Institute For The Future

Creating Change with Food + Foresight

In January of 1969 at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland, California, the Free Breakfast for School Children program was started by a group of changemakers who knew that a nourishing breakfast was critical to student success—and that kids in underserved communities of color often started the day without one. This group, the Black Panther Party, realized that to make the future they wanted, they needed to start with good food.

The Oakland program, which relied on nutritionists to plan meals, party members to prepare and serve them, and local businesses to donate the ingredients was quickly adopted by the national party and the Panthers went from feeding hundreds to feeding thousands of children a day. Within a few short years, an FBI campaign to undermine the Panthers, generally, and its free breakfast program, specifically, put an end to the free meals. But the party had succeeded in directly giving thousands of kids a better shot at a brighter future with food. And their free breakfast program created the pressure needed to turn a collection of modest USDA pilot free breakfast programs into national policy, creating the 1975 School Breakfast Program that, today, almost 50 years later, feeds almost 15 million daily.

Food has always been used to create change, whether it’s an individual diet designed to help a single person manage a challenging health condition or an urban garden intended to plant seeds of hope in a community where there is little to be found. At every level—the global, communal, and individual—food is a rich and powerful tool to create new futures. It is literally a medium for change for everything from health and identity to labor and politics. In this article we highlight six exemplary individuals changing themselves, their communities, and the world with foresight and food.

Flipping the Fast Food Model

Roy Choi wants a future where healthy food is affordable, delicious and easily accessible regardless of socio-economic status. To make the change he wants to see, he’s taken on the ambitious goal of flipping fast-food on its head, by creating a restaurant that has all the appeal of a junk food chain, but with health benefits, not burdens.

This might seem like a strange undertaking for the owner of a Michelin starred-restaurant, but when you consider who Choi is, it’s not so much of a stretch. Choi was born in Seoul and raised in Los Angeles where he became obsessed with good food, and learned the value of tight-knit community. And he already has one unlikely culinary coup under his belt. As the late Anthony Bourdain explained in Time magazine, Choi “changed the world when he elevated the food-truck concept from ‘roach coach’ to highly sought-after, ultra-hot-yet-democratic rolling restaurant” with his Korean taco truck, Kogi.

Inspired by the realization that food can be a tool to support communities, not oppress them, Roy teamed up with chef Daniel Patterson to open LocoL, a chain of restaurants in low-income neighborhoods with fast-food prices and convenience—but better nutrition and community accountability.

In an interview with FLOOD, Roy says he chose a fast-food concept because it’s a gateway to how many communities are eating, “Since the only places that open up in the hood often are fast-food restaurants, why not build one with ‘heart and humility?’”

Roy goes on to say this model shouldn’t just be in Los Angeles, it should be in every city: “There should be chefs opening up delicious natural food outlets that are staffed by the community, providing more jobs, providing more opportunities, getting more people to come into shops—or providing access and ways for people to make their own shops.”

Creating stronger community is not just about providing healthier food to people who need it. It’s about having the foresight to take an unhealthy but familiar model and reimagining it as an empowering platform for equitable access to nutritious food and local employment opportunities. Choi says the way to do that is to “give and love and breathe and listen, then act and do.”

LocoL, Choi asserts, is not just a restaurant, but a social experiment in feeding people better. The restaurant itself rose quickly, with several branches opening in a couple short years, but fell just as fast—all locations are set to be shuttered in the near future. Trade journal QSR Magazine, puts forth a number of possible explanations, from larger trends in the food world such as the rise of grocery ready-made-meals, to underlying issues, like a misalignment between LocoL’s for-profit status and commitment to valuing their mission over money.

Using foresight to make change isn’t about persistent, unbroken success. Instead, as, IFTF Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen reminds us, it’s about being clear about and committed to a bold vision, but flexible about how it is achieved.

