Disasters can look very different depending on where you are in Peru, a country of extremes: coastal desert, the Andes, the Amazon, and dozens of climates in between. The country is also deeply unequal. Political and business elites in Lima are often far removed from what happens outside their own neighborhoods. Just a few days ago, as floods were already hitting parts of Lima and concerns were growing about the upcoming “Super El Niño,” the new government’s economy and finance minister said: “Let’s not exaggerate over a little water up to our knees.”

Peru is one of the countries historically most affected by El Niño and sits at the heart of the phenomenon. Usually, winds push the Pacific’s warm water away from South America and toward Indonesia and Australia. Along Peru, the cold Humboldt Current moves north, while colder water rises from below. On the other side of the Pacific, all that warm water helps create the clouds and heavy rains, which helps drive the vast atmospheric circulation across the Pacific.

El Niño begins when those winds weaken. Warm water comes back to South America, sometimes pushing sea-surface temperatures 1–2°C above normal during strong events. And then things start shifting far beyond this area: the rain moves, atmospheric circulation changes, and weather patterns change around the world.

A “Super El Niño” is the same process, only much stronger. Ocean and atmosphere keep reinforcing each other for months. This very strong El Niño could push parts of the equatorial Pacific close to 3°C above normal, releasing even more heat into an atmosphere already warmed by climate change. 2027 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record, with everything that comes with that: heat waves, deaths and illness from extreme heat, worse conditions for agriculture and livestock, wildfires, and greater demand for water and energy. There is also a higher risk of floods in some places — the Greater Horn of Africa, for example — and drought in others, including Central America and southern Africa.

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Peru has lived through two very strong El Niños that this one could resemble: 1982–83 and 1997–98. It experiences El Niño frequently, with several events in the past decade alone, but when it is especially strong, it reshapes the ocean and much more.

That cold current usually makes this part of the Pacific one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world. Yet in a country proud to be the birthplace of ceviche, Peruvians barely eat anchoveta — the world’s largest single-species fishery. Instead, it is mostly turned into fishmeal and fish oil and exported to feed fish and pigs in places as distant as China. Anchoveta loves to eat the plankton that flourishes in cold waters. When the water warms, there is less food, and the fish move — sometimes into deeper waters, sometimes farther south. Anchoveta catches fell to less than 10% of their previous level in 1983–84, and to around 20% in 1998. Sardines also moved or disappeared from the usual fishing grounds. At the same time, tropical or warm-water species appeared or became more abundant, including mahi-mahi, tuna, or mackerel.

On land, El Niño came with huaicos, a word that sounded so strange to me as a child and became familiar from then on. Normally dry ravines turned into torrents of mud and debris, destroying almost everything in their path. In 1983, huaicos also struck central Peru, hitting areas where many homes had been built informally and with little protection from this kind of risk. This informality — more widespread now than then — is the result of exclusion and poverty. People had been leaving their towns for years, pushed by poverty, economic crises, and the lack of opportunities. Then terrorism made that exodus much worse. Entire communities fled the crossfire between the Shining Path and the armed forces, and the state did little to prepare for where all those people would live. Since then I’ve heard people in Lima criticize the “ignorance” of families who built their homes in places exposed to huaicos, with little empathy for the fact that people build where they can: where they can afford it, where they are allowed to stay, where they won’t be pushed out.

Farther south, around Arequipa, Cusco, and Puno — home to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca — El Niño brought the opposite: drought, severely affecting agriculture and livestock. In 1983, a year I barely remember, mostly for the extra sun, Peru’s GDP fell by more than 10% — almost as much as during COVID in 2020. The president called it the worst natural disaster of the century and authorized agricultural loans and aid as the number of people affected climbed above 1.3 million. What I remember more clearly came a few years later. Driving through those northern deserts on the way to my father’s hometown of Olmos, we were amazed to see hills usually made of sand and earth covered in green.

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By 1997, we were supposed to be better prepared — or at least we talked much more about El Niño. At home, I remember my father and our beloved neighbor spending their free time figuring out how to keep the expected rains from ruining the rooftops. Lima is so dry that the tiny drops we get have their own name, garúa — more like mist than rain. Maybe that’s why I still watch a real downpour, like the ones that fall almost every “summer” afternoon in Mexico City, as if it were the northern lights. In the end, the torrential rain never really came to Lima, even though we were all waiting for water to pour through those new roof pipes — especially the “architects.” But the intense rains returned in the north. And in a desert depression, an enormous lagoon of more than 2,000 km² formed. Suddenly, you could fish in the desert, amid birds and new vegetation. Within a year, the lagoon had shrunk dramatically, although it expands again during extraordinary rainy seasons.

But we were not that prepared after all. In 1997–98, as in 1983, food ran short in some places as roads were cut off. Northern regions were again isolated, crops destroyed, animals swept away, and food became more expensive. Some people were down to one meal a day, despite communal kitchens and food aid. And in 1998, huaicos reached almost to downtown Lima.

Are we better prepared now? The economy and finance minister later apologized, calling his comment “unfortunate.” I don’t want to condemn someone for one bad comment — I have been a minister myself, and I know any public official can slip up, especially when new to the job. But without “exaggerating,” it is hard not to read in those words some of the old problems of Peru’s elites: centralism and disconnection from the rest of the country, and a technocratic obsession with numbers that too often misses human suffering. Because that traditional economic technocracy rarely leaves the office. Because they rarely travel extensively through Peru to understand a country so complex and diverse, with so many different realities — and so many different ways of being hit by a phenomenon as complex as El Niño.

Around the world, El Niño will bring disasters (and suffering) in some places and temporarily reorganize ecosystems. Some regions will produce more food and others less. There is now better technology and larger stocks in some places. The world may still produce enough food overall. But enough food globally doesn’t mean access everywhere. The World Food Programme warns that by the end of 2027, at least 49 million more people could be struggling to get enough food, especially in Central America and southern Africa. And the strain is already showing elsewhere: drought is restricting traffic through the Panama Canal, while low water in Brazil’s Tapajós River could make it harder to move soy and corn. Add wars and tariffs to that, and the risks multiply.

El Niño — like many disasters, and like climate change — exposes inequality in resources and in the distribution of suffering. What meant more sun to me as a child in a grey city meant drought to others. What looks like “just water up to our knees” to one politician can mean floods that cut communities off, or huaicos that destroy homes and everything inside them. What may look like enough food globally can simply mean hunger somewhere else. El Niño also reminds us how connected we are. Winds weaken, ocean temperatures rise by two or three degrees in part of the Pacific, weather shifts across the planet, and someone thousands of miles away may no longer be able to afford food. Maybe the challenge is to connect our empathy (and our policies) as tightly as these ecosystems already are.

And they have been making their way into our diets for decades, to the point that avoiding them entirely is now almost impossible. Yet I don’t think we are treating the issue with the importance — or the nuance — it deserves in conversations about food systems, despite recent efforts to bring it onto the agenda.

What bothers me even more is how normalized unnecessary plastic use remains. Even in my hyper-gentrified neighborhood in Mexico City — full of people who care about organic food, cycling, and sustainability — disposable coffee cups and other single-use plastics are everywhere.

It’s easy to blame the person holding the cup. But my anger is misplaced — and so are the accusations they could turn back on me about flying or eating meat. As with many other food systems challenges, the problem is not just the consumer; it is the system.

The Plastification of the Planet — and Our Bodies

We eat, drink, breathe, and wear plastics. They are all over our kitchens, bathrooms, and beds. The pollution they create will remain on this planet for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Plastic is in the ice of Mount Everest, across Antarctica, at the deepest point on Earth — the Mariana Trench, almost 11,000 meters below sea level — and in some of the planet’s most remote places. It is present throughout marine ecosystems, from coastlines to the deep ocean floor, and accumulates in vast ocean garbage patches.

And it is increasingly found inside animals. The famous image of a sea turtle with a plastic straw up its nose horrified us, but plastic is also found in pelicans and penguins, shrimp and crabs, whales, chickens and cows, sardines and mackerel. And many, many more.

How much plastic are we eating? Hard to know. The often quoted claim that we ingest a credit card’s worth every week has since been challenged. But they are present in much of the water we drink. Microplastics have been found in meat, with higher levels reported in more processed products. The same is true of ultra-processed foods, where processing machinery and packaging can add another layer of contamination.

You can actually put enormous effort into eating well — getting your macronutrients and micronutrients right, eating a diverse diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables, avoiding sweetened beverages — and still eat plastic. It comes through the water we drink and fruits and vegetables we eat. Broccoli, for example. Apples and carrots have been found among the highest in fruits and vegetables, respectively. Chemicals can also leach from packaging and kitchenware into food, especially with heat, long contact, and fatty foods.

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Throughout the Food Chain

All that plastic we use every day — those annoying coffee cups and bottles, supermarket packaging, bags, and now the explosion of delivery and online-grocery packaging — can fragment into microplastics (visible pieces, the size of a pencil eraser, or particles much thinner than hair), and smaller still into nanoplastics, able to enter tissues and cells.

This is the plastic we tend to notice: the downstream waste. It makes sense that packaging gets so much attention: it accounts for around 40% of global plastic waste. It is also where we tend to blame consumers — as I sometimes do.

But much of the plastic in food systems is upstream, where we don’t see it. This includes lost and discarded fishing gear in the ocean and the large amount of plastic used in aquaculture — cages, nets, ropes, and more. The oceans have rightly received more attention than land (although never enough) since we have essentially turned them into one enormous plastic trash can.

Much of what happens in agriculture is simply out of sight for those of us who don’t live on farms. Microplastics can enter fields through irrigation water or sewage sludge used as fertilizer (wastewater treatment captures much of the plastic in water, concentrating it in the sludge). They also come from synthetic mulch, greenhouse films, irrigation pipes, and even rainfall. Once in the soil, these plastics interact with it chemically and can be taken up by crops, eventually making their way onto our plates.

Convenience vs. Our Health — and the Planet

“Selling produce is like holding a melting ice cube and asking how much someone will pay for it.” It’s clear the convenience of plastic: it slows the rapid decay of fresh food. It is also cheap compared with many alternatives — at least if we ignore all those external costs and look only at the price paid by consumers. Plastic was one of the defining material innovations of the twentieth century. No wonder Mr. McGuire tells Benjamin in The Graduate: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.” He was right: plastics became extraordinarily practical and very difficult to replace.

