 So, hello. Welcome to the Davis Futures Forum. My name's Brett Lee, and I'll be introducing our speaker this evening. Thank you for coming out on a Wednesday evening. I appreciate it. Our speaker Paula Daniels is currently co-founder and chair of the Board of the Center for Good Food Purchasing, a non-profit entity that encourages public and private institutions to purchase sustainably grown food. She was the food policy advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Villargoza, and has held academic appointments at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the Vermont School of Law. And so, I'd like to welcome Paula Daniels to come and speak with us this evening. Sorry about that. I'm not very good at operating power points, but I think it's ready to go now, so thank you very much. I'm so happy to be here, and I really appreciate the invitation. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you very much, Judy. Where is Judy? For organizing all of this. She's a really wonderful ambassador and organizer and Dima as well. And I appreciate that you all came tonight to find out about this work. It's something that I've moved toward as something that's obviously pretty vital to a lot of us. And I'm happy to be invited here to talk about what we did in Los Angeles and what we're now doing that was a program of the Food Policy Council that spread nationally. But I thought I'd start by just sort of talking about why we got involved in all this. And a lot of it has to do with the changes we're seeing in our world, and what we're seeing is the role that Food and the Food System plays in that, and how it can play a role in reforming things for the 21st century. So this slide you'll see is a quote from Jonathan Foley, and it's fairly recent, so he's the president of the California Academy of Sciences, or the state of it. And he says things that a lot of us have known for a while. In the 1970s there was a book called Future Shock by Alvin Toffler that I remember reading and thinking the premise of it was that the world's changing exponentially fast. And at the time when the book came out in the 70s, I thought, wow, I couldn't ever be any faster than it is right now. Little did I know. And for those of you who are younger than me, you may not get it, but trust me it's really an issue in a single lifetime. So much more changes happen than in all of human history combined. So there's a lot that we're grappling with in terms of what our world is about and how we affect changing it when things are moving so fast. And one of the things that I think is really critical to think about is how our current world is designed and why it needs like an update. And the way I think of it is like I've been remodeling my home that was built in the 60s. We might need to remodel a few things that were built in the 60s in the mid part of the 20th century and some of that is our major infrastructure. So just think of the way I mean I'm from Los Angeles. So Los Angeles is a 20th century city. It's completely designed in the 20th century, really. I mean it was founded earlier than that, but its rapid growth came in a time when there was an automobile. So it was designed around the automobile and it has that hard wire infrastructure of the freeway. So many of our transportation systems were designed in that time too. But what else that is really fundamental in shapes how we live was designed in that same time frame. So whoops I skipped over something. So I guess you can guess where I'm headed with this, but what do you think these two things have in common? Obviously when they were designed. But before I go to the next slide to point that out, let me explain what these pictures are. So on the right is the California aqueduct. It's part of the state water project. So our water system. So in addition to our transportation systems, our major water system was designed in the mid 20th century. On the left, you all recognize that logo, right? But guess where I took that picture personally? In Berlin in 2014. Now let me tell you where I took it. I was in Berlin just four years ago and I was in this store called Kadebe which is, if you've been there, it's like Herod's or Nordstrom's or Neiman Marcus. It's a high end department store. It has eight stories. On the top floor is their gourmet food section. So it was the gourmet food section. They had international foods from around the world. So you go to the French section and you get these beautiful mustards and you get these wines and these vinegars. You have the Italian section and you have a lot of artisanal stuff. So I'm eager to see what the representation is of the United States. And this, I kid you not, was it. So it was France. It was Jell-O. It was stuff that we don't really, I mean they're still on our shelves but it was our cultural representation to the rest of the world in Germany. Stunning to me. So I only took a few pictures. I should have taken a panorama of the whole thing. But when were Pop-Tarts, I think a lot of us might remember. I certainly do. But when were they developed? Pop-Tarts first came out. Why is this going so fast? I'm sorry. I think I pressed it too hard. First, we're designed in 1964 and 1963. That's Governor Pat Brown and Orville Dam, the state water project. The very first development of that. But these are old systems. Our food system is an artifact of that time. It's an old system needing upgrade. Orville Dam clearly needs an upgrade. I think you all know about that story. So what else happened? What were some of the other drivers of what was happening during that time? I just think it's worth pegging it to think about why were the policies developed the way they were. 20th century California in mid 20th century was, let's see if this works. I'm not seeing it work. Okay. Here's a picture of early 20th century California Los Angeles. Anybody want to guess where that is? Anybody know LA? What's that? Pretty close. Can you see the hills in the background? Hollywood Hills. This is Western Avenue. What became Western Boulevard? That's just the turn of the 20th century. So the amazing thing to me is that they're wearing bicycles and that the women are wearing skirts and bicycling and they're going somewhere. I don't know where. But the point is, obviously we know we overlaid a lot onto what was not a very abundant landscape in terms of water availability. What you don't see are cars, but you also don't see any trees, right? So we did a lot in the 20th century. That's 1892 California. Starting you know, toward 1948 when McDonald's hamburgers were started. Disneyland. 1955. The year I was born. I'm going to date myself on purpose. So you can I'll be talking about 1955 in a second. Orville Dam, which we talked about before. These are some of the big things that shaped our society and how we run government, which was this is Howard Jarvis 1978 and Prop 13 was past. These are some big things that started making changes in what our policy infrastructure is as well as our hardwired water and other structures. And Disney had a big cultural influence obviously in 1955. So that's kind of how we got here. And then but what here means in terms of the food system is that sorry, I think I just have to have a lighter touch. Not only do we have a lot of problems in term, you know, which will go over in a second, but we have a lot of cardiometabolic disorders from our food system. I'm not sure if I need to explain that to you all, but a lot of obesity and what is the worst, we're calling it diabetes and obesity, you know, combined, but mostly in lower income communities. We also have a lot of agricultural impacts from our food system, just the water use alone. This is done by Bloomberg quite some time ago, but the water use to produce beef, as you can see, very high. There's also a lot of food that goes into it and it produces quite a lot of carbon. So there's a lot of impacts from what we've decided to do with our cultural preferences are regarding food, particularly the consumption of beef and meat in this country and the impacts that that has. Yeah, that one's hard to read, I'm sorry, but the others will be easier. Okay, great. There's also, you know, this issue that we're all grappling with in terms of climate change and the greenhouse gas emissions by sector. This is from the United States EPA. It's still up on their website and you can see that agriculture, forestry and other land uses, but primarily agriculture are responsible for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions, the largest sector in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. There's a lot of other issues relative to environmental impacts of agriculture, nitrate runoff, things like that, so there's a lot of consequences to producing those pop tarts, which are a real, it's a perfect of our mid part of the 20th century. The drivers, and again 1955 the year I was born, so mid part of the century, before then the lowest income Americans had the healthiest diets. Why? Because they were mostly producing their own food. They had victory gardens, they weren't as tied into a very globally industrialized, efficient food system. The obesity I talked about, which is that combination of obesity and diabetes, more prevalent now in low income Americans. Here you can see the difference in the obesity rate, 12% than 60%. Part of a lot of this is the consolidation in the food system that is then trans toward providing profits and efficiency. So, chicken productions, an example, there used to be 36 companies involved in it, now there's just three in chicken production. LA County before 1955 was the largest agricultural producing county in the country. I know it doesn't produce much at all now, this is its rank. We've lost farming and farmers, so the workforce used to be significant in agriculture before 1955, and now it's under 2%. So again, what does that mean? It's consolidated, it's efficient, it's mass produced, but what are the outputs from that? And there are less farms but more being produced from those farms. So, how do we change it, right? So, what examples can we look to? And in a lot of ways when you look to the future and trying to think of what you can do next, as Peter Drucker would say, a man of the mid 20th century, he's a very well known management expert and there's a school in Claremont Colleges that's named after him. But, you know, a lot of times when you're thinking about how do you want to plan for something, you say what's most likely to happen, but what he advocates for is accounting for uncertainties, because we're living in an uncertain time, right? So, we have climate change, when Orville Dam was built, they were probably looking at, well, how do we hold this much water, but they weren't accounting for some changes, they weren't accounting for uncertainty and other sorts of risks they didn't really know about. So, he advocates that what do you think has already happened that might create the future? And let me give you an example of how that might come into play in terms of how we can think about how we move our food system forward. And I'm going to talk about air. So, this again, we're going back to the 1950, you know, the mid 20th century, the year around the time that McDonald's and Disneyland were created. And around that time, huge crisis in terms of air pollution. This is a picture of the city hall of Los Angeles in 1948, the air pollution was really bad. When I moved to LA in 1973, air quality was notoriously bad there. My sister went to school at Scripps, we moved from away and, you know, I went there, she went to Scripps and I remember she was on the track team and she couldn't run because she couldn't breathe very