E287: Food policy insights from government agency insider Jerold Mande

[Music] We speak to the Adonutrition and Policy Expert Gerald Mann, the CEO of Nourish Science, a non-governmental organization focused on solving the country's nutrition crisis. Jerry is also an adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a fellow at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. Jerry's had a long and distinguished public policy career, among his posts in government. He served in the Food and Drug Administration and served as Deputy Undersecretary for Food Safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in charge of Food Safety and Inspection Service from 2009 to 2011. He co-founded Nourish Science in 2022 with a goal of ensuring every child reaches age 18 at a healthy weight and a good metabolic health. So, Jerry, welcome. It's really nice to see you as always, and I'm so happy you could be part of our podcast today. Well, Cali, it's great to get together again with you. So, you co-founded this organization along with Jerome Adams, Bill Frist and Thomas Grumbly. As we said, doing sure every child reaches age 18 at a healthy weight and a good metabolic health. That's a pretty tall order given the state of the health of youth today in America. But let's start by you telling us what inspired this mission and what does it look like to achieve this in today's food environment. I was trained in a public health and also in nutrition in my career, which has been largely in service of the public and government. I've been trying to advance those issues. And unfortunately, over the arc of my career from when I started to now, particularly in nutrition and public health, it's just gotten so much worse. Indeed, today, Americans have the shortest lifespans by far. We're not just last among the wealthy countries, but we're standard deviation last. But probably most alarming at all is how sick our children are. Children should not have a chronic disease, yet in America, maybe a third do. I did some work on a tobacco at one point at FDA. That was an enormous success. It was the leading cause of death. Children smoked at a higher rate, much like child chronic disease today, about a third of kids smoked. And we took that issue on and today it's less than 2%. And so that shows that government can solve these problems. And since we did our tobacco work and then it's only 90s, I've changed my focus to nutrition and public health and trying to fix that. But we've still made so little progress. Give us a sense of how far from that goal we are. So if the goal is to make every child reaching 18, a healthy weight and in good metabolic health, what percentage of children reaching age 18 today might look like that? It's probably around half or more, but we're not quite sure. We don't have good statistics. One of that challenges we face in nutrition is, fortunately, the food industry or other industries, lobby against funding research and data collection. And so we're handicapped in that way. But we do know from the studies that CDC and others have done that about 20% of our children have obesity, about a similar number, have a type 2 diabetes or the precursors, pre-diabetes. You and I started off calling it adult onset diabetes and they had to change that name to a type 2 because it's becoming so common in kids. And then another disease, fatty liver disease, really unthinkable in kids, something that typical pediatrician, which is never see. And yet in the last decade, children are the fastest growing group. I think we don't know an exact number, but today at least a third, maybe as many as half of our children, have a chronic disease, particularly a food cause chronic disease or the precursors that show they're on the way. I remember probably going back about 20 years, people started saying that we were seeing the first generation of American children that would lead shorter lives than our parents did. And what a terrible legacy to leave our children. Absolutely. And that's why we set that overarching goal of ensuring every child reaches age 18 and good metabolic health. And the reason we set that is in my experience in government that there's a phrase we all use, what gets measured gets done. When I worked at FDA, when I worked at USDA, what caught my attention is that there is a mission statement. There's a goal of what we're trying to achieve and it's ensuring access to healthy options and information like food. Now the problem with that, for as well as fail, but the problem with that is the bureaucrats that I over saw would go into a supermarket, see a produce section, a protein section, the food labels, which I worked on and say we've done our job. They would check those boxes and say, we've done it. And yet we haven't. And if we ensure that every child reaches age 18 at a healthy way and good metabolic health, if the bureaucrats see how are we doing on that, they would have to conclude we're failing and they'd have to try something else. And that's what we need to do. We need to try radically different strategies because what we've been doing for decades has failed. They mentioned the food industry a moment ago. Let's talk about that in a little more detail. You've made the argument that food companies have substituted profits for health and how they design their products. Explain that a little bit more if you will and tell us how the shift has occurred and what do you think the public health cost has been. Yes, the way I like to think of it and your listeners should think of it is there's a North Star for food design. And from a consumer standpoint, I think there are four points on the star. Taste, cost, convenience and health. That's what they expect and want from their food. Now the challenge is to marketplace because that consumer, you and I, when we go to the grocery store and get