Why we’re better together
Recorded at Climate Con 2021 on November 10, 2021
Why we’re better together
The climate crisis is fundamentally a crisis of connection. Let’s see how we can embrace our unique influences, contribute to the group, and organize in a way that moves us forward. We’ll explore why it’s so impactful to meet IRL, talk about our differences and shared dreams, and plot a future together.
A conversation with:
Diana Tellefson Torres (UFW Foundation)
Nate Mook (World Central Kitchen)
Elise Loehnen (Pulling the Thread)
Full transcript
Cody Simms: We're going to start with an exploration of the human condition in the face of changing local circumstances due to climate change. This first panel, "Why we're better together" we'll touch on how frontline communities are building collective power and coalitions, and it will touch on the importance of food as a unifying basic need.
Elise Loehnen she's a writer and host of the podcast: "Pulling the thread". She's going to lead a discussion about how we come together collectively and work together for the human, work together for human dignity in life. Over to you, Elise.
Elise Loehnen: Thank you Cody. Good morning everyone. I'm in Los Angeles and as mentioned, I'm an author, a writer, host of a podcast called 'Pulling the thread'.
I was the former chief content officer at Goop. I was there for a really long time thinking about a lot of these issues and pushing out content to help unite us. And as mentioned, this is the panel about why we're better together and I'm joined today by two incredible leaders in the food space and different arenas who are really active change agents. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about them, and then they're going to tell us all about, a little bit more about their journey and how they came to occupy those spaces and bring so much relief and really shedding light on weeds.
Our first panelist is Diana Tellefson Torres. She's the executive director of the United Farm Workers Foundation and prior to being chosen to launch and direct the UFW Foundation, Diana served of the Immigration Reform Field Director for the United Farm Workers Union. So from 2000 to 2008, she was an advisor for the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs through its Institute for Mexicans Abroad.
She has also worked in Arizona on voter registration and "Get Up and Vote." She graduated from Stanford with an undergraduate degree in psychology. Which is I'm sure fascinating and actually really helpful. So UFW, if you're unfamiliar, it's focused on improving the safety and working conditions for farmers across the country in the face of increasingly unsafe conditions which include obviously COVID 19, ,but also wildfires and climate change. They are working one example of their work, is an effort to pass a federal heat standard, to protect indoor and outdoor workers, including farm workers from heat. As you will hear and as we all intuitively understand.
Farmworkers are the people who provide the food that power our lives. And they are, there in nature, trying to make this happen against really sometimes terrible and terrible conditions. They are our heroes and not necessarily recognized like that. So we're going to hear more shortly. I'm also excited to introduce Nate Mook, who serves as the executive director of World Central Kitchen where he works hand in hand with world renowned activists and the nonprofits founder,- sorry, a very needy cat. Hope no one is adverse to cats- and humanitarian chef José Andrés. So I'm sure all of you are familiar with their incredible work at the frontlines, feeding millions and millions of people who otherwise would not have access to food. Nate oversees all at worlds WCK's operations, including the organization's emergency and disaster relief efforts.
And they also do a lot of long-term impact projects. He helped create and lead Chefs for Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria, that served nearly 4 million meals to people in need. He's also a documentary filmmaker and he did an HBO documentary called Baltimore Rising. He also was taught by former president Bill Clinton to travel throughout Africa and document the president's eight country humanitarian tour.
So these two are obviously incredibly tied to food and how it fuels us. So, let's get into how you guys came into this work. So let's start with you Diana. Like how did you, take us through your journey a little bit?
Diana Tellefson Torres: Sure. And first and foremost, thank you for having me on at least, and all the folks putting this wonderful conference together. And I'm say first and foremost, I want to also say thank you to Nate and World Central Kitchen during the pandemic we've been working together and we've done a number of events in the central valley and in the central coast of California, we've provided meals to farm workers. The irony of it all is that farm workers who feed this nation often do not have enough food to put on their own tables and the irony of that, the impact of the climate crisis, in addition to all of the other issues which I'll touch base on today I think is something that most folks aren't aware of.
I came into this work 17 years ago. I was doing a fellowship called Coral in Northern California and so every month you're doing an internship in a different sector, and then there are some focus weeks and one of the focus weeks was agriculture. So we hopped in a van and went to different locations within agricultural California and talked to growers. And we talked to people about water issues, etcetera.
