 This is the sixth in our series on sustainability. Last quarter, we brought people to the campus from all over the world to provide different perspectives on sustainability. And throughout the rest of April, we will continue to do that. We have a couple of very interesting speakers from Switzerland and from Washington DC coming up later in the night. Tonight is sort of an unusual night and a special night because it's one of those rare opportunities where we get to showcase the research to work people here in the campus, not just the professors but the students, because a lot of the vitality of this campus and a lot of the interesting things that are going on, and we hope it continues to be this way, comes from the students, graduate students and undergraduate students. And tonight's speakers are and have been students here. So I want to tell you a little bit about each of them. Brian McDonald, who received his BA and Master's degree from Virginia Tech, was a PhD student here in social ecology. He graduated recently and is just completing a postdoc before taking a regular faculty position at Penn State. He's also the Assistant Director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs, which many of you have heard about, and has played a really very crucial role in establishing that center and growing into its current sort of size. His work focuses on how sort of the complex networks that have emerged, largely driven by technology, by economic globalization, by political openness, that have emerged in the defined world that you are in and the defined world which is in very critical ways different, considerably different, significantly different from the preceded yours. And it has generated a set of challenges that are unprecedented. And he looks at how these networks are amplifying and creating new threats and new vulnerabilities. A lot of his work is focused on the global food system and the ways in which the global food system provides enormous benefits, but also basically provides your generation with a set of enormous challenges, challenges that you will learn a lot more about in the next hour. He's not only been a student here, he's also been a very active, wide range of activities on and off campus, and has established himself as a leading researcher in the area of food security and globalization of food production and consumption. He's the co-editor of two books, one on landmines and human security, another on global environmental change of human security. He has published a wide range of academic journals and other venues. He's talked about food security across the country and a number of other countries. So he'll be joining us shortly. He's going to be accompanied by a woman who's at this time still an undergraduate student here at UCI. Kelsey Neger, who's a psych manager, is also, I just want to point out this sounds like a little bit like graduation, but she has a 4.0 GPA, she's a region scholar, UROC researcher of the month, campus wide honors program. Last year she began working with the Center with Brian and myself, doing a sustainability assessment of the food system here at UCI. And this was a rather, this was sort of novel work and we required her to get the approval of a wide range of people on the campus to look at the character of food that you eat day after day after day. It turns out that only about 9.5% of that food would qualify as sustainably produced food. The campus is committed, along with other UCI campuses, to reach a goal of 20% of this food being sustainable. And the study that Kelsey conducted last year has been an important platform to giving sort of impetus to reaching this target. This year she's carried out, she designed and carried out a survey about attitudes towards sustainability into the system here on the campus. And the survey that she did, she gave some of you may well have responded to, had a rather incredible response rate of over 75%. It's a real pleasure to introduce to you two of the UCI's students who have been doing really remarkable and innovative work in the area of food sustainability and food security. So let me turn it over to Brian McDonald, Dr. Brian McDonald and Kelsey here, thanks very much. Well, good evening. Delighted to be here and have a chance to talk a little bit about some of the research that's been going on at UCI. Tonight I'm gonna start off for about the first 20 minutes and provide a little bit of a larger context for the work that we've been doing. Talk a little bit about the links between food security and sustainability and define those concepts and how they fit together. Provide a brief overview of what we talk about is world food problems, the sort of challenges that we face in the food system globally in many ways. It's just as pressing a challenge as the world faced in 1950, but it's much different landscape of challenges. It's not just hunger, it's not problems that can just be solved by increasing agricultural output. And we'll talk about why that is and how that presents a little bit more complexity and nuance to the sorts of things that we have to face going forward. Then as Dr. Matthew mentioned, Kelsey will talk a little bit about her research here on campus and the findings of some of the work she's been doing. I'll conclude a little bit more with some steps that can be done both at the global level, but also things that you all can do starting in your daily lives to have an impact on sustainability and food. And then we will have some time for question and answer before I think you all take a break and then decide what's gonna happen next. So while I talk about food, I, as Richard mentioned, I have a PhD in social ecology. A lot of my work is in political science and international relations, which tends to focus on things like international conflict, global trade. And one of the things we find in a lot of political science and international relations is food's really off the screen, although food has been one of the primary drivers of conflict and instability throughout human history. And there's been a great deal of global effort trying to deal with food problems, understand food problems and try and solve them. And despite this effort during the 20th century, food issues remain a significant source of challenges as we move through the 21st century. In recent years, rising food prices have motivated unrest in many parts of the world and increased the number of people who did not receive proper nutrition. National and international food safety episodes have raised awareness of the ability of the food supply to transfer health threats from animals to people and around the world. And there's growing recognition of the role that agricultural and food production activities play, both in driving climate change and environmental change, but also recognizing that climate and environmental change are gonna have significant effects on food security and food production in the coming decades. So in terms of this talk, I think there are really three key messages. We're gonna throw a lot of you, use a bit of a fire hose on food security so we know you won't kind of drink everything in, but we hope you take away a few key messages. And the first is that the world is facing significant food problems and it's unlikely given the ties and the drivers of these problems, things like global population growth, increase in wealth and changing consumption patterns of people around the world. Food problems today are tied into these core drivers of a lot of global processes. So it's unlikely that we can just sit back and say, this is a problem that's getting a little bit better every year and if we leave it alone in 30 or 40 years, there won't be 100 people left in the world. That's not the direction these problems are going in. So there's unlikely that these problems will improve without significant and targeted action. The second key message is that food insecurity is rarely about insufficient food in an absolute sense. We can't just grow more food and solve all the problems we face with the food system even if it was possible to grow more food without significant environmental and social costs. And third is that sustainability is both a core challenge but also can be a core theme for thinking about how we improve food security. So a couple of core concepts that can help provide some orienting guidance as we walk through this new landscape of world food problems. And the first concept is this idea of food security. At the most general level, food security refers to the concept availability of food and people's ability to access it. The most commonly used definition is from the world declaration on world, the road declaration on world food security from 1996. And this is an idea that food security exists when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. And economist Emeritus Sen identifies food security as a vital component of what's