Nine years ago, this morning, our littlest had an allergic reaction to a plate of scrambled eggs.
Yesterday, I was in NYC and spoke at a luncheon with the Time Magazine’s health editor, beautiful food designed by an extraordinary woman with Hampton Creek products, products made without eggs. The irony of it all was not lost on me, as I thought about it marking the ninth anniversary of this work.More
This morning, I woke up to a country that is hard to recognize. I do not know when we completely lost sight of justice. When we let it go.
Social justice, racial justice, sexual justice, food justice. It’s not ‘for all’ anymore.
I have seen it for some time in my work, this work to provide clean and safe food for all families. It should not be a function of zip code, but more often than not, it is.
Justice for all.
We learned the words, to not judge men by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, but lost the action.
And in this world that is all too digitally enhanced, altered and genetically engineered, we have completely lost sight of what is true. And justice is slipping through our fingers.
Our founding fathers built this country on the principle that there should be liberty and justice for all. Some still had slaves at the time, the hypocrisy can not go untouched, but the adage is that once we know better, we do better.
So why are things getting worse?
In a televised debate earlier this year, my opponent said that those who want clean food can get it if they can afford organic. In other words: If you can’t afford it, tough luck. It made my entire body shake, and I felt sick.
How there could be such blatant disregard for human life, for liberty? I do not know. I have worked with moms on food stamps, single parents supporting asthmatic, allergic little boys. The color of the skin doesn’t matter. Our hearts all beat the same way for the love of our children.
What can we do? How can we heal this, so that our children will live in a just and peaceful society?
It’s a loaded question. And I am sure that there will be many answers, but for me, for now, I will continue to work so that all children, regardless of race or income or socioeconomic status, will have access to both life-saving medical devices for allergies and asthma and life-saving food.
But it feels too narrow, so this is what I pledge:
To love without hesitation.
To shine light on the good that is happening.
To inspire hope.
To live with kindness.
To be a mirror so that others can see the gifts they have to offer.
To love so much that it pushes away this darkness.
I hope that you will join me.
I unplugged over Thanksgiving for the first time since I began this work nine years ago.
I suppose I could have done it before, but I was afraid.
There is an energy in the work. It propels you every day. What would happen if I stopped? What would I feel?
The first four days, I felt nothing. I was tired. I hadn’t had time to stop and really process any of it, how someone wired for the financial world had become this.
Just prior to the break, a man that I had worked for on the equity desk died. It triggered a flood of emotions. He was the Chief Equity Officer when I worked as a financial analyst on a team that managed billions in both hedge and mutual funds. He was a father, for sure, doting and caring for all of us as a dad would, but he was also a gamesman, a sharp shooter, angling in with precision. We worked hard, and we played hard. It was an amazing time to be in the financial world. Tech companies were taking off, it was a tsunami of IPOs as too many of them came public. It was exciting, rewarding, and the guys that I worked with are still friends today.
Being an analyst was black and white. We crunched numbers and analyzed data. There was no heart in it. No emotion. My intuition helped me read management teams, but that is about as sentimental as it got. I had designed my academic career for it, my life. I loved it.
In that moment, it suddenly contrasted with what my life had become.
The last five years have been a chapter that began with the publication of my book. Naively, I thought at the time, the book would do the trick and I could go back to the life I’d planned. “There it is,” I’d thought. “The research, the data, the work. It’s bound, backed up and defined for anyone who wants it. Now I am going to go back to what I’d planned to do…work in the investment world.”
But that didn’t happen. About 6 months after the launch of the book, a period in which I experienced both more love and more vitriol than we could have ever imagined, we felt the impact. It was life-changing. We were not wanted by the chemical industry. At the same time, we were embraced by so many. Everything was changing and changing fast, and my instinct was to run away. It was scary to be responsible for so much. It was even scarier to feel it.
So we made plans to do that. The house sold in three days. And one day, I was standing outside under a tree and looked ahead to what my life would be if I ran away. And I turned and went inside to my family and said, “I can’t go. I have to do this. I don’t know what will happen, how it will unfold, but if I run….” What I wanted to say, but the children were too little to hear it, was that it would do something to my soul. It would die on the inside.
It was not easy. Not for anyone that I loved. The decision was huge.
Looking back on that now, I realized that what I was running from was fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of criticism, fear of what might happen. I could not see what it could become. There were so few people involved at that point. But that day, my heart beat louder than the fear that was running through my head, and we stayed.