And not until the very end, if we actually go out to a farm where we got to see farm workers and full-scale doing very difficult work and they were sitting on this machine and I just remember how isolated, everything felt that all you can see here is like tons of open space and then farm workers that work like crouched down working in that position and they had, their bandanas on and a number of them were women. And you could hear some of them coughing because as the machine moved, so did dust. And I asked the grower. Can we speak to one of the workers we've been speaking to all these folks about agriculture and the backbone of this industry, are the workers and we haven't spoken to a single person. And so he said no. And so I just asked a million questions and learned that farm workers are excluded from overtime in this country. That workers are hunched down working, back-breaking work, and don't have the right to overtime, to basic things because they were excluded from the 1930s legislation that protects other workers, the Fair Labor Standards act and other legislation that basically says that farm workers don't have the right to overtime, they don't have the right to join a union at the federal level. And in many states, that's, that remains the case unless the state decides to change the law internally. And so just this, that day, I don't know something like hit me in the stomach. It was like a punch in the stomach that I was meant to see what I was seeing that day.
And that I would not sit on the sidelines while farm workers were voiceless. And I knew about the United Farm Workers. And that day I tell, told the other fellows, I'm going to go work with the union. I'm going to go work with the UFW and learn about what's going on and what I can do to make a difference.
And it's been now 17 years. And so 15 years ago I was asked to start the UFW Foundation, which is a nonprofit arm of the union. And we augment a lot of the advocacy work at the federal and different state levels to really change the fact that farm workers have been excluded from the rights that many other workers get to enjoy and just many of the other economic and social issues that impact farm workers on a day to day. That's how I got started.
Nate Mook: Yeah. An amazing story, Deanna. And it's been an incredible honor to work with you and your team throughout the pandemic and, I just can't emphasize enough how important the work that UFW Foundation is doing, and also, I think to, to your point, recognizing what's always been the case that these farm workers are so essential to our country, our food system, and it's so important that we be thinking about them and now that we're starting to get through this pandemic we should not pendulum swing back the other direction and not, and forget. So yeah.
My journey here has been quite non-linear, I would say I was not in the food industry. I didn't work as a chef with Jose or in the restaurant world but actually started my career in tech and startups and was doing that for many years out in California. And then decided that I wanted to see how I could apply some of my experience and knowledge to like uplifting others, not just for my own benefit, but what are the things that I can do for others and started traveling around the world and visiting amazing small projects and nonprofits.
And it was around this time that Jose began World Central Kitchen in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He was a chef who had a number of restaurants and but was always really looking at how he could, as a cook, bring instead of just cooking for the few in his restaurants, how could he cook for the many and found himself on an island, a fancy event with chefs, Eric Ripert and Anthony Bourdain cooking in the Cayman islands when the big earthquake struck Haiti.
And Jose had a moment where he was like I can't be here cooking for a few people here when so many people need support in Haiti. And that brought him to Haiti for the first time and started to see where, how we could really look at food, not just as a problem, not just through the lens of hunger, but through the lens of opportunity, how can food be empowering and uplifting and how can we think of our food systems in that way?
How can our food systems not be a drain on our health, on our economy, on our people, but actually be things that lift us up. And what Jose saw in the early days of his work in World Central Kitchen was how we weren't bringing to bear the best of the knowledge and the experience, especially in times of crises.
We think about doc, we think about medical crises around the world, right? Who do we send? We send doctors, nurses, people that know medicine, people that know how to respond and yet when we're looking at food crises around the world, we weren't always sending the people that know food the best.
And that's where the crux of the beginnings of the seed of World Central Kitchen was planted. How can Jose bring to bear as a cook ,as a restauranteurist? More than anything else, I actually think Jose is more like a historian of food. Like he just loves food and culture and history and how it all intersects and one of his favorite things, he has a book from the civil war, a cook from the union that was his diary, documenting what it was like cooking during the civil war and just like understanding where food has evolved and come from over the years. And that was the beginning of World Central Kitchen.
And I got to know Jose in the early days. I started to do documentary film work, as you mentioned, Elise. And that brought me to Haiti after the earthquake and started to see this big chef with a big vision. And he was just starting to work, but what I saw was this passion and this energy for not accepting the status quo if you get to know Jose, one of the things that you'll know about him is you don't say no and you find solutions, you find ways to do things. And as I worked alongside him over the years, not as part of World Central Kitchen, but just we were collaborating on a number of projects and spent time in Haiti exploring food and the history and the culture there and things transformed in 2017 when hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. Jose and I flew down to Puerto Rico really, without any agenda, just trying to see how we could potentially help. We didn't know, there wasn't a lot of communication out of the island. There was no electricity. So we were just trying to figure out what we could do. And we landed on the first commercial flight to land in San Juan and said, OK who's in charge of food and water right now on the island. And what we quickly learned was that nobody was in charge and nobody had a plan and there were 2 million people that needed food. And the US government was paralyzed because it had no idea how to respond.