necessary for human beings to flourish. And he said a person or household or population has food security if it has sufficient access to food to permit full, robust human development and realization of human capacities. So in both of these definitions of food security, you get a sense that there's a component that's about the availability of food and an equally important component about people's ability to access food. And that can be physical access, that can be economic access, that can be social access. There are a lot of reasons, even when food's available, that people are not able to get access to it. The roots of modern food security are often traced to President Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address where he laid out his vision for a world founded on four freedoms, including what he called the third freedom, freedom from one, which translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy, peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world. And this, there had been a lot of activity around improving access to food under the League of Nations prior to World War II. But Roosevelt's vision of a world founded on these four freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from fear alongside freedom from want became really the sort of orienting goals for a lot of the activity that the United Nations was founded around and sort of set the framework for the post-World War to efforts that the United States sought to create in the world. And since the end of the Second World War, there's been a great deal of effort to optimize food and agricultural production towards trying to achieve food security. And they used a variety of strategies including improving production, boosting food supplies and stockpiles, establishing international trade systems, developing global agreements and targets around food security. A lot of very different strategies trying to identify the reasons that people all around the world get food in very different ways from very different sources and sort of trying to find the problems that were leading people to not have access to enough food. And for a time, from sort of the 1950s through the late 1990s, the early part of this decade, it looked like this basket of strategies that was being put together, we were seeing a sort of steady decline in the number of hungry people in the world. And it seemed like the world had figured out a way, it could increase production, it could increase trade, increase economic access to things and hunger was sort of going away in the world. And it did seem in the turn of the 21st century, like by the middle of the 21st century, there wouldn't be chronically hungry people left in the world, but this would be a problem to solve for a few reasons that's not where we are anymore. I'll talk about that in a few minutes. So food security remains a significant and necessary and critical component of efforts of global governance efforts. The second core concept that's useful for us to think about is sustainability. And that's another theme of the course that many of you all are in and the speaker series that some of you may have attended other events in. So while the concept of sustainable development was really powerfully articulated in the late 1980s, there's a long history of thought and interaction about the appropriate relationship between humans and nature. And we can consider a number of thinkers that have laid out what they thought of as a sort of ideal relationship between humans and nature. Tonight I wanna begin with Thoreau. And we often talk about Henry David Thoreau as someone he's most well known for his exultations and exhorting of embracing wildness. We can think about the famous quote from Thoreau that sort of everybody often hears. It was in Dead Poets Society. It's in his essay, Walking About, Live Deep and Suck Out the Merrill of Life. And it's this sort of association of Thoreau with sort of wilderness and wildness. But tonight what I wanna talk about Thoreau is being important is because he really moved Americans to a middle ground between wildness and civilization. And he saw that the sort of pastoral agrarian life was a way to take the good things that existed in civilization, but also the good things that existed in the wildness of nature and bring them together to sort of a middle point that allowed humans to have the benefits of civilization and also the benefits of wildness. It was something that prior to Thoreau had not been articulated as sort of a vision for Americans. Prior to Thoreau, a lot of the thinking in America is about cutting down the wilderness, settling, moving westward, turning the frontier into a civilization. So Thoreau was one of the first people to articulate this idea that maybe there were some benefits in not completely converting all of the American continent into civilization. And these ideas would be incredibly influential to people like Ebenezer Howard who's a British thinker at the turn of the 20th century with his ideas of garden cities. And it was this notion of yesterday people lived and worked in smoke. Today they were living in suburbs and working in the smoke, but with advances with technology and urban planning it might be possible to live in a different kind of a city. And his idea was something that looks very familiar to us today as we think about sustainable cities but these were sort of small scale cities that would have their own agricultural systems, would produce their own food, would have their own small scale industrial systems and they would be connected in. And these networks of cities rather than being big sprawling cities they would be sort of small, more livable cities. And Howard's ideas were very influential to thinkers like Lewis Mumford and also people like Matt Mackay a thinker who is most well known for his ideas of the Appalachian Trail which we think about today as largely a wilderness trail that extends 2,179 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahman in Maine. But as you may be able to see on the left hand picture which is a hand drawn map that Mackay originally intended the trail would be something that would connect not just Georgia and Maine but would have these branch trails that would connect into major cities like New York City and Boston. But along the trail wouldn't just be a wilderness experience, it would be self sufficient communities, farms, areas where artists could live and sort of provide a refuge for people from civilization, from industry. In the 1960s when Del Verri, a poet and farmer from Kentucky wrote that it is a rule apparently that whatever is divided must compete. We have been wronged to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best. Divided body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with one another. And none of these competitions has ever resolved in the triumph of one competitor but only in the exhaustion of both. And the last thing I want to highlight is Maria Rodeo who has written in a recent book that the debate over the climate crisis and environmental destruction has been almost completely focused on energy usage. We haven't yet made the full connection between how we grow our food and the impact it can have on the climate crisis and our health crisis. And this is just a very small and imperfect sampling of many, many writers and thinkers who have written on this topic. And what is needed these thinkers suggest are relationships between nature and society that enhance the health and vitality, not just of human communities but of all communities and of the ecosystems upon which all life depends. And this, of course, is a central idea around the concept of sustainable development which is most powerfully articulated by the World Commission on Environment and Development in its 1987 report, Our Common Future. This is a well-known definition of sustainable development that humanity has the ability to make development sustainable, to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Wrapped up in this definition are two core ideas. The first is this concept of needs, the essential needs, in particular, the essential needs of the world's poor which have priority, and also the concept of limitations imposed by technology as well as social and political structures on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs. And both of these concept needs and limitations are especially essential with regards to thinking about food insecurity. Improving sustainability of agriculture and food production systems was recognized by the World Commission as a key component of sustainable development. They devoted a chapter of Our Common Future to talking about food and sustainability. And one of the things they found is that there were sufficient agricultural resources and technology needed to feed growing populations of the world, but really the problem wasn't how to farm or the technology