Explore Official Dialogue Feedback

Hunger must be recognized as an equity issue and in order to do so, researchers must get to the root causes of food insecurity. These issues include poverty, systemic racism, income levels, gender disparities, age gaps, and many other societal factors. By addressing these and increasing access to resources, through a holistic and multidimensional approach to equity that takes into consideration people and their vulnerabilities, food insecurity is likely to decline. Increasing multidimensional efforts at the community level will ensure that local buy-in is supported. Community efforts can inclu... Read morede grassroots advocacy, community gardens, local health centers and locations where people are able to safely gather and learn about food systems. In order to promote resilience, our response to COVID-19 requires a systems thinking approach concerning the investment in sustainable communities in the United States. Efforts need to be taken to ensure we don’t just recover to pre-pandemic levels of food security, but rather are able to create systems that are sustainable and resilient long term and can anticipate shocks like COVID-19, extreme drought or natural disasters from climate change, etc. There is room to improve health education by highlighting food as medicine and teaching about the health effects of food insecurity. Identify who the “story tellers” are to create effective science policy communication. The best storytellers are not the academics and experts of the field, but the people who live within and experience the systems. Ensure that stories encompass the whole system, and answers the question of why this problem persists. In addition to identifying storytellers, interdisciplinary researchers also play a role, in close coordination with cross-sectoral stakeholders, in developing evidence to support informed decision making by policy makers. Read less

Tools and models: Tools and models can be useful in supporting evidence-based decision making related to addressing hunger-related challenges. They can aid in the evaluation of different policy interventions. However, these tools do not necessarily offer a holistic assessment of the impact that might be expected by adopting different scenarios. For example, impact on GDP is not does not cover the complete impact of a scenario, unless paired with other development indexes (ex: Human Development Index) and social-economic metrics which can better assist researchers in creating more effective pro... Read moregrams. Read less

Evaluation metrics: It is necessary to approach hunger while also acknowledging the other connected issues that Americans are facing. We cannot fix food insecurity without fixing parallel issues that are tightly interconnected with hunger. Additionally, data is inconsequential if we are unable to facilitate change on complex, interconnected issues. Some discussion members argued that a greater focus on research and information gathering distracts from acting on hunger based on what we already know to be the root causes and solutions. The evaluation and metrics side of hunger can correspond to ... Read morethe four values in order to broaden the way in which we view hunger in the US. Hunger can be examined at the individual, household, local, and national level. Do they differ? Is it worth it to examine hunger on different levels if the end goal remains the same? Is current national data the best measure of hunger? Is examining heterogeneities or homogeneities more effective for systemically implementing food security? Participants also suggested the examination of rural vs. urban perspectives. Read less

Stakeholder engagement & trade-offs: In this session, participants examined the definition of ‘Stakeholder’ within the context of food insecurity systems. In tackling issues of food insecurity, it is vital for individuals to recognize their multifaceted role as consumers, stakeholders, and agents of change in their communities. The most effective ways to bring about transformative stakeholder change within American food systems is to start organizing at the grassroots level, as well as to utilize the value of pathos and storytelling to engage people in supporting the fight for zero hun... Read moreger. As organizing can be difficult due to varying levels of access within communities, the group discussed existing barriers people may have for engaging stakeholders, and expressed the need to acknowledge power imbalances which prevent active change from occuring in the United States. The discussion ended with brainstorming specific policies to enact communal change, such as the USDA partnering with and supporting Black farmers to alleviate food insecurity in the country’s largest food deserts (which are primarily composed of American BIPOC communities). Read less

Science-policy communication: This session focused on the relationship between systems-thinking and storytelling. It is difficult to capture a complex system in a narrative, but it is doable. It is important to have a “story bank” of useful narratives to pull from. Additionally, it is important to select good storytellers. The best storytellers are not the academics and experts of the field, but the people who live within and experience the systems. Stories must encompass the whole system--many stories try to break up the system and describe only fragments of it, leading to inaccurate stor... Read moreies (e.g. farmers are the key to fixing hunger). It may be simpler to show a fragment- who is hungry-, but needs to go beyond and shift to why they are hungry. There needs to be an increased focus on discovering why hunger persists and what the systemic issues are. Story-telling hunger provides an opportunity to explain a complex system that isn’t always included in the narrative- the SDGs. Story suggestion: there are statistics about minority farmers in the U.S. and systeming challenges against them, but no one is telling this as a story. (Black farmers were also mentioned in topic 3). Read less

