. And one thing that amazed me was that a three-foot-tall grassland plant has a root system that extends more than three to four times below the surface of the earth. And those deep roots work to stabilize and they nourish the soil and can sequester huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. So, rangelands are important in that way, and I think it's important for people to understand about that. Another thing is that I think our Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Rangelands, they're a part of our collective history and legacy, and their landscapes that provide us all with clean water and clean air. They offer us respite and recreational opportunities. And in our world now where 80% of the population resides in urban areas, it's pretty easy for us to overlook what we don't encounter every day. It's my hope that "Homeground" will engage viewers from across the country to consider the significance of regenerative ranching and its potential benefits to all of us regarding climate and conservation, wildlife, and food production.   Well, what an important goal. So good luck looking forward. So, for people who are listening, who'd like to obtain a copy of the book, how should they go about doing that?   They can go onto my website: sallythomsonphotography.com.   Bio Sally Thomson is a documentary and fine art photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work explores the relationship between nature and culture and how that forms our perception and expression of where and how we live. Thomson's previous experiences in landscape architecture and conservation planning inform her work as a photographer, which aims to inspire the conservation and regeneration of endangered environments and the cultural legacies they support. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from North Carolina State University School of Design. She is the Past President (2017-2021) of the American Society of Media Photographers New Mexico Board of Directors.