needed to produce more food. It was a question of political will. It's a question of bringing people together to make hard choices needed to change trading systems, think about the subsidy system, think about reducing the market barriers. So this is 1987, so almost 2012 is gonna be the 25th anniversary of the publication of this report. And these are the same problems that we identified today. It's not technical, it's not necessarily about the scientific aspects. It's about the political and social factors that impede sustainable agriculture. And they identified that to be sustainable, efforts needed to take in the need to shift production to where it was most needed, to secure the livelihood to the rural poor, and to conserve the resource base that all farming, but also all life is dependent upon. So briefly then, I just wanna take you through as we talk about the world food network, the network of global food systems. What are some of the core problems that we think about today? The origination of thinking about this is just recognizing that globalization is this big process that's been occurring over the past couple of decades, has changed the way that food systems operate. That the food system that we exist in now, if you go to a restaurant and you order a meal, that meal is very different than it might have been 10 or 15 years ago. Each component of that, whether it's beef, lettuce, tomatoes, bread, potatoes, the Coca-Cola you may have with it, that's a different meal than you might have had. It may be even the very same restaurant in the restaurant chain a few decades ago. And by globalization, whatever they're talking about, is a set of economic, social, political, and environmental processes that are involving increasing speed and scale of interactions which operate through networks and they're transforming many aspects of daily life, not just the global food system. But one of the major transformations we've seen is a recognition that local, regional, national, and international food systems really have been intertwined into what we can talk about most properly as a network. It's not a system, it's not an integrated whole. It's this sort of set of ad hoc connections that change based on market factors based upon the time of year to move, to grow food and move it around the planet. And this is just a map that shows global meat flows in various parts of the year for just three kinds of meat, pork, beef, and poultry, which just gives you a little bit of a sense of how this food system has come together and what it looks like. And in recent years, we've seen a great deal of unrest and signs that this food system isn't exactly, these food systems aren't coming together well and they need to be shepherded a little bit more. There are significant rises in global food prices related to a number of factors, including environmental and climate changes, severe weather events, in certain parts of the world, speculation as economic unrest started to spread and the real estate markets were looking a little risky. Some investors started moving some of their wealth into things like wheat and other commodities which they thought historically would be relatively stable. Of course, this caused significant price increases with those commodities, things like the price of corn tortillas in places like Mexico increased significantly in short periods of time, which like the large scale rallies like Mexico one and the opera laugh in Mexico City. Global food safety episodes, changes in what we think of as good and bad actors in the food system and more recently, an effort by the First Lady of the United States to really try and focus attention on the problem of overweight and obesity in the United States, which has just become an epidemic leading to more and more what we once thought of as adult onset problems, things like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, hypertension, adult onset diabetes are being seen more and more in younger and younger children and these are things that are going to have significant impacts all throughout our lives. One of the things that we see with globalization is a recognition that more and more things that we used to talk about as impacting states now are being felt in the daily lives of individuals and communities and to try and capture this shift, we start talking about human security, which has achieved when and where individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate or adapt to threats, have a capacity and freedom to exercise these options and can actively participate in pursuing these options. So it's a very different idea of security than the sort of old top-down notion that when states are secure, their citizens are secure. Human security is built on this implicit recognition that people need to be involved, even in defining what they see as threats to the security of themselves, their families. And there are three primary sets of challenges to food security that I want to go through in a little bit more detail. The first is ensuring proper nutrition. The second is optimizing food safety. And the third is managing global environmental change. When it comes to ensuring nutrition, as I mentioned before, we saw a pattern for much of the 20th century that the number of chronically hungry people in the world was sort of slowly decreasing. In the last few years, there's been a sharp reversal on this trend. And the estimates for 2009 are that there's now more than a billion people in the world that are chronically hungry. It's up sharply from 950 million the year before. And if these estimates are correct, that will mean there are now more chronically hungry people in the world than there have ever been since 1970. So very, very sharp increase. Very alarming statistics. The World Food Program estimates that one in six people on this planet is chronically hungry. So you can't overstate enough the challenge of hunger that people face. And at the same time that many people in the world face increased hunger, the global economic crisis has also meant that many of the coping strategies that people face have been broken down. So they'd be facing higher food prices, but they're also facing lower employment prospects which may impact remittances, which may impact giving to charitable organizations. This is something that the World Food Program's faced in the last few years. At the same time, it has to pay more for the food aid it's buying. It's also facing decreases in donations from individuals and donor countries. So it's really, there are a number of factors driving this increase in the number of people who are hungry. So it's not an easy thing to solve. It's not just a bad weather event or a cyclone that took out rice production in one area so you see a little bit of a blip. It's a number of things that are causing this increase. So that makes it much harder to try and figure out ways to solve it effectively. And these trends, as you can see in 2010, which is the red line on this, the World Food Price Index that FAO puts out is not as high as it was in 2008, but it still remains quite a bit higher than it was in 2006 and 2005 before this recent rise in food prices occur. So like so many other areas of the global economy, it seems like we've adjusted into a new normal that food prices are probably not gonna drop back to the levels they were before the recent rise in prices. And this is something that's impacted food security here even in the United States. The number of people in the United States who lack minimal access to food shout out to 49 million last year. It's the highest number that USDA has recorded since they started keeping track of food insecurity in the United States in 1995. So even in developed countries, even in the United States, this is trends that are being seen in Europe and the United Kingdom and Canada, more and more people are not getting access to sufficient food. But hunger as big of a problem as it is is not the only way that food security impacts people. There's also a problem from what's called micronutrient efficiencies. Maybe people are getting enough calories from their diet, but they're not getting the vitamins and minerals they need for an active and healthy life. And this is a problem especially when it affects children or mothers who have significant impacts on maternal health. And this is a major challenge for development because micronutrient deficiencies have long knock-on effects. That means kids who aren't getting enough iron or vitamin A in their diets today are gonna have developmental impacts. They're gonna affect societies for 20 and 30 years to come. So it's not just that you can have a child who doesn't get enough proper nutrition for the first few years of their life, and then if they get it afterwards, you're dealing with people that have permanent developmental problems, permanent impacts on their health and their potential. And