When did you know that you wanted to work in food?

The questions.  I wanted to work in the world of food after learning how our food system implicates several of the deepest questions humans face:  What should our relationship to nature look like?  What is justice, and what basic human rights do people deserve, if any?  What should the relationship between human rights and political lines be?  Are humans different from other animals, in terms of how we should be treated?  What are the greatest causes of, and solutions for, physical suffering?  What role should governments play in securing and promoting public health?  What are the tensions between corporate and public interests, and how should they be resolved?  And, ultimately, how do we progress toward building a world that is food secure?

The vision.  On top of being interested in these enormous food-system related questions, I've always felt some longing to live in a society where life revolves around small, pastoral communities, where pastoral communities revolve around close-knit, multi-generational families, where these families revolve around shared values and experiences, and where these values and experiences revolve around things that matter: relationships, community, nature (including our physical engagement with it, exploration and understanding of it, and sense of connection to it), food, health, ethics, suffering and death.  One of my motivations for working in food systems advocacy was to help build the world I want to live in.

Integration.  There's a notion that the society I've just described is "undeveloped," one of the past, or somehow mutually exclusive with "progress."  I disagree.  I want to help systemically integrate our evolving know-how into the rebuilding or augmenting of the small communities that gave and give us meaning and stability in the first place.  Let's mix the "old" and the "new."  What does that look like?  Our food system is a great platform for concretely addressing the question.

How did you get your current good food job?

I resigned from a law firm in New York City to volunteer for AmeriCorps in Vermont.  During my AmeriCorps year, I started working on a documentary about how changes in American consumer values impacted Vermont's agriculture economy, leaving many small dairy farmers of a different value-generation behind.  How do these now elderly farmers interpret the meaning of these changes?  For background on the state's ag economy, I called the Director of Vermont Law School's Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (Laurie Ristino) and asked her for an interview.  She agreed, but when I showed up to meet her, she'd forgotten what the appointment was about and said something like, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were here for the job."

"What job?" I asked.

Always be ready to adapt!

How did your previous work or life experience prepared you for a good food job?

I have a mixed-bag background of international and domestic human rights and corporate legal work, a natural inclination to assume that I know very little about anything, and a competing desire to learn and try everything.  As a result of my background and personality, I lean toward (1) seeing food, among other things, as a system that interrelates with other systems, and (2) taking humble, collaborative and practical approaches to problem solving.

I've found that having an open, collaborative, practical and entrepreneurial mindset is crucial in such a complex, inter-disciplinary, global field.  For example: food insecurity is not caused or resolvable by one thing.  We need multiple perspectives and coordinated strategic efforts to address it, to say the least.

What was the greatest obstacle you had to overcome in pursuing your good food job dream?

Deciding to momentarily let go of financial security.  As I mentioned before, from 2008-2012, I worked at a large law firm in New York City doing fascinating legal work on headline-news cases with fantastic colleagues, and making what seemed to be oodles of money.  During that time, though, I didn't feel fulfilled, and knew I wouldn't feel fulfilled until I was doing something more fundamentally socially redeeming and living in a more natural environment.

I started looking for do-gooder legal work in Vermont, a former home of mine and landscape I've always connected to.  After months and months of looking for the right kid of job but not finding it, I started to feel completely trapped in the rat race.  At some point, I realized that joining AmeriCorps was a possible off-ramp.  It could (1) take me to Vermont and (2) allow me to perform community service for a stipend and bare-bones health care while I (3) continued searching for meaningful legal work.  The risks: letting go of a secure, great salary, and facing the significant chance that there wouldn't be job-light at the end of the AmeriCorps tunnel.

Ultimately, though, and perhaps naively, I chose adventure and the pursuit of meaning over the rat race, and am already so deeply grateful that I did.  Through AmeriCorps, I wound my way to this great job.  Even better, though, my first weekend in VT, I met the amazing woman who's now my wife.  In retrospect, it's like my whole life was waiting for me just around the corner; all I had to do was have the courage to get up and go look for it.

Name one positive thing that a former employee taught you that you continue to appreciate?

Dan Connolly is the Managing Partner of the New York City office of the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.  He was my boss and mentor for four years.  To me, he exemplified how being a good person is a prerequisite to being a good manager and a good attorney.  I try to emulate him in my work running the Food & Agriculture Clinic.

What can you identify as the greatest opportunities in food right now?

There are so many meaningful opportunities in food systems advocacy right now.  Here are just three:

1) Food systems are not yet fully perceived for their significance in terms of both revealing and impacting human choices and behavior.  We're scratching the surface on the relationship between what we eat and our health.  Likewise, we're scratching the surface on the relationship between our food system (production to consumption) and the environment.  What about the impact of the rules governing commodities or agriculture-based derivative financial products on international food prices?  Read Bet the Farm by Frederick Kaufman.  What about the tension between intellectual property rights (i.e. companies owning patents on seeds) and antitrust concerns (i.e. companies consolidating the commercial seed market)?  Read Diana Moss's analyses of the issue.  Today, advocates and educators still have historic opportunities to expose the significance of food itself.

2) Animal welfare.  We still think it's ok to treat animals with cruelty for the sake of food production.  Historic opportunities remain to challenge and change "factory farms" of any scale.  The fact is, we kill to live, whether we're consuming animals or plants.  However, we should be ashamed of treating other beings inhumanely while they're alive.  We can do better than that, and legal advocacy has a significant role to play in improving the welfare of animals raised for consumption, as long as this practice continues.  Read Peter Singer's Writing on an Ethical Life.

3) State food system initiatives.  Check out Vermont's Farm to Plate Initiative.  Likewise, read about the national growth of state farm to school policies and programs.  Across the U.S., we're just starting to identify and connect the dots of our local food systems, and to create the infrastructure for mobilizing these dots, once connected.  In doing so, we're democratizing the food system state-by-state, locality-by-locality.  By democratizing the food system, we're slowly democratizing discussion on the host of issues the food system implicates.  Both in your professional and your consumer lives, there is room to participate.

If you could be compensated for your work with something other than money, what would it be?

Health and happiness for loved ones.