But back then, we knew far less about the health effects: stroke, heart attacks, obesity, lung disease, and fertility problems. And then there is cancer, linked to some of the many chemicals used in plastic production and as additives, which are used, among other things, to make materials resistant to water and grease. All of this comes with enormous health costs. One estimate put them at $250 billion in the US in 2018 alone.

We have already talked about plastic pollution in oceans and soils. But plastics are also a climate problem. They are overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels and generate around 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

And all these pollution costs are not distributed equally. Where are petrochemical plants, refineries, incinerators, and landfills usually located? Close to low-income and marginalized communities. As with many environmental harms, those often the most exposed are the same that contribute the least to this pollution.

And the problem is accelerating: more than half of all the plastic ever produced has been made in just the past two decades.

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Why Isn’t Plastic a Food Systems Priority — and Why Has So Little Changed?

In food systems, plastic has been largely absent from the priorities of conferences, manifestos, reports and dialogues — or mentioned only in passing. There is something almost natural about this. We tend to see plastics as belonging to “other sectors,” much as we have with trade, finance, or insurance — all fundamental to how food systems work, but rarely given the attention they deserve.

Too often, we assume these issues fall outside our field, our institutions, or our expertise: someone else is responsible, someone else knows more. Climate change was once treated this way too. Fisheries still often are, in a food world historically dominated by agronomists. Only recently, with a more systemic view of food, have nutritionists, environmentalists, economists, and others begun to sit around the same table without it feeling like the Tower of Babel.

But this is the easiest part of the explanation. The harder and real reasons have much more to do with power, interests, and the stories we have been told about plastic.

This does not mean there has been no progress, mostly led by the European Union. It has developed one of the world’s most ambitious regulatory frameworks for plastics. In 2019, it approved rules — in force since 2021 — targeting the ten single-use plastic products most commonly found on European beaches. It banned some, including straws, cutlery and plates, and imposed restrictions on others, along with extended producer responsibility and collection targets, including 90% for plastic bottles by 2029. As of this month, the EU is also starting to apply new rules on packaging design, recyclability, reuse, and labeling. In the US, where plastic waste per person is higher than anywhere else — nearly twice as high as in Europe and sixteen times as high as in India — progress has been slower, although some states have restricted plastic packaging.

And in 2022, came perhaps the most important step yet: the decision to negotiate a UN plastics treaty covering the full lifecycle of plastic, from production and design to disposal. The plan was to complete negotiations by 2024 and open the treaty for signature in 2025. Predictably, that did not happen.

And the reasons for that failure provide a useful entry point into the deeper obstacles — the same ones that help explain why plastics remain peripheral to the food systems agenda, and why progress on plastic pollution more broadly has been so slow.

One: A confluence of corporate power from different industries — and geopolitical power

Why is there still no UN global plastics treaty? The petrochemical industry sees plastics as its lifeline as the energy transition threatens fossil fuels — a transition they are doing everything they can to delay, with considerable success. Plastics are their star product, driving much of petrochemicals’ future growth.

And this is where two highly concentrated industries become intertwined. The interests of a company like ExxonMobil — one of the world’s largest oil producers, but also the largest producer of virgin polymers for single-use plastics — converge with those of Coca-Cola, Nestlé, PepsiCo, and other dominant food and beverage companies that depend heavily on cheap plastic packaging (and in some cases own or invest in bottling operations that manufacture and source plastic packaging, and even own packaging and recycling businesses).

All of this is visible in the UN global plastics treaty negotiations. Hundreds of industry representatives — with ties to petrochemicals, plastics, packaging, as well as from food and beverage companies — have participated in the talks, in some cases even as members of national delegations.

The result: a bloc of petrostates and major petrochemical producers — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and others — has blocked the most consequential measure on the table: limits on plastic production. They have sometimes found allies in countries such as Brazil, China, and the US, depending on the moment or the administration.

On the other side is the High Ambition Coalition, with 70 members, including the European Union, the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, many Latin American and African countries, and numerous Small Island Developing States. It is still pushing for binding global limits on plastic production.

Two: The business model of long food supply chains depends on plastic

Food companies have a powerful reason to defend that supply of cheap plastic: much of their business model is built around it. Long-distance food supply chains depend heavily on cheap, lightweight plastic to move products safely and keep them fresh for longer. That, in turn, supports year-round availability regardless of season and the supermarket and convenience-store model built around it. Ready meals, food delivery, and online grocery shopping have added another layer of dependence on plastic.

Packaging does much more for them than protecting food. It is part of how companies sell it: branding, advertising, differentiation, portioning, and shelf visibility. Is all that packaging really necessary to transport food and keep it safe? In many cases, no.

Three: Narratives and myths - food security, recycling, biodegradable, circularity

In food, the overall story is especially convenient: we need plastic to keep food safe and fresh; consumers need to know how to manage their waste (while also feeling reassured about plastic packaging); and technology will eventually take care of the damage — if not now, then through creative solutions “soon”.

These narratives and myths, together with misinformation, are common among industries seeking to protect their interests from regulation and public backlash. We have seen it with ultra-processed foods, tobacco, and many others. But what is particularly interesting is where the playbook originated: the oil industry wrote the manual for misinformation, and others later copied it.

The use of the food security narrative: This argument presents plastic as indispensable because it extends shelf life, protects food from some forms of contamination, reduces food waste, and is cheap — ignoring it’s health and environmental costs. But it creates a false choice: plastic or disease and food waste. It conflates the public interest in food with the private interests of industry, when the trade-off is much more complicated than that.

The recycling myth: Less than 10% of plastic has ever been recycled. Not surprising, really, since plastics were never designed to be recovered. Food packaging is particularly problematic to recycle because much of it is single-use and has contact with food.

Actually, recycling itself is not clean. It generates pollution and can release additional micro- and nanoplastics, as well as toxic substances. And in countries with limited waste-management infrastructure, plastic is often openly burned, with even worse consequences for health and the environment.

Another myth: biodegradable plastic (it’s often not very biodegradable). I still remember a supermarket ad showing one of its biodegradable bags floating in the ocean and then simply disintegrating. It must have been one of the most misleading ads in history!

Most plastic is not biodegradable, and even plastics marketed as biodegradable often break down only under specific conditions. PLA — polylactic acid, one of the most common bioplastics — can biodegrade in industrial composting facilities. But access to those facilities remains limited in the US and many other places. And if the plastic is burned instead, it still creates pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. More research and innovation may make biodegradable plastics a better alternative in the future. But many of today’s claims are misleading, giving people the reassuring impression that these products will simply disappear after we throw them away.

Circularity as the win-win solution. We don’t need to produce less, consume less, or change very much. Let’s keep the convenience: you, the consumer, win, and I win. And to governments: I’ll keep investing, creating jobs, and contributing to economic growth. I heard this constantly when I was in government — from the petrochemical industry, but also from those selling the circular economy as the silver bullet that would allow production to keep growing. Faced with poor results, they always asked for patience: the technology would improve.

The reality is that the circle is rarely closed. Many plastics lose quality during recycling, while contamination and the mixture of chemicals in food packaging make true circularity extremely difficult.

Four: Shorter food chains remain ignored, marginalized, and treated as obsolete

Part of the reason so little has changed is that we have invested very little in food systems that could depend less on plastic. There is a huge deficit of public — and private — investment in the national, territorial, and local infrastructure that connects producers with nearby consumers. These shorter chains often provide healthier food, can be more sustainable, are generally more inclusive of smaller producers and informal actors — and should require less plastic.

Fifth: There is no magic replacement

There is no single substitute that is as cheap, light, resistant, flexible, hygienic, and able to extend shelf life as plastic. Why don’t we have better alternatives? A big part of the answer is cost: plastic will remain the cheapest option as long as its health and environmental costs stay outside its price. Only by accounting for those full costs can we properly compare paper, glass, aluminum, reusable containers, bioplastics, and others — none of which is perfect. And only then will there be stronger incentives to invest in the research and innovation needed to find better ones. In the meantime, we should distinguish essential uses from unnecessary ones.

Solutions for plastics in food systems and beyond — false and real.

There are five major ocean gyres where currents concentrate floating debris. The most famous is in the North Pacific, home to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between California and Hawaii. It’s a vast area filled with bottles, toys, toothbrushes, crates, and enormous discarded fishing nets that can trap fish, sea turtles, seals, and other marine animals.

In 2012, an eighteen-year-old Dutch student named Boyan Slat went viral with a TEDx talk proposing an outlandish idea: rather than chasing plastic across the ocean, why not build a giant floating system and let the currents bring the plastic to us? He raised millions of dollars — some of it from the plastics industry — and received enormous publicity, promising to remove half the trash from the patch within five years. Unsurprisingly, the first system failed, although the project continues in different forms.

But what is more interesting is why the idea attracted so much attention: it promised to clean up plastic without having to stop producing so much of it. That is what false solutions do. They leave producers’ interests untouched, reassure consumers that everything will be fine (while often blaming them for the problem), and divert attention from prevention.

Real solutions attack the problem at its source. The following seven measures cover most of the structural agenda, including limiting production and making producers responsible for what happens to them throughout their life cycle, as well as other restrictions and regulations.

They are not exhaustive, but together they tackle the problem much closer to its root causes. They cannot be voluntary. They require governments to change the rules and incentives under which plastic is produced and used. They also require multidisciplinary approaches. Plastics need a much more prominent place in food-systems debates, bringing together agriculture, fisheries, health, environment, trade, and waste policy. And policies should be designed so that the costs of the transition do not fall disproportionately on consumers, particularly lower-income households.

1. Binding caps on virgin plastic production. This means setting binding production targets, especially through the UN plastics treaty. The logic is simple: produce less plastic instead of figuring out what to do with ever more of it afterwards. It is probably the single measure that would have the greatest impact — and the one most fiercely opposed by plastic producers and major producing countries.

2. Make producers pay the full cost of plastic. This is known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). Today, taxpayers and local or national governments often pay for the collection, sorting, treatment, and disposal of plastic waste. They shouldn’t. The companies that put plastic on the market should. EPR extends producers’ responsibility beyond the sale of a product to what happens to it afterwards. This should include agricultural plastics such as mulch films, greenhouse covers, and irrigation pipes, as well as fishing gear. Producers should pay for its collection and treatment.