also, sort of ironic, the same time that we're facing the highest number of chronically hungry people in the world, we're also facing the highest number of overweight and obese people in probably human history. We can see this even in the United States relatively rapid and in fact short-term increases in 1990. No US state had a prevalence of obesity in the adult population greater than 15%. But by 2008, 32 states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%. And six of these states had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30% of the adult population. The prevalence of overweight obesity is strongly linked to pressing social concerns. For example, healthcare spending on obesity and obesity-related conditions now accounts for about 9.1% of all healthcare spending. So almost one out of every $10 that we spent on healthcare in this country is related to concerns of overweight and obesity. And this is a particularly ironic result of the recent rise in food prices is that many people facing a shrinking food dollar find themselves turning to fast food outlets to places where they can get food sources that may be cheaper, may be filled them up but they're not getting coal rings, they're not getting fruits and vegetables, they're not getting the things that they need to lead an active and healthy life. And when we talk about the causes of this basket of problems that we can think of as malnutrition, whether it's hunger or overweight and obesity or micro nutrient deficiency, the problems aren't just food. There's this sort of complex, often talked about is food, health and care. Sometimes it's that people don't have access to food. Other times it may be that they're sick and they have increased nutritional demands. You can get all sorts of parasites or things that raise your daily nutrient requirements from things like 1,700 to 2,000 calories a day to double or triple what you might need. Also things like lack of access to clean water. And then other things like cultural decisions. Many of us come from cultures where foods that were once kind of special foods. I grew up in the South and fried chicken was a big food that we used to have on Sundays because it's a lot of work to clean a chicken, cut it up, bread it, fry it. If you're doing it in the kitchen, it takes a long time. But now the things like fast food have made that readily available. Things that were once kind of treat foods become available and you can have fried chicken for, well, every meal of every day because you can get chicken biscuits or small micro chicken biscuits for breakfast. So you can have fried chicken for breakfast if you want. So when we talk about solving these problems, it's not just a question of growing more food or growing different food. It has a whole basket of challenges related to cultural practices, people's family decisions, but also things like whether they have access to clean water and their healthcare issues. A second set of challenges is the need to optimize food safety. And in recent years we've seen a number of global issues. In 2006, there was a case of contamination of organic spinach. 2007, pet food in the United States, the largest recall of consumer products in US history was contaminated with melamine. It's a cold byproduct if you put it in food and you test it, it looks like that's a lot more protein than it actually does. So it's a cheap way for people to make pet food like it has a lot more food in it than it actually did. And this was not only significant because it affected a number of Americans who own pets, but it also pre-saged a much larger stare in China where the same substance found its way into milk and milk products that sick in 300,000 people in China. And also got into milk powder that used in things like candy that was found as far away as the Netherlands or powder milk that was sold in Africa. So really, these are global crises. As was in 2008, 2009, there was a scar, or not a scar, but a problem involving peanut butter. It was also international because mostly in the United States that there was one person who bought a packet of crackers and then crossing the candidate and ate them. So it became an international crisis thanks to that Canadian who had unfortunate food choices with his peanut butter crackers. And it's really hard to estimate and get good figures on how much foodborne illness there is out there. But the CDC estimates that one in four Americans becomes sick every year with some sort of foodborne illness. So again, it's a fairly widespread probably in the United States and around the world. A third set of challenges is the need to manage global environmental change. Food and agricultural production are significant drivers of impacts on land, water. We've seen significant large scale effects, such as the dust storms that affected the United States and the middle part of the 1920s, 1930s, United States and Canada, one of the major factors that leads to a large population in Southern California coming from middle parts of the United States. So agriculture, food production activities were sort of more comfortable with the notion that they can have significant localized impacts. But we're also becoming more and more aware that these things aggregate and they have significant impacts, significant drivers of global climate change. But also, according to the latest reports from IPCC and things like Sir Nicholas Stearns report from the British government, will have significant effects that could impact food and agricultural production. Things like melting glaciers and rising water scares, the increasing droughts, but also increasing floods in certain parts of the country, rising sea levels and ocean acidification which could impact fish stocks and various impacts on ecosystems and species, not just charismatic things like polar bears, but also things like honeybee populations or soil bacteria which aren't quite as furry and maybe not as huggable as polar bears in reality are probably not very huggable, but they seem very huggable. But soil bacteria seems less huggable, is probably less huggable, but very, very important to things like carbon sequestration, the ability of plants to take up water and nutrients and these are things that are gonna have widespread global impacts. Even this is in charge from NOAA that talks about changes in seasonal precipitation in the United States and Canada, and you can see that the browner that things get or the drier, the bluer, the wetter they get, so anybody knows anything about farming or gardening, not enough water can be just as much of a problem as too much water. And so we're gonna see a lot of changes even in North America that's gonna have significant impacts. Earlier this year, we had a very, very wet winter in many parts of the Midwest. It was very difficult for farmers to harvest corn at the same time as the corn prices were at record highs. So it put farmers in a very difficult position that they could just get their corn out of the field. They could face a significant profit opportunity, but the weather made that very difficult to do. So in terms of confronting global change, there are mitigation measures that we'll have to think about things that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance sinks, which agriculture and soil management could be a significant source of waste to sequester carbon in the soil. But there are also adaptation measures, things that reduce vulnerability of systems against actual or expected climate change effects. There are also interactive effects. These are separate silos that things that we do in one area, we have to think about the way that these things all tie together. Things that people who are hungry may do to increase their access to food, maybe they'll go higher on the hillside and try and plant more than they have in the past, that could increase erosion or lead to more siltation in rivers and waterways. So these things are interactive and we do have to think about them holistically as we think about trying to put together some of the problems. So I wanna pause there and turn it over to Kelsey and let her talk a little bit about her research into your attitudes towards sustainable food. I mentioned my name is Kelsey Maher and I'm an undergraduate student here at UC Irvine. And I've been involved in a number of projects related to research and advocacy and education around food on campus here. But I would ask to speak today about a survey I conducted last quarter about student attitudes and behaviors around sustainable food on campus. Many of you may have actually taken this image. Just to give you a little bit of background, throughout the United States, colleges and universities are now implementing programs to address the social and environmental costs of conventional agri-food systems that Brian just discussed. These farm to college programs, as they're called, seek to redirect