The Zero Hunger Pathways Project (ZHPP) is a collaboration that applies a systems approach to end hunger in the United States. The collaborative aims to chart equitable, resilient, and sustainable pathways to profoundly improve availability, accessibility, utilization and stability of healthy food for all. Dialogue 3: Trade-Offs Evaluation and Science-Policy Communication focused on identifying: 1) tools and models to evaluate pathways for improving food and nutrition security in the US; 2) multi-faceted evaluation metrics that reflect food systems sustainability, equitability, resilience, and... Read more health outcomes; 3) mechanisms and barriers for proper stakeholder engagement and trade-off dialogue; 4) mechanisms and barriers for science-policy communication. This event brought together cross-disciplinary scientists and expert groups as well as cross-sectoral stakeholders and policy makers. Read less

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Much of the discussion focused on Track 1 and 4. Our event included a panel discussion and breakout rooms. All attendees actively participated in the conversation with other leading experts in the areas of food security, environmental sustainability, hunger and other facets of the food systems. Panelists include: Dr. Yanna Liang Professor and Chair, UAlbany Department of Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Kate Shearer Director, Corporate Responsibility Solution Design, Sodexo North America Dr. James Malatras '99, '00, '08 Chancellor, SUNY Dr. Marion Terenzio President, SUNY Cobleskill B... Read morereakout Room topics included food waste, food access, food quality, food utilization and food transportation. Our focus was how to make the food system in higher education function equitably, practically and sustainably. Read less

Please see attached feedback forms for breakout room main findings

Please see attached feedback forms.

The final session was Policy's Role in Moving From Conversation to Results. The panel included Funder for Regenerative Agriculture, Grace Communications Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Day One Project. Ideas shared included: 1. Breaking down policy siloes in the US that are relevant for both health and agriculture. The Food and Drug Administration manages drug use and approvals, antibiotics for animal production and aquaculture, monitors chemical use on vegetables, food safety parameters (e.g. safety of compost). The US Department of Agriculture monitors for meat, soil, ... Read moreland conservation with the Natural Resources Conservation Science, Agriculture Marketing Services. Pesticide safety and approval lies with EPA, so do manure and antimicrobial cleaners. And these are not areas that overlap or converse with each other. For example, health is not frequently part of conversations at the USDA. Antibiotic use has been a uniting topic as there have been inter-agency panels with the CDC. 2. The ability for recent policies to bring these separate departments and advocacy groups together, such as carbon banking or true cost accounting. 3. Low hanging fruit opportunities for policy. For example, 23 states still have subsidies for fossil fuel based fertilizers as they are tax exempt. This should be the opposite to tax fossil fuel inputs and chemicals that are damaging towards nutritious food and ecosystems. Another example includes EPA regulations that make it easier to spray antibiotics on crops where there is no proof of its utility. 4. The role for multistakeholder groups. The movement needs scientists, lobbying power, a good coalition of people, a good social media campaign, end purchasers, investors to provide risk capital for these folks to work together and be able to create new models that policy can build off of, and the need for a network of environmental justice communities that can work together as the same issues happen all over the place. Read less

The two day event also held two breakout sessions with multiple topics. 1. Exploring Agriculture and Human Health Connections 2. Expanding Nutritional Literacy 3. Innovating in Nutritional Dark Matter 4. Early Adoption of Regenerative and Nutrient Dense Foods 5. Agriculture Investment Strategies for Human Health Outcomes 6. Supporting Research and Innovation at the Intersection of Agriculture, Food and Health 7. Policy's Role in Advancing A Healthy Food System

There were differences between voices that are urging waiting before acting on early research and results around the soil and human health nexus. There was some discussion that many of those voices are the ones that are benefitting from the current status quo of prioritizing quantity at the expense of quality of foods. There was disagreement over how valuable carbon markets will be for the growth of appropriate practices and policies in regenerative agriculture. Carbon markets can be seen as a reductionist method to put all impacts into one measurement when there is a risk of little long term ... Read morebenefits and carbon accounting does not include enough of the measurements of the additional benefits, e.g. around water. That is why there needs to be a greater linkage of carbon to other impact areas, such as nutrition. Read less