I needed a bigger team and decided to use the platform I had to lift up others. I could not build a movement without a team, and as others began to step forward, I shared their work. The team grew and so did the movement.
There have been people in this work that have forever changed my life. Some are academics, some brilliant business men, some funny, genius friends. They make me feel good when I see them. True friends are one of life’s greatest blessings. But perhaps one of the most pivotal is a friend who won the Ironman in Hawaii six times. He was the first inductee into the Ironman Hall of Fame.
He was an ally in the early years, connecting me with my first academic who had studied agriculture and genetically engineered crops back in 2006. But more than that, he was a coach. He had defied odds, eating a plant-based diet while others ridiculed. He was organic before anyone had a clue what it meant. And he calculated his food intake with the precision of a mathematician and scientist. Everything that he put in his body fueled his success. Each nutrient, protein, fat, carb had a purpose. It was fascinating to watch.
But what I really came to learn from him was that what you put in your head matters just as much as what you put in your mouth.
I’ve watched him coach triathletes and recently came upon a piece that he wrote about fear. As I read it, I thought about all of the fear and hurdles that had been in my head. How close I had been to talking myself out of this work so many times. Fear makes those obstacles seem real, insurmountable at times. What I had learned is that love makes them obsolete.
So in the hopes of inspiring others the way that Dave Scott inspired me, here are his thoughts on fear. I am tempted to edit it down, replacing the language that he uses about a race with language that applies to this work. But this work is as tough as any race, so use the lessons, learn them, condition yourself to them as you would any muscle, and put fear in its place.
The world needs your heart, your love and your courage. And this is our race to win.
4 Fears (from the article “Mental Preparation: Facing Your Fears”)
First off I’d like to talk about the four definable fears that we might all have. We might have one or multiple of these. The first one is the fear of the unknown. The second one is the fear of disappointment. The third is a fear of commitment. And the last one which we can lump together is the fear of failure or success.
The fear of unknown – the unknown part going into a race can be alleviated very, very easily if you do your homework. And what I mean by your homework is to know the race course in advance. Everything is online. You can look at it online, you can look at the course profile, you can get feedback from athletes over the last two, three or ten years depending on the history of the event so you can have a good understanding of that race, the nuances of the race, the hills, the windy sections, the real tough sections and you can ask other athletes they’re experiences. What’s even better is that when you arrive not only do you have this kind of mental road map but you also have the opportunity to actually drive the course or ride the course or pieces of that course, run the course and make sure that you’re doing all the segments of the swim. By doing this, you’ve taken out a huge amount of that unknown. It’s just like being on your home course. Races that I was able to repeat over the years certainly that made it easier. I knew the gearing, I knew there were windy sections in Kona when I was there for the Ironman race, and this allows you to relax, to be calm during the race and certainly to be calm beforehand.
The other thing that will really help is if you take that course and divide it up into segments (those segments may not be equidistant). In other words, on the bike – and I’ll come back to the Ironman in Kona – you would never divide 112 miles up into equal components but there are segments in the race and, for example, the first five miles on the bike has a lot of ups and downs and through the town and it‘s a very non-rhythmic part of the course. I’ve told all my athletes in preparation that rarely would anyone feel good on those sections but you have to control what you can control. So recognizing your plan that you’ve laid out and knowing the segments of the race, you can start breaking it down. Lastly, I’ve never thought of any race that I’ve done and backtracked in the miles. In other words when I raced Kona I didn’t say, “Gee, I’ve got two miles down on the bike, I’ve got a 110 to go.” That would be mental suicide. So again, breaking that course down into segments will really help as you go into the race.
The second one is fear of commitment. With the fear of commitment, recognize the training plan that you’ve followed. I’ve never known an athlete who said “Oh I’ve followed my plan 100 percent, it’s been exactly right, I didn’t have any aberrations in there, never got a cold, never had a hamstring issue, or sore back.” We all have issues. There’s not an athlete alive who has not had to overcome obstacles to get where they are right now. When you look at your plan, go back and recognize what you have conquered in your plan. I use the word “conquered” because it’s really important when we look at how we’ve prepared for the race, everyone has these aberrations, everyone has the ups and downs, but we should see a trend where you’re improving and looking specifically at the last week to ten days of the great training days that you’ve had. In the second video I’ll give you an idea on how you can really extract the key elements on your commitment and your plan.