university dollars in order to support food systems that not only nourish the health of consumers, us, but also the welfare of communities and the environment and food producers. As institutions of immense purchasing power, universities are poised to make really big changes in our global food system. Just here in the United States, colleges and universities spend about $4 billion on food every year. And by investing in food that is sustainable and socially responsible, these institutions can leverage their purchasing power to establish localized food economies. Here in the University of California, we're in the midst of establishing a farm to college program at each campus in the UC system, and several students in this room were actually pretty actively involved in that process. Last summer, after a student campaign that had lasted several years, we were able to get the UC to adopt sustainable food service policies that now mandate that every campus in the University of California purchase 20% sustainable food by the year 2020. These farm to college programs hold great potential for social and environmental stewardship, but the effectiveness of these programs depends on colleges' ability to balance these social and environmental concerns with the needs of their consumers' armies. Unfortunately, I found very few studies that have examined the college market for sustainable food, partly which drove the project that I did. I actually only found three studies about the college market for sustainable food. These studies were conducted in Belgium, UC Santa Cruz, and UC San Diego. These studies demonstrated that students at each of these campuses were interested in learning more about how their food is produced, and interested in supporting food systems that are socially responsible and sustainable. But their willingness to pay for these foods varied across region, which suggests that the affordability of these foods significantly impacts students' willingness to purchase these items, which to me is a really intuitive finding on a student. So my main objective in conducting this study was to understand the attitudes and behaviors of students on campus in order to make effective decisions about campus-based educational programs and the food policy that we've been working on on campus. My second theory objective was to examine regional differences in the students' food culture, and I did that by comparing the results of my survey to the results of surveys conducted at UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego. My survey was 28 questions, and it was online. Six students, about 10 to 15 minutes to complete, and I adapted the questions from the survey, from the surveys conducted at UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego, so I could make across the members' comparisons. The survey was distributed to all 4,350 students who hold a meal plan on campus, as well as residents of several on-campus housing communities, and overall 906 students completed the survey. Here's a quick snapshot of the students who took it. As you can tell, the only students were really over-represented in the survey, it makes me think that they had a thing better to do than sit around and take surveys. And freshmen were also over-represented, which makes sense to me, because I think about 90% of the meal plan holders on campus are freshmen. That's just a breakdown of gender, and I'm not really sure why the pie chart got caught. Compared to our campus as a whole, Asian Americans were slightly under-represented, while European Americans were slightly over-represented, and survey respondents identified themselves as middle-class and moderate or left-leaning. So most respondents, about 63%, reported that they eat at the dining halls at least a few times a year, with about a fifth of respondents saying that they ate there at least several meals each day. And over half respondents have disaster meal plan at some point in their college career, and only about a third of respondents currently don't have meal plan. So all that being said, what did I find? So I found that students expressed a really clear interest in purchasing sustainable food on campus, and they had a really inclusive definition of what sustainable means to them, and I'll get to that in a second. 64% of respondents reported that they would be interested in purchasing sustainable products if they were offered at multiple dining locations on campus, and these are just a few of the comments that I received on the survey that support that claim. Participants demonstrated a really clear interest in a variety of social environmental issues, such as the ones that Brian mentioned, but they expressed the most interest in issues that are related to our personal consumption, that being nutrition, safety, affordability of food. And this graphic displays students' responses to a question about how much importance they place on different food issues. And it shows the percentage of students who claim that they were at least somewhat interested in each of these issues, and as you can tell, nutrition was significantly more important to them than any of the other issues, although they were important. When we asked students to indicate what food qualities were included in their personal definitions of sustainable food, they reported very inclusive to definitions that covered a broad range of social and environmental issues. I listed the top five qualities that participants chose, and you can see that four of the top five are related to personal consumption, healthiness, safety, minimal processing, and affordability. So in all these questions, it's really clear that students are interested in a wide variety of food issues, but they're most interested in issues that directly affect them. And this result, again, is rather intuitive, and it will be a good fact to keep in mind as we think about how to better educate students about other social and environmental issues. I'll get to that. These are just a few more comments that I received on my survey. I received hundreds of comments on my survey, and an overwhelming majority of them had to do with the health of the food offered in the diagonals. Maybe some of you can relate to it. So beyond nutrition, affordability is the main concern for students. 82% of students said they would be interested in purchasing sustainable foods if they were offered at the same price as other foods, while only 25% said that they would purchase them for a higher price. So while students are interested in supporting sustainable production methods, their willingness to buy these products is closely linked to the price of these items, which, again, is no surprise. So shifting gears just a little bit, I also wanted to get a sense of how much students already know about their food, and most students reported that they don't know enough about where their food comes from, and they even indicated that it's difficult to find this information. I can relate to this. I spend a lot of my life thinking about food and trying to figure out where my food comes from, and even I have a really hard time figuring that out, so this definitely comes as a result that makes sense to me. And this lack of knowledge is also apparent when we ask students about how often they purchase foods that are commonly regarded as sustainable. After defining the terms fair trade, organic, and local, we ask students about how often they purchase products that meet these qualifications. And overall, students actually reported that they'd purchased these products rather frequently, almost half of the respondents claimed to purchase them at least once a month. But you can notice that for the fair trade and local category, the most common response is, I don't know. To me, that suggests that students either don't know enough about labels to look at them when they're buying products, or they just don't consider these labels when they purchase food. Organic certifications seem to fair a little bit better, probably because it's a more established certification. And because of that difference, that suggests to me that it's not that students don't look for these labels, it's just that students don't know enough about them to recognize them when they're purchasing food. To me, this hints at one of the major conclusions which I do for myself, which is the need to educate students about where this food comes from, how it's being produced, and how it affects other people and the environment. Indeed, students did seem very interested in learning more about their food, and this graphic illustrates their preferences for learning about their food. They preferred media for learning more about their food, or many labels and webpages, and table tennis product labels and brochures were the next preferred. Others were preferred by less than 25% of the population. So this suggests that with the exception of webpages, students