And, Puerto Rico is a place that prior to the earthquake was importing over 85% of its food, right? Over the years, it had gone from 50% food production on the island to less than 15%. And you start to understand how a place like Puerto Rico can become so vulnerable, especially with these growing number of climate disasters.
And this is true all over the places as we become more a globalized world. And we rely on things from the outside when those systems start to break down. We just did what cooks, know how to do. We just started getting cooking, getting involved. And I, ended up taking over operations of (...), but our big kitchen where we were producing 75,000 meals a day, and we started to distribute meals all over the island. And we realized that this model of working locally, engaging with the locals, working side by side with people in the community, purchasing from local farmers, working with local restaurants and food trucks was not only the right thing to do, but was also way more efficient and effective.
When in order to get fresh and healthy, nutritious meals to communities in times of crisis. And since then, we've been able to take that model from Puerto Rico and apply it all over the world from fires in California, to volcanoes in Guatemala, to cyclones in Mozambique and to refugee and humanitarian migration crises all along the Southern US border and during COVID where we distributed around 40 million fresh meals in the United States, working with amazing local organizations on the ground and nationwide organizations like UFW to reach those that were impacted through the pandemic and I ever, I went to Puerto Rico, not knowing what to expect, and since then I haven't left.
I've been part of World Central Kitchen since then. And Jose asked me to step in and really take over as we grew starting in the beginning of 2018. And we've actually been cooking somewhere in the world every single day since we hit the ground in Puerto Rico. So there's no shortage of need and as our changing climate creates harsher situations and makes it harder for people to sustain themselves where they live at home and creates these larger and larger disasters that we need to prepare and respond to. You know, our work unfortunately has only continued to increase. If we were a for-profit business, I would say this is wonderful and we're in a growth industry as a nonprofit business that really should be putting, our work should be putting ourselves out of business, in a perfect world we shouldn't have to exist. Unfortunately, we're having to do more and finding ourselves in more contexts, many of them related to the climate crisis that we're facing right now. So that's how we ended up where we are.
Elise Loehnen: It's incredibly inspirational and thank you both for what you do. We're living in this age of empathy, which is arguably a wonderful thing, this feeling for feeling with other people and certainly an upgrade on sympathy, but what I've sensed and I'm sure we'd all agree is when you think about what's happening in the world, particularly as it's now on our phones all day, like we are able to see all the suffering around the world. That it's overwhelming. And I was talking to someone recently, who's a mentor, spiritual mentor in some ways and she was like, empathy is great, but now it's time for compassion. It's time to transition out of everyone being like, I feel everything in my pain body and I am swamped by emotion, and start to move it into action and find ways to be productive. You guys have both done that, Nate, I love that you're, you transitioned. And I would imagine the skillsets are actually helpful, right? To be able to produce films and understand all of the mechanisms and all the people who need to be coordinated and funneled into the same direction. It's probably a really good transfer of skills. So I'd be curious, for both of you, for people who are listening and I can sense from the audience that a lot of people are already engaged in this work, but for people who are ready to do something besides supporting financially and, things like get out and vote, et cetera, with their own power in their extracurricular time. How do you, what's helpful? Cause I also know, like we don't want to be kids on the soccer field who are all like rushing to score goals here. We need support across the field and people need to be harnessing their gifts. But how would you advise people to get engaged with food and climate in a helpful way?
Diana Tellefson Torres: Sure I can. Where do I start with this? It's very important. First and foremost within the Farm Worker Movement,, we want to ensure that consumers, that the general public really does understand the level of impact that the climate crisis is having on farm workers. And so the crop workers are 20 times more likely to die from heat than any other worker in this nation. And so that's, data from the centers for disease control. And so as we're looking at solutions for the climate crisis we can't forget the fact that we are already experiencing climate crisis on the ground. Farm workers are on the front lines of that, and many are being impacted by the heat that is increasing on the ground.