The third one is fear of disapproval and I think disapproval – disapproval of yourself, disapproval that your family is not going to be there for you – I think that’s a bunch of baloney. They’re always going to support you. They’ve supported you in your journey to get to where you are right now. We can be kind of crazy and manic about our training and preparation but they’re always there and they’re not going to let you down. And regardless of how you do they’re still going to be there. So don’t put the disappointment on yourself. I think if you look at the unknowns, you look at the commitment, the fear of disapproval should be erased.
The last one is fear of success or fear of failure. I find about 70% of the athletes that I have dealt with from amateurs to pros have this real fine line. In other words, we have a short memory on what we’re trying to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. I might have a great ride or run on Sunday but four or five days later, I can be off my game and we think we’ve failed. I always remind them to think about what they have done and what they have accomplished. When we look at the fear of success or fear of failure, it’s important to recognize the stepping stones along the way and in the second video I’m going to suggest that you actually write down these little steps that you’ve recognized and take a look at the last few months. When you look at your training plan and you see these breakthrough days or breakthrough sessions. Part of it is the mental side that says “hey, you know what? I had a great day today.” And some of us share that with our partner or spouse or family and some of us are silent about it. And it really depends upon your wiring. You don’t have to be vociferous about always exclaiming you had the greatest training day in the world. I was quite quiet about it when I would train, but silently I used this as mental ammunition for the race. I recognized those little improvements that I had and was able to say “You know what? Dave, you had a great day today – you’re gonna be able to do this in the race.”
We are running the race of a lifetime. Fear less, and love more. It is our race to win.
This morning, I attended Summit 3.0, a business conference designed to inspire people and organizations to become the best version of themselves that they can be.
The day started with music. Michael Franti took the stage.
It was just Michael and his guitar. His bare feet resting gently on the stage. “I have a new song,” he said. “It’s not on any album….” And he began to sing…
“Everybody ought to hug somebody….at least once a day. Everybody needs to kiss somebody…..to love somebody at least once a day.”
It was 9am. No one cared. He had everyone singing.
Didn’t our days start with singing when we were little? It opened people up.
Love is a rocket fuel. It comes in all shapes and sizes, and the crowd loved it. I thought about all of the people that I love, and how love has seen so many of us through this work. His words rang so true.
When he finished, John Mackey, the co-CEO of Whole Foods, was introduced. It felt full circle. I remember two speakers from business school back in the 1990s: John Mackey and one of the founders of Compaq Computers.
Mackey’s talk was about the evolution of humanity, enlightenment, nothing to do with food. He shared personal anecdotes and a story about how his mother told him back in 1987 when she was dying that she wish he’d go back to school and get his college degree. He never did. She died never knowing the contribution he made to the world, to clean food, to the conversations we now have today. “She died thinking I was a failure,” he said.
And he spoke about the types of mindsets, people, “memes” was the word that he used.
I thought about how our lives unfold in chapters. We are such creative designs ourselves, each a very unique work of art in progress.
Mackey’s talk began with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, water, shelter, intimacy, and he took it up the pyramid from there. Each stage or “wave” of this evolution had a color to it…blue, purple, orange, green. What he got to was that in the end, there is no judgement of where anyone is in the process. There is just love-inspired work driving us to solutions that will serve humanity. Conscious integration.
It was big stuff, and I then I thought: How many people think about this? We get so busy, so caught up. The burden can be heavy. Maybe it’s self-imposed in some cases, the treadmill we put ourselves on because we think we don’t have the right house, car, clothes, that we are not “enough.” But in some cases, the burden is heavy just because it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. And if these anchors are tied around our feet, anchors like disease, joblessness, heartache, can we reach for the stars?
And I thought about the work we do every day to help people believe in their own unique abilities to create change. We are here because we are a unique design. No one else on the planet has the combination or heart, mind and skills that each one of us possess. No one else has our story. “What if we are not enough?” we think.
But what if, together, we are?
Towards his conclusion, Mackey said, “When fear leaves, love takes its place.” It hung in the air. I wrote it down.
I wish Franti would have taken the stage again.
Fear and love. It keeps coming back in my life, like a rhythm.
They don’t mix. Like oil and water. They don’t co-exist. And I thought about the struggles that we’ve seen, the fears, the “what-ifs”. I thought about the fear I felt, the intimidation, the hurdles.