prefer to learn about their food at the point of purchase, that is the very moment when they're deciding what to eat. And this is summed up rather nicely by this comment left by one participant, who said, I prefer point of contact information, not nebulous general ideas that might affect my behavior, but at the moment and in the place that I'm deciding what to buy, set the two options next to each other and label them. Over here on the right, we have a graphic of a labeling system that we piloted in Pippin last year. It's a carbon food print labeling system, or we labeled foods according to our general idea of their carbon impact, and based on the results of this survey, we might look at rolling this program out to the entire campus. So interesting enough, my results didn't differ significantly from the results of surveys conducted at Santa Cruz and Davis. In each of these surveys, students demonstrated a really clear interest in learning more about their food issues and in supporting food systems that nourish both communities and the environment. And students at each of these campuses are interested in learning more about their food, especially at the point of purchase. So what does this all mean and why is this important and how can we use this to make UDCI a better food system? So first of all, it's really heartening to me as a sustainable food advocate that to learn that students in this campus community are interested in purchasing food that is healthy and sustainable and socially responsible. I'm working with a number of students right now to establish purchasing guidelines on this campus that would prioritize food that meets our criteria for sustainable food. And it's really good to know that the larger student community supports actions like this. Because students have expressed the most interest in issues related to personal consumption, I think we have a really real opportunity to educate students about other social and environmental impacts, but to frame these issues in terms of their personal impact. If we begin our educational programs by discussing the ways in which our food choices affect our own health and well-being, then I think we can open the door to larger discussions on the state of our global food system. It was fairly obvious to me that affordability is the main concern for students, especially in this economic climate. And I think these concerns will continue to drive our search for innovative cost-saving strategies so that UCI dining can provide sustainable food at a price comparable to other foods. Just a quick example of these cost-saving measures. Two years ago, UCI dining went trade-less. I don't know if any of you remember having trays in the dining halls, do you? Well, we took the trays away and many of you were sad about it, but we were able to save a lot of food and a lot of water and we've been able to funnel thousands and thousands of dollars towards purchasing sustainable food with that money. As another example, we're looking to implement meatless days in the dining halls, either this quarter or fall, and use that as an opportunity not only to educate students about the benefit of a plant-based diet, but to use the cost savings from not having meat on those days to purchase more humane and anti-village free meat on the remaining days of the week. And finally, the biggest conclusion I heard from the survey was the need for more education around food issues on this campus and in college campuses everywhere. We're a university. As an institution of higher learning, I think that we should be applying our educational mission not only to the topics we study in the classroom, but to the food that we offer in our dining halls. It's important for our own health, as Brian mentioned, the way that we're eating today is literally killing us. We've seen dramatic increases in the number of diet-related illnesses, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, and several experts predicts that our generation is going to be the first generation to live a shorter life than our parents because of the way we're eating. It's also important for the welfare of food producers, communities, animals, and the environment. As Brian mentioned, our food system is pretty much headed towards social and environmental collapse. And as youth, we have the largest stake in our future. As future doctors and business people and politicians and lawyers, we should be learning how to feed ourselves in a way that isn't threatening the health of ourselves and everything else around us. That being said, I think it's really important that we educate students at the point of purchase in the dining halls and retail outlets where we're actually deciding what we're eating. And we're planning on using the results of this survey to establish educational programs and labeling initiatives within all of the dining halls on campus to help students make more informed decisions about their eating habits. So this educational program is only one of several student campaigns going on on campus in conjunction with the Relief Challenge, which is a student group that I work with on campus, and maybe if we have some time at the end of the presentation, I can let you know more about what we're doing, but for now I'd like to hand it back to you. All right, so I just want to quickly conclude then building on what Kelsey talked about with some of the things that can be done, both at the global and national level, but also things that you all can do sort of going forward. And I do hope we'll have some time for questions and also for hard questions to Kelsey about her methodology on the survey and statistical significance of various measures she used because I know she's been practicing a lot. So in terms of addressing global food security problems, there are things that can happen that we can talk about as relatively near term strategies, and then there are challenges that are more longer term for us to deal with. And examples of the things that can be done in near term are things like providing targeted food aid and micronutrient supplements to populations that are at risk, establishing community based nutrition and health services, integrating nutrition education and micro-credit programs, and improving maternal health and education about care and feeding of children. So similar to what Kelsey was talking about, a lot of things having to do with education about helping people make different decisions about feeding themselves and feeding their children, small things that could have big impacts in the lives of children, things like whether to use formula or whether to breastfeed. So education, very important component of the near term strategies, but also larger longer term strategies along with things like improving water and sanitation systems, developing global vegetable markets, creating recreation programs, improving regulation of food systems, infectious disease control and health services, improvement of the education and status of women, and optimizing agricultural subsidy systems, introductions and trade barriers. In terms of improving food security, there was a great deal of global concern during the sort of 2007, 2008 with the rise in food prices. There were riots non-rest in over 60 countries around the world, including countries like Egypt and Haiti. The food rights in Haiti were so bad the prime minister of that country lost his job. So this caused a lot of global attention on the food prices. And at the G8 summit last summer in Lacola, Italy, there was a statement on global food security which emerged where the G8 countries endorsed five principles which they felt should guide future investments to address food insecurity. The first was to invest in partnerships around country-led plans to identify needs, obstacles and strategies. So letting countries set out what they felt they needed. Did they need more agricultural research? Did they need more funding for small farmers? Let the countries identify their needs and then the donor community would come forward and help them meet those needs. To address underlying causes of hunger, through comprehensive approaches including research, infrastructure and recognizing the vital role of small farmers, especially women small farmers who produce 70% of agricultural outputs in low-income countries. The third principle was to improve coordination of efforts to avoid overlap in areas without assistance and this is something we see time and again as there's a global crisis there'll be a massive infusions of aid into certain countries or certain regions that then a few years later it's very, very difficult for those countries and regions to get the assistance they need. And when you're talking about transforming agricultural systems, developing local food markets these are things that happen on time scales of decades not two to three years. Leveraging benefits of multilateral institutions to