home, on taste, cost and convenience, if we want within an hour, we can know whether the food we purchase met our standard there, what our expectations were. That was for health. There's just no way to know in a day, a week, a month, even in any year or more. We don't know if the food we're eating is improving and maintaining our health. Right? There should be a definition of food. Food should be what we eat to thrive. That really should be the goal. I borrowed that from NASA, the Space Agency. When I would meet with them, they said, "Gerry, it's important, right? It's not enough that people just survive on the food they eat in space. They really need to thrive and that's what we need to do. And that's really what food does, right? And yet we have food not only though we thrive, but we get sick." And the reason for that is, as I was saying, the marketplace works on taste, cost and convenience. So companies make sure their products meet consumer expectation for those three. But the problem is, on the fourth point on the star on health, because we can't tell in even years whether it's meeting our expectation. That sort of cries out, you're at a policy school. Those are the places where government needs to step in and act and make sure that the marketplace is providing that feedback through government. But the industry is politically strong and has prevented that. And so that has left the fourth point of the star open for their interpretation. And my belief is that they put in place a profit. So they're making decisions in the design of the product. They're taste, they got to get taste right. They got to get a cost and convenience right. But rather than worrying what does it do to your health, they just say, "Let's do a profit." And that's resulted in this whole category of food called ultra-processed food. And I actually believe in the future, whether it's 100 years or 1000 years, if humanity's gonna thrive, we need man-made food we can thrive on. But we don't have that and we don't invest in the science. We need to. But today, ultra-processed food is man-made food designed on taste, cost, convenience, and then how do we make the most money possible. Now let me give you one other analogy if I could. If we were CEOs of an automobile company, the mission is to provide vehicles where people can get safely from point to point B. It's the same as food we can thrive on. That is the mission. The problem is that when the food companies have designed food today, they present it to the CEO. Everyone gets excited. They're seeing the numbers, the charts, the data that shows that this food is gonna meet taste, cost, convenience. It's gonna make us all this money. But the CEO should be asking this following question. If people eat this as we intend, will they thrive? The very least, they won't get sick, right? Because the law requires they can't get sick. And if the managers were honest, they'd say, "Here's the good news, boss. We have such political power. We've been able to influence the Congress and the regulatory agencies that they're not gonna do anything about it. Taste, cost, convenience, and profits will work just fine." Couldn't you make the argument that for a CEO to embrace that kind of attitude you talked about would be corporate malpractice almost, that if they want to maximize profits, then they want people to like the food as much as possible. That means engineering in a way that big people overeated, hijacking the reward pathways in the brain and all that kind of thing. Why in the world would a CEO care about whether people thrive? Because it's the law. The law requires we have these safety features and cars and companies have to design it that way. There's more immediate feedback with the car too in terms of if you crashed right away because it didn't work, you'd see that. But here's the thing. Harvey Wiley, I don't know if you know that name. You probably do. He's the founder of the Food Safety Programs that I led at FDA and USDA. He was a chemist from academia came to USDA in the late 1800s. It was a time of great change in food in America. At that point, almost all of families grew their own food on a farm. And someone had it decided who's going to grow our food. It's a family conversation that needed to take place. Increasingly, Americans are moving into the cities at that time. And a brand new industry had sprung up to feed people in cities. It was a processed food industry. and in order to provide. shelf stable foods that can taste costs convenience. This new process food industry turned to another new industry, a chemical industry. Now it's hard to believe this, but there was a point in time that just wasn't an industry. So these two big new industries had sprung up process food and chemicals. And Harvey Wiley had a hypothesis that the chemicals that were using to make these process foods were making us sick. Indeed, food poisoning back then was one of the 10 leading causes of death. And so Harvey Wiley went to Teddy Roosevelt. He'd been trying for years within the bureaucracy and not making progress. But when Teddy Roosevelt came, he finally had the person who listened to him back then. USDA is right across from the Washington Monument to the White House. He walked right over there into the White House and met with Teddy Roosevelt and said this food industry is making us sick. We should do something about it. And Teddy Roosevelt agreed and they wrote the laws. And so I think what your listeners need to understand is that when you look at the job that FDA and USDA is doing, their food safety programs were created to make sure our food doesn't make us sick. Acutely sick. No, like heart disease or cancer 30, 40 years down the road, but acutely sick. No, I think that's absolutely a point. That's what Wiley was most concerned about at the time. But that's not the law they wrote. The