The second session was around Making the Case for Integrating Soil Health and Human Health. The session consisted of presentations from Brightseed, North Start Transition, and Axten Farms. Brightseed shared their work connecting soil and human health. Plant rich diets lead to health as diets deficient in plants are 3x more deadly when measuring global deaths attributed to diet. This is why many small molecule drugs (63%) come from natural sources. Plants have proteins, starches, lipids, and other compounds. Only 100,000 compounds are known in the academic space, but there are millions or ten o... Read moref millions in existence so Brightseed works to map compounds. They have started with 700,000 identified through artificial intelligence systems that index commercial placts, create a database of plant compounds, and connect to a digital model of human health. Their process found a plant compound in black pepper that can improve metabolic health, with impending clinical trials around the research. Metabolic health is the top reason after age for COVID complications, which includes fatty livers and little to no treatment options. North Star Transition shared the investment case for deploying capital in this space. There is a movement for integrated corporate reporting with sustainability but there is still a gap for corporations to acknowledge the soil health connection to human health. The reason there is no change at the systemic level is because the issues are treated in siloes. For example, the health service in the UK really only works with food when discussing obesity and also lacks information and focus around the nexus of soil and human health.They have been working on regional change within the country of Wales in order to explore what systemic scale can look like across a region of 3 million people. They brought together 35 organizations across sectors in order to break down the silos of conversations. They have crafted four ambitions for Wales: i) land use that leads to revitalized connections between the land, air and water that optimizes positive impact for nature, community and carbon; ii) the Welshe food system is optimised for the wellbeing of citizens, community and nature; ii) the hidden voices of nature and future generations are present for all decisions in government and business; and iv) integrating community and nature in the delivery of scaled-up prevention to improve wellbeing outcomes. Axten Farms shared their work managing a family farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. They have farmed in a water limited area for over a hundred years. They faced a series of weather events that made them vulnerable and saw that perennial crops had greater resiliency. So they began adopting practices to build resiliency, such as cover crops, reduced synthetic inputs, stripper headers and stubble retention, diverse cash crops with companions, compost and carbon based inputs, compost extract and biostimulants, and synergistic crops. The idea of how big of a difference soil management practices could make really stuck with the farm as they learned about the practices of others, such as Gabe Brown. They built a seed cleaning facility that cleans all grain grown on the farm to food grade and the seed market, as well as regeneratively grown flour, that they directly market and control the end to end process. An important part of this work has been around community and socioeconomics as they have seen the loss of fellow farmers so they aimed to build a process that could employ and retain more people in rural communities. They have also conducted grain nutrient testing to highlight the major difference their practices have made on nutritional quality, and that has also translated to more flavorful products. Read less

The third session was Bringing Back Nutritional Wisdom. The panel consisted of American Heart Association, Health Research Institute Labs, Link Market, and BeingBrigid Nutrition. Ideas covered included: 1. Increased focuses and research on nutrition from the NIH to US government agencies to the Periodic Table of Foods Initiative to catalog nutrients and their connection to growing practices. The importance of public policy bodies to learn more from existing work and build this into altered or new policies. 2. How much is left to learn about food and nutritional dark matter, and the role dietit... Read moreians are playing to spread more knowledge about this place and build the connection to responsible agricultural practices. Conventional medicine focuses more on a diagnosis as opposed to thriving, having the right nutrients, reducing inflammation, maximizing metabolic health, and failing individuals. Historic and traditional medical practices made the connection between food and nutritional quality with health, but there has been a lack of science for this that has steered conventional medicine away from nutritional wisdom. Medical schools teach as little as a single session around nutrition that future doctors can bring into their future practices. The health care community needs to catch up through community shared knowledge, nutrition education for the medical community, strategic partnerships between nutrition and medical entities, partnerships between responsible food service and medical institutions. 3. Link Market’s free grocery delivery services to seniors and a publicly funded brick and mortar grocery story in public housing in St. Louis. They only sell food that meets guidelines laid out by the American Heart Association. They have worked deeply on finding the balance between sourcing affordable food and that food coming from responsible sources that have grown food in more nutritious ways. They have also been part of Food Rx work for medical professionals to recommend healthier food through prescriptions that can be filled by grocery store kiosks on site. 4. Difficulties around food access and nutrition from food swamps, people being failed by profit and drug and surgery centered medical systems, marketing of the cheapest and most affordable foods that destroy physical and mental health, lack of nutrition education available to people (e.g. understanding the difference between feeling full and having nutritious foods), the lack of affordability for healthier and responsibly grown food. 5. How to educate more people around nutritional wisdom. This could be specific to individual health and dietary needs, people learning more about their bodies and being their own health advocates, guiding them through the change of mindset and confidence in what they are doing, increasing comfort around cooking healthier foods, bring in people that are good communicators. This also includes educating farmers to understand that they have the ability to do something better and deliver high quality nutrition, or other supply chain actors to recognize this and fund farmers for that work. Read less