You talk to farm workers in the central valley. It's always been pretty hot in the central valley, but farm workers, professional farm workers, who've been doing this for two decades, three decades will say it's never felt as hot. There are longer days or more days and longer days of heat than what I've experienced in the past.
And they continue to, not only have to deal with heat, now we're talking about the wildfires, we're talking about extreme climate conditions that they are experiencing on the ground. So if a farm worker isn't in a union, many farm workers are just afraid to speak up at the workplace when they don't feel safe. And so, you saw many pictures. Many of you may have seen pictures of farm workers who were still working and then there's like smoke right behind them. And foremen are telling them to continue to work. Why? Because the crop is seen as very valuable and often the risk, the health risk and the life of the individual is not treated as valuable as what they are harvesting or picking.
And so we've got to really change that paradigm and figure out how do we mitigate what climate crisis is really exacerbating on the ground and the type of health risks that farm workers and other outdoor workers may be experiencing. And part of what we've been doing over the last, I would say commencing and like 2005, when we really started pushing for policies that addressed the mitigation of heat exhaustion and so, we worked in California to push for legislation that would protect farm workers. Basically, very basic things: having access to enough water, making sure that the employer has a plan for what to happen, what they should do when someone is experiencing a condition where they know that there is heat illness involved.
And so training the workers about what to expect, what to look out for when something happens to your peer and you can recognize that potentially being heat illness, a lot of that was not happening on the ground. Farm workers weren't even being provided with basic shade. We had to fight to get shade for farm workers in California, things that don't cost a lot of money.
And we were able to get governor Schwartzenegger to finally be able to put out regulations that says that farm workers have the right to shade, to basic water, et cetera. And so this is a campaign that we've really coupled with climate crisis, right? Like we want to make sure that individuals around the world know that the climate, it's not going to be something that we worry about 10 years from now or stuff that's going to happen to you. It's happening now right now. And the impact of the individuals who are low income on the ground in jobs that they can't let go of because they need it to sustain their families and often putting themselves at risk.
We need to be able to have policies to ensure that we're able to protect those folks. So we ended up pushing for legislation at the federal level. That is similar to what's in California. And so that bill is named after Ansunción Valdivia, who is a farm worker who died from heat exhaustion here in California. And his family really was one of the families that was very engaged in the heat campaign here in California. Then assembly woman, Judy Chu who's now Congresswoman Judy Chu was working with us to have policymakers come and do a meeting in the heat in the middle of the central valley. That's where they discussed outdoors, why heat illness protection was needed.
And you'd see all these policymakers sweating up a storm, right? They're not in a climate controlled office in the Capitol. They're really feeling the impact of the heat. And so more and more the stories that we can tell of the types of impact that the climate crisis is having on real people, the people who are feeding this nation and many other workers as well, I think that those stories are incredibly helpful. Part of what we're doing is making sure that story telling is happening, that farm workers are lifting their voices and showing pictures and videos and sharing their story of what they're experiencing on the ground. And then sharing that with broader audiences, such as yourselves and having others really help us push for policies that protect workers at the federal level. And I would say this is not just a problem in the US, right? This is something that we're seeing around the world. Indigenous peoples that are leaving central America and Mexico, who depended on certain crops and due to drought and other extreme weather have had to leave their native lands to come and seek work. And so many will say that they may not have left if that impact would not have happened in their native lands. And so we're going to be seeing more and more of that. So we want to continue to share those stories.
I must say that the Biden administration just announced recently that they are now in the process of putting out comments so that they can develop a heat regulation that's federal here in California. And so we'd love for folks to get engaged and submit comments as an individual, as an organization, et cetera. And then just, we are very excited to work with partners that we may not have worked with in the past that are engaged in climate change and figure out how we can work together to uplift this crisis and the solutions that can come of it. First and foremost, mitigating what's already happening and then working together to figure out how that storytelling can really change the heart and minds of folks to see this as a true crisis and to act.
Elise Loehnen: I love the idea of holding the meeting and the heat. That's incredible. It's like the foreign minister from, I think it was Tuvalu who did his COP 26 speech from the ocean showing the impact of rising levels, sea levels. There was a question from the audience, which is that, which I think is important, which is: How does immigrations - it's from Harsh Sharda- how does immigration and immigrants play into the farming as a profession? And also, I guess the ways in which we do not or do protect them and their human rights. So how does, how do we, how does that play out.
