The Making of a Food Movement
By Kathleen Merrigan and Elanor Starmer
By any measure, the state of civic knowledge in the United States is poor. In 2014, a national survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn found that 35 percent of Americans couldn’t name even one branch of the federal government, and only 36 percent could identify all three. Asked which parties control the Senate and House of Representatives, only 38 percent answered correctly. A 2016 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that nearly a tenth of college graduates thought Judith Sheindlin — AKA Judge Judy — was a member of the Supreme Court.
That’s a scary omen for the future of our civic institutions and civic engagement. Perhaps less obvious, it means something scary for the future of our food system as well.
Bear with us here. If you’re interested in food, you’ve probably noticed a surge of activity in recent years. Entrepreneurs and investors are pursuing new food and farm businesses left and right. Consumers are asking more questions about what they eat and how it was grown. Communities around the country are looking at food as a tool to help them meet a variety of goals — and school and community leaders, nonprofits, philanthropy, farmers, and other business leaders are interested in building food systems based on values like sustainability, equity and health.
Since the 1930s, federal policy has shaped how we do food and agriculture in the United States. A recognition that “food is different” — it’s fundamental to human life, critical to national security, and uniquely vulnerable to factors beyond farmers’ control, like weather or pests — has led to decades of government involvement in the food and farming sectors. Over the years, the policy tools used to support U.S. agriculture have changed, along with philosophies on the role of government. The impact of those changes on things like farm economics, what food is grown where, who has access to food, and who benefits from our food system has changed too.
The two of us spent nearly 15 years inside a building that is arguably the seat of food and agriculture policymaking in the United States: The U.S. Department of Agriculture. In daily news roundups, listservs, social media feeds and in conversations with friends and colleagues, we felt energy coming from new corners. Food and ag were suddenly hot.
So naturally, we waited for folks to bring the heat to our door. USDA is a $150 billion institution that oversees pretty much every aspect of the food system — and if you care about that system, you’d want to weigh in on how those resources are spent. Which farmers can get a loan or insurance, tools that are critical to successful businesses? Who is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch at school, and what will the nutritional standards be for those meals? What kinds of projects will USDA’s research budget, which totals hundreds of millions of dollars, support? How will consumers know whether their food contains, for example, genetically-engineered ingredients? Many of these decisions are ones Congress leaves up to USDA. And so we waited for the swell of new energy and new voices to arrive and weigh in.
And waited. And waited. And waited.
Looking back at our time at USDA, we feel proud — and also a bit dismayed. The faces we saw in the building during our time there were, for the most part, the same faces that have been fixtures there for many years. Somehow, the surge of new interest in food and agriculture that took hold all over the country didn’t seem to make it to our corner of DC.
Did we — the administration and the broader federal workforce — do a lot to expand access by new players to USDA’s many programs? Did we find creative ways to support growing markets for things like organic agriculture, local foods, cooperatives and other business models that build community wealth? Absolutely.
Were there critical outside partners from these sectors bringing issues to our attention, pushing us to do more, and giving us good ideas to run with? Yes, and they were vital helping ensure that the policies we oversaw responded to the diverse needs of U.S. agriculture.
It’s just that the capacity of these partners is vastly out of sync with the buzz. In other words, while food and ag are hot, and while there is a lot of lip service to the idea that “policy matters” to sustainable food systems, those words aren’t being backed by resources to help diverse voices engage effectively in policy. We owe a debt of gratitude to the groups and individuals that came in to talk with us — but think what would have been possible if there had been more of them.
Maybe these expectations are unreasonable. When most people think of policy, they think of Congress. Perhaps a better indicator of policy muscle would be the presence of diverse food and ag players on the Hill. Yet when we look at who is pounding the halls of Congress to advocate on issues so popular in the public dialogue — from beginning farmers to organic, from farmworker rights or rural prosperity to the connection between agriculture and climate change — it’s largely the same small group of organizations that come into USDA. Are they doing great work? No question. And it’s all the more impressive because they do it on a shoestring budget with very little company. We should celebrate them, but we shouldn’t be surprised if they can’t bring us the moon.
This gets back to the earlier point about civic knowledge. It may seem obvious, but one’s understanding of how the policy process works correlates directly with one’s ability to influence that process. And the nuts and bolts matter. It is one thing — an important thing — to convey a big vision about what the food system needs, or even what food policy should look like. It is quite another thing to turn that vision into policy change. It requires “translators” who can plot out incremental steps — which sometimes feel VERY incremental — that ultimately lead to that bigger vision, and a powerful, diverse grassroots coalition willing and able to engage all along the way. Those translators may be housed in advocacy groups, industry, philanthropy or government — or ideally, all of the above. Right now, the bench of food and ag translators focused on issues like sustainability, equity and health is dangerously shallow.
Well-equipped translators not only shape policy, but they also hold policymakers accountable when they don’t act in the public interest. As much as we all wish policymaking worked like it does in the textbooks, it doesn’t; people make mistakes, there are political pressures to prioritize a specific agenda, and there are competing priorities that make it hard to progress on a certain issue if you can’t keep it in the public spotlight. Translators know how to navigate that minefield. That could mean pushing a member of Congress to utilize all of the tools available to him or her in addressing a critical issue, or holding an agency’s feet to the fire if it implements a policy in a way that goes against the weight of public comments.
We are at a moment of opportunity. The level of interest in food and agriculture and the public focus on questions of sustainability — environmental, economic, social — is higher than it’s ever been. The population of U.S. farmers is aging fast; the average age of a farmer is nearing 60. The federal workforce at USDA mirrors that trend. Certain parts of USDA will see more than a third of their employees retire in the next five years.
Will future farms and federal offices, and the ranks of food-focused groups and businesses, be occupied by individuals who bring diverse perspectives and a commitment to sustainability to their work? And will these individuals have the tools they need to align policy with that vision?
There is reason for hope. New organizations are joining the small group of longstanding stalwarts and beginning to take on policy as an issue. The post-election surge of civic engagement will, we hope, have positive repercussions in the food and ag space too. To capitalize on this energy, we just launched a new Food Policy Leadership Institute focused on the bench-building we so badly need. The road is slowly being paved — but we have miles to go.
Unless diverse perspectives are represented at the policymaking table, the end product will reflect only a small subset of those perspectives — usually those who have the most to lose from changing up the status quo. As the saying goes, “decisions are made by those who show up.” Perhaps as an indicator of our civic knowledge deficit, this quote has been attributed alternately to President Truman and President Bartlet — the latter of whom, of course, only presided over the cast of the West Wing. But we’ll let that one slide for now.
Kathleen Merrigan and Elanor Starmer recently launched the Food Policy Leadership Institute at George Washington University.