The fourth session was Nutrient Density from Farm to Body and What We Still Don't Know. The session was led by Danone North America on the regenerative agriculture programs with their family farms. Panelists included Peak Origin, Bionutrient Food Association, Brightseed, and TeakOrigin. Ideas covered included: 1. The bad history and current state of nutrition and agriculture. Nutritional guidelines in the US have not been updated in decades. 70% of US healthcare goes to chronic diseases that can mostly be attributed to poor nutrition. Only 12% of Americans are without high blood pressure, high... Read more cholesterol, or pre-diabetes and diabetes. Obesity is the most common medical disqualifier for military service. A study comparing diets of the same foods but grown differently showed significant inflammation differences between those eating the same foods from responsibly grown practices than those eating conventionally grown foods. 2. Bionutrient Food Association has been working on figuring out the variation of nutrient density within food items to define the spectrum variation and averages, correlating that with growing practices, and building the instruments needed to figure out nutritional information in real time. We have the ability now to develop the data at scale around plant compounds, growing practices, and human health outcomes. 3. A common way to understand the connection between regenerative growing practices and nutrition needs to be established in order to avoid confusion and further barriers to scaling. There is no way to certify or market food that is nutritious and grown regeneratively. All existing ones are binary modes of assessing, but it is a continuum where personal spectrometry products or more targeted nutrition science can allow people to have a holistic understanding of the food in front of them and how it connects to the idea of food as medicine. 4. There are opportunities to educate consumers around food and nutrition, and the existing food in low cost grocery stores that can serve nutrition needs and access to better tasting foods. Investors should be aware that food fits impact categories that investors are trending towards as one of the literal greenest investment categories. 5. There is a huge opportunity to come together on these topics to ensure that there is global nutritional density and equity, but it will require a level of collaboration and framing that doesn’t exist. Better collaboration is needed across both spaces and the spaces together as there are many existing organisations tackling regenerative agriculture, nutrition wisdom, food equity and access, and other overlapping categories. This will also be important in elevating local knowledge and issues that need to be addressed for food equity and access. Read less

The fifth session was How Investments in Farmland Can Drive Nutritional Outcomes. The panel conversation was led by RFSI and consisted of Mint Creek Farm, Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, and the Rodale Institute. The session focused on: 1. What has happened to soils in the past century as the connection has been lost between growing food and soil health. Farmers have increasingly paid less attention to soil heath as they have been told that the most important metric is yield and biology has been replaced with chemistry. This has also included the fact that the idea has been lost that soil is te... Read moreeming with life. For example, a teaspoon of healthy soil has more microorganisms than there are people in the planet. 2. How this degradation of soils has impacted human health from a medical professional on the panel. The medical professional shared their observations over multiple decades of observing human health from increased inflammation related diseases to increased obesity. These medical issues are highly connected to the amount of chemical inputs in agriculture that damage the microbiota of gut, reducing the body's immune system while also causing inflammation. Obesity can also be tied to the consumption or overconsumption of empty nutrient meals lacking the substance needed for the body to feel satisfied. 3. The difficulty that farmers face as they try to manage better agricultural systems. This includes the burden of farmers having to educate consumers on why regenerative practices or humane treatment is important, the difficulty of running a small business, lack of financial resources, lack of partners with the capacity and expertise to work with farmers that want to have better practices. 4. The importance of technical and financial assistance to transition land towards regenerative practices. The panel, including a farm owner, shared their experiences with consultancy and digital education efforts funded by state (e.g. Pennsylvania) or national governments for farmland transition programs that current land grant universities are not serving. Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT also discussed their work offering mortgages and lines of credit from 600 investors towards transitioning farmland across the US. 5. The Rodale Institute shared their increasing consultancy work assisting farmers supported by public funding. This includes a 2022 4-day summit for the medical community to have first hand experience with on farm soil health practices and their relevance to practicing medicine. Read less