3. Repurpose subsidies and make plastic reflect its true cost. Repurpose subsidies to fossil fuel and petrochemical industries that help keep virgin plastic cheap, and redirect them toward R&D in sustainable alternative materials or more sustainable agricultural and fishing practices. But go further: plastic should reflect its real cost, including its environmental and public-health impacts that are usually paid by the rest of us — and by the planet. Otherwise, alternatives will struggle to compete. Even recycling is undermined when recycled plastic has to compete with artificially cheap virgin plastic.

4. Phase out and ban unnecessary and problematic plastics. Start with extremely short-lived plastics, excessive packaging, and materials that are unnecessary in the first place. Then target the most toxic and high-risk chemicals, as some jurisdictions are already doing with BPA and PFAS — including in food-contact packaging and kitchenware.

5. Radically reduce food packaging. Set mandatory packaging-reduction and reuse targets, with refill systems in supermarkets and reusable takeaway containers. One useful proposal is an essential-use test: is the plastic really necessary to ensure food safety or prevent food waste, or is there a sustainable alternative? Public food procurement can help set standards for essential plastic use that can then be extended to supermarkets, convenience stores, and other food retailers. Regulation — not voluntary pledges — should require major beverage and snack companies, supermarkets, and convenience-store chains to redesign their packaging and distribution systems. And packaging should carry clear information on how much is actually recycled, not aspirational claims about recyclability.

6. Make reuse and refill the default. This is not about asking consumers to remember to carry their reusable containers. It’s about ending designed disposability. Much of our plastic is designed to be used for minutes and discarded immediately. Regulations should make reuse the standard in supermarkets, beverage companies, restaurants, and delivery platforms.

7. Don’t use farmland as the final dumping ground for pollution produced elsewhere. Sewage sludge can carry plastics into agricultural soils. Once there, we already know they can make their way back to us through the food we eat.

Some of this is already being designed, implemented, discussed, or negotiated as we speak, and the agenda will keep evolving — and facing resistance. As with climate change, hunger and malnutrition, and pollution, we need collective action strong enough to change the rules — and make these solutions politically unavoidable.

But have we forgotten completely about consumers? Is there more nuance here?

A culture of ultra-convenience

Coca-Cola once collected, washed, and refilled its glass bottles dozens of times — more than 50! The shift to disposability came later because it was more profitable for the company, not because consumers demanded it. And plastic-lined disposable cups helped the coffee industry sell more coffee, anywhere, anytime. Today, an estimated 250 billion cups are thrown away every year.

This is why I have focused — like many experts, scholars, journalists — on solutions that shift responsibility back to producers. Blaming consumers is itself part of the industry playbook. Consumers do not necessarily want plastic; they want what is inside it.

But does that mean there is nothing cultural about our voracious use of resources and plastic? We cannot ignore a deeply ingrained expectation of ultra-convenience.

Yes, consumers can do a lot — and change can happen quickly. Remember that Portlandia sketch about grocery bags? A customer forgets his reusable bag, asks for a paper one, and is subjected to an absurdly embarrassing intervention. The manager tells him that when she wakes up in the morning: “my eyes don’t forget to open, my heart doesn’t forget to beat”. Hilarious. But attitudes toward reusable bags changed much faster than we probably imagined back then.

Like many of you, I’ve been reducing plastic in my life and in my kitchen, and some changes are surprisingly easy. I’ve rarely used plastic water bottles, takeaway coffee cups, or — even worse — coffee capsules; I’ve switched to glass jars and wooden utensils; and I hardly ever order delivery. I particularly miss sous-vide — “heat, plastic, and food are a toxic trinity” — even though it makes restaurant-quality salmon. And also miss non-stick pans: so easy to use!

Other changes take more time — or money. I make my own fermented beverages and yogurt, buy much of my food at the farmers’ market, and avoid a lot of packaged cereals and snacks. I even make popcorn at home and take it to the cinema. Some choices require more investment, like a water filter certified to reduce microplastics. And I have friends, many with children, who have gone much further than I have.

Much of what I can do undoubtedly reflects my privilege — in time, resources, and information. If I were a single mother with two children living on minimum wage, I probably wouldn’t have the time or money to worry about all this. Sustainability should not depend on how much free time you have.

But that doesn’t mean we have zero responsibility for what we come to see as normal, necessary, or something we are entitled to. Convenience itself is not the problem. The problem is equating modernity with my personal freedom to have everything available, all the time, exactly as I want it. Plastic has become part of this lifestyle of consumerist comfort, and of an individualism in which only my convenience seems to matter.

The most important thing consumers can do is push for the structural changes I described above: through local and national politics, voting and pressuring representatives, joining movements demanding change. Consumer-awareness campaigns can distract us from structural responsibility, but they can also barely touch the deeper sense of entitlement many of us have developed to a frictionless life, where our ultra-convenience should never be threatened. It shouldn’t be utopian to think that this, too, can change. The threats posed by climate change, malnutrition, and pollution will only get worse if we refuse to change — and refuse to think beyond the supremacy of the individual. That matters too.

Now, that tradition is under threat in Germany amid concerns about sluggish economic growth. A Financial Times columnist echoed the case for change, complaining mostly about the inconvenience and the “added mental burden of having to fit shopping into my schedule” during the rest of the week. Reading that made me think again about what Sundays like these are actually worth.

During the year I spent in Hamburg, I loved seeing how Alster Lake came alive on Sundays: people jogging, strolling, and, in a city where many dress in various shades of black and beige, somehow looking more colorful, their conversations more animated — with more time to connect with others and with the city.

I visited museums, exhibitions, or the magnificent Elbphilharmonie. Sometimes we took a romantic walk through the woods to forage for mushrooms (once finding just one, which we cooked anyway). I actually had time to finish reading the FT Weekend, including the excellent interview, the book reviews, and even that shameless ode to consumerism — How to Spend It magazine. And yet I barely spent anything. Many restaurants were closed — although occasionally I ventured farther afield for a delicious meal, including to a place casually named HYGGE. But I spent many Sundays cooking with other people, often making more elaborate recipes that took longer, and opening good natural wines that we had bought in advance.

The week is a social construction, of course, as is the idea of periodically stopping to rest together and reconnect. It takes different forms: slow Sundays in many cultures; Shabbat, which suspends work and structures shared time around meals; or iftar, which brings people together to break the daily fast during Ramadan. Germany’s Sonntagsruhe — supported by an alliance of trade unions and churches — protects time for family and spiritual recovery. But it also embodies something deeper about collective time, what shouldn’t be part of the market, and the idea that “society contains the economy, not the other way around.”

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None of this takes away from the inconvenience for parents, with all the planning ahead required to have enough food at home. Most of my friends in Hamburg and I lived in a community that fed us very well almost all week — a kind of Thomas Mann Magic Mountain, next to a lake, with fancy, beautifully designed apartments — so we had little need to buy much. But in general, many have grown addicted to the instant gratification of convenience stores, 24-hour delivery, and apps. Besides convenience, the other main criticism is about freedom: if I want to buy now, work on a Sunday, or open my store when it makes most sense for my business, why should I be limited? In fact, people can shop online on Sundays — which puts physical stores at a disadvantage.

Sonntagsruhe forces you to slow down, plan ahead, use what you have at home, and organize a meal with care and time. But above all, it gives you quality time. Time with family without consuming. Time to connect with the city, with culture, with other people, with nature. It contradicts the narrow economic idea that only more consumption can save us. The need to increase consumption is used as an excuse for everything: not to raise taxes, not to impose environmental regulations or nutritional regulations. Sunday rest protects some time from commerce. And that principle goes surprisingly far: even robots in automated stores cannot operate on Sundays. It’s not only about labor protection. It’s about protecting people from consumption, because there are other important things to do in life.

And the most powerful thing about Sonntagsruhe is that it synchronizes free time across society. A Sunday off is different from a Tuesday off precisely because your family and friends are more likely to be free too. That also weakens the argument that protecting Sunday rest comes at the expense of freedom. Freedom is not only the freedom to choose when to work or consume, but also the freedom to have time off when the people you care about do too.

Of course, some essential workers — a term we used constantly during COVID — still keep Sundays running: hospitals, gas stations, trains, and some food businesses. And in Germany, bakeries too — because bread is considered essential, and is delicious. This weakens the argument that protecting Sunday rest comes at the expense of freedom. In unequal societies, the answer is: “they can take another day off.” But on another day, their families and friends may not be free. Sunday rest is a social equalizer.

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If we only valued things that increase GDP, we would encourage people not to cook, not to spend time reflecting and recharging with friends and loved ones — wait, that’s what we’ve been doing for decades! We need to reclaim those moments: for physical and mental health, for connection, for stronger ties with the people around us and our communities.

This is not only a defense of Sonntagsruhe and similar practices. It is a broader critique of the relentless promotion of consumption, driven by a one-dimensional economic logic that prioritizes efficiency and productivity, and ignores everything we gain from spending our time differently. The question of who controls our time matters more than ever. It would be naive to assume that artificial intelligence will simply make us all work less. Some people may work much less — perhaps while earning much more — while others may end up working more, very likely for less. That is why we need to protect collective rest itself.

I’ve always cherished those moments. In Lima, Sundays were for connecting with family — often what in other countries would be called extended family, but what we simply call family: aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors who became family. I have watched, sadly, as consumerism has taken some of that space in recent decades, with more malls and more ways to spend Sunday consuming. In Mexico City, Sundays have meant more time to wander through this enormous, chaotic city — still chaotic even on Sundays — to slowly prepare one of those colorful breakfasts, ride a bike along streets closed to cars, or linger over meals, asados, and dinners at home.

Perhaps nowhere is the value of shared time more visible than around a table. Commensality is one of our oldest forms of connection. Cook, invite, share. Open a nice wine, enjoy the conversation, spend time with the people you love. We need more of those collective moments throughout the week. To deliberately make room for them, as a refuge from lives becoming increasingly virtual and impersonal. Modernization does not have to mean more consumption. It can also mean protecting more time for ourselves and the people we love.

What can we learn from a vegan activist? For starters, that passion and enthusiasm can persuade without preaching.