Choi remains undeterred. “Until generational racism stops being handed down at dinner tables and until more are even able to sit at them,” we need to fight for change,” he says. In a social media post, LocoL insisted that despite retiring the retail locations, “We are not closing! The mission is as strong as ever.”

Reframing Food as a Universal Right

Free food is nothing new. Countless canned food drives and soup kitchens across the globe dole out sustenance at no cost to the recipients every day. But the way this kind of food is served up inherently contains certain connotations—you are only receiving this scarce resource due to the generosity of others.

Artists David Burns and Austin Young provide free food with an entirely different ethos. Their project, Fallen Fruit, has been touted as fresh and innovative, but one source of their inspiration is quite ancient: a passage from the Torah states farmers should not harvest the edges of their fields or gather the excess “fallen fruit” that drops from trees but instead “leave them for the needy and for the stranger.”

Their solution to food deserts isn’t to provide more fresh produce for sale at local vendors, but to plant fruit trees in public spaces. So far, they’ve done it in 30 cities across the globe, in some locations creating entire “urban fruit parks” where locals can pick as much fruit as they need. Additionally, they’ve made their project a platform for others to create their own public food forests. “Endless Orchard” is their crowdsourced map of fruit trees that anyone can pick from, and they encourage everyday people and communities to plant their own trees and add them to the map.

The community art projects of Fallen Fruit are an attempt at cultivating a radical ethos of sharing. They find that, when given the opportunity, “people actually love to share and really understand that, in caring for fruit trees given to them, the public is in turn caring for other people.” Some of Fallen Fruit’s most urgent work has been in The Ninth Ward of New Orleans where many denizens have felt a systemic lack of care for generations. Food can not only build a sense of caring, sharing, and empathy in geographic communities but also in communities of color and gender identity who have similarly been overlooked or underappreciated.

In this way, the trees are about more than just providing fruit. Burns and Young are actively working to create a future where the narrative of food isn’t that it is simply a commercial product that people have to pay for, but, in a world where we can easily make it in abundance, a universal right everyone is entitled to. Their motto perfectly sums up how Fallen Fruit thinks about making change with food: “Share Fruit. Change the World.”

Forging Constructive Food Identities

Food is such a powerful tool to create change because it doesn’t just connect us to each other, but it also quite literally makes us who we are. The food we eat becomes us in a physical way and it also creates us in a more abstract way—it is a critical component of our identity.

Brian Kateman is deeply concerned about factory farming and the impact that it has on human health, our environment, and farmed animals. And he sees identity as an important tool for making change on these pressing issues. Becoming a “vegetarian” or “vegan” isn’t an easy identity for many people to adopt, Kateman believes, partly because it doesn’t allow enough flexibility and imperfection. He came up with the term reducetarian to describe people who decrease the amount of meat they consume, not cut it out completely. He started the Reducetarian Foundation to promote the idea that the “all-or-nothing” identities like “vegan” are not our only option.

Kateman explained to Grist that “reducing a person’s meat consumption from 200 pounds a year to 160 makes a much bigger impact than turning someone who already eats very little meat into a textbook vegetarian.”

He warns against the kind of exclusivity and judgment sometimes associated with current food identities.

“I think that we can leverage identities and terms that signal our values to build coalitions and stakeholders and find ways to work together,” Brian explains, “but the caveat is that those identities need to be productive; they can’t pigeonhole us into a world where we only interact with other people who share our exact same interests and ways of being.” Katemen hopes the reducetarian identity can bypass the conflict between veganism and vegetarianism and omnivory, promoting a common ground of reducing the consumption of animal-based products while at the same time advocating a world where we move beyond factory farming.

Using ‘Discomfort Food’ as a Mirror

Imagine a restaurant where you sit down and are handed a menu, only to discover that you are being asked to pay twice the normal price other diners pay based on your race. That’s exactly the experience Sartj, a popup lunch counter in New Orleans created by chef Tunde Wey, where eaters who identify as white are asked to pay two and a half times the base price for lunch. This price difference is not arbitrary—it mirrors the wage disparity between white people and African Americans in New Orleans. And what Wey seems to be saying with this pricing structure, is that, far from being novel, differential pricing exists as part of every day life, but in reverse— because of wage disparities, African Americans are, effectively, being asked to pay more for their food than white customers at any restaurant they patronize.