In the end, I couldn’t wait for the fear to leave. There wasn’t time. So I chose to love. I was afraid that it would hurt, but love is more powerful than fear.
And when you love without hesitation, you will find that that is where your strength lies, and together, we will change the world.
Love is a rocket fuel, and it is time to rise up.
I wrote a letter to a friend’s mom just before she died. I never met her and wanted to thank her.
I never got the chance. I hesitated on sending it, wondering if it would look stupid. She died just four days later.
I talk a lot about finding a friend as you step into this work. And this particular mom had given me a great one.
We met in 2010 when a friend introduced us to talk about food. It was an immediate friendship.
Flash forward about four and a half years, and there we were standing in front of a crowd of parents talking about our food, families and our fundamental human right to know what is going into the food we feed our loved ones. We were talking about a ballot initiative, #Yeson105, in Colorado to label genetically engineered ingredients in our food.
I couldn’t help but think of everything we’d seen in our work together. My heart gets too big for my chest sometimes, and it makes my eyes leak. I was told not to make it a kumbaya thing.
As we stood in front of the Colorado Moms for Labeling group, we discussed how as Americans we haven’t been told that our food now contains genetically engineered ingredients designed to withstand chemicals like the weedkiller Roundup. 64 countries around the world have been given this information. We haven’t. It is a fundamental human right, an American thing, a civil rights thing.
But it is also a love thing. The reason that it hurts so much to learn this—that ingredients have been hidden in our food while American companies label them for families in other countries—is because we are losing loved ones to conditions like cancer, diabetes or food allergies, and there is grief. You want to hit it away. But you can’t, because underneath the grief is love. It is a rocket fuel.
You could see it in the meeting. You could feel it. It was what had brought us together. It had been an invitation to moms that day, but dads were there, babies, little ones and others.
And again, as I listened to this friend talk, I looked out at those in front of us, knowing what they had been through, their courage and what brought us together—this love we have for our families and country.
And as we packed everything away that day, I thought of my friend’s mom.
What I’d wanted to tell her was “Thank you. Thank you for raising such an awesome son. Someone brilliant and strong who gives his heart and talent to this work to make the world a better place. Thank you for giving me such an incredible friend.”
As we do this work, all of us, in memory of those that we love—moms, friends who have lost little ones, and others that I never met like Emily, Giovanni, Roman, Debbie and so many more—it reminds me every day that love is more powerful than fear.
We see it here in Colorado, around the country and around the world, as we work to Vote Yes on 105, Yes on 92 and www.justlabelit.org.
Love is such a rocket fuel. We are only here once. Be brave. It will be our legacy.
Written in memory of Dixie.
For the first time last night, I told my parents about the threats that I have received in this work.
It’s not a conversation that I’ve ever wanted to bring up with them, because a mother’s desire to protect her child doesn’t stop when she becomes a grandmother.
Mom’s face drew in as I spoke.
I started at the beginning, with the threats that I had received in the first years of the work, the defamation that I endured and the meeting with an allergist that gave me the courage to move on. He had testified in FDA subcommittee meetings. His face was as white as a ghost when I shared what had happened to me. “You don’t want to mess with this,” he said. Fear came out of his every pore. How could I not tell this story?
As we left his office that day, turning down the hallway to the elevators that led to the lobby of the children’s hospital in which he worked, there were children with cancer everywhere. They were being drawn in little red wagons with rods attached for their IV drips. Like little boats in an ocean. How could I not tell this story? I have to tell this story, I thought, so on I went. Never once, in the nine years since, forgetting the look on that doctor’s face. It was as if he had seen a ghost.
The defamation continued, but so did the downward spiral of the health of one of our boys, so I continued on, like a soldier or a marathon runner, one foot in front of the other, each day as it came, not knowing where the slander would come from next. In 2007, he was hospitalized, and my commitment to the work began at a level that was deeper than anything I had ever known.
Within a year, I was interviewed by a New York Times food writer who said, “You are their worst nightmare.” And the defamation began in earnest when Random House announced that I would be writing a book. Accusations flew from everywhere. I was a “PR whore”, in it for the celebrity, why would anyone listen to a mother?
My mail was tampered with. What were they looking for?