I met Kasia Mak at the last EAT Forum in Stockholm, where she took me to try meatballs — vegan, of course. They were so good that, if I ever decide to leave my omnivore life behind, I would ask her to guide me through the best restaurants in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe.

In this conversation, she tells us how becoming vegan made her a foodie, how much she likes being cooked for, and how hating eating alone led her to found Heartbeet, the women’s network for vegans and the vegan-curious that she leads in Amsterdam.

1. The last dish you cooked, and who it was for.

I don’t cook. I’m the lucky one. I have ridiculously talented friends who cook for me.

The last thing actually baked for me came out of the oven this morning. A friend messaged me that she’d just pulled fresh vegan sweet buns out of the oven. I grabbed my dog and walked straight over.

I don’t cook for people. I take them out to restaurants, and then they cook for me. Everyone’s happier that way.

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2. Where does your passion for food come from? When did food stop being just food?

I used to be one of those kids you had to force to eat. Then, when I was studying, I ate the cheapest supermarket food I could find.

And yet my whole career somehow attached itself to food. My first job at eighteen was in a pizza place. After that: managing innovation at Carlsberg, leading marketing at Burger King, and finally delivering food at Just Eat — where I also moved from marketing into sustainability.

But the real shift came when I went vegan.

I never expected it, but going vegan made me a foodie. That was the first time I actually thought about what I was putting on my plate. Where’s the best food? What are the options? What restaurants, concepts, and innovations are out there? Going vegan opened up a whole world of food I didn’t know existed.

And now I’m obsessed.

One week it’s the only 100% vegan hotel in the Dolomites, eating my way through Omnia before it gets its Michelin star. The next week, it’s me standing in my local supermarket, comparing every tofu on the shelf - have you ever tried the fermented one? Best vegan pizza in London at Purezza. Plant-based lamb. Vegan fondue. I make friends in every vegan restaurant I walk into, and at every food conference I attend.

3. The restaurant you always return to, and the one that marked you forever.

I have two regular places. One is Sonny, my favourite falafel and fries spot in De Pijp, the hip district of Amsterdam — you can meet me and my dog there every Tuesday. The other is a bar on the Market Square in Wrocław, where I go whenever I’m home to fill up on Polish veggie food. I’m just a big pierogi person when I’m there.

The one I’ve been to only once but can’t stop thinking about is Café Gratitude in Los Angeles. Every dish on the menu is named after an affirmation: you order by saying “I am Grateful,” “I am Beautiful,” “I am Powerful.” So before the food even arrives, you’ve had a hit of happiness and appreciation. They also run a community meal where people pay what they can afford.

That’s what I love: healthy and sustainable, with a good dose of creativity, making you — and an experience that excludes no one.

4. The song that moved you this week, and the book on your nightstand.

I’ve had a crush on the same Polish singer for years now, so probably it’s him: Dawid Podsiadło, Chciałbym umrzeć z miłości. And don’t judge me by my Christmas songs: I’m addicted, and I’m fairly sure I’m the only person in the world listening to them all year round.

The book I just finished is The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Strange, but definitely worth reading.

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5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

I hate eating alone. Maybe that’s exactly why I built Heartbeet: a heartbeat and a beetroot, action mixed with plant-based, feminine energy without the labels. I now have the phone numbers of 360 vegan women, so I can go out to eat any time I want. In fact, I’m leaving in a moment to check out a new ice cream and wine bar with some of the girls. They make gelato from fava bean milk - can you imagine? - in flavours like vanilla tonka and pineapple basil.

I also organise regular events, to prove that vegan can be social, fun and fulfilling — because there’s a real problem hiding underneath this. Food is deeply social. But the moment you change how you eat, you can feel incredibly lonely. People start challenging you at the table. They ask questions you don’t always have answers to. You stop feeling comfortable dining with meat eaters. You basically have to rebuild your social circle from scratch and find new people to eat with.

So: one hundred percent for eating — vegan — with others.

6. Picture a dinner in 2050. What’s on the table? What’s gone? What’s new?

Call me naive, but I see it as plant-based. We’ll be far ahead of the current protein transition targets, and eating meat will be so last year.

I also think individual nutrition and food efficiency will have improved enormously. Diets tailored to each person’s health needs and life situation. Far more functional.

And I hope, no matter what, we’ll have come back to the roots: farm to fork, vegetables straight from the soil, real people behind what we eat.

7. Is there room for hope? What gives it to you, and what takes it away?

Absolutely. I’m a big optimist, and Burger King is the reason why.

I was working there when it happened to me: one day I looked at a Whopper and saw a cow. I started digging into the animal welfare and environmental impact of what we eat, went vegetarian, and two years later went vegan while working on the Veganuary campaign. If it can happen to the person selling the burgers, it can happen to anyone.

And it happened to the business too. I was there when they launched the Impossible Whopper in the US. I remember getting the first plant-based patty during a new product development session. Mind-blowing experience. That was a brave move, and it democratised the whole plant-based category. Now it’s everywhere.

So I believe any person and any business can change, given the right information, the right push, or the right leader to inspire it. If Burger King could kickstart the trend on plant-based meat, we can absolutely change the way we eat.

8. What’s the conversation nobody in your world is having about food?

People.

We talk endlessly about the planet, about health as a concept, about animals, more and more about social justice. We don’t talk about the people actually changing the way they eat and the social consequences, the challenges, the risk of burnout.

It’s not that easy being a food rebel. You travel with limited access to choice, you’re hosted by others, you go to conferences — and it’s still completely natural for everyone to serve you meat and cheese. You want to eat differently so you often leave the room hungry and disappointed, misunderstood, angry. We need to do far more for those people, so they stay motivated to lead by example.

People need to change the way they eat for the food system to transition. But people want to live happy, convenient lives, and eat tasty food they can share with others. So we need to make it easier for them.

9. One billboard for the vegan movement, anywhere in the world. What does it say?

You can’t love animals and eat them too.

10. When you have people over, how do you set the stage for real connection?

I love playing matchmaker. I go through people’s profiles and interests and I plan the seating.

There are two kinds of gatherings I adore. The first is an intimate dinner with deep conversation — that’s where I put real effort into who sits next to whom. If it’s a bigger group of strangers, I bring conversation starters, a little game, icebreakers.

The second is a standing party with a big crowd, where people move around freely and find each other on their own. There I pay much more attention to the setting and the vibe of the space — not too loud, room to breathe.

Either way: I’m Polish. Hospitality is in my blood.

But no. They’re back — or they never left. Even in the US, ultra-processed food still makes up 53 percent of the calories adults eat, barely down from 55.8 percent a decade ago. In June, Science published a commentary, “Ultraprocessed Foods and Obesity: Interpreting the Evidence,” questioning whether the harm is caused by processing at all. Vox ran with the skepticism almost uncritically. The Atlantic’s version was “A Fancy Name for Junk Food.” I started seeing these articles and discussions everywhere in my inbox and social feeds. Debates I thought were settled years ago were getting relitigated all over again.

So I watched the same reaction from many people I know who have worked this issue for years: “here we go again!”

All this noise about the NOVA classification (the system that sorts food by how industrially processed it is) shouldn’t obscure the clear evidence tying ultra-processed diets to worse health. Good timing, then, that the American Journal of Public Health gave its entire July issue to the evidence. Chronic disease. Product engineering. Corporate influence. And the role tobacco companies played in building the modern ultra-processed food industry. Those of us who've been in government have felt that pressure directly — corporations trying to treat the ministry (and in many cases, the people working there) like just another one of their own operations offices. And that same corporate influence shows up directly in this debate. The Science commentary’s authors disclose, in their own conflict-of-interest statement, support from the ultra-processed food industry itself.

Not a coincidence; this is an old pattern that we can recognize immediately. Stuart Gillespie analyzes these strategies in Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet. Dispute means paying scientists and associations to sow doubt about evidence. Distort is lobbying governments while shifting the media narrative toward personal responsibility and “lifestyle choices.” Disguise happens behind Trojan-horse front groups, so the industry’s fingerprints never show. Then there’s derailing/delaying: corporate litigation used to obstruct and slow down government action. And dodging — minimizing what you owe by shifting your tax liabilities into havens.

When I was running a think tank, industry tried to hire us (through third parties) for a study on the UPF-malnutrition link, with the questions worded so it would be impossible to find the obvious link. Of course we didn't take it. That’s real line-crossing, as is illegal lobbying, discrediting critics, and manufacturing doubt. This is the exact tactic tobacco and fossil fuels used for decades. And there’s also the money in politics, and litigation used to delay and intimidate. A Lighthouse Reports investigation, led by Thin Lei Win and covered by The Guardian and other newspapers, found companies suing countries over public-health rules specifically to drive up the cost (and the fear) of reform.

What people usually praise them for is different: distribution efficiency and omnipresence, shelf life, food safety. I've seen the omnipresence part firsthand — Coca-Cola and that disgusting fake chocolate called Sublime (which my compatriots inexplicably love), in corner shops in villages deep in the Peruvian Andes, places barely reachable by road. These are real things. Distribution, especially, is worth studying. But take food safety. A product that won’t give you food poisoning tonight can still be making you sick over years. Is it too much to ask for food safety that protects you both today and in the long term?

For those of us who do want to make the case for healthy food, the industry understands a few things we often don't: which arguments and actions actually work. And they have the resources to hire smart people, sharp on strategy and narratives. Here's where that shows.

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1. It’s about the economy for governments.

I’ve spent time in cabinet meetings (every Wednesday at 8am, for many hours, during my time as minister), and one thing is pretty obvious. After the president or prime minister, the finance minister is usually the most important person in the room — with direct access to their ear.

The industry knows this pretty well too, and it talks in the language economists like, citing threats to employment, investment and growth if governments consider taxing or restricting ultra-processed foods. And finance ministries are already worried about growth, while defense spending rises, tariffs return, and geopolitical uncertainty makes everything harder. So the case for stronger regulation also needs to be economic: lower productivity from absenteeism and disability, more pressure on public budgets, and more money coming directly out of households. And that economic case is bigger than the costs: a transition toward healthier and sustainable food can also create jobs, investment and new economic activity in farming, fishing, aquaculture, processing, markets, logistics and many other parts of the food system.