well. But it was bad then, but worse than that. How many of you watched The Crown? Have you seen that show? Do you remember the episode with Winston Churchill and the smog? They were all struggling with it. This was a worldwide problem. It was air quality. They also did not really know what it came from right away. And if you watch that episode of The Crown where Winston Churchill is running around, people are dying of breathing problems in the hospitals and they're crashing into each other. And people were saying, you know, maybe this is from coal emissions and he goes, now it's just weather. You know, it's just an oddity of weather. And he had to be convinced that something needed to be done about that. Well, I mean, we were in the same situation here in the United States. There's a picture on the right. Again, this is like, it's in 1954 it's of the Optimist's Club, the Huntington Park Optimist's Club. And there were gas masks. I don't know if you can see it. And they go, why wait until 1955? We may not get there. So they were feeling pretty doomed by what the air quality was like back then. But what did we do? How did we fix that? Again, that's the air quality then. We actually did research. And we started in California. We were the first place to really apply research and some governmental attention to trying to address the problem. So they established an air pollution control district in Los Angeles. A Caltech researcher, and this was the big breakthrough found that the smog was coming from automobile emissions, at least in California. And then there was further research to get more specific about it. But then they did regulations, auto emissions control technology was mandated. And then tailpipe emissions standards came actually in the mid 20th century. And now this is Los Angeles is the air. And I actually realized lately we've gotten used to the fact that we have actually really good air quality in Los Angeles. And a lot of that has to do with our air quality control boards and the work they've been doing to tackle emissions. So they figured out what it was. They came up with a solution. Another example. This is from when I was in college. So the lines, some of you may remember this. There was an oil scarcity. And there were lines and you could only get gas on alternate days because they were trying to ration it. So that actually combined with air quality issues and the scarcity of oil that actually promoted our renewable energy push starting in the 70s. Now starting on a national level Carter actually passed a law that's opened up energy production to independent producers. The idea was to promote solar and to promote other forms of renewable energy. The next president came in was Ronald Reagan, felt differently about things, reversed all of that. So the federal level started going back and forth on renewable energy. What happened? And this is why I think it's analogous to the food system. Regions took over. We started developing renewable portfolio standards. Those are regional. What I remember in Los Angeles when I was in the mayor's office was that we had a goal of 20% by 2020. And we arrived at that target by thinking about how we could produce energy in a different way. How we could organize our policies around that. How we could promote job production in the economy and create incentives and so forth. And we hit our target and you know how successful California has been in that in general. And obviously this is where we are with renewable energy now. So my premise is we can do the same in food and I think it has to start on a regional level. So that's why I started the LA Food Policy Council. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I've been involved in water policy and I was looking at the connection between water and food. That was my driver also being from Hawaii. When I was born Hawaii was at a time of peak sugar. When my dad was born sorry peak pineapple. When my dad was born Hawaii was at a time of peak sugar. So Hawaii was an agricultural economy. But agriculture was leaving Hawaii. And you know we started becoming a tourist economy. But Hawaii cannot produce enough food to feed itself. So the problem there is if the ship stopped going to Hawaii because it's 5 to 90% of their foods imported, Hawaii would be out of food in a week. With climate change, two hurricanes came very close to Hawaii last year. People had to shelter in place. The stores were strict bearer food. And if they're really in cargo ships were quite literally ordered away. So it's not hypothetical. It was real away from the ports. So Hawaii is looking very much at trying to produce a regional food system for themselves again. So Los Angeles Food Policy Council is going to pause on this slide for a second to show you what this actually was done by a student at Berkeley who's in geography who wants to map things out. But each one of those squares represents different organizations that were participating in the food system in different ways that we brought together. And we did this because we had a lot of folks working in different areas in the food system up to that point in time. We were disaggregated and kind of siloed. A lot of the design of the 20th century in terms of infrastructure was actually working in terms of how we dealt with issues. We all started specializing quite a bit but that meant that we were working at the ends of the problem but not necessarily upstream to the root causes of the problem. And our law of the root causes were policy and economics. So we wanted to bring folks together to work together around how can we really create a robust regional food economy that would help address some of these issues. So we started pulling them together and I'll talk to you in a second about how. But these were what we found were where the groups were working in different areas that we all pulled together over time. So just a little bit of history. I started doing it in 2009 putting together a task force to look at and this was issued by a directive of the mayor Mayor Villargoza to develop a food policy framework for the region and to look at whether or not we should have a food policy council because it wasn't a foregone conclusion. So we formed a task force announced it at a farmer's market celebration, the celebration of 30th anniversary of farmer's markets and what better time to announce a policy than then because farmer's markets were about supporting small farms but also bringing food to low income communities. That was the idea of farmer's markets in LA. So how do you get that to a bigger scale? So it's not serving some farmers, some people, but serving the region was what we were trying to get at. So we did our work. We started the food policy council and had some programs adopted. I was moved over into the mayor's office and then it's now become something that is continuing to survive. So that's an overall snapshot of its trajectory but I want to tell you a little bit about how it got started. So we pulled the task force together. It was 20 folks across the food system spectrum, deliberately only 20 because we were going to write a report. Many of you may know how challenging it is to write a report by committee. So we wanted 20 people who would tackle the report but we also held quite a few listening sessions. So over the course of our time, which is about 10 months from the time we convened to the time we produced the report, we had many listening sessions, urban rural roundtables, worked with a number of communities, identified a number of communities, all told we talked to hundreds of people and funneled that in through the task force, which was representative of every critical point along the food system spectrum, from production to supply chain businesses to advocacy groups that deal with hunger issues and academics and so forth. But we started with the definition of what we were aiming toward and what we were aiming toward was to have LA be a good food region and what did that mean? This was the definition we arrived at. It was borrowed from the Kellogg Foundation definition but it was healthy, affordable, fair and sustainable was how we defined it and continue to define it. So it's addressing all those areas. And this was the report that we issued. So it had 55 action steps actually, which we boiled down to six priority areas, which you can see there yourself but a lot of it had to do with promoting a good food economy and addressing healthy food access through building a market for good food, addressing hunger, urban agriculture was really key. And then we did recommend that there should be a food policy council, which is actually not an easy decision I have to say because there were quite a few groups working in this area and in particular in LA with a larger urban area like that, many of the non-profit organizations were addressing hunger issues. What we realized we didn't have though was a strong connection to the rural economy. Very urbanized and our urban border was so far away, LA's 465 square miles so we didn't have that strong connection. It was something that we realized was very important over the course of our sessions and so ultimately it was decided we needed a food policy council because otherwise we weren't going to have those deliberate conversations across the food system spectrum and we had also brought in a number of businesses along the supply chain so this was a place where we could all meet and figure out how we were going to address these issues. So we formed a food policy council and this is the structure. And this was how it was as of the time I left the mayor's administration. So you can see we didn't see it as hierarchical. That's pretty key right there. We saw it as radiant. We saw it as everybody playing a role and there was the center of it but then it extended out to our network. So there's no boss here. It's more that we were moving a big wheel and we were the center of that, all the spokes of the wheel. So in the center of it was staff. I was leading it. I led the formation of it. I recruited the board and put the structure together but I hired staff right away and then we were able to recruit additional staff. So by the time I left we had about eight staff and then we had a leadership board which was the core decision making group and that board was 40. It's a lot but it was meant to be representative of the food system spectrum so our decision was to have two from each sector. No more than two. But two so that if one person couldn't come another person would. But also not just representative of that entity but that person had to come and couldn't send a replacement because we wanted to have continuity from each meeting. So we had two farmers, two along the supply chain. We had two from anchor institutions, LA Unified School District Food Service. We had the county department of public health. Part of the reason, I'm going to stop there for a second, part of the reason we formed it as a collaborative entity was because the city and county of LA are not the same. It's very unique. The city's one entity, county's another entity. In many places you have a combined city and county government. I think most places are like that. Maybe not here but we had a separate city and county so we did not have the health department. We did not have control over SNAP or food stamps or CalFresh. That was all with the county. And we did not have control over the school district. So the mayor couldn't by executive order bring the relative relevant departments together. San Francisco had actually created a food policy council and that was done by executive order of Gavin Newsom who was mayor at the time. But he was able to do that because