Restaurants, Covid, and community

It isn’t quite the same to meet with Danielle Leoni and Dwayne Allen, owners of The Breadfruit and Rum Bar, over a Zoom screen. The Breadfruit and Rum Bar, opened in downtown Phoenix in 2008, is on such a small side street – you’ll miss it if you do not know what you are looking for – offers a vibrant, tropical, welcoming, warm feel.

We are thrilled to announce Arizona State University’s Food Policy & Sustainability Leadership 2020-2021 class. With a commitment to shaping food and farm policy in the public interest, this cohort of leaders hails from across the country including Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, D.C.

As an avid traveler, I’m always interested in how people outside of the United States conceptualize our country. It’s certain that US popular culture is overrepresented on the global scene, but the predominate picture of the nation is heavily skewed to NYC, LA, and Miami. In truth, it’s not just people across oceans who have this urban-centric view; a sizeable (and growing) population within our borders has no realistic perception of rural America today, much less what the future holds for people like my family living on a farm.

During our week-long immersion trip to Washington DC, we had the pleasure of meeting with Kevin Concannon, a man with an incredible history of public service, and who most recently served for nearly eight years as President Obama’s USDA Under Secretary of Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services.

Amid the national anxieties of the impending coronavirus, the ASU Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership cohort traveled to the “belly of the beast” of American policymaking to visit with and learn from individuals whose collective decision-making authority, journalism/reporting, and positions in the food industry impact us as citizens of this country. It was one of the most interesting, yet intellectually overwhelming trips to Washington, D.C. I’ve had since I was first there in high school.

After a week full of meetings on and off Capitol  Hill, students of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems gathered back at the ASU D.C. headquarters to hear from expert agricultural journalists, Jerry Hagstrom of The National Journal and The Hagstrom Report, and Liz Crampton and Catherine Boudreau* of Politico.

On our second full day in Washington D.C., we heard from food policy experts from all kinds of backgrounds. I was particularly interested to hear the stories of representatives from nonprofit organizations who have been working on food policy.

The final day of our DC immersion brought the exciting opportunity to speak with Joe Glauber, who spent 30 years at USDA – including 6 as chief economist – before assuming his current posts as senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).[1] An expert on global trade, Glauber delivered a compelling overview of U.S. agricultural consolidation, before enlightening us with his perspective of the Trump administration’s farm and trade policies.

This blog post was written by Arizona State University graduate student Annalise VanVranken. In addition to studying Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership at ASU, Annalise is a Strategy and Partnerships project manager

  By Ariel Kagan and Jenna Riemenschneider   Achieving food security and sustainable agriculture remains one of the grand challenges of the 21st century. Since we published this report in 2018

“Don’t give up” and “never take no for an answer” were words that resonated throughout the office of the Honorable Rosa DeLauro, Democratic Congresswoman representing the 3rd District of the great state of Connecticut. These words of wisdom from her mother were passed down to ASU Food Systems and Sustainability Leadership cohort during our week-long immersion in Washington D.C. They have served her well.

On a sunny March afternoon, the ASU Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership cohort gathered in the courtyard of the US Environmental Protection Agency Headquarters to hear from Shannon Kenny, Senior Advisor on Food Loss and Food Waste at the EPA. Kenny has worked on energy and environmental policy since she began at EPA in 1998.