2. It’s also about economics for the people.

One of the industry’s favorite lines is "ultra-processed food is cheaper, and it tastes good." Is it really cheap? Once you add the public-health and environmental bill, it isn’t. But, on the other hand, the price of healthy food is high, and we feel it directly in our own budgets. I've felt it in places as different as Mexico City, New Haven, and Hamburg. And if it's both healthy and organic, the price climbs even higher. We need to make healthy food affordable for everyone, and that has to be a priority.

I see real momentum here: Mamdani put it on New York's political map; FAO gave it serious space in this year's State of Food Security and Nutrition report; and the High Level Panel of Experts lists it among food systems' critical, emerging, and enduring issues. I’ve argued in another article for something structural: repurposing subsidies; investing in what fresh food actually needs to move (cold chains, rural roads, traditional markets); taxing ultra-processed products and subsidizing fruits and vegetables; using public procurement for healthy products; and building better public food infrastructure, instead of leaving that entirely to the market.

And, actually, the industry loves to paint any restriction on ultra-processed food or promotion of healthy diets as elitist, an attack on what poor people supposedly want. The actually discriminatory position is shrugging while poor people are left with nothing to eat that won’t eventually make them sick, then calling anyone who wants to fix that an elitist for imposing their idea of health. The New Yorker’s piece on food deserts makes a fair point about access (it isn’t the whole story) and it emphasizes the need to consider preferences, but leaves that point quite open. Which brings me to the next issue.

3. Deliciousness.

Even if researchers now argue the ultra-processed foods are engineered for addiction, not pleasure, how do you compete with concentrations of sugar, salt, fat, and calories that barely exist in nature? That brings us back to the question left open above. Access matters. But so does preference, shaped by culture, history, money, memory, habit. And often by plain comfort: food that simply makes you feel good.

So how do you make healthy food actually taste like something people want and gives them comfort? By treating taste itself as the priority. Preference isn’t fixed. Taste can be learned. Repeated exposures can increase a kid’s acceptance of a vegetable they initially rejected. Palates change once intake actually drops. Salt preference resets within weeks of eating less of it.

None of this research and understanding of preferences is comprehensive, or as well-funded, as it should be. We know far less than we need to about sugar, sodium, fat, and calorie addiction. Taste and pleasure have always been treated as unscientific and too personal to take seriously as major policy research priorities. When I write about deliciousness, or about pleasure in food at all, I feel the skeptical looks from some colleagues who treat the whole subject as superflous. Given what these habits cost us in health spending alone, that omission doesn’t even make economic sense.

4. Clear as water.

This is hard to picture if you grew up in the Global North, where you turn on a tap and clean water is just there — for everything, but especially for drinking. Across much of the Global South, it isn’t. The kind of explosive stomach illness that made US headlines last week is a routine hazard elsewhere. Ask any visitor to Mexico City or Lima who carefully avoided tap water and bottled everything, only to get sick anyway from the water used to cook their food, or the ice used in the margaritas or pisco sours. It used to be worse. Fermented drinks (beer, wine, pulque, chicha, kvass) became popular in part because for most of human history, they were often the safest liquid available.

Listening to The Daily recently about cyberattack threats to poison US water supplies (threats that, so far, haven’t materialized, maybe because the escalation would be catastrophic for everyone), I kept thinking about the basic responsibility governments have, budget constraints or not, to guarantee something this fundamental to a dignified life. Because where clean water isn’t reliably available, sugary drinks fill the gap. And they give a false sense of quenching thirst, wrapped in excessive sugar and additives, and in a lot of places they’re more omnipresent than clean water itself. Plus, of course, the “comfort” that comes with all that sugar. Getting drinkable water everywhere in the Global South, starting with schools but reaching every home, has to be part of the food-systems agenda. Why isn’t it higher up the list?

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5. The tobacco strategy.

The industry’s defense has followed tobacco’s script — deny it, insist the evidence isn’t there, manufacture doubt, litigate, covert advertising. It’s still running today. In Love Storyv (as in many TV shows and films), Sarah Pidgeon's Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy smokes non-stop, gorgeously rehabilitating the image of smoking. And World Cup sponsorships, linking products that make us sick with sport.

But tobacco control didn’t stop at denial and doubt, and neither should we. Treat addictive products with genuinely high concentrations of sugar, sodium, saturated fat and calories the way we eventually treated cigarettes, across the board. Tax them hard, restrict how they're advertised, and limit where and how easily they can be sold. And maybe the most important step is getting the industry out of the room where the rules get written. Tobacco offers a precedent that is increasingly guiding how to deal with that: Article 5.3 of the WHO's tobacco treaty bars industry representatives from health-policy negotiations entirely, since it's quite clear that their interests and the public's are fundamentally incompatible.

The UPF industry has enormous economic and political power. Still, we’ve seen reforms happen (many in Latin America), because enough people pushed in the same direction. Civil society organizations got resources and coordinated their work. Public researchers produced evidence that governments could use, and communicated it well. Journalists exposed industry tactics, including cases of espionage (I’m not kidding) against reformers. None of that would have been enough, of course, without politicians willing to act.

And now the coalition needs to get broader. I’ll admit I’ve been surprised to see some colleagues adding to the doubt in this latest debate, when the evidence is so clear. But the public has been moving in a good direction for years, less willing to accept that eating well, and being able to afford it, is too much to ask. That public needs to be part of the coalition too.

Harry Neira, once Peru's barista champion, is the founder of Neira Café Lab in Lima, the specialty coffee chain that has become the go-to destination for coffee lovers in the country. Harry has a unique ability to talk about coffee with passion and empathy — even for those of us who aren’t professionals or Q graders.

Harry talks about hospitality as coffee’s next wave, the young producers giving him hope on climate, and the grandmother in Piura whose coffee he still calls the best in the world. He finds creativity in eating alone and connection in eating with others.

1. The last dish you cooked for someone — what was it, for whom?

Arroz con pollo with huancaína for my whole family. We got together at my apartment, shared a meal, and had a great time.

2. Where does your passion for coffee come from? Tell me about the first moment coffee stopped being just coffee.

From my grandmother. Ever since I was a kid I would go to my grandmother’s house in Piura, and she would take me out to the farm. We’d harvest the coffee, dry it in the yard, and then she’d peel it. My grandmother would roast it in a clay pot over firewood. I still remember that incredible smell. Then she’d grind it on a batán and brew it for everyone in the house.

My grandmother was also a baker, so there was always fresh bread in the mornings with that coffee. My grandfather would show up with the milk jugs, and everything was just like that — a luxury.

For me that was the best coffee in the world, and it still is, actually. It’s just that I had normalized coffee being that way, you know?

But then I got to Café Verde (one of the first specialty coffee shops in Lima), and I saw that professional and exciting side — but above all, that unknown side of coffee. That’s where coffee took on another meaning. Not because of what was new to discover, but because of how the whole specialty spectrum connected with my past, with that tradition, and with the innovation I was getting to know, understanding, and that I still hold onto with a lot of curiosity. At that intersection is where coffee stopped being just coffee.

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3. The coffee you always return to — and the coffee that marked you once, forever.

My grandmother is still alive. She still has coffee, and she always sends some home. So I always come back to that coffee. We always put it on the table, and whenever we have it, we drink it up at home fast so it doesn’t go bad. My grandmother is still roasting it right there over firewood. And having that coffee again is going back to being a kid, going back to sitting at that table with my grandmother — and that’s the coffee that has marked me forever.

4. The song that moved you this week and the book on your nightstand right now.

On Melancholy Hill by Gorillaz. Those songs that make me float a little — such a vibe. The book on my nightstand right now: Carreras con Propósito, by Mariana Costa.

5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

Eating alone helps me think. To stop, to reconnect some ideas. I like eating alone. I think it’s a good creative space.

Eating with others reminds me why I do everything else. It’s that moment I guard, that I always look for, and that space where there’s so much enjoyment and so much connection. I think each of us connects with hospitality — that hospitality that exists to share. Eating alone brings me to creativity; eating with others reminds me of the value of those moments.

6. By 2050, which beans, origins, and methods will be gone? Which will be new?

Some varieties will disappear — you can more or less predict which ones already, the more delicate ones. Possibly Bourbon, Typica. Some Geishas could disappear. For sure, research is already being done to see which varieties will be more resistant.

I also think there’s going to be a lot of exploration in the Robusta species — it gets consumed a lot and it’s kind of the ugly duckling of coffee. But I think Arabica is going to be pretty challenged. Robusta is going to keep improving, and it wouldn’t surprise me if by 2050 we’re drinking good Robustas.

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7. Climate change is coming for coffee. What gives you hope, and what takes it away?

What worries me is that the climate is changing faster than we’re reacting. And what gives me hope is the new generation of producers. These young people who understand coffee, who understand specialty, quality — who understand they have to bring in science, that there has to be a balance between quality and business, but also caring for the environmental impact. I think there’s much more awareness in these young people about caring for the environment and taking responsibility — being accountable, being the ones called to care for the environment today, because this can’t wait. And I think that being young, they get it, and above all they’re taking action on it.

8. What’s the conversation no one in your world is having about coffee right now?

So I think we’re talking a lot about quality, about profiles, about techniques, about business models, about science — but we’re not talking about a topic that’s super relevant, which is how we get young people, the children of producers, to want to stay on the land. There’s also a huge opportunity there to build a future that isn’t just dignified, but full of potential and impact.

It seems to me that the coffee community avoids those conversations because they have a lot to do with public policy — they have to do with politics. So I think that’s where we, as entrepreneurs, as actors at the end of the chain, get stuck a little. We need more conversations about the opportunities that exist for young people to stay generating value from the land.

And I don’t just mean the farm or production — I also mean that they can develop a business vision from the land: develop their brand, open their roastery in their region, open their café or cafés, enter retail with their coffee brand, and so on.

I think we’re talking plenty about cup scores, tasting notes, science — but we’re forgetting this social side, and how we turn coffee into an engine that generates opportunity and prosperity.

9. If the third wave was about single origin, roasting quality, and the barista as craftsman — what do you think the fourth wave should be?

Well, the fourth wave should be hospitality. We’ve already learned how to make incredible, extraordinary coffee — we’re going to take technique way up and all of that. But I think it’s time to start lifting our heads and smiling at the customer. To go from being coffee geeks to showing a more human side. I think it’s time to make room for hospitality and make people feel that coffee is the vehicle for better moments — sitting at a table, meeting people, generating culture.