all the departments were under his purview. Even if we could have done that, I wouldn't have wanted to do it by executive order. We thought it would be best to create an entity that ultimately would be a non-profit and survive on its own past any administration which is what we did. So that it could be populated with an ultimately guided by somebody other than someone in the administration although having a connection to it. So we also had the county health department. We had Whole Foods and we had a number of NGOs. So every issue area represented as only two. That's the leadership board in the middle. But then there were a lot of people who were interested in other issues. We had about 150 people interested in urban agriculture. So we wanted them represented. We had urban agriculture in the governance board but if we had everybody there who was interested in urban agriculture then maybe that would be the only thing we would take on and we knew there were a lot of things we wanted to challenge the 55 action steps we had developed. We knew there was more than that. So we created a working group structure which you could think of sort of like sub-committees initially we were thinking of it as a subcommittee of the board. So every board member was part of and initially chaired a working group and ultimately the working group then elected its own chair which happened. So we did still have 150 people in the Urban Act working group that came up with a set of recommendations. I think we had only eight people in the good food economy group but they came up with a set of recommendations that was pretty key. So it didn't matter how many as long as they came up with a set of recommendations that came to the board the board approved. And then because we would have meetings and we'd have hundreds of people showing up our first meeting we had 80 people the next we had 90 then we had 120 we started getting 200. We had a lot of people showing up and not everybody wanted to work on a working group but they wanted to learn what was going on. We created the network and that's the broader circle on the outside and that's where we would have sessions a lot like this one. You know we'd have different topics that we would bring up panel discussions and so forth for the network. If people wanted to get involved and become part of a working group they would work their way into it. I have to say for a second after I was talking about this to a class like my structure the structure we created and I stopped and I looked at that that you know what that is actually like Congress I didn't realize it at the time but think about it you have the Senate which is two from each state I had two from each issue area and then you had the Congress which is representative based on population I had the issue groups based on interest I mean I went God if that isn't just a model that kind of works I didn't even realize it at the time but then I went geez that's yeah so why not you know so you can have a balance you know checks and balances against each other so it became a very fluid decision-making process that worked really well and I'll explain that right now because I want to tell you what we developed in terms of programs so we had a number of programs that we did we did actually address street vending we did address urban agriculture in the meetings street vending came out of a working group that ultimately it was past it was a wonderful organizing effort that was past just last week but our key programs that were meant to really start making that 21st century upgrade to their food system were these three interlocking programs one was I'm sorry that's light but one was a good food purchasing program which I'll talk about more to build the market for good food the other was to build the supply chain and then in terms of equitable access the healthy neighborhood markets so just quickly on the healthy neighborhood market that's community market conversions to help small markets more prevalent in low income communities source and sell healthy food because the issue is that only mostly junk food is available in low income communities because it's cheap right so this is a conversion in progress but an issue for them is that they have a hard time accessing produce like it's very easy for them to get drop-offs from Coca-Cola and Nestle's and Kraft because they have their capillary structure in terms of delivery and they'll take an order and fulfill it and so that's why you have a lot of junk food in low income communities it just makes it easier for them and these are small business owners but it's very hard for them to source and sell healthy produce they often buy it from supermarkets and then mark it up and it's already old by the time they get it because it's been in a supermarket and handle a lot so what we looked at was trying to build some way to get them healthy food and and that was compra foods and cooperative purchasing for the markets so they will compra foods will go to the terminal market and act as their intermediary and get food at a wholesale price for them according to their orders and provide it to them so that they can sell it and their stores at a price and it's fresher and they have more of it so that works pretty well and we also have the healthy neighborhood market network training so it's a peer group and that is really amplified their ability to do that work because they're learning from each other the small business, the healthy food neighborhood market network around the city and it's really amplifying the program quite a bit we use our board to teach them so we use the whole foods executives to teach them we use a lot of other folks to teach them and then we have the good food purchasing program which is where I am now and that actually was adopted in LA in 2012 and I want to talk to you about it because it's our key program in terms of procurement I do see I'm running a little short on time I'm sorry but so I'll try and go through this really fast but one thing I want to mention to you is that it was adopted in 2012 by the City of LA and LA Unified School District and I was in Rome in October to get an award for this program for its adoption in 2012 that was given to us by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization the World Future Council and iPhone Organics International of adopting this program we got the future policy award of 2018 for scaling up agroecology we're the only program in the United States to be given that award and they had looked at international policies from around the world quite a few of them and there were only eight that won overall and we were the only one from the US so what is this thing I'm switching slides here because the logo shifted this was what it looked like when we were part of the LA Food Policy Council because it got so much attention we spun it off into its own program and its own entity called the Center for Good Food Purchasing which was created in 2015 and since we created it's expanded quite a bit but we did it because we understand the purchasing power is key this is a quote from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food who issued a report in 2014 supporting food policy councils and decentralizing and regionalizing food so again that's the 21st century upgrade but also procurement as he says very few source of leverage but government and its purchasing power can be a very key source so we designed it to have five core values the short version of how it works is it's like lead certification but it works for food purchasing in major institutions and it has the five co-equal values of supporting local economies, fair labor, animal welfare, environmental sustainability and public health and we had again a huge two year research process while we were part of the Food Policy Council we researched, had a stakeholder process a lot of review of this an example LA County Department of Public Health wrote our nutrition program NRDC participated in the environmental sustainability piece, farmers participated in the local economy piece and etc the first year of its adoption by LA Unified School District and this is in part why we got the award I'm sure because this immediate change LA Unified School District $150 million food budget a year they were prior to adopting our program sourcing less than 10% of their produce locally with in one year 60% was sourced locally it redirected $12 million into the local food economy it created 150 jobs all in a year because they hadn't really thought about it before but they'd been thinking about nutrition but they hadn't been thinking about their impact on the food system this program helped them not only think about it but helped them figure out how to direct their purchases that way we get their food purchasing dollars look at it at the farm level have a point system we analyze it rate it and reflect it back to them in point score and in the star rating so that was one of the big differences the jobs came from local food processing you know for the traditional produce and then they started also directing more sustainable purchasing reformulation of bread and so forth it's a 13 billion program I was going to show you a video but we're completely out of time and I think the audio doesn't work but we are now in the process of expanding nationally and trying to reach more of that the 13 billion in federal school lunch money throughout the country it's happening here I already talked about that just a little bit more background of how it works we have a pretty extensive standards committee that helps us develop the standards first standards were developed it's an extensive manuscript document that the school districts follow were developed in 2012 we had an upgrade in 2017 and we're going to have another upgrade in another five years we do the upgrades and these are the institutions a number of academic UC Davis is part of it other schools around the country as well as organizations who I think you'll recognize are all part of the input process and that so we have expanded after almost a minute after we took it out of Los Angeles into its own entity we were adopted by Oakland San Francisco unified school districts and we're now in 14 cities municipalities around the country we have staff in New York today that we're presenting to New York Chicago adopted it we have a partnership now with urban school food alliance which is the alliance of the 11 largest school districts in the country and what we're doing is analyzing their purchasing we're now analyzing about 895 million dollars worth of purchasing by municipal institutions and letting them know how they're doing so back to that question that Peter Drucker asked and I'll wrap up from here what you're seeing is something that came that impact came from a food policy council it came from a stakeholder group it came from folks coming together and thinking about how do we do that how do we remodel our version of the food system how do we give it that 21st century upgrade that's what we came up with and it's making a difference what I want to suggest to you though in terms of being regional what's happened before that will plan for the future we knew through the dust bowl that we needed to take care of our soils this is the conservation act written by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s that was an overly efficient food system that wasn't taking care of its soil that created the dust bowl problem we're kind of at that place again we've got healthy soils initiatives but what's going to get us there I do believe is going to be regional robustness it doesn't have to replace the food system we're talking about renewable energy the