Diana Tellefson Torres: Immigration is a huge issue. And so at least half of farm workers aren't documented in the United States. And in addition to that, we have about 300,000 or so farm workers that are coming in from other parts of the world to work as guest workers under what is now called the H-2A Guest Worker Program. And we have seen a lot of abuses that are happening there. In fact, one of the workers who passed away from heat exhaustion and in 2018 Miguel Angel Chavez Gusman was 24 years old, had just been in the US for three days coming from Mexico. And he died from heat exhaustion. His coworkers told one of our organizers in Georgia that they had been working 16 hour days. And their contract said that they would be working 10 hour days, which is still an insane amount of time in Georgia heat in the summer. So you know, this is the type, we have to deal with both abuses that are happening on the ground and employer accountability. But also that the real back that extreme weather has a huge impact on individuals. We are fighting as hard as possible to be able to get immigration reform in this country to provide not only farm workers, but other immigrants who contribute to this nation in so many ways.
To be able to have the access to live and work here without fear of deportation and so that they can really feel the ability to speak out when there's something that's happening on the ground at the workplace that needs to be rectified. And that fear from undocumented workers, coupled with the fact that farm workers for decades have been excluded from the Fair Labor Standards act and other protections really makes for this, like I've mentioned before, this system that isn't broken, it was designed to keep farm workers in poverty. And so as Nate is talking about, like, how do we look at food differently? How do we look at making sure that agriculture and the food industry is sustainable at all levels? We have to make sure that farm workers and the people on the ground and the people who are doing the work have a voice in the solutions that were coming up with.
Elise Loehnen: Yeah, no, certainly. Is there any version, and then Nate we'll get back to you, but is there a version, like the BBB or the B Corp which obviously is supposed to be protective of people, but as consumers, is there a way to ascertain in the grocery store who are the growers who are responsible for their workers and the conditions? How transparent is the supply chain?
Diana Tellefson Torres: Not very, I think, yeah, we have worked very closely as a movement to really come up with different ideas of how to address the lack of transparency. One of those is we set up a sister organization called the Equitable Food Initiative, EFI and in EFI you can find the products that farm workers who are under EFI organizations harvest and Costco and other stores, they have a label that says, farm worker assured. And so you can find that and those workers get trained to be able to have a committee at the workplace and to address problems and issues with their employer.
And then, the UFW on the union's website ufw.org has a list of union employers around the country that have a union contract. There's a problem with labeling in general that often you see, like it's the distributor that's listed on a product and you don't really know who the farm labor contractor is or what was the actual farm that provided this food.
And so one of the things that we're looking at is, how do we leverage technology and the professionalism and knowledge that farm workers have to get to that transparency? And so that's for another conversation, but really what we're looking at is how do we uplift that information so that consumers know where to buy and which employers are doing, what they should be doing.
Elise Loehnen: Yeah, I think that's, as a consumer, that's our vote spending our values and people obviously want to make good choices. So I'm excited for more transparency throughout the supply chain. And even the fact that I feel like in conversation with people who had never really contemplated it, you hear words like supply chain, like people are starting to understand that it doesn't miraculously appear, but in terms of miraculously appearing Nate as you mentioned, you're in a booming business because there's only going to be more climate crises around the world and people will need access to food.
Besides monetary support and halting, not halting, but dealing with climate change, slowing its role. How can people best, like what would be your advice to people who are feeling like they need to transition or get involved in a way that's helpfull.
Nate Mook: Yeah. It's a great question. Cause I think, especially as we're and as COP is underway in Glasgow it's the question of, okay, what do we need to do? And there is, I think as Deanna said there's the long-term stuff of bringing down carbon emissions and carbon capture and, OSHA certificate, there's all sorts of things that are going to take a lot of major government initiatives to solve and that often can feel very overwhelming okay. This is just so massive global problem of, rising temperatures in greenhouse gases. That what can I do, I don't have a private jet that I'm flying everywhere. But I think, what's really important in this conversation around climate is to recognize that, there are tangible things that are happening right now that are already impacting communities and to start looking at those and seeing where we can start to improve things. And what are the most important pieces to me, especially, being on the ground in most of these types of climate disasters, especially but even was the case during COVID as well is that populations that generally are most impacted, are ones that are already fairly vulnerable in the first place, that everybody is not impacted equitably by these big disasters or storms or climate change more broadly. And so I think, one starting point is to almost step back and say, we don't necessarily have to look at this, especially around food as a solely food and climate issue. There are things that need to be done there that we need to be thinking about and looking very big picture, but also just more granually in our own backyards. When a big, I was just down in Louisiana, for example, hurricane Ida category 4, hurricane hit Louisiana, really did tremendous damage, but you look at the populations that were impacted the most, especially once the power went out for nine days in New Orleans, these were, the same folks living in the lower ninth ward that were impacted by previous storms that don't have access to healthy, nutritious food on a day to day basis, that struggle, to put food on the table, normally that don't have access to the same services. You will have seniors that were living in homes that were essentially abandoned by the people operating those homes. Like, it's the vulnerable populations that end up being disproportionately impacted by these changes.