Wey uses food as a mirror, forcing eaters to confront the issues that exist behind their meals. Food spaces are one of the clearest reflections of power structures in the U.S., Wey believes, yet they are often deemed not to be appropriate places to discuss or confront those structures. Food experiences and dining venues, in Tunde’s mind, should not be sterilized from the discomfort and messiness of critical discourse. Since our current food system is exploitative, it is an effective medium to examine exploitative systems more broadly. Since food is communal, we can use food to examine who is included our community and who isn’t. Since food is cultural, we can use food to examine cultural appropriation. Sartj and Wey’s other conceptual creations—from his Blackness in America Dinner Series in 14 cities across the US to his 1882 series exploring anti-immigrant attitudes—push eaters to examine these issues.

The Washington Post has called the cuisine Wey serves “discomfort food.” But his agenda is much broader than food. Though he is a brilliant writer, Wey’s status as a celebrated chef makes food a unique medium for him to communicate in, hosting conversations that aim to contribute to changing the narrative about inequality and lead to a future where resources are redistributed in a more equitable way.

Collecting Recipes for Resistance

To create something new in the kitchen, many first reach for a recipe. The word recipe has two different but related definitions. A recipe is “a set of instructions for preparing a particular dish,” as in “a traditional Thai recipe.” The other definition is “something that is likely to lead to a particular outcome,” as in “a recipe for success.” Recipes are perfect metaphors for creating new futures since they are, in their broadest sense, a set of instructions to achieve a desired outcome.

Cookbook author and food activist Julia Turshen thinks that the form of a recipe “gives us a nice framework for planning anything, whether that is organizing your community or being part of a larger movement.” Her most recent cookbook, Feed the Resistance, can be looked at as a sort of compendium of people making change with food. Its comprised of recipes in both senses of the word: essays from activists (including Tunde Wey) in addition to instructions for creating food to feed them. The book contains recipes for easy posole and ending recidivism. It beautifully documents the ground rules for apple squares and organized activism, all the while urging us to gather around a table with these recipes to plan meals and revolutions.

Turshen not only documents the efforts of other changemakers, she is a changemaker herself. She and others created Equity at the Table (EATT), an online community for women/gender non-conforming people, focusing primarily on people of color and queer people, in food. It connects people to resources such as legal help for those who have experienced workplace abuse and allows community members to list themselves in a database so they can be discovered by journalists, restauranteurs, and conference organizers. EATT is inspired by the age-old aphorism that “when you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence.”

“We can use food to achieve this more equitable world,” Julia says, “and when I think about what that world looks like or what that table looks like, it’s not just about diversity. There is an important difference between diversity and equity. Equity is about a power shift, not just a transfer of power from one group to another, but reframing how we see power. How we create it and maintain it. How it’s wielded.” Having a seat at the table is critical, but so is the structure of the table itself. Julia suggests this metaphorical table should be envisioned as a circle with no head and where everyone is on equal footing. This metaphor helps us think critically about the power structures that have historically limited the ability to truly empathize with others.

Food is the Future

You don’t need to be a cookbook author, a chef, a non-profit founder, or an artist in order to use food to create a new future. You eat multiple times a day, meaning personally you have opportunities to change the future with food regularly. How can you use food’s universal language to speak to others in new ways? How might you create new food identities that reflect your values? Can you create greater empathy in yourself, your family, or your community with food? Are you willing and able to see the systems reflected in and through food, even if they aren’t as equitable or just as you might assume? Food provides all of us the opportunity to be changemakers and write our own story for the equitable, sustainable, healthy, and humane futures we want and our world so desperately needs.