goals were 20% by 2020 30% by 2020 can we regionally create goals that are like that that are a village overlay on a global food system I mean California does have a goal now of 100% renewable by very ambitious date and maybe it will get there maybe our food system gets to a place where it's 100% regional but there's a lot of value in the global food system too so I'm not saying we get off of it completely let's set targets that are different than 5% which is where most of us are right now which is where Hawaii is right now which is if we only have 5 to 15% Hawaii is the stark example of it but that's true for Los Angeles too because we so rely on that global system right we know that things that are produced here like Fresno go elsewhere and don't feed the people in that region so what are we trying to create but something that we all used to have which is villages or you know more renewable energy it was a natural way of producing things and while we're not we're going to have the benefit of modern technology and modern knowledge things are moving so fast because we sit on a wealth of knowledge from centuries of learning and we can combine it all and not disaggregate it we can combine it and take the best of all of it and create a system that's going to work for all of us much better thank you so if Paula is open to this we'll do a 10 minute period of question and answers and then we'll have a panel seated where there'll be a panel discussion and then at the end of the panel discussion there'll be an additional opportunity for questions and answers of the panelists as well as Paula if she's open to that so I see a hand going up here I'll just preface this by saying ideally your question is relatively brief so we have more time for Paula to answer the questions the reason I mention this is sometimes people take 10 minutes asking the question right so that's not meant to be insulting it's just an observation that I've had over some of these future forums so we'll start over here does your program have anything to do with food waste and are you familiar with the food shift program in Oakland is there anything like that I am not personally familiar with the food shift program in Oakland some of our staff might be some of our staff are in the Berkeley area but we do have points in our program for food waste so basically what we're doing the good food purchasing program reflects back how they do but I will say the LA Food Policy Council is very involved in food waste and food waste strategies and helping so getting waste to be used and give back to people in need yeah we have members on our Food Policy Council so now a member of our Food Policy Council board is Rick Namias who founded Food Forward which takes unused produce and imperfect produce and donates it to food banks so that is an element of what the Food Policy Council works on what was it could you repeat his name please it's Food Forward is what you should remember it's the group in Los Angeles that are specifically about the fairness in workers for the good food purchasing just because we are in a producing area and farm workers are very much part of our economy so it's wondering in terms of what are the standards and what are some incentives to get people to have fair labor practices yeah so the way our standards work is that again we have the five categories and in each category we have the baseline level and then they must have 15% of their purchases at that level and then they can there's tiers and they can do better in each category so I'm going to talk about fair labor but just to give you an illustration of how that works for local baseline could be within state you get more points if it's within 200 miles and more points if it's from a smallholder farm USDA definition so you can see how the tiers work right and so in other categories we point towards certifications so in environmental it points toward so we're not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of what we constitute environmental what our standards community does is look at which certifications do we want to use so organic is in a tier for environmental so for labor the baseline is comply with labor laws which is the right baseline but I can talk about it a little bit more but I could get wonky on this so let me do briefly here but so you can do better by buying from fair trade certified or union is an option it doesn't have to be 100% union but you know that you can have this array of things that equitable food initiative these certifications that are already involved in fair labor the baseline what we do very heavy on analytic staff which are all graduates with master's degree in public policy by the way if anybody's interested because we're hiring another one right now that's where we build up our team so they take the food purchasing data and then they cross check against databases so for fair labor they will cross check against OSHA everybody knows what OSHA is and fair labor wage an hour violations etc and so we're cross check against it will even cross check if somebody's actually organic because certified so if they say they're organic certified we double check so we do a lot of verification so with labor we will find that there are violations that happens like you know nobody wants to have a moving violation when you drive but I've had a few so I'm not saying you know it's but if it's repeat willful serious we will reflect that back to the purchasing institution say this is what we found along your supply chain can you write to those suppliers and ask them what they're doing to address this what that creates is a transparency right it's not enforcement per se but that communication starts making a difference we actually found a lot of violations with Tyson's that as a result LAUSD did not renew their contract so it went to Foster Farms which is California based that's a lot of chicken I'm curious about how the policy council is addressing land use policy and what kinds of changes it's starting to recommend within both the city and maybe county use of land I will say honestly that we are very urban focused still you know we were trying to maintain that connection with the rural community I have moved onto the Center for Good Food Purchasing and we have more of an urban focus and a real focus on healthy food the markets from the land use standpoint it was primarily focused on urban agriculture and the urban agriculture incentive zones and deploying that there's another level of this I think is coming which is to have more involvement from the county so we're hoping that the county not only adopts a good food purchasing program but starts working more closely with us in other aspects to the county than the health department so the county LA is 465 square miles I can't even tell you how many the county is I should know but the number is so big I think my brain can't keep it it's gigantic there's eight cities in the county and it's 12 million people and they have a lot of land a lot of agricultural land so we're influencing the development of their sustainability plan right now and so we played that role in terms of being a voice on it but truthfully it's not something we focus on as much because of you know the urgency of the other issues that we've been addressing just because of the nature of our makeup but it's something that a food policy council could easily take on I will tell you in New Orleans so I advise food policy councils around the country also and New Orleans is working on a lot of those issues is it just a page one has different array but it's been incredibly valuable to have a food policy council there their government has appointed them as a just recently it happened this year as their key policy advisor for food policy and land use around there it's a recent accomplishment for them I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about the efficacy of your programs so it seems like you should be able to pretty easily look at if there's been substantial reductions in obesity rates or if there's been substantial reductions or improvements in food purchasing decisions especially with some of the cities in the surrounding areas and I'm wondering if you've actually seen any substantial changes in health impacts like you mentioned with your presentation or even in food purchasing decisions across not so easy to address to figure that out because there's a lot of variables in what causes cardiometabolic disorders so we have been talking with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and other health based organizations about how to construct a longitudinal impact study that would take a lot of time so we do have partnerships with academic institutions to try to construct that but we don't have the data on health impacts we do it's more it's more available us to get economic impacts because we can trace that pretty immediately like the $12 million and 150 jobs and it was not only did we get the report back but we can verify it through a number of sources but we're at the point where we're getting enough information that we're going to start producing some reports we're hoping next year is what we're looking at because we now have six years of data from LA Unified School District but the other school districts just came on recently right so you need to have a lot of time in one place and have a program working consistently across time to see what those kind of impacts are I'd be happy to follow up with you after this so we'll just have time for two more questions at this stage and then there'll be the panel discussion with also Q&A so hi I'm wondering if there were tensions between LA between fair and affordable and sustainable and if so how those played out within the council? There were not that was quick I'd be happy to elaborate on that more because I think I understand what you're getting at do you compromise one while pursuing another but there were not because we're a big tent coalition and we agreed we're going to focus on all of them equally attention I guess the question would be for adopting institution does it compromise their ability to afford to buy the food maybe it's a separate question though but I don't know if you're asking that one well the reason we went to large institutions is they have significant purchasing power and there's purchasing power can shape the economy around it so the way large institutions buy is they usually buy through procurement process that's an RFP so they will set the price parameters it has to be within this amount so responsive responsible bidder has to bid within that amount but we also because they adopted our program they built us into their RFP and said it has to be within this amount and you have to comply with the good food purchasing program so the distributors would go they were bidding on it okay we get our marching orders so why would they do it because you have why would they agree to bid within that price and they're going to do it in the future which is not huge for a school district and still do all the rest of this because they have volume and a commitment and that's huge for somebody who's running a business guaranteed volume if you get the contract five years and a large volume and a long term commitment so that that's why we targeted that area but also because it's an area where it can have the most change in general. Hi Paula, first of all recognizing the scalability or the scaling that's part of the strategy of anchor institutions on a national and even potentially international level but as far as the actual technology itself and the database and tracking systems that you developed with so many including us as a partner organization working