Moments that capture the coffee, not the other way around.

10. Between hosting behind the coffee bar all day and hosting at home sometimes for dinner, what habits or rituals carry over? What changes?

Well, you know I always tell my team that whoever walks into Neira is like a guest arriving at your own home, and that we should aspire to treat them the same. When we welcome people into our shops, we always want to make them feel special, to find a space where they can slow down, and leave with a smile and a little better than they came, right?

And I think, well, that a café like Neira and a home like yours, like mine, like my team’s — both can become a refuge. So I think that’s what connects them.

What changes? You get a lot of people at the café. There’s a level of responsibility that sometimes ends up distorting that warmth — and I understand my team, right? Because imagine, we get 200 people a day; and at the shops in the business district we get around 600, right? Each person arrives with different energy — one from a meeting, another from a board session, others who just had a fight with their partner. So the level of pressure we carry changes, right? At the café, the pressure is to hold up, to keep that smile going from customer number one to customer number 200.

At home it’s much softer. You have a lot more freedom because there are fewer people. But I think in the end what always ends up connecting is how both the café and the home become a refuge.

Everyone needs to eat, hopefully three times a day, and most of us enjoy it, most of the time. At the table, in the kitchen, at a restaurant, at a festival. Sometimes, these become moments of gathering and conviviality. A Peruvian cevichería on a Saturday. A Georgian supra with the whole family and half the neighbourhood: thoughtful toasts, empty dishes piling up, and bottles of orange wine and chacha being passed around. An endless Argentine asado. A late Friday lunch at a Mexico City taquería that extends into dinner.

Food connects us to a shared sense of pleasure, that collective “¡qué rico!” (this is so delicious!), to taste, to memory. It connects us to place too: to communities, their heritage and biodiversity, and the pride that comes with them.

The OECD report Promoting Social Connectedness Through Food uses food as a case study for building connection in a world where isolation and loneliness have become a bigger problem. Japan, Korea, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have all launched national strategies in recent years to fight loneliness and rebuild connectedness. The report looks at cases across the food system, showing how the social infrastructure of eating can create real opportunities for interaction.

Sometimes loneliness is hard to see. Kristen Radtke’s graphic memoir Seek You gets at this well, showing how something so ordinary can remain invisible. The OECD’s figures reveal just how widespread it is: across its member countries, 10% of people say they have no one to count on in a crisis, 8% have no close friends, and 6% feel lonely most or all of the time. Daily meetings with friends have also declined, while digital contact has increased, suggesting that digital interaction may sometimes be replacing face-to-face socialising. Even public space is getting less social: one US study found that walking speeds rose 15% over three decades, while people spent less time lingering on sidewalks (vindication, finally, for those of us who’ve been told repeatedly that we walk too slowly).

The loneliness crisis has no single cause. We all experienced how COVID-19 made isolation worse. Social media and messaging are replacing some of our face-to-face interactions. More people live alone. Populations are ageing. More adults are growing older without children or close relatives nearby. And every day we see the places where everyday social life happens coming under threat: libraries and community centres can barely survive public spending cuts, while rising rents and gentrification are putting pressure on neighbourhood cafés and traditional markets too.

There’s also something more cultural at play: hyperindividualism. Ezra Klein and Priya Parker, in their conversation about gathering, put it well: we’ve gotten very good at protecting our boundaries and our personal freedom, and much worse at building the relationships and obligations that sustain community.

I feel that tension myself. I’m sociable, extroverted (we’re all social animals) but I also value solitude, and the freedom to build an identity out of my own experiences and influences, not reduced to where I was born, or to simplistic nationalisms, or to the pressure to think like my own tribe because “we” are right and “they” are wrong. For many of us who grew up in more conservative societies, with strong communal bonds, that distance can be liberating. But of course we can still miss the belonging and love it gives to us. Everyone tries to find their own balance between autonomy and connection, but hyperindividualism can leave you with plenty of freedom and not enough community.

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There are obvious objections to making this a policy priority. The first: that treating social connection as a policy priority sounds soft, sentimental, perhaps another “woke” concern. In fact, as I write this article, I worry that many people will react exactly that way and dismiss the whole issue as a “first-world problem.” And I grew up in a culture where you simply didn’t talk about loneliness or mental health. Saying you were struggling could be seen as weakness, even as something shameful. That hasn’t disappeared, although we talk about mental health much more than we used to.

The second: that there’s a longer list of more urgent problems. It’s a fair question. Should loneliness be a policy priority when people still don’t get enough calories, when billions can’t afford a healthy diet, when wars turn food into a weapon and displace entire communities? Loneliness, like hunger, is often rooted in poverty, in an economic system that denies millions the income they need for food and other basics. There’s also a real risk of “loneliness-washing”: corporations running feel-good campaigns around food while selling the ultra-processed products behind the diseases they claim to fight. All true. But fighting loneliness through food doesn’t have to compete with any of it. It should be one part of integrated food, public-health, and social-protection policy, not a substitute for the structural reforms we need.

None of this is new, either. More than 25 years ago, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned what happens when civic life, trust, and community ties start to weaken. We now know social isolation and loneliness are tied to worse physical and mental health, worse outcomes at work and in school, while strong social ties make communities safer, more resilient, more prosperous.

Food is part of that story too. People who cook and share meals with others tend to be happier, more trusting, more engaged in their communities. Of course, food isn’t the only way to connect: there’s sport, music, dancing, games. But food is unusually universal. Everyone has to eat, ideally several times a day, and sitting down at a table requires no special talent. And food offers something else entirely: the possibility of cooking for another person, one of the most ordinary and most meaningful acts of care and love there is.

For a lot of people, this starts at home, at the family table. That's where many of us learned to interact, connect, care. But even people close to their families still need friends, neighbors, people from other generations, someone new to talk to.

In my Substack interviews about food and life, I always ask people whether they enjoy eating alone. Almost nobody says yes. Even the ones who do usually admit it’s really about the adventure — the chance to talk to interesting strangers at a restaurant, or bond with someone over a shared obsession with a particular cuisine. I feel in a similar way. When I eat alone, part of the appeal is an unexpected connection.

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Any serious policy should prioritize those most vulnerable to disconnection: people facing economic hardship, older people, and those experiencing both food insecurity and isolation. But rather than treating loneliness only as an individual problem, to be addressed through social-skills training or therapy, the OECD report calls for more opportunities to connect within communities. That means creating and strengthening accessible, high-quality social infrastructure: the spaces, organizations, and activities that make interaction possible and foster a sense of belonging. These spaces, often called “third places” because they exist outside home and work, include libraries, parks, markets, cafés and community centres.

The OECD report gathers some interesting examples of this in practice. Some began from the ground up: food forests turning vacant lots into edible public parks in Boston; community cafés and beekeeping in Japan; the Men’s Pie Club in the UK, where men meet weekly to bake pies together; weekly pop-up restaurants in the Netherlands; and shared meals connecting migrants, refugees and local residents in New Zealand.

In other cases, public support has helped such ideas grow: Cali, Colombia has scaled its community dining halls, the Comedores Comunitarios. Melbourne funds a Community Meals Subsidy Programme aimed mostly at older residents. And Germany’s federal government backs Multigenerational Houses, where cooking and shared meals are one of many ways different generations end up in the same room.

These examples point to a much wider set of possibilities. Some already exist and could be strengthened or redesigned to encourage more connection; others would require a little political imagination. I see particular potential in the following:

Traditional and informal food markets (especially common across the Global South) are already spaces of community and social cohesion. That role could be strengthened: closer collaboration with local governments, better infrastructure so they work not just as places to shop but as places to linger.

Public restaurants. Nourish Scotland and United Cities and Local Governments has made the case and documented the best examples, which I have analyzed here. Poland’s milk bars (bary mleczne) and Turkey’s Halk Lokantası and Kent Lokantası, for instance, also function as social equalizers, open to everyone, not reserved for the most vulnerable.

Public supermarkets. These could sell healthy food, distributed efficiently, at lower prices, and double as spaces of community and integration. They should borrow the logistics and distribution know-how of private supermarkets, without copying their homogenized products or their “non-place” character — spaces designed for anonymous transactions, fast turnover, with no real sense of identity, relationship, or belonging. For some older people living alone, the weekly grocery run is their only social interaction of the day. A public supermarket should be designed accordingly: not just to move people through checkout quickly, but to give them a reason to stay, talk, connect.

Community kitchens, ollas comunes, and community dining halls deserve support. Of course to cover basic food needs for people in vulnerable situations, but also as key social infrastructure. Peru’s ollas comunes show the wider potential here. Unlike a conventional soup kitchen, they’re built around mutual support. Usually, women bring together ingredients, money, and labor to feed their own families and neighbors. And they build trust, stronger relationships, women’s leadership, and the collective capacity to face adversity together. Yet they remain precarious, with inconsistent government support despite being fundamental to Peru’s poorest communities, and a heavy reliance on unpaid women’s labor. The OECD report describes a similar case in Cali, Colombia, where grassroots ollas comunitarias were formalized and scaled into a city-wide network of Community Dining Spaces.

Food festivals can be social infrastructure too. Peru’s Mistura once brought huge crowds together with farmers, market vendors, and cooks, turning food into a shared public event. Why not make that kind of encounter permanent? Something close to it already exists at Los Pinos in Mexico City, the former presidential residence, now a public cultural complex. Every weekend, its Cocinas de Humo host traditional cooks from across Mexico’s states, letting visitors eat while learning about regional ingredients, techniques, histories. It’s a wonderful act of “expropriation”: taking a former presidential residence from those in power, giving it back to the public, and using food to build community, celebrate diversity, and connect eaters with the people who keep culinary traditions alive.

Then there’s the infrastructure of school meals. A well-run school meal program (healthy food for students, support for local and agroecological farmers, local cooks in the kitchen, native and seasonal ingredients on the plate) can become the backbone of something bigger, feeding into the same markets, public restaurants and festivals mentioned above, and used to foster even more connection.

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This should be permanent infrastructure, not reliant on volunteers alone. Many of these initiatives depend heavily on volunteers, often women, risking burnout, and quietly shifting public responsibility onto unpaid labor. Nor should it rely on outside partnerships that can evaporate (private companies, philanthropy) though collaborating with them, and above all with communities, matters for surviving political swings. Some private initiatives are worth encouraging: coffee corners inside supermarkets, delivery workers trained to notice lonely people.