law doesn't say acutely ill. And I'll give you this example. Your listeners may be familiar with something called grass generally recognized as safe. It's a big problem today. In this tree, co-opted the system and no longer gets approval for their food at it. And so you have this generally recognized as safe system and you have these chemicals and people are worried about them. In the history of grass, only one chemical has FDA decided we need to get that off the market because it's unsafe. That's partially hydrogenated oils are trans fat. This trans fat causes acutely illness. It does and it causes acronic disease. And so the evidence is clear. The agency is known that it has a responsibility for both of acutely and acutely illness. But you're right. The industry has taken advantage of this sort of chronic illness base to say that that really doesn't what you should be doing. But having worked those agencies, I don't think they see it that way. They just feel like here's the bottom line on it. The industry uses its political power in Congress. And it shapes the agency's budget. So let's take FDA. FDA has a billion dollars with a B for food safety for the acute food safety you're talking about. It has less than 25 million for the chronic disease. There are about 1400 deaths a year in America due to the acute illnesses caused by our food that FDA and USDA are trying to prevent. The chronic illnesses that we know are caused by our food caused 1600 maybe a day more than the acute every day. Now the agency should be spending at least time if not more worrying about those chronic illness. Why doesn't it? Because the industry used their political power in Congress to put the billion dollars for the acute illness. That's because if you get acutely ill, that's a liability concern for them. Let's talk about the political influence and just a little more detail because you're in a unique position to tell us about this because you've seen it from the inside. So one mechanism through which industry might influence the political process is lobbyists. They hire lobbyists, lobbyists get to the Congress people make decisions based on contributions and things like that. Are there other ways the food industry affects the political process in addition to that? For example, what about the revolving door issue people talk about? Where industry people come into the administrative branch of government, not legislative branch and then returned to industry. And are there other ways that the political influence of the industry has made itself felt? I think first and foremost it is the lobbyists those who work with Congress and affect particularly the funding levels and the authority that the agencies have to do that job. I think it's overwhelmingly that. I think second is the influence the industry has. So let me back up to that a second. As a result of that we spend very little on nutrition research for example. So it's 4% of the NIH budget even though we have these large institutes, cancer, heart diabetes everyone knows about they're trying to come up with the cures who spend the other almost 50 billion at NIH. And so what happens you and I have both been at universities where they're nutrition programs. And what we see is it's very hard to not accept any industry money to do the research because there isn't the federal money. Now the key thing is not an accident it's part of the plan. And so I think that the research that we rely on to do regulation is heavily influenced by the industry. And it's broad. I've served you have others on the national academies and the programs. When I've been on the inside of those committees they're always industry retired scientists on those committees and they have undue influence. I've seen it. Their political power is so vast. The revolving door that is a little of both ways. I think the government learns from the revolving door as well. But you're right. Some people leave government and try to undo that. Now I've chosen to work in academia when I'm not in government. But I think that does play a role. But I don't think a place the largest. I think the thing that people should be worried about is how much influence it has in Congress and how that affects the agencies budgets. And that way I feel that agencies are corrupted. But it's not because they're corrupted directly by the industry. I think it's indirectly through Congress. I'd like to get your opinion on something that's always relevant. But it's time sensitive now. And it's a dietary guidelines for America. And the reason I say in the time sensitive because the current administration will be releasing dietary guidelines for America pretty soon. And there's lots of discussion about what those might look like. How can they help guide food policy and industry practice to support healthier children and families? Well, it's one of the bigger levers the government has. The biggest is a program snap or food stamps. But beyond that the dietary guidelines set the rules for government spending and food. So I think often the way the dietary guidelines are portrayed isn't quite accurate. People think of it in terms of the once pyramid now that might play. That's there. That's the public facing icon for the dietary guidelines. But really a very small part. The dietary guidelines are meant to help shape federal policy. Not so much public perception. It's there. It's used in education in our schools. The plate previously the pyramid. But the main thing is it should shape what's served in government feeding programs. So principally that should be snap. It's not. But it does affect the WIC program women, infant children, the school meals program, all of the military spending on food. Indeed, all spending by the government on food are set. It governed by or directed by the dietary guidelines. And now some of them are self-executing