with you with many other community lines with family farmers. Alright thank you hi yeah doing tracking around the country is there any vision for potentially ever being able to scale in the way that others would be able to plug into that actual system and use it themselves oh yes we're developing a technology I mean there's so much this is what I mean about using 21st century technology like solar power which is old technology in some ways 21st century technology yeah we're talking with tech partners and figuring out a way to have this be a useful tool in general so there's a lot to come along those lines it's exciting so thank you for that and I'm going to introduce my colleague Gloria Partita who's going to introduce the panelists I do have a favor for Gloria Matt is sort of first in line for the next round of questions should his question should he still have a question for the panel or the speaker we're sorry we didn't get to your question Matt but first in line for the next round and as Gloria's pulling up some information I'd just like to say again thank you Paula for speaking it's not only interesting but it's also very exciting I believe that if we were to fast forward a year from now I would be very surprised if our community and area did not incorporate some of the ideas that she's talked about I'd be very surprised and Paula you're sitting next to county supervisor Don Saylor who I think is also very interested in this area okay so do you want to go ahead and just introduce the panelists and have them show my slides really quick well I'm going to introduce the panelists so that they can take their seats while my slides are being pulled up and I've only got five minutes I was told so I won't take very long we have Dr. Catherine Brinkley from UC Davis and Robin Waxman has a local farm in Davis and Anya McCain from Cool Cuisine Evan Dumas and he's with UCD Food Recovery Network Don Saylor who's our county supervisor and Andrea Leopour of the Food Factory in Hot Italian and Salamence so I just wanted to also welcome everyone and thank you for coming and I wanted to take this opportunity as we're talking about food sustainability to put in a plug for equity because I believe in making sure that when we have any important conversation that we remember equity and hopefully I will be able to do this correctly. So food sustainability as you've had a very good presentation on is the production of food that protects the environment, public health, human communities and animal welfare. Yay I did that right. Okay and so I think that this is a great graphic that sort of shows all the areas that people normally think about when they think about food sustainability and what I think often is left out is in the upper right hand corner and that's fair and accessible and there are a lot of ways that you can bring equity when you're working on food sustainability. There was a grant that was set up by the Kellogg Foundation and they went into communities and had people compete for these grants where they brought forward very creative ways to engage different communities and culturally engage those communities and so this is an example of two grants that were given. One was in New Orleans where this group put together a whole program around the culture in New Orleans and the food there and one of the reasons that I find this interesting is because the other focus that I have is economic development and part of the conversations that we've been having is ways that we can use food sustainability in our relationship with UC Davis to provide a transfer of the technology there to create jobs in Davis and whenever we have those conversations what I have, what comes to my mind is how are we going to make that an opportunity for everyone in the community. So this is one of my favorite ways that LA took food and created opportunity. Homeboy Industries in LA where I'm from was started by father Greg Boyle and gave this opportunity to people who had been in trouble and set up a kitchen and I believe that people gravitate towards these types of endeavors because it makes them feel good. You feel good when you're supporting people and you're giving them the opportunity and it just creates all sorts of wonderful opportunities and I think that food is a wonderful way to sort of it's a common ground that people can rally around and in my opinion Paul Newman has nothing on Homeboy Industries. This is a more local effort. I don't know there are people here who know Stellariz. She created this group in Oak Park at the elementary schools and she taught fourth graders how to run a food business and so they spent some time putting together a business plan and then they served a very fancy meal. This is one of my favorite businesses in town. This is Pooros Churros if anyone has ever had. They are probably the best Churros in Davis. This is my son and this is his business partner and that's my grandson in the middle and I started this food it's a food booth and we go to festivals. My son has cerebral palsy and so he has a very difficult time finding employment and so he's very proud of running this business and both he and his partner Lori are in wheelchairs and they have a great time and we make great Churros. This is another one of my favorites. This is Purple Tree Cafe and do you want to stand up? This is Pam's business and she started this. It's a bicycle coffee cart which fits very nicely into our value system here and she employs people with disabilities and she makes wonderful vegan baked goods and farmers market Wednesday night. This slide is a very familiar slide to some of us. This is our budget over a number of years in Davis and what I want to point out here is that you see the dips and the dips are recessions. So recessions come along right now we are in the longest upswing, I think we're 10 years on an upswing which means that people are very nervously looking at the next recession and I think that it's really important that we build resilience around our economy and I think that having a really strong system around food is important and I think that it's a great opportunity for us to be supportive in this area and to have a guard for when that recession hits. And that's all I've got. I told you I was going to be brief. So is this still on? Yes. So I think that what we're going to do is that each panelist will have five minutes and then we'll take questions after. I'll start and I'll give you the gift of brevity. I'll speak less than five minutes. Really thank you to Judy for helping to organize. Thank you to Paula for coming and talking to us about food policy councils. Thank you to all of our elected officials, our business owners, the non-profits, the students who are in the room who are excited about this topic because it's something that's been bubbling up and Dima Tamimi who really helped organize this but couldn't be here today, she put this on and she and I along with Judy serve on the downtown planning advisory committee and food is constantly coming to the surface is something that the community cares about and wants to do something about. So this talk tonight is part of a series. We've had three discussions about what are the strengths that Davis has, what are some opportunities and where might we go and this is a wonderful launch pad for thinking about what might happen and as our mayor has said it's probably going to happen next year which is exciting so there's some momentum. So from those three conversations that happened prior to tonight I just want to share some of the strengths and the opportunities that the community identified. As you all know our neighbor is the University of California Davis which is the number one agriculture university in the country number two in the world, sometimes number one. We have 400 faculty who focus on food we're in Yolo County which is one of the most agriculturally biodiverse regions in the world and Davis as a city has a food legacy in its own right with a co-op one of the nation's oldest farmers markets and the farm to school program so we have strengths to build on here. We also have opportunities that don't have a polystyrene ban on take out a lot of cities in California already have that. We don't allow food trucks unless they move every 10 minutes and because of the good work of the L.A. Food Policy Council and the Street Food Vendor Alliance and L.A. a new state policy that has come down this year means that Davis will need to rethink its public health policies around street food vending. We also don't have a billboard like Winters has that you know has that beautiful cornucopia of food spilling out into the city so we don't really have an identity around our food despite having so many strengths and we are the city in Yolo County with the highest percentage of the food insecure population. So we have to think about building on our legacy of sustainability, thinking about economic development. Our economic development plan was from the 1990s so it's time and also how to build in that fair and equitable piece that Mayor Pro Tem Gloria Partida talked about. So there's some really exciting conversations and I wanted to leave you all with that so you can start thinking about what Paula has shared with us tonight and what we might do here that will be because Davis is not L.A. even though I can see us biking down a dirt road and an ag. So I'll turn it over to Andrea LePore. This is on, can you hear me? I'm Andrea LePore and I have a few hats here but I founded Hot Italian in 2009 if you're familiar with Hot Italian. We were the first certified restaurant in the region, the first bicycle friendly restaurant in California and then became the first real certified or pizzeria rather in the United States. Didn't fare as well in Davis so I turned that into Solomon's Delicatessen which I'm also a founder of. Solomon's is inspired by sort of the New York Delicatessens but with more of a California twist so we recently became also the first Jewish Delicatessen that's real certified in the U.S. We're over in the Davis Commons and we're opening in downtown Sacramento which is in a tower records store which is hence the name Solomon's Delicatessen named after Russ Solomon. If you're familiar with tower records which was closed back in 2006 unfortunately but Russ was from Sacramento and there was nothing in Sacramento that signified that tower was ever from the region so we wanted to honor Russ and the history and what tower meant to so many people as a community gathering place but one of the reasons I was invited here tonight was to talk about the food factory and the food factory is a development I've been working on for about three years. I started it about three years ago when I was finishing my masters in sustainable design and it's a food incubator for small food producers. The site is about 35,000 square feet. It's located on a two and a half acre site in Sacramento. We really look at it as not just a Sacramento sort of benefit but rather a regional one. There's about 200 incubators around the country and none in this region. So it's really intended for small food producers, hopefully healthy and functional foods, consumer packaged goods what not. I'm a graduate of UC Davis and there's about I think 7,000 students that graduate every year in food and egg departments here and they kind of go off to other parts of the state or country because there's not places here for them to start businesses so hopefully we can get this incubator off the ground and really be an opportunity for people to start their business and grow it. One of the benefits I think aside from being a farm to fork capital the connection with UC Davis and then obviously the connection