And it means public financing: these programs shouldn’t depend on the good intentions of NGOs, though working with them matters. Social initiatives outside government are sometimes better placed to experiment — trying mechanisms and pilot projects that bureaucratic restrictions make hard to test inside government, and scaling them up, if they work, with strong community participation.

This infrastructure should also work as a social equalizer. Fighting loneliness should mean building a more integrated society, where the most vulnerable mix with everyone else; not as an act of charity, but as equals, with the same dignity.

None of this is easy, obviously. Rising food and energy prices make community meals, public restaurants, and some of the programs I propose here more expensive. And how do you propose fighting loneliness amid so many fiscal pressures, exacerbated by political instability, higher defense spending, and the long-delayed bill for climate adaptation? Many of these initiatives can use spaces that already exist: kitchens, markets, schools, and community centers. And they should be designed to address several problems at once: food insecurity, nutrition, mental health, isolation.

There’s also a risk that attractive local projects end up being used by politicians as “social-washing,” distracting us from the harder reforms on poverty, working conditions, or access to healthy food — the ones that are much more challenging. Clearly, the answer is to embed these programs within those reforms.

And food doesn’t automatically create connection. I see it every day, even in a city as talkative as Mexico City: people can eat next to each other without exchanging a word. And the most isolated will probably be the hardest to bring in. The answer also has to be good program design, with recurring activities that create enough regularity to build trust and familiarity, and openness to different kinds of people.

And yes, they should be evaluated. Are people actually coming back? Do they feel less isolated? Do they feel more connected to their community? We need to understand which mechanisms work best, so successful programs can be scaled up.

Since I started working remotely — right after being a government minister in Peru through a good chunk of COVID, when for a while I interacted with dozens or even hundreds of people a day — I’ve come to appreciate being able to focus, especially when I’m writing reports, articles, my book. But I miss being around people. I get frequent zoom calls, like most of you probably do. But most of my face-to-face professional contact now happens at conferences, workshops, and similar events.

On a day-to-day basis, the balance I need comes from moments shared around food: cooking at home, eating out or sharing coffee, taco tours, asados, buying at markets, sharing complex wines — with people I love or am getting to know, old friends and new ones who inspire me and bring me joy. Usually around food, most of the time music, and sometimes, if we are lucky, also dancing.

To face everything coming — climate change, geopolitical instability, rising food and energy prices — we can’t do it alone. We need each other. And that goes beyond our psychological well-being. Communities that eat together are better prepared for what’s ahead: more resilient, more trusting, more capable of acting together. It starts, as it always has, at the table.

If you want to understand how Mexico City actually feeds itself, you talk to Tiana Bakić Hayden. She has spent years researching and walking the Central de Abasto — the biggest wholesale food market in the world, sitting in Iztapalapa. She’s Serbian-born, raised between Serbia and the US, now a professor at El Colegio de México, and has recently co-edited Urban Food Systems in Latin America: Territories, Mobilities and Governance.

In this conversation she takes us to the giant wholesale market, and to how hard people work there; a Serbian chard soup on weekly rotation; why she’s rereading Little House on the Prairie; and the vanishing family table.

1. The last dish you cooked for someone — what was it, for whom?

I cooked for my kids — they are who I cook for the most regularly. Yesterday I cooked a zupa od blitve, which is Swiss chard soup. It’s a really simple brothy Serbian soup, made out of sautéed onions, Swiss chard stalks, leaves, carrots, and potatoes, and you serve it with some sour cream or yogurt.

2. Where does your passion for food come from? Tell me about the first moment food stopped being just food.

The passion comes from my family. Both of my parents are great cooks — my brother’s a great cook. Food has always really structured both the household rhythms and routines and timetables, but also conversations, talking about food, reflecting, remembering.

And I grew up in a transnational household, between Serbia and the United States. Food was always associated with travel — arriving to a place meant arriving to new flavors, a new palate.

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3. The restaurant you always return to — and the restaurant that marked you once, forever.

I always return every time I can — anytime I’m in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — to Tram’s Kitchen, which is a Vietnamese restaurant, which has been a sort of establishment in the city for decades. And it’s really simple and unassuming, has sort of the checkered vinyl tablecloths, some news station always playing in the background, and really affordable dishes. But it emerged at a time when most of us had never tried Southeast Asian food. And it feels like that first experience of trying an entirely new set of flavors.

4. The song that moved you this week and the book on your nightstand right now.

A song would be Te Elijo a Ti from Caro Luna. It’s this kind of really sensual slow cumbia that I’ve been loving recently — great to work with, sit with, and also dance with. And dance is my other passion in addition to food.

And the book on my nightstand now — this is actually funny and unexpected — I’m reading the Little House on the Prairie books. I have one of those on my bookshelf; they’re children’s books that were really popular when I was young, and they’re stories of settler colonialism. But one thing I remember that jumped out at me from those books when I was a child was actually their depictions of food. So I’m sort of critically rereading the book to understand the place that food played in these very colonial narratives, and in children’s fiction more generally in the early 20th century. I have this idea that food was really, really actually very important to children’s fiction and children’s imaginations then, perhaps more than in children’s books now.

5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

So I have to confess that I virtually never eat alone, because I have small children, I have colleagues, I’m on the go a lot. So eating alone gives me mental space, gives me a chance to read a magazine or a newspaper as I eat, to not have to serve anybody else. But in general, I love eating with people. I like serving them. I like asking them what they want, what they like. So I’m a big fan of commensality.

6. Picture a dinner in 2050. What’s on the table? What disappeared? What’s new?

I guess my question — perhaps what disappeared is the table itself? I’ve read that tables in general are disappearing, as people’s apartments get smaller, as people live by themselves more, as they eat at home less and invite people over less. So maybe in 2050 there’s no table, at least if it’s a home dinner. And maybe there aren’t as many people eating together. But I’m sure there’ll be new “superfoods”. I’m sure there will be some new powders that we can add to our foods that’ll be the new panacea for a while.

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7. Is there room for hope in the future of food? What gives it to you, and what takes it away?

The main hope I have is that, perhaps precisely because people’s homes are getting smaller, and domestic and family arrangements are shifting and fragmenting, we may come up with more collective eating spaces and options outside the home. So this is a hope that has more to do with the form of eating than with the substance.

It has been the case for quite a while that people eat outside the home, and that family meals are declining. But I don’t think we have really embraced the idea of collective eating options that aren’t just restaurants. Restaurants are great, but perhaps the hope for the future is that we will have more of a collective ethos around eating and feeding others.

8. What’s the conversation no one in your world is having about food right now?

I would love to hear more conversations about the relationship between labor and food. How does the work we dedicate our lives to shape the way we eat, and how we feed ourselves and others? And I mean beyond the question of income.

We spend most of our waking hours laboring in some capacity, so this feels like a subject that deserves much more attention. Labor struggles are food struggles. And as labor patterns shift, so do the ways we are able to eat — but we rarely think about this directly.

Relatedly, I would love to read or hear more about historical and collective efforts to feed and eat together outside the home: Soviet milk bars, ollas comunes in Latin America, and other examples. In urbanizing contexts, the question of collective eating feels incredibly important.

9. La Central de Abasto is the largest wholesale food market in the world. What does even a food-obsessed person not know about it?

Maybe food-obsessed people do know this, but I think it’s worth mentioning again just how much people there work — that in the Central de Abasto, it’s really common for everyone from large wholesalers to the small loaders and diableros, to resellers, to not have a single day off. It’s almost a point of pride that they only don’t work 2 days a year, which is Christmas Day on the 25th of December, and on January 1st. And that kind of both exploitation and self-exploitation is part of what makes the food system operate. I think it’s really devastating just in terms of labor, but it’s also a reality of the food system, and amidst all of the color and the noise and the vibrancy and beauty of that market,.

10. When you have people over, how do you set the stage for a real connection? Music, food, light, the first drink, the seating, etc, etc.

Well, I think it’s not deliberate, but rather a function of being a person who’s always running a little late. But often when people come over for dinner, I have them gather in the kitchen, keeping me company while I finish cooking things, preparing things last minute. Sometimes I’ll have them chop a thing, or sometimes just give them a glass of wine and have them entertain me while I finish chopping things. But I find that actually the kitchen and the prep space ends up being the first step of interaction, more than a kind of curated setting with everything being served properly.

I met Thomas Legrand while I was working with UNDP, where he leads the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) — one of the few spaces in food systems asking what our inner lives, values, and relationships have to do with transformation. His work brings together questions that are often kept apart: agroecology and mindfulness, food and spirituality, systems change and our relationship to self, others, and nature.

That work is now entering a new phase with the first Global Conscious Food Systems Summit in Bhutan (Aug 31^st – Sept 4, 2026), co-organized by CoFSA with the Royal Government of Bhutan, UNDP, and partners. The Summit will bring together food systems leaders from around the world to ask what transformation might look like if it included not only institutions and incentives, but also consciousness, connection, and care. In this interview, Thomas — author of “Politics of Being. Wisdom and Science for a New Development Paradigm” — talks about his grandmother’s plum tarts, mindful eating, and Star Wars.

1. The last dish you cooked for someone — what was it, for whom?

It’s my wife who usually cooks, I have to admit.

But I can cook when needed, especially when she’s not there. In my family, I’m famous for polenta, vinaigrette, and crêpes — I don’t exactly know why.

The last dish I cooked was, I regret to say, pasta with pesto for my two young daughters. My wife wasn’t there, so I made gluten-free pasta, which I find much lighter to digest, with “semi-industrial” pesto that was good enough for them to eat — they are generally spoiled by the homemade pesto my wife makes.

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2. Where does your passion for food come from? Tell me about the first moment food stopped being just food.

Probably goes back to memories with my grandmother, who was a great cook. We often spent holidays with her in a country house in Normandy, France, where she would make plum tarts from the trees in the garden.

I also remember being fascinated by her mic-mac cream, a dessert where one side of the bowl was chocolate cream and the other was vanilla cream, and somehow they did not mix. It seemed like magic to me. Later, I understood there was no magic at all — it was just the way the creams were poured in from each side.