support and fulfill country plans. Looking at ways that if improvements are being made to try and boost food systems those can be also tied into things like developing water systems, improving health systems. So leveraging and tying together so that investments aren't working across purposes and pledging long-term commitments based upon accountability of years and decades needed to affect these changes. So in terms of things that you can do in your own life there's some general guidance offered by people like nutritionist Marion Nestle to eat less, move more and eat lots of fruits and vegetables. And then there are also more concrete strategies that you can do and I just come up with 10 sort of my own David Letterman list of things you can do. I'm sorry, I'm gonna read it I don't have a guest star to come in tonight. The first is to recognize your choice that your choices matter and when we talk about food there's this odd dissonance that goes on because if you think about the volume of advertising that convinced you that your food choices matter the amount of money that's spent globally to get you to drink this soda versus that soda is really staggering. But then there's a sense when it comes to food that it sort of says, well your choices don't really matter it doesn't really matter whether you eat organic or not it doesn't really matter whether you have meat six days a week or seven days a week but the reality is that one of the most political things you do every day is voting with your pocketbook and with your plate the things you choose to eat the things that you put on your plate the foods that you buy, the restaurants you support the companies you support it's one of the most political things that you do throughout your life and so that's important to think about Kelsey talked about some of the values that are up there and thinking about what's important to you is important to you that you're eating things that are local that have low carbon footprint that are socially just, that are humane that are fair trade each of those sometimes you can't get all of those in a single food choice but you can think about the things that are most important to you and that brings us to number two which is supporting good works through your consumption and supporting companies to support your values and it's important to look beyond the sort of easy answers that companies like Walmart that are doing very commendable things to try and support and nourish local and regional food systems companies like Panera which donate I'm not funded by your Walmart or Panera these are just two examples but they donate all their leftover baked goods at the end of the day to local shelters and to groups that can help get those products out to people and so these are things that you can look for and choose where you're gonna have lunch or where you're gonna do your grocery shopping but also supporting good works through your giving to things like the World Food Program groups like Heifer International and the Land Institute are really making sustainable food issues part of their portfolio of things that they're dealing with fourth is to end the clean plate club is this, does anybody grow up with a clean plate club? You had to finish your plate and hold it up in school we used to have to do that and it was really embarrassing if you didn't because of the food falls on you you have to walk on it all day with lunch in your hair and people talk about this as this notion of sort of a sort of 1950s notion that wasting food was bad but food journalist Michael Pullin talks about older rules sort of Victorian era rules that it's better for wasted food to go to waste than to go to your waste and so we need to be thinking about the messages that we're giving to children the messages that we give to each other when you say things like you know it's a bad idea to leave food on your plate especially if you look at the average portion size in restaurants most restaurants that do is increase so much that you shouldn't feel that need just because someone serves it to you that you have to eat all of that food and a corollary to that is reducing food waste one thing that works for a lot of people is to try and come up with measures about how much food they actually eat so something like a food journal for two weeks about the food you buy at the grocery store and the food you actually eat often there's a lot of aspirational buying people at the grocery store and they buy a lot of fruits or vegetables things they hope they'll eat but they won't actually and so if you look at what you do eat not only does it make that economic sense to you because you may be throwing away 30% of the food that you buy but it also helps you think about how you reduce wasted food which is a significant source of food waste used food that is not actually consumed and this can also go through strategies of things like sharing an entree with a spouse or a partner or somebody you like to be a partner when you've gone on a date it could be a great way to sort of build that camaraderie and sort of reach over and eat part of their meal so it can also make their cost of dates quite a bit cheaper so it looks a lot cooler to say I'm socially conscious that I really don't have enough for both of us to eat an entree other items to think about strategically decoupling from the global food network to eat locally and seasonally as I mentioned I grew up on the East Coast and if you went to farmers markets in Virginia in January you're looking at a lot of squash a lot of zucchini, a lot of canned things in California we're so fortunate to live in a place that you can go to farmers markets to eat really really well the things that are fresh and local almost all year round and you can also do this through things like community supported agriculture schemes or going in with your friends to join these things that get you basket to food that's fresh and what's in season seventh idea is to think about how important food is to you is food more important than high definition cable is food more important than your mobile phone plan is food more important than new rooms for your car we're often even in choices where people have constrained budgets they're making choices about how important things are to their life right now we're not yet seeing a lot of incentivization through healthcare to make preventative choices but those are things that are going to have an impact on your life and so thinking about how much food rates to you an eighth idea is to be a critical eater but not a guilty one there's a lot of it's sort of American in our puritan heritage that there's a lot of sort of sin and guilt about how people eat it's just to recognize that human trade if we think back to things like the silk road which we focus on luxury goods historical analysis of trade flows along the silk road have shown that that trade was really maintained by short range trade and long range trade in precious food stuffs so food has always been a part of economic exchange I really like coffee, I really like some other things like single malt scotch and so I hope that there are always some global trade flows so think about what's important to you maybe the things that really really matter to you that are sort of carbon intensive foods but there are other things that you can balance that out against things that you can eat locally things that you can eat sustainably or things that you can give up tying into that notion of education is to learn more about your food and where it comes from there are easy ways that you can do this when you're in the produce section of a supermarket talk to the produce manager, talk to the people that are stocking things ask them where foods come from and these are people that have a tremendous amount of knowledge chefs also the chef at UCI has done some great real food community dinners the last couple years they have a lot of knowledge about food and so you can ask the people around you and asking them a lot of stores have things like store dieticians that you can contact and one of the things that happens when you start talking to these people about asking where food comes from and why they're buying it from those places it lets them know that you care if it's cheap or you're not just going to buy the green pepper no matter how much it costs or where it comes from that those things impact your food choices those are important messages for store managers to get and to be able to channel their food system the final thing is to recognize that food is a social process it's not just a means to an end and this is one of the things that we talk a lot about food and health and nutrition but we don't often spend enough time thinking about how we eat and why we eat and food is a social process that defines human cultures throughout history we talk about major inflections in human history when people went from being