with the capital and really have an impact and influence on food policy. So I'll be around for questions. Can you hear me? Okay. I just want to introduce myself. I'm Robin Waxman. I'm the executive director of a non-profit organization in town called Farm Davis. Farm Davis asks the next generation to examine their role in a current system that perpetuates economic inequality and food insecurity in a way that they can undermine. We're asking people to undermine that system in a way though that encourages generosity so we exist 100% through the generosity of our community. We don't sell any food. Basically we grow food to give away in shorter terms. So we started in 2009. It took me about a month that I convinced my husband to donate our front yard to the public over on K Street and that year we grew 1,000 pounds of food on our front yard with the help of UC Davis students. Before this time there was not a plant that had survived my touch. I don't know why I did this but since then two years later we thought what could be better than an urban farm but a real farm. So we went ahead and purchased a 2.6 acre parcel on Road 95. It's about a 45 minute bike ride from here and we invited the public to farm with us. Since then I was identified as a master gardener and I actually now know how to grow a plant. Last year we grew 6,400 pounds of food between the K Street farm. We have a small front yard that we're farming in South Davis and farm 2.6 which is our 2.6 acre farm. We feed over 9,000 people in Davis every year. Our food only goes to low income and homeless people. We're directly with Davis Community Meals, Steak, Empower Yellow, a women's shelter that they have, and two low income housing residencies in Davis to supply their fruit and vegetables. They get plenty of bread donation but they don't get a whole lot of fresh fruit and vegetables. So we've been growing a whole bunch of food. We're asking everyone to come and learn people come and we start from the beginning. Most people who come don't know how to do anything so we have a lesson and we meet every other Saturday. We also meet during the week. We meet on Monday, Tuesdays and Thursdays which are our donation days and we ask you if you would like to come and learn how to garden and farm with a group that has maybe like-minded ideals we would invite you to come and help us out. If every one of you had come to a farm work day we could probably get everything done. All of you. Because we run on the generosity of the public we have small grants and things like that that we get the suroptimists and the Rotary Club bought us a tractor and so we're actually like a real farming operation. We just don't sell anything and we would also invite you at the end of the year to open up your pocketbook and donate some money to Farm Davis if you'd like to see us keep doing our work. Otherwise if there's no seeds we don't plant anything. We just 100% rely on the generosity and the culture of Davis. Thank you. If you've never been to a work day at Farm Davis, it's really fun. I encourage you. My name is Anya McCann. I'm the founder of Cool Cuisine. I'm going to spin this conversation just a little bit to a different side. We have about 400 members on Meetup and another 400 or 500 on social media and access to about 3,000 plant-based eaters in the area. I'm just wondering how many of you in this room have been to a Cool Cuisine event and how many of you have been to a Plant Punk Kitchen dinner? Only 5% of the corn in the United States is grown for human consumption. 95% goes to feed animals that people eat. A very recent large study published in the journal Science reviewed data from 40,000 farms in 119 countries covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. Alarmingly, livestock provide 18% of calories and only 37% of protein, but they take up 33% of the farmland. That's a really bad efficiency loss. Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way that you can reduce your environmental impact on the planet. The author of this study from Oxford University said a vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car. If you've read the recent article that my husband and I circulated last month, we really think that sustainable food could be a theme and an identity for Davis and the future, and we've been really going to all the downtown planning meetings and we're really excited about it. I could take this discussion in a billion different directions, but I'm going to focus really narrowly today on cool cuisine and food in restaurants and at public gatherings. I think that we can weave these themes of low carbon food throughout all the ideas that are being circulated today. I think there's a place for it to be part of all of these discussions. If you want to reduce your impact on the planet, the World Resources Institute says you should, one, eat less calories, two, eat less animal products, and three, specifically eat less beef. I know that most people in this room are not going to switch to a fully plant-based diet, but my goal and the goal of cool cuisine is to make it easier for you to eat less animal products and lower on the food chain. We work to make sure that there's options in our local restaurants so that everyone has a larger selection of delicious, planet-friendly, and plant-based foods. The more great options there are, the more we displace meat on the menus, and just overall we do better on our environmental goals. If everyone in Davis dropped meat off of your menu for just a few more meals a week, it could make a difference as a community, and it will help us reach our community climate action goals. I know that statistics aren't really going to convince you, but maybe mouth-watering, delicious food might. At the Sunrise Rotaries Oktoberfest, this year 80 out of the 630 guests chose the delicious new plant-based sausage that we offered, and another 10 or 20 others really wanted it, but we ran out. That tells me that about 15% of attendees at your average Davis event would prefer or go for a plant-based option. So I'm encouraging everybody to start thinking about that in your event planning. We're running a large burger battle coming this March. Professional chefs at our local restaurants are going to compete to create the most mouth-watering delicious burger that happens to be planet-friendly and completely plant-based. We expect 20 restaurants to participate and diners will vote for awards that are going to be given in several categories. They did this in Sacramento in June. 30 restaurants designed 50 different burgers, and over 16,500 burgers were sold in one month. So it was a really good economic little shot in the arm in Sacramento, and the restaurants were really thrilled, and they all, about more than half of them added the item to their menu. To make it more fun, we're encouraging people to join up with your family, your friends, your colleagues, and your clubs to form tasting teams and create your own awards. So you can go and grab a beer and a burger and then vote. Service clubs, church groups, fraternities and sororities, the City Council. I hope everybody's going to participate. I've got flyers in the back that give you our website and some information. And we also have a new card that if you happen to like eating plant-based, you can take a few of them, and it's a thank you card to restaurants saying thanks for doing a good job. You can drop it off when you pay your bill. Anyway, as a part of the bigger picture, I suggest that the City of Davis and people who live here aim to get to the point soon where every organization and institution in town can claim to always have a decent, attractive, and delicious plant-based food option at their events, and aim to reduce the amount of animal products at events. I've suggested through the Natural Resources Council Commission that all city-sponsored events could be plant-based, or at least have a good option. And city vending machines could have 50% planet-friendly options in them, DJUSD cafeterias, every church luncheon, every rotary club breakfast and dinner, and all of our wonderful annual fundraising meals like Village Feast and October Fest. So I encourage every person in this room to think about how you can contribute to that mission through making suggestions to the groups you're involved with. We also have, you can take our thank you cards, you can take my card, and please feel free to contact me if you need some advice on how to implement any of that. And you can sign up to get information about the burger battle in the back as well. Thanks. Hi. I'm going to just run a timer so I stay on time. Hi. My name's Evan. I'm a student at UC Davis, and also the current president of the Food Recovery Network. For those of you who haven't heard of Food Recovery Network, we're a chapter of a national organization on about 230 college campuses. And what we do is essentially pick up, so we go, we're at the very end of the whole food system as it is at the moment. We're at the point where the food is good, but would have been put in the landfill. So wasted food essentially, that's totally edible. And we pick it up and take it to homeless shelters in Davis, Woodland and Sacramento. So the way that we work and operate is we're entirely student run. We receive support from faculty and from the university to varying degrees and from different departments, but for the most part we're run entirely by students. We pick up from the dining commons on campus, from the markets on campus, and now recently, thanks to a partnership with Yola Food Bank, we also pick up from the farmers market at Davis. So the Friday farmers market, not the Friday, the Saturday one, we go up to the vendors at the end of the day and ask them any produce. Ask if they have any produce they weren't able to sell. We collect it and donate it on campus actually. So I guess the way that this relates to Paula's talk and what the LA Food Policy Council is doing is we wouldn't be able to do what we are doing without connection and networking. The food recovery network at Davis was founded in 2013 and from 2013 to 2017, which is when the current officer board took over, we had only recovered about 12,000-ish pounds of food. From 2017 to 2018 we recovered 19,000 pounds of food. From September to now we recovered 17,000 pounds of food. So if you're familiar with exponential growth, that's what that looks like. And none of that would have happened without us making connections. The way the club operated from 2011, not 11, 13 to 2015, 2017, getting all the dates mixed up. The way we operated is we asked for student volunteers to ride bikes with bike trailers from the DCs to the shelters in Davis. The average person could only carry about max 100 pounds of food on a trailer, on a bike, on a rainy day in Davis at like 40 degrees Fahrenheit. And so our capacity was a lot lower and we had no idea that people were interested in what we were doing. Sometimes we'd sit there and be like, why are more people not helping and volunteering with us? We're such a great cause. And it doesn't matter how great your cause is if you don't tell people about it. Like to be honest, that's what it was. The second thing is we were originally running a platform where we had one intern riding their bike hauling the food. And again, no matter how great your cause is, if it's not fun, people are going to stop doing it. So in coordination with telling people about what we do, actually asking for help instead of being full of our hubris that we could do it on our own. We have now been able to expand. We have our own electric vehicle. We borrow a van from campus without having to pay for it. We actually now donate some of the food