I had earned a full scholarship to business school and graduated as the top woman in my class before working on a team that managed billions in assets as an equity analyst. Just because someone hadn’t bothered to learn my background didn’t mean that it didn’t exist. Every case study in business school, every exam and time spent managing the a fund for the endowment committee still held. I’d done the work. Let them talk .
And then came the threats from Kraft and Burger King. I remember the day I learned of them, sitting in the office of a friend. It was in July 2010. I stared across at him, “They know who I am,” I said. He almost laughed. “Yes, they know who you are.”
Terrified didn’t even begin to describe the feeling.
A year later, I delivered a TEDx talk that sent a scientist working at an ag school funded by Monsanto into orbit. And the stalking, defamation and slander continued.
As I told my parents about all of it, I told them about what happens on social media, how I show the children the bullying and use it as a lesson. “Do I believe what these anonymous people say about me? People that may not even be using their real names? People who won’t disclose their background or who funds their work? Or do I believe what I know to be true about the work that I have done, and that for my entire life, I have done the work? As an analyst that covered the food industry, as a business school student and at everything I have ever thrown myself into?”
It’s not even a question.
I told my parents about the Arctic seed vault, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, that received inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries, and how it is there to protect seed diversity perhaps as a hedge against genetically engineered foods and the monoculture of soy and corn that it has produced, “with the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato, the first deposits into the seed vault represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in the world.”
“Scary,” was all Mom could say. Here eyes were locked on me. I don’t know if she was talking about what had happened to me or the seed vault.
“Don’t you worry that these stalkers are doing anything they can for attention?” She was talking about me.
I paused, looking her in the eyes but feeling her in my heart.
“Mom, I couldn’t not do this. I learned too much, from scientists who were threatened, about studies that weren’t being done, about what countries around the world were doing to protect children. There was something in that doctor’s eyes back in the Children’s Hospital that first year that showed me what would happen if I turned my back. If I had done nothing, this would have become a cancer in me….
I found love, courage and faith to move through it.”
My grandfather had been a preacher, Mom’s dad, and for some reason in that moment, I thought about the quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
I do this work because I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation…where they will have the right to know what is in the food that they are eating as children around the world do.
In order for that to happen, we must have the faith, courage and love to continue on.
This is written in memory of Mark Pittman, an investigative reporter at Bloomberg News, that I met with in 2009.
In November 2013, I received an invitation to speak at Bloomberg in New York City.
The invitation meant so much. I’d obviously used Bloomberg as an analyst when I’d worked on the equity desk, but it meant more because of someone I’d met who worked there as one of our country’s lead investigative journalists.
He had been an incredible supporter in the early years of my work. We related on Enron, which he had covered as a journalist and which had recruited me out of business school, and on collateralized debt and commodity obligations, fancy names for paper contracts that banks could make a lot of money on.
In the months leading up to the event (I was billed as their second quarter speaker for their speaker series) I held my breath. Why? Because there have been incredible invitations in the almost nine years of this work that have never materialized, from speaking on national television shows to debating the National Cattleman’s Association. Producers will call, having booked segments, scheduled travel, previously unable to contain their excitement, saying they are so sorry, but…
Would this one? Things had been put in place, dates locked in, we would see.
So when I took the stage earlier this week, I felt all of that and then some. As I looked out into the sea of faces, all I could think was that I was supposed to be in that audience, in the financial world. It was everything I had trained myself to do. I had graduated as the top woman in my class in business school, on a full scholarship, recruited by Exxon, Enron and the banking world. It was the trajectory I had chosen and worked hard on. But then life had different plans.
Speaking at Bloomberg that day brought all of it back, and it reminded me of two memories. The first was back in November 1999, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, meeting with some of our traders. They told me to run a trade, I said “Sure!” handed them my jacket and took off. When I got back, they just stared, as my jacket had hidden a 6 month pregnant belly. It was too funny, and they apologized for weeks.
The second memory was of being in Bloomberg’s tower five years ago, meeting with one of our country’s best investigative reporters. His name was Mark Pittman, and he was a bear of a guy, smoker, rode motorcycles and talked non stop about his wife and girls and the chickens they were raising in their backyard. He fully understood the scope of this, he was such an ass kicker, and at the time, he was leading Bloomberg in suing the Fed for full disclosure over the banking crisis of 2008. He died later that year.
It meant a lot to be there.
We need to finance a smarter food system, one that feeds all families clean and safe food, not processed foods that have been loaded with synthetic ingredients meant to mimic real ones. We spend more than any other country in the world on health care and disease management and less than almost any other country on food.