Toward the end of her life, she reminded me of the young boy I had been, with light in my eyes when I watched her cook or ate what she had prepared. So I don’t think there was one first moment. I think I have always enjoyed food very much. It is one of the great pleasures of life.

3. The restaurant you always return to — and the restaurant that marked you once, forever.

I return to Dormy House, in Étretat, France. Étretat is a beautiful town in Normandy, on the English Channel, known for its huge cliffs — now also very famous on Instagram. It is also the place where I proposed to my wife. I remember we went back there about ten years ago, for the first time after the proposal, but now with a young baby.

The restaurant has a panoramic view of the sea and the cliffs. It is up on the cliff, overlooking the whole bay, the village, and the sea. It is such a beautiful place, with a truly unique position — and very good food, especially seafood.

One restaurant that marked me forever was Kacao, in Guatemala City, which seems to have closed.

It was in a large pavilion, surrounded by a tropical garden, and celebrated the cuisines of different Maya peoples and regions of Guatemala. It served traditional and regional specialties — I remember a Caribbean soup, tamales, pepián, and other dishes — and the staff wore traditional Guatemalan dress.

It was a real immersive cultural experience. I found it such a powerful example of something other countries could learn from, so I was really saddened to discover that it had closed.

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4. The song that moved you this week and the book on your nightstand right now.

The song that moved me this week was the music from Star Wars. Sunday was an important day because we watched Star Wars for the first time with my two young daughters, who are 8 and 11. And I think that music creates a very special effect. Maybe it speaks to the child who still lives inside us — or to the hero.

I am actually reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I had heard that Star Wars was built on many mythologies shared across different cultural traditions, and that Campbell brought those patterns together in this book.

About a year ago, I met a shaman who had studied with Campbell, and he recommended the book. It is a very interesting vision: the hero’s journey as an archetype we can find in many traditions, and the idea that many of our myths and stories follow common patterns, which Campbell highlighted in the book.

5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

I rarely eat alone. But sometimes it’s good to have a break and be alone in silence. In those moments, I like to practice mindful eating, if possible, in my garden.

I actually live in France next to Plum Village, the Buddhist community founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. We practice mindful eating there, which is even more powerful when we practice it together, in a shared silence.

But otherwise, I do think food brings people together. In our busy lives, meals are often the time we have to truly socialize. Food creates a space for conviviality, and for deep, friendly connections with one another.

6. Picture a dinner in 2050. What’s on the table? What disappeared? What’s new?

I tend to think there will be a lot of disruption, and maybe some forms of collapse, that will affect our food systems. In the future, we will probably have to eat in a much more local and seasonal way. Maybe some of that food will be grown by ourselves. And hopefully, we will also eat less meat and dairy.

7. Is there room for hope in the future of food? What gives it to you, and what takes it away?

I think hope is not so much about what happens “out there.” I consider hope a key part of our own inner balance and strengths. So yes, I would say there is hope.

One reason is that the case for agroecological transition — and the understanding of its benefits — is clearer than ever, especially in a world facing so much disruption and different forms of collapse. We have seen this year, for example, how the war in Iran has affected access to fertilizers, exposing the vulnerability of industrial agricultural systems to geopolitical shocks. I think these systems will face many disruptions in the future.

What concerns me most about the future is the concentration of power in a few corporations within food systems.

8. What’s the conversation no one in your world is having about food right now?

A few years ago, I would have said that the conversation we were not having was about how, fundamentally, all food systems are grounded in our relationship to self, others, and nature — in our ways of relating to the world.

That was when we were starting to design the Conscious Food Systems Alliance, which addresses disconnection from self, others, and nature as one of the root causes of the food systems crisis, and highlights the role of inner development — mindsets, values, and worldviews — as a key lever for food systems transformation.

At the time, I was not hearing many people having that conversation. Fortunately, we have been able to help build it, to the point that we are now co-organizing the first Global Conscious Food Systems Summit, with the Royal Government of Bhutan, UNDP, and partners. It will take place in Bhutan from August 31 to September 4 this year.

We are looking forward to bringing together around 400 food systems leaders from all over the world, including heads of state and government, in conversation with many conscious food systems leaders.

9. What does a ‘conscious’ food system actually look like? Give me a scene from one you’ve seen?

It is difficult to say. I don’t think there are so many complete examples yet, but there are pieces of the puzzle in many different places already. Within the Conscious Food Systems Alliance, we have an important collection of case studies that illustrate this.

For me, one example is very close to home. As I mentioned, I live next to Plum Village, the mindfulness practice center founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in southwest France. I live very close to that community, and I think they embody some pieces of what a conscious food system can be.

Part of their food is grown on their own farm, called Happy Farm. The food is local, organic, and vegan. And the way we often eat there — breakfast, lunch, and dinner — is through mindful eating. That means being in silence, trying to be fully in the present moment, and connecting deeply with the food we are eating.

It is also a meditation on the sacredness of food. We are what we eat, and through the food we eat, we enter into relationship with Mother Earth. So being together in silence, connecting with the Earth through food, becomes a very sacred moment. It is also a practice that brings the community together.

Outside the practice center, we have also developed a community-managed shop, which opens three times a week and sells organic products, including fresh food sourced from local farmers.

So, in my opinion, mindfulness, connection to the Earth, and the sourcing of local, organic food are definitely key components of conscious food systems.

10. When you have people over, how do you set the stage for a real connection? Music, food, light, the first drink, the seating, etc.

My wife cooks very well, and she loves doing it. When I travel, I often bring back food from different parts of the world for her. I like doing that because food connects us with experiences and carries stories of the world that I can then share with our guests.

I am also very sensitive to making sure the house feels beautiful, with harmonious energy. I like the house to be clean and arranged. My wife does ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. We also pay attention to the way we lay the table, and we often involve our daughters in that.

And then there is the practical side: thinking about what we can plan so that, at some point, our daughters can leave the table and let us really talk — or even arranging for them not to be at home that evening, so we can fully connect with our guests!

Unluckily, right after London, I went to Paris, following the heat wave. I landed at Karim and Charles-Marie’s place, a cozy, book-filled apartment in the XXe, happily on the ground floor. In two days I learned a great deal about how they deal with heat. Windows shut, metal shutters down so no sun gets in. They use thermometers, inside and out, and only open the windows once the outside temperature drops below the inside one. The method was simple: stay calm, stay still, and don’t do anything that might dehydrate you.

I broke that method on the first night, when I suggested — and talked them into — going to “cool off” with a glass of white wine at Delicatessen, one of my favorite places in Paris for natural wine. After only a couple of glasses, I spent a horrible night, the temperature above 30, the humidity thick, and — obviously — dehydration from two small glasses of chenin blanc.

If I was struggling that much, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much worse it must have been for the elderly alone in their apartments, the sick in hospitals, the parents carrying babies through streets where I could barely move — sweating copiously, dehydrating, unable to walk more than a block without stopping.

The next day I could only recover in museums, cooler or air-conditioned — the Hilma af Klint show at the Grand Palais (more on that amazing exhibition soon) and Calder at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Aside from that wine faux pas, everything else was strategic with the food — cold food, canned fish, olives, nuts — no cooking in the house; water and natural electrolytes all day, non-stop; water on my face and body all day to cool down; lying on whatever patch of floor felt coolest.

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It was hard not to miss air conditioning. Having lived at various points in the US, and spent quite some time in many Latin American cities so shaped by it, I’ve come to expect that kind of relief. I don’t handle that kind of unbearable heat well myself. I read The Great Gatsby a long time ago, but the scene that stayed with me is the one where the characters are suffocating in a New York City hotel during an intense summer, and the heat makes everything unbearable. This heat intolerance is part of why I live in Mexico City, a city that stays dry and mild almost all year, except for a couple of weeks between April and May — a window that, because of climate change, keeps stretching — even though most people assume all of Mexico is hot and humid like Tulum.

Of course, in places where average temperatures have long been low enough that AC was not considered necessary year-round, cooling becomes most urgent for those who cannot simply leave: public transport, schools, hospitals, care homes, and badly insulated apartments during long heat waves. France learned this the hard way. The 2003 heat wave caused roughly 15,000 excess deaths, with the elderly especially affected and mortality higher among people at home and in care homes. The shock led France to build a National Heat Wave Plan: better forecasting and alerts, public information campaigns, local registries and outreach for vulnerable people, and cooling measures in care homes. Things have improved, but not enough. When record heat returned in the summer of 2019, France still recorded around 1,500 excess deaths. In the current heat wave, estimates point to around 1,000 excess deaths.

In parts of Europe — France, for instance, where roughly a quarter of homes are thought to have air conditioning — this heat wave has turned la clim into a political fight. The far right wants to broadly expand access through subsidized, zero-interest loans. The Greens have long treated AC as a false solution to climate change, something that eases the symptom while risking higher energy use and emissions — though even they now accept that some places, including schools, hospitals, and care homes, may no longer be able to do without it. Much of the left remains resistant, arguing against “air conditioning everywhere” and calling instead for thermal renovation and deeper adaptation.

There are real reasons not to install air conditioning everywhere. It depends on the city — many places don’t need it for the handful of genuinely brutal days a year, though that calculus is shifting fast with climate change. Air conditioning also works by pushing hot air outside: my private cool room is subsidized by a slightly hotter city. It uses enormous amounts of energy, concentrated on the very days the grid is most stressed — and if the system fails on one of those days, there’s no way to protect all the people who’ve become entirely dependent on it.

But I think there’s something else behind the French resistance too. France still carries something of a postwar culture of scarcity — a more communal instinct than an individual one. I don’t want to romanticize that, or the country’s culture more broadly: transport, hospitals, and schools clearly need more cooling, now. But the solution has to be built on something other than individual comfort.

And yet, in much of the world, that comfort comes first. The unnecessary use of disposable plastic cups I see in people heading to coffee shops every day. The addiction to ice in every drink, with its own hidden energy cost. The air conditioning itself, kept so aggressively cold in some places that you often need a jacket in the middle of summer just to sit through a conference or a workday in an office. Many modern American office towers were built, from the mid-20th century on, with windows that simply don’t open — sealed glass boxes designed around central air rather than a breeze.

Those habits reflect a model built on consumption, on producing more, on abundance and excess. But they also reflect something more individualist: the idea that each person has an almost unlimited right to use oil, plastic, ice, and air conditioning however they like