we collect from campus to campus. So it's a pretty crazy exponential growth that doesn't come from great leadership. It comes from just talking with people. And the food policy council is a perfect example of that. It is bringing people together from all different stakeholder viewpoints and organizational viewpoints who had no idea each other existed and trying to come up with a better solution. And to be honest, every conversation I've had hasn't always led to some sort of actionable result. But just having that conversation or hearing another person's conversation has led to all of our best ideas. So yeah, connection. That's the theme. Thank you. So I'm Don Saylor. I'm a county supervisor representing Davis Winters, the campus area in the farm country in southwestern part of Yolo County. Thanks. Thanks to Dima and Catherine and Ann for the work that you've been doing on food connection issues. And thanks to the Davis Futures Forum and the City of Davis for hosting this event and to Davis Media Access for filming it and being sure going to be broadcasting in the community in a little while here. Some themes that I heard in Paula's talk one is the power of shared leadership. And Evan just talked about that. The shared leadership, connection and collaboration there are a lot of food heroes in this room and a lot of food heroes in Davis and Yolo County. But if we don't find better ways of connecting and we're missing opportunities to really make a powerful difference. I want to recognize the Yolo Food Bank that's here. You know the Food Bank is two representatives, Joy Cohen and Michael Bish are in the room with us. We used to think of food banks as the place of last resort for food and unfortunately they become more and more relied upon for the first resort for much of our population around the country. Here in Yolo County one in six people is food insecure, one in six adults is food insecure and one in four children are food insecure. Catherine mentioned that Davis has one of the highest food insecurity rates in the county. Davis has the highest poverty rate in the county. You don't think of it that way because we often think of starving students and we sort of chuckle that that's a fun status but the truth of the matter is in UC Davis and other campuses around California starving students is no joking matter. We do have students who are not going to, they're not coming from places where BMWs graze. They're coming from places where their whole community raised the money to send them off and we've got food insecure students here in large numbers. A few years ago when I first joined the community as supervisors I began to become more and more aware of the hunger issues that face us in Yolo County and Catherine again said something very powerful about the strengths that we have. Mediterranean climate, strong technology, really successful growers, the world's leading university, I don't care what those rankings say, in agricultural research. Whoever you go in the world you're going to hear about UC Davis if you connect with anybody in agriculture. We're packed with food heroes from Gail Feinstra who kind of wrote the book on food systems to the people on this table and several others that I recognize from the work that we've done. We've got everything we need and yet there are still hungry people here and so we've got to lash it up. When we talk about farm to fork in our Sacramento region we've got to realize that it needs to be farmed to every fork. So the food that we produce is eaten here. In our region, in our six county region, because I think region, Paul you mentioned region as the unit of action, I tend to agree with you. In our six county region, the Sacramento area only 2% of the food that we produce is eaten here. The rest is sent someplace else. A lot of it is sent away to be canned and processed and sent back to us and we buy it at the discount stores and the big boxes and we don't know that it was actually produced just a few miles away. So we've got a food system that is geared largely toward export, toward an agricultural economy that is global. It does produce the pop tarts in Paris but that's okay. That's a reasonable part of our economy but we have a more diverse food system that needs our support. From producers to transporters to processors to manufacturers to the various ways of getting food in the hands of consumers from institutional consumers to the traditional markets to the farmers markets and to the food support programs that many of the people here are trying to find ways to patch. So I think the power of shared leadership resonated with me. The description that Paula gave about the rate and scope of change as we think about where we're going next, some of us are talking to people in the agricultural sector who are starting to think about all kinds of new ways of producing more and better healthy food. The technology of today is not the same technology in the fields a hundred years ago and we know that it's not going to be the same in the time ahead. So we are in a situation with the strengths that we have to really prepare for those next waves of change and to be sure that as we move forward it's not just an agricultural economy designed to make money for people and to process chemicals into stuff that we call food but it actually is a place where the food system works for everybody. Our region is a region that's poised to be the best. We already are in terms of most of these issues but we can and must do a whole lot better. I think that we have so many food heroes and the key for us is to move together to strengthen our balanced food system so that when we're talking about farm to fork we're talking about farm to every fork. A few years ago we started Diane Perot and I convened a group of people we called YOLO Food Connect and the idea was to bring this kind of conversation together. It is more of a we just set it up as sort of the intentional forum for accidental collaboration. So we come together, we share each other's ideas and the key success in those meetings that we have about every quarter for me is that nobody wants to leave when the meeting is over. People continue to find things that they want to work on together and one of those is the business with Solano Park and the Food Recovery Network that Ethan is talking about Evan is talking about and the food bank collaboration that works there. One last comment for me I do want to continue to dwell on I want to tell you a little bit more about why we have the high food insecurity and poverty rate in Davis. It's because the campus has more than 30,000 people out of a total of about 65,000 give or take. Those numbers are generally on the target and those folks, the student population counts. They count in these numbers and they count in the real world experience of human beings and so we've been working hard to find ways to provide connection and access to the food support programs CalFresh or NAP or Food Stamps however you want to call it WIC and free and reduced lunch program meal programs for students. Having those programs be more and more accessible easy to get to and easy to understand for students on campus and this campus is the first one in California that actually has county eligibility workers on campus working with students to help them go through the application processes. That now is embedded in what's called the Aggie Compass which is now no longer in the back rooms in a carol or some place hidden that students can't ever go to on purpose and now it's in the Memorial Union right up front in the front yard sort of the entrance point. So students can come in, there's food available that's donated by local farmers and they have a way to get into a program where they can access greater amounts of food. These things happen when the thing that Evan talked about when we connect and when we collaborate and when we find ways to do something that we couldn't have even thought of if we were doing it all by ourselves. So I think you're a genius in those comments and Paula thanks again for coming. I was going to ask this question of Paula but it's even more topical given what we've just heard from the panel. Your first name is Andrea experience Andrea had with hot Italian and I ate there probably a half a dozen times in its short history but exactly it wasn't enough and part of what was said in other discussions on yet in putting together her network of cool cuisine the network of the students in putting forward for all the things that Paula talked about we have many of them very advanced our food production in all is really very strong. We have a lot of awareness and focus on social justice issues could be more but the life blood getting to your economic development point is that we have more people who are going to good restaurants like Andreas and the networking that has succeeded with these other areas is something that I think we need to do much more of as a community and I'd like to get some of the ideas of the people in the panel about how we can network together so that the 80% who are the silent majority we all are in the 10% or 20% who really care and who are really involved but her business succeeds because the 80% come and they're aware of just how good a restaurant hers is my favorite restaurant in town is Yakitori Yushan and I bet you there are many people in his room who've never heard of Yakitori Yushan. It meets all of the criteria that are here. What could we do as a community to network better and to make sure that businesses like Andreas that epitomize our goals don't end up in Sacramento. I promise I didn't pay him to come tonight. No, I think it's a good question. I think it's actually a question I've been asking myself and I obviously believe in Davis enough to open another restaurant here because I do believe that the people that live here not just students will sort of speak with their wallet. I think it's difficult in Davis where a lot of people are house poor. Housing here is very expensive and there's a lot of young families. I think there's what nine elementary schools here which says that there's a lot of young families here and so as young families your priority obviously is your kids and so your kids are doing violin and water polo and have a lot of demands and so really the last priority is going out to restaurants and so I think it's our responsibility to keep reminding people that we do have good food and healthy food and even though it isn't a restaurant we make everything from scratch and we do source sustainable seafood and do all those things that people want. I don't know, I'm not sure I have the exact answer obviously because Solomon's only been open now six months and we're hanging in there and I think Davis Commons really primarily is a lunch place which Solomon's primarily is as well. It's kind of breakfast and lunch so it fits better there than Hot Italian did so hopefully not going to let it all do better. Anyone else has anything to add to that? You saw my slide on working groups so we just created one for our partners to see what some of the issues are but we were mostly looking at developing businesses along the supply chain because we want to rework the supply chain to a value based supply chain if you know what I mean by that meaning reflecting the values. Supporting restaurants is something that we do have chefs as part of our food policy council so I think it's important to bring folks together and figure out what the common needs are. It's a policy council so what's the policy changes that need to be made is usually what our question is when we come together. I do actually. So this is just an example of maybe what you're talking about