Demand for organic food is growing, yet the U.S. farmland for organic food is shrinking. We are sourcing our organic food from other countries.
We are smarter than this and can build a food system that meets the needs of 21st century families, one that makes clean and safe food affordable to all Americans.
It is going to take all of us, families, farmers and the financial world. The burden of disease is burdening our families, our country and our economy. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Leveraging our collective talents and skills, we can build a smarter system. The legacy is ours to create.
Written in memory of Mark Pittman for his girls and wife. He will always be remembered.
2013 was the year of the Food Awakening.
Consumers and Wall Street got in on the food movement like never before.
Thanks to social media and online networks, eaters around the country used their voices to create change. The courage was contagious and inspired countless acts. The list below highlights just how much we can do when we leverage our collective talents.
Some of these changes happened with lightning speed, others were years in the making with many out in front, that finally came to a head in 2013.
The message is clear: The bottom line is that we impact the bottom line of companies, and companies that are moving with the consumer, bringing transparency to their products, are being rewarded in the marketplace.
As the food awakening continues, the food industry has a choice: to step forward, respond to consumer demand and be rewarded in the marketplace or to entrench, using obsolete technologies and artificial ingredients, and ignore the growing concern of Americans around the country over the health of their loved ones. There really is only one answer.
Here’s a list of just some of the incredible accomplishments of 2013 as shared across social media. It reinforces that while none of us can do everything, all of us can do something, and together, we can create incredible change.
And while there were countless others, some were personal:
“My daughter realizing she’s been eating organic ketchup poured into a non-organic bottle…and when the charade was revealed, saying she wondered why the ketchup tasted better lately.”
“I’ve lost 42lbs…dont drink energy drinks anymore..dropped all my bad blood levels …went from 40 inch to 32 inch waist…just cutting out processed food with HFCS and GMOs.”
And from a Navy Seal: “Nothing spectacular, had heart operation, found tumors same time, got sick, went whole, got better, kicked the cancer end of tumors, and watch with shear amazement at what we had been brainwashed into eating, have gotten a few of my seal buddies now on organic diets and transformation is amazing, keep at it, you have people like me watching…”
Keep at it. 2014 is going to be a great year. Companies and investors are paying attention. The food companies that do not adapt will find their 20th century products, loaded with artificial dyes, growth hormones and GMOs soaked in pesticides, becoming an obsolete technology in the 21st century.
Keep an eye on legislation and labeling laws, as well as things like the Trans Pacific Partnership which protects patented products (like the chemical industry’s GMOs in our food), send an email to a Congressman’s office or share a YouTube video with a friend.
Hedge funds are paying attention, Wall Street is paying attention and parents are on the front lines sending messages every day, as they navigate the grocery store aisles differently.
A quick look at how UNREAL candy is revolutionizing the candy aisles in Target shows just how quickly it can be done.
Just because we have inherited a food system that no longer works for us today does not mean that we have to embrace it going forward. Together, leveraging our collective talents, we can build a smarter food system, so that clean food, free from genetically engineered ingredients regulated by the EPA as pesticides, becomes a freedom afforded all Americans.
Recently, the social media food world has been abuzz with a Chipotle commercial that includes a song by Willie Nelson urging us to go “back to the start“. The premise is that agriculture is no longer what we want it to be with too many toxic inputs, externalized costs and unintended consequences.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have real concern over the way that our current agricultural system is structured: farmers are contractually obligated to buy certain products, while using seeds that have not been tested for their long-term performance and then have to be licensed for use due to their patents, and are obligated to a system in which at any time, fuel, fertilizer or licensing fees can suddenly spike, impacting their incomes, their livelihoods, their debt levels and so much more.
And yet at the same time, modern day farming has brought tremendous advances. Having spent time with farmers in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Washington state and other parts of our amazing country, I am in awe of what farming looks like today. I have listened and learned about tractors outfitted with computers that enable things their grandfathers could never have dreamt of. A recent post, highlighted by Monsanto on Twitter and seen on America’s Farmers blog (written by a farmer’s wife who is also a mother of four) shares that insight and paints the picture of what farming looks like today for those who haven’t been able to get there themselves. She writes:
“Today, a farmer feeds 155 people. In 1960, one farmer fed only 26. Today, our tractors and combines are mostly run off of computers…dropping one seed every six inches for proper placing of a corn plant. Our sprayers and manure spreaders are also monitored by computers to spread correct amounts of nutrients over our precious soils…”
And as I reflect on all of it, of the passion, the dedication and the love on display, including Bill Gates recent public relations tour to rebrand farming as ‘high-tech agriculture,” I can’t help but think that what we need isn’t a rebranding campaign or a food fight but a food education, one in which there is an honest dialogue, with experts brought to the table, from all parts of the food continuum.
