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Abstract

How we produce, process, sell, consume, and dispose of food has a tremendous impact on human and planetary health. Food production is the largest cause of global environmental change, biodiversity loss, and water and land use. Wide-scale hunger still occurs around the world alongside increasing prevalence of overweight, obesity, and diet-related diseases. As a touchstone for the most critical issues of our time, food makes them tangible and urgent for all of us. Contrary to conventional thinking, the complex challenges of our global food system are not policy or technical problems to be solved, but relationship crises to be healed.  Ultimately, the root of our food system challenges lies in the stories we’ve been told and believe about farming, food, nature, our economy, and our relationship to it all. In this talk, Nicole will discuss her work at the nexus of the most pressing, timely, and controversial issues surrounding food, and will explore the confluence of efforts that are creating resilient, regenerative, place-based initiatives that are our best hope of weathering the coming storms.

Speaker Bio

Nicole Negowetti is an expert on the future of food, an internationally recognized food law and policy scholar, advocate, attorney, and former Harvard Law School educator. For nearly fifteen years, Nicole has developed, led, and implemented a broad range of federal, state, and local policy initiatives addressing the health, environmental, and economic impacts of the food system, and promoting sustainable, equitable, and healthy food and agricultural production.  She is Managing Director of the Plant Based Foods Institute and Vice President of Policy & Food Systems at the Plant Based Foods Association. Nicole serves on the United Nations Development Programme’s Conscious Food Systems Alliance, is a Visiting Lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy,  and is an adviser to the Friedman School’s Food & Nutrition Innovation Institute.