but a couple of weeks ago we had a fundraiser at Dunlow Brewery. Have any of you guys been to Dunlow Brewery? It's really neat. I had never been there and what happened was because we made this partnership all of our farm people went to some companies they had never been before and were introduced to a brewery that's pretty awesome. They had beer that tastes like whiskey. It's really neat. So they had discovered this place so I think that you were talking about the people who care like the 10% of the people who care if those people can be matched up in that way like if businesses were willing to host these things like restaurants were willing to host these things I think it was an excellent way in which people had been introduced to Brewery. I just want to say when you're talking about matching up Robin I'm wondering if there's a way that some of the homeless people who don't have a myriad of other problems but who just are jobless and could be gotten out to where you need the help because I think that it's a great opportunity for them to get the training now that you're a master gardener and actually how to grow things and then we can get them involved in growing food for themselves and others and we get you the help that you need so there's just a thought there. I'm struck that only two of the panelists up here are embedded in the market system. Everyone else is working outside of the exchange system you're working in writing services versus kind of a business model where there's where it's market based sort of things and also I'm struck that the market is failing to feed our people. We have a failure of the capitalist system failure of the exchange system to basically feed the people who really needed their system. I'm also struck that basically these food councils are way of working around the old way of change in our American economy was in entrepreneurs but this innovation this new kind of this lead standard of the food system is a way of basically spurring these food councils a way of spurring things. I'm wondering whether how we can what that says about 21st century capitalism and I'm kind of confirming it but Paul has some comments about whether the capitalist system can change enough to really feed our people in the country. Does anybody want to take that? Do you want to take that Paul? I'm thinking it's a question about capitalism so I just think it's about making the economy work for us and I do think that I guess if you want to go back to the original ideas you have Jefferson and Hamilton but this will be short don't worry and I'm not going to break out into song but Hamilton had a view of a centralized manufacturing global economy basically although he didn't imagine America being what it is now. Jefferson was more for the smallholder farm than believe in an agrarian economy so I think it's a matter of kind of decentralizing our economy again because it's quite consolidated I'm not against capitalism I actually believe in business and enterprise I just think there needs to be more in the middle stream so we have a lot of small which is great we need more in the middle and I'm about the middle and so we're trying to build a mid-scale economy through our purchasing program for regions it's that large consolidated in the hands of a few oligarchic economy that I don't think works well for us so building out that mid-scale is a goal for me at least. I'd like to make just a couple comments on that too part of this is not about eliminating the ability for people to create businesses and make a profit to care for their families and to care for their futures it's some of it is about removing some of the barriers to entry for in the marketplace so one of the challenges that farmers have is always being able to have access to markets so if you're a large farmer you've got contracts and you've got all kinds of ways to guarantee that your product is going to be sold at either risk involved but you've got a heavy risks but you've got a structure an infrastructure in the economy to support your activities if you're small you're probably you're going to have some challenges but you're going to create things like farmers markets and CSA deliveries and all kinds of other alternative approaches to the traditional market system part of what I think local food systems can focus on is reducing barriers to entry for new kinds of businesses that are innovative that are coming up places like I'm going to say like the Upper Cross that is looking at ways of partnering with other businesses to create new kinds of products and have new distributed ways of accessing your markets and those kinds of businesses exist throughout our community and we're talking about making them more available I will tell you though that in addition to the economic aspect of this when we talk about food security and hunger that we've talked about a little bit here it's a proxy for poverty and if we talk about we're going to solve issues of poverty in our county or our city or our region people's eyes glaze over because they don't really want to talk about it it probably offends them in some ways or they want the people who are poor to simply pull themselves up by their own bootstraps as if they have those to start with but if we talk about hungry children people pay attention and they think that they own a part of the problem and they're interested in helping address it that's the genius of it to me Hi, I guess I'd just like to talk about carbon for a minute so in Paula's presentation she had the wonderful IPCC data derived graph that shows agriculture is 24% of emissions when you start talking about it from a livestock perspective it comes into about 18% of all emissions are affiliated with livestock specifically and so we've talked a lot about equity in terms of access to food but we haven't talked a lot about equity in terms of carbon balance affiliated with food so when are we going to really start pushing forward and adopting policies that correctly price emissions for food so you can look at a fee bait like we've instituted for other things where you take high carbon foods to subsidize lower carbon foods and people that are buying higher carbon foods tend to be more affluent and those buying lower carbon foods tend to be less affluent it can really start getting to a lot of social and economic equity issues if you start dealing with the carbon equity in our food budgets and food balances and I don't see anyone really presenting a lot of solutions here to start dealing with this direct issue that we need to address if you look at California right now at a state level we price carbon emissions from literally every sector except for agriculture and that seems like a huge issue and if we start talking regionally maybe we should be pricing carbon in agricultural products regionally so we can start dealing with our local issues I don't see any good reason other than AB 1838 which was enacted which directly prevents us from taxing agricultural products in grocery stores but there's no reason we can't start thinking about this from a different perspective and actually using some of our policies and some of our goodwill and some of our networks to create incentives to level the playing field for new business practices to come in that actually offer lower carbon food options and rewarding them by making it more expensive for their traditional conventional food systems to play in our market so I'd appreciate people's comments or thoughts on what they're doing to try and address this 24% of the emission issue. Well I'll just say that sort of dovetailing on what Don said I mean I think we need to be able to provide access for not you know farmers and makers so they do have the ability to make products locally and then distribute locally I mean right now even at Nugget and Co-op many of the products are actually made here it's really hard to buy only products other than produce that's actually made here and if it's not easy for these makers to make their products because they don't have access to capital or commercial kitchen or whatever the barriers are we have to make it easy and affordable for these makers to be able to produce their product locally and then distribute locally answer that so it's not an easy thing to answer quickly it's an important question. Taxes are complicated you raise taxes a way to do it they can be regressive in nature though depending on how you manage it. There is some I wouldn't say it's happening here in California but I have read about some question about a carbon tax on factory farm meat production it's been raised in other countries and other parts of the world. There's an effort called true cost accounting and food underway that's trying to calculate the negative externalities of food you could look at t-bag so a lot of these efforts are happening internationally to quantify these externalities which can in turn once they're more known lead to remedial types of ways to address it it depends on how that provokes the public policy response and what the public will is toward that I will say in our program we do have a way to address environmental sustainability through meat reduction so this is what cool davis was talking about so Oakland unified actually was able to reduce their carbon footprint reduce their water footprint and save $42,000 by reducing meat in their food so there's kind of a behavioral shift that can happen there's lots of levels which these shifts can take place as was mentioned a behavioral shift is one that can start impacting it but if you really want to look at it from that point of quantifying and addressing I would say t-bag and the true cost accounting and food efforts which are happening globally are moving in that direction. The policy response is complicated given the current national and international political situation so unfortunately did you want to I think that if we want to address that on a really local level one of the things that we are if we're going to meet our climate action goals as a city is that this theme for our new downtown if we're going to create we're going to create say on G street a kind of innovation center I don't know we're using different names for it but if there's going to be some kind of a space created where it's got a theme attached to it that coming up with something that's focused on lower carbon foods and sustainable foods is a really great direction I think for our city to go. Thank you unfortunately we are out of time I think you can ask people questions directly and we want to give an opportunity to join the teacher. Put a plug in for future, future forms. So most of you I'm Chris Granger with Cool Davis Cool Davis provides the platform upon which Davis Future Form is a working group of Cool Davis as is Cool Cuisine and what I would like to encourage you to think about is how you can get involved there I'm guessing there's going to be some activities that come out of this discussion but also Cool Cuisine and the Davis Futures Forum are always looking for volunteers and other people who want to get involved in their work. This next year we'll be looking at some new topics for Davis Futures Forum and Judy Corbett who's here tonight has been the lead for thinking those up and bringing great speakers like Paula to us from other places so we'll be putting out a survey at the end of this month and if you get that electronically we'd love to get input from you about future topics that you'd like to hear about so thank you for coming tonight. I'd like to just thank Paula again and Judy in our panel and if people would like to ask a few more questions to the panel we'll just rush out of here you can catch them before they leave.