A dialogue that educates, revealing the limits and constraints we have not yet seen because of the lack of open science due to the patents that protect the changes in our food supply as intellectual property of chemical giants.
A dialogue that informs not just to farmers, but also livestock breeders and consumers, one that brings truth and transparency to the table, that isn’t afraid of labels that are so descriptive and informative that farmers and consumers are given the freedom of choice on which our country was founded.
A dialogue that through its revelations, lowers the barriers to entry so that rather than a monopolized food supply that does not allow for the best, most efficient, effective and affordable products to be brought to market, we can create a food system that gives farmers financial flexibility to choose the best practices, consumers the information they need to make an informed choice when it comes to feeding their families, and data required to build a food system that is embraced around the world, so that once again, American farmers are restored to their place of admiration.
We’re not there yet. Not close, so until we are, I’ll keep working on it, and I hope that you will, too. Lend your voice to the food dialogues, lend your talents to creating a healthy food system, and remember, that the most important thing that you could do before doing anything is to listen.
Over the last few years, so many people have reached out to share their stories and their passion to protect the health of our country and have asked, “What did it take to get started?”
As I’ve reflected on this, it took me back to the beginning of my story. And in all candor, that is not a place that I like to visit much. Because in the beginning, it was isolating. Organizations that were supposed to be looking out for the best interests of our children were having allergic reactions to me, I had been absolutely buried in the research, not sleeping, not eating, consumed by concern for the health of the American children and the health of our food supply, and any pictures of me taken from that time reflect it. I looked like a skeleton, as I’d been swallowed by the work and what seemed like everything that I’d believed in was stripped bare.
But along the way, I learned one of the most valuable lessons in all of this. You can not go it alone.
You have to find a friend to stand beside you to cheer you on. And about a year into my work, I connected with a bestselling author and film producer. In February 2007, he filmed my story. A few months later, I connected with an extraordinary woman, Deborah Koons Garcia, who produced the predecessor to Food Inc., a ground-breaking and life-changing film called The Future of Food. To this day, both remain friends. And then, because of these friendships, I appeared on the CBS Early Show before a national audience. And suddenly people knew my story.
Because in that appearance in the fall of 2007 that I found the courage to share my work, my concerns over the rate at which we had introduced artificial colors, preservatives and genetically engineered ingredients into our food supply while other countries around the world were preserving theirs for the sake of their children. To love more and to fear less and to put my face on on an issue, not knowing what people might say. My husband stood beside me in that first broadcast, and you could literally see the toll it the work had taken on me physically. To watch some of those early interviews or to look at some of the pictures almost hurts, as I was a skeletal version of the person that I am today.
And as that appearance hit, I began to hear from countless others whose stories were the same. Those whose children suffered from food allergies, those writing books, those battling cancer. And I realized that there is far more that unites us than divides us, and that together, we can create the changes we want to see in the health of our families and food systems.
And as I reflected on the stripping away of old beliefs and the building of new ones, it reminded me that despite what can seem like insurmountable odds, we have more strength and courage that we are ever aware of, and love that can serve as a rocket fuel. But that we need friends standing beside us.
So for those of you who have asked, “Where do I start?” “How do I begin to make changes in my community, school, state…?” The first thing that you must do is to find a friend. If your spouse is on board, take it for the gift that it is. If not, look (and don’t stop) until you find someone who shares your passion and concern.
Food is an intimate and loaded issue, and people can become incredibly defensive and say extraordinary things (I’ve been accused of just about everything!).
But the love that you have for your friends and family will serve as a rocket fuel. And as you begin to express your concern over the state of the health of our families (on Facebook, on a blog, in your community, to your local Congressmen), you will quickly learn that your concern is shared by countless others (like the 900,000 Americans that have sent comments to the FDA), and it is together, that we can change the dialogue and create a food system that will define our families, farmers and future in a way that makes all of us, every American, both healthy and proud.