And so I think a starting point is to say, okay let's even step back from the climate discussion and say, okay, how can we make sure our food system more broadly is more equitable in that? And people in our communities that might be just down the street from us, have access to the resources and the tools.
And a couple of things that all I'll bring up here just as examples. You know, one of the things that we saw during the pandemic, especially as which really shone a spotlight on the fragility of our food system in the United States but more broadly around the world as well, is that schools for example, they don't just educate our kids, but they also feed our kids. And so when school shut down, it wasn't just, oh, where's my kid going to learn. It was holy shit. How's our family going to eat. And this, I think was a big wake up call for a lot of people. And that again, let's start a discussion there, okay how can schools, we know that schools play the central role in communities. We might have food deserts in America, we generally don't have school deserts. There are schools everywhere. So how can we turn schools or make these schools recognize their importance in nutrition, in health, in all of these issues and start investing in them.
Investing in our schools to provide fresh, healthy meals to kids at no cost. How can we look at making access to food more efficient. One of the things that struck me during the pandemic was, I think we all saw these long lines, right? Of people waiting in line to get boxes of food from their local food bank, these images of cars going for miles and miles.
We saw this in Texas, obviously, sorry, in New York, even when we were just handing out, families would get lined for seven, eight hours to wait to get a box of food or come early, because they didn't want to miss being able to get food. And you realise, how is anybody gonna be able to progress forward if they're spending the entirety of their day, just trying to get some food to survive, right?
That's not a good situation. And yet at the same time, you can go on your phone place an order on Amazon and two hours later, Amazon shows up at your house and we're still distributing food the same way we did in the 1980s. There's so much opportunity, I think, to rethink the systems of support and assistance to make our communities more resilient, to invest in this. And we'd go on forever about all of the things that need to be done.
But I think the underlying issue here is that we don't have to solely, the effects of climate on our communities and access to food ultimately are exposing underlying vulnerabilities that already exist. So how do we start to address those and do that in meantime, and everybody can play a role in that, like way down to the local level in variety of ways of local organizations that are working in your backyard.
As Deanna said, like legislation, there's a lot of ongoing legislation that's coming up. If there's ways that you're interested in learning more and getting involved and pushing for these issues, next week the AFT American Federation of Teachers is going to be making a big push around universal school meals, for example, as one small thing. Different groups are doing amazing things to push obviously are essential farm workers, making sure that they have the rights, but even, even something that doesn't seem like a food issue. A livable wage, right? Making sure people get paid properly. The best thing you can do for hunger is make sure people are paid properly so they can afford food on their own. That's the most important thing. So something that doesn't even seem like it's connected to food and climate actually is super interconnected because it's just about the ability for families to support themselves, ultimately, which is where we want to get to.
So that's what I would recommend is looking at this, and even looking at it through a shifting lens a little bit, and seeing how, what are the issues that you can get involved in in your own backyard on these issues. And there's so many ways to, it doesn't have to be okay, how do we, how do we address how climate is impacting food system globally? Because the challenge is so big, you might just be like, I don't even know where to start. The one last thing I'll say. Is that we as a country, one of the biggest challenges, we have a department of agriculture, we do not have a department of food. And so we tend to look through the lens of food through this very specific way around agriculture that's unfortunately dominated by a lot of big ag business. So starting to push for a more broader view, a lot of cities locally, are having food policy directors now, they're starting to look at food more holistically because food touches, education and health and aging and all these issues. So we need to do more of that and that is something as well that you can get behind within your communities.
Elise Loehnen: Thank you both so much for your work, your expertise, your time today. Here to a livable wage and yes, people need autonomy so that they aren't reliant on a spigot of aid that could come or go. That is not empowering. So thank you both.
And we're here to, we're turning it over to the next panel.