hunter-gatherers to being agriculturalists we have major definitional issues when we talk about different cultures and different societies we talk about Italian food and Chinese food and Latin American food and so these things are very important and it's good to recognize that and especially with regards to young people that thinking about not just food but also and how to garden and how to can and how to bake these are really good skills that taking time if you can if you can find classes through UCI or through sometimes through the art they offer cooking classes so through recreation through YMCA's it's a good time in your life again comes back to economics it's a lot cheaper to cook a really nice meal for somebody on a date than it is to go to a restaurant so you can we are primaries to try to use motion color to attract the opposite sex of the species so thinking about food as a social process and one of the things that Dr. Matthew mentioned is that a lot of my work focuses around studying networks and in the last decade or so we focused a lot on the bad things that networks can do archaic and terrorist networks and the ways that networks can make people insecure but there are a lot of great examples we did a book on the landline movement which is a fantastic example of how networks of people can come together and address pressing global problems the growth of sustainable food in the United States and around the world is another fantastic example of this organic food has been a significant growth 20% a year on average over the past few decades driven by consumer interest this is not a government policy this is not driven by big corporations and big agriculture this is people's desire to have more organic more sustainable food options it would have been a really really good bet if you were looking at examples of networks going to have significant social impacts organic food had sort of lingered since the 1960s as a small part of the food system it's still a relatively small part organic agriculture is about 1% of US agriculture but there's a lot of consumer interest in it and so it's a great example of ways that people's interests can drive the food system there's still some major challenges out there the first is this question of what are needs something implicit in the idea of sustainability sustainable development what is the need that you're trying to fulfill do all people need to eat meat with every meal all throughout their lives can people live flourishing and fulfilling lives without eating a lot of meat and this is often this is much an ethical question as it is a sort of nutritional physiological question certainly people have their own values and their own views about these things and this is a question that we don't really have a good answer to this real significant impact to the question of how we're going to try to feed the 9 million or so people that are going to live on the planet in the middle of this century is everyone going to try to eat the sort of so called western diet lots of meat, lots of processed foods are we all going to be trying to live to a certain a different sort of standards and this brings up another question of what is sustainable food something that Kelsey's research is really interesting and touching on we have some things like organic that have very defined meanings in the United States there's a national organic standards that lay out what is organic food but for other things we don't really have good measures of what's fair, what's socially just what's climate neutral or what's high climate impact there aren't you know people are starting to think about these things but we don't have clear standards and so that notion of what is sustainable food is yet to be negotiated something that Mark Hallay touched on in his talk is the impact of subsidies which started out as a way for governments to prevent rapid fluctuations in food prices to keep people happy and people well fed and governments in power but subsidies have become a much more problematic challenge for us and it's very difficult to think about just waking up tomorrow and removing subsidies but we also have to face the real reality the impacts that these things have and one of the ways is to start getting a lot more transparent about the amount of subsidies that we're all paying and what those things are going for especially in times of tight budgets and people can think about do they like that where that portion of their taxes are going another set of challenges that were having to come in terms of the impact of technology things like genetic modification have received a considerable amount of discussion it's still not a solved problem there's still wide variations in people's attitudes towards this technology, this basket of technologies especially between the United States and the European Union but also things like the growth of pharmaceuticals this notion that we can put medicines into plants could be a fantastic set of advances for things like breeding if you could get polio vaccine into something like a banana it would be a lot easier to just hand people a banana and have them eat it and get a vaccination rather than have to give them a shot but also a lot of ethical and a lot of sort of definitional issues about what's food, what's medicine and then a sort of emerging ideas about what the impacts of nanotechnology will be on food this sort of science that's really in its infancy but as we've seen with genetic modification things go from sort of the laboratory to the supermarket shelf very quickly often before we as a society have had chances to think about how we want to use things and sustainable food security really includes a whole basket of challenges and some of them include technology, ethics things I've talked about tonight but we still exist in a world that is defined largely by this old urban, core, rural periphery model where people live in cities more and more people live in cities now for the first time where half the human population lives in cities never before in our history has that been true but we still sort of live in cities that get stuff from outside they get water, they get energy, they get food and so sustainability is going to require us to rethink that notion why can't we design cities that grow their own food that produce their own power that develop their own and filter their own water these are the challenges that are going to define you all's lives this is going to be the key definition of the economy in the coming years trying to solve these challenges in a way that create growth and create jobs for people and so I want to leave with just a couple of yardsticks for thinking about how we move towards more sustainable agriculture the first is from Aldo Leopold who was one of the early founders of the discipline that we talk about now as environmental ethics and spoke eloquently about the need to know and understand and respect nature and he put forth this idea of a land ethic which said that we should examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right as well as what is economically expedient the thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity stability and beauty of the biotic community it is wrong when it tends otherwise in addition to the political processes that I touched on involving actors from state international and non-state realms food security has important individual components that reflect people's history, family, culture, traditions and values and these dimensions are reflected in some of our most common daily practices and truly sustainable solutions to food security issues must also consider these personal dynamics for instance California co-author Gary Snyder reminds us the importance of same grace as a way of linking ourselves and our families to the lives we have come before us and upon whom our survival is based we look at eggs, apples and stew Snyder writes they are evidence of plentitude, excess a great reproductive exuberance millions of grains of grass seed that will become rice or flour millions of codfish fry that will never and must never grow to maturity we will not deceive ourselves we too will be offering we are all edible not from a sort of cannibalism standpoint but from a we're going to die and things microorganisms are going to digest I just realized that connotation a little star there Gary Snyder does not endorse cannibalism especially since this is going to be put up on YouTube so then to return to the key messages of the talks tonight the world is facing significant food problems it's unlikely these situations these are not problems we can just sit back and on autopilot they'll be improved food security is rarely about insufficient food in an absolute sense and sustainability is a core challenge and must be a core theme in improving food security so with that we'll close and Kelsey and I are happy to take some questions