once the dietary guidelines change. The government changes its behavior. But the biggest ones are not. They require rulemaking. And in particular today one of the most impactful is our kids meals in schools. So whatever it says and these dietary guidelines and there's reason to be alarm in some of the oppressed reports. It doesn't automatically change what's in school meals. The Department of Agriculture would have to write a rule and say that the dietary guidelines have changed. And now we want to update. That usually takes an administration later. It's very rare. One administration could both change the dietary guidelines and get through the rulemaking process. So people can feel a little reassured by that. So how do you feel about the way things seem to be taking shape right now? This whole maha movement make America healthy again. What is it? To me what it is we've reached this tipping point we talked about earlier, the how sick we are and people are saying enough. Our food shouldn't make us sick. At middle age I shouldn't have to be spending so much time with my doctor. But particularly it shouldn't be hard to raise my kids to 18 without getting sick. We really need to fix that and try to deal with that. But I think that the maha movement is mostly that. But RFK and some of the people around them have increasingly claimed that it means some very specific things that are anti-science. That's been led by the policies around vaccine that are clearly anti-science. Nutrition is more and more interesting. Initially they started out in the exact right place. I think you and I could agree the things they were saying they need to focus on the kids. They need to get ultra-process food out of our diets. We're all the right thing. In fact you look at the first report that RFK and his team put out back in May this year after the president put out an executive order. Mostly the right things on this that again focus on kids. Ultra-process food was mentioned 40 times in the report as the root cause for the very first time. And this can't be undone. You had the White House saying that the root cause of our food cause chronic disease crisis is the food industry. That's in a report that won't change. But a lot has changed since then. They came out with a second report where the ultra-process food showed up only once. Yeah, what do you think happened? I know it happened because I've worked in that setting. The industry quietly went to the White House, the top of political staff in the White House. And they said you need to change the report when you come out with the recommendations. And so the first report I think was written by Mahat or FK Jr. and his lieutenant. The second report was written by the White House staff with the lobbyists of the food industry. That's what happened. What you end up with is their version of it. So what does the industry want? We have a good picture from the first Trump administration. They did the last dietary guidelines. And the secretary of agriculture then sunny Purdue. His mantra to his staff, people reported to me, was the industries. Keep the status quo. That is what the industry wants. They really don't want the dietary guidelines to change because then they have to reformulate their products. And they're used to living with what we have. They're just comfortable with that. For a big company to reformulate a product is a multi-year effort and caused billions of dollars. And it's just not what they want to have to do, particularly if it's going to change from administration to administration. And that is not a world they want to live in. From the first and second Mahat report where they wanted to go back to the status quo away from all the radical ideas. It'll be interesting to see what happens with dietary guidelines because we've seen reports that RFK Jr and his people wanna make shifts in policy saying that they wanna go back to the pyramid somehow. There's a cartoon on TV South Park. I thought it was produced to be funny, but they talked about what we need to do is we need to flip the pyramid upside down and we need to go back to the old pyramid and make saturated fat sort of the core of the diet. I thought it meant to be a joke, but apparently that's become a belief of some people in the Mahat movement, RFK, and so they wanna add saturated fat back to our diets. They wanna get rid of plant oils from our diets. There are a lot of areas in nutrition where the science is unsettled, but that's one where it is. Indeed, again, you go back only in 1950s, 1960s, you look today, heart disease, heart attacks. They're down 90%. Most of that had to do with the drugs and getting rid of smoking, but a substantial contribution was made by nutrition, lowering saturated fat in our diets and replacing it with the plant oils that they're now called seed oils. They take that step and the diet for drugs come out next month and say that saturated fat is now good for us. It's gonna be just enormously disruptive. I don't think companies are gonna change that much. They'll wait out 'cause they'll ask themselves the question, what's it gonna be in two years? 'Cause that's how long it takes them to get a product to market. - Jerry, let me ask you this. You've painted this picture where every once in a while, there'll be a glimmer of hope. The long comes, "Maha," they're critical of the food industry and say that the diet's making us sick and therefore we should focus on different things like ultra-process foods in report number one. It's mentioned 40 times. Report number two comes out and it's mentioned only one for the political reasons. You said, "Are there any signs that lead you to be hopeful that this sort of history doesn't just keep repeating itself where people have good ideas. Their science is suggest you go down one road but the food industry says no we're gonna go down another in government obeys. Are there any signs out there that lead you to be more hopeful for the future?" - There are signs to be hopeful for the future. And number one, we talked earlier, is the success we had regulating tobacco. And I know you've done an outstanding job over the years drawing the parallels between what happened in tobacco and food. And there are good reasons to do that. Not the least of which is that in the 1980s, the tobacco companies bought all the big food companies and imparted on them a lot of their lessons, expertise, and playbook about how to do these things. So that there is a link there. And we did succeed. We took youth smoking which was around a 30%, a third when we began work on this in the early 1990s when I was at FDA. And today it's less than 2%. It's one area where the United States leads the world in terms of what we've achieved in a public health. And there's a great benefit that's gonna come to that over the next generation as all of those deaths are prevented that we're not quite seeing yet, but we will. And that's regardless of what happens with vaping which is a different story about nicotine. But this idea, success in tobacco, if food industry has a tobacco playbook about how to add dick so many people and make so much money and use their political power, we have a playbook of how to win the public health fight. - Tell us about that. What you're saying is music to my ears. And I'm a big believer in exactly what you're saying. So what is it? What does that playbook look like? And what did we learn from the tobacco experience that you think could apply to the food area? - Well, there are a couple of areas. One is gonna be leadership and we'll have to come back to that because when he's only succeeded in tobacco it's a good fortune of having a David Kessler at FDA and Al Gore is vice president and nothing became more important to them than winning this fight against a big tobacco. Al Gore, 'cause his sister died at a young age of smoking and David Kessler became convinced that this was the most important thing for public health that he could do and keep in mind that he came to FDA with the furthest thing from his mind. So one of it is getting these kinds of leaders and that does RFK Junior Marty McCarry match up to Al Gore and we'll see, but the early signs aren't that great. But we'll see, there's still plenty of time for them to do this and get it right. The other thing is having a good strategy and policy about how to do it. And here, what tobacco was a complete stretch, right? There was no, where did the FDA get authority over tobacco? And indeed we eventually needed the Congress to reaffirm that authority to have the success we did. As we talked earlier, there's no question. FDA was created to make sure processed food and the attitudes and processed food don't make us sick. So it is the core reason the agency exists is to make sure that if there's a thing called ultra processed food, man made food, that is fine. But we have to thrive when we eat it. We certainly can't be made sick when we eat it. Now David Kessler, I mentioned he's put forward a petition, a citizen's petition to FDA. Careful work by him. He put months of effort into this. And he wrote basically a detailed roadmap for RFK and his team to use if they want to regulate ultra processed food. And I think we've gotten some initially good feedback from the Mahar, RFK people that they're interested in this petition and they take action on it. - So the basic thrust of the Kessler petition for my understanding is that we need to reconsider what's considered generally recognizes safe. And that these ultra processed foods may not be considered safe any longer because they produce all this disease down the road. And if Mahar responds positively initially to the concept, that's great. And maybe that'll have legs and something will actually happen. But is there any reason to believe the industry won't just come in and quash this like they have other things? - This idea of starting with a petition in the agency beginning an investigation and using its authority is the blueprint we used with tobacco. There was a petition. We responded. We said, gee, you raised some good points. There are other things we put forward. And so what we hope to see here with the Kessler petition is that FDA would put out, what's called in advance notice of a proposed rulemaking with the petition. This moves it from just being a petition to something the agency is saying, we're taking this seriously. We're putting it on the record ourselves and we want industry and others now to start weighing in. Now here's the thing. You have this category of ultra processed food that because of the North Star I talked about before because the industry the marketplaces failed and gives them no incentive to make sure that we thrive, that keeps us from getting sick. They've just forgotten about that and put in place a profits instead. The question is how do you get at ultra processed food? What's the way to do it? How do you start holding the industry accountable? Now what RFK and the Maha people started with was synthetic color additives. I was one I would pick but wasn't a terrible choice because if you talk to Carlos Montiro who coined the phrase ultra processed food and you ask him, what is an ultra processed food? Many people say it's this industrial creation. You can't find the ingredients in your kitchen, agrees with all that. But he thinks the thing that really sets ultra processed food and the harmful food is the cosmetics that make them edible when they otherwise won. I've seen inside the plants where they make the old fashion minimally processed food versus today's ultra process. In the minimally processed plants I recognize the ingredients as food and today's plants you don't recognize anything. There's powders, there's sludges, there's nothing that you would really recognize as food going into it. And to make that edible they use the cosmetics and colors as a key piece of that. But here's the problem, it doesn't matter if the color is synthetic or natural. And a fruit made with natural colors is just as bad for you as one made with the synthetics. And indeed it's been alarming that the agency has fast tracked these natural colors as replacements because it's not natural, we don't wanna use that. And the whole approach has been off and it by how is this gonna get us there? How is this focus on color attitudes gonna get us there? And it won't. - Yeah I agree with your interpretation of that. - But the thing with Kessler, you got part of it right, but the main thing he did is say, you don't have to really define ultra process food which is another industry ploy delay action. Let's focus on the thing that's making us sick today. And that's the refined carbohydrates for fine grains and food. That's what's most closely linked to the obesity, the diabetes we're seeing today. Now in the 1980s the FDA granted, let's set aside sugar and white flour for example, but they approved a whole slew of additives that the companies came forward with to see what we add to the white flour and sugar to make it shall stable, to meet all the taste, cost and convenience considerations we have and profit making considerations we have. Back then heart disease was the driving health problem and so it was easy to overlook why you didn't think that these additives were really harmful. And you could conclude with a generally recognized the safe which is what the agency did back then. What Kessler is saying is that today you just, when he's laid out in this petition, it's self-executing. It's not something that the agency grants that this is grass or not grass. They were just saying things that have a historical safe use that scientists generally recognize it as safe. It's not saying the agency decides it's the universe of all of us scientists generally accept. And it's true in the 80s when we didn't face the obesity and diabetes epidemic, people didn't really focus on the refined carbohydrates. But if you look at today's food environment, and I hope you agree with this, that what is the leading driver in the food environment about what is it about ultra-physis food that's making us so sick, it's these refined grains in the way they're used in our food. And so if the agency takes up the Kessler petition and starts acting on it, they don't have to change the designation. Maybe at some point they have to say some of these attitudes are no longer grass. But what Kessler is saying is by default, they're no longer grass because if you ask the scientists today, can we have this level or refine grains? They'd say no, that's just not generally recognized as safe. So he's pointing out that status, they no longer hold that status. And if the agency would recognize that publicly and the burdened shifts were widely really always meant it to be on the field. the industry to prove that there are foods or things that we would thrive on, but that wouldn't make us sick. And so that's the key point that you go back to when you said, and you're exactly right, that let the industry use their political power to just ignore health altogether and substitute profits, then you're right. There's sort of a do share responsibility is just to maximize profits and they can ignore health. If you say you can maximize profits, of course, you're a capitalist business, but one of the tests you have to clear is you have to prove to us that people can thrive when they eat that. Fribe is the standard. It might require some congressional amplification because it's not in the statute, but what is in the statute is the food can't make you sick. If scientists would generally recognize what say, if you eat this diet as they intend, if you eat these snack foods, these ready to eat meals as they intend, you're going to get diabetes and obesity. If scientists generally believe that, then you can't sell that. That's just against the law and the agency needs them to enforce the law. That all makes a really good sense. You made so many interesting and illuminating points today, so I really appreciate you being with us. The parallels with tobacco are really interesting. The food industry starts to sound like it's just uncockerable and that it's all powerful and nothing could ever be done to rein in its political influence. All one has to do is look back at tobacco because that was true. The tobacco companies at one time and then things change and some of those same signs are occurring now that make it seem like there may be some parallels getting acted out in the food arena. I share your optimism for those very, very reasons and it's really nice of you to lay that out and it's nice that you're optimistic because you've had such vast experience inside and outside of government. So Jerry, thanks so much for being with us today. It was a really terrific interview. Nice to see you again. And congratulations for your work and good luck with it all. Thank you Kelly. It's great pleasure to join you together. I remember family, the conversations we had, I yelled together about a tobacco when you launched the Rudd Center and was just so delighted that you seized on that and continued to promote that as something we need to follow. Thank you for listening to the Leading Voices in Food Podcast. This program is an educational series produced by Duke University's World Food Policy Center with the goal of promoting productive conversation for food systems change. If you would like to subscribe, you can find it on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music or your favorite podcast app. Transcripts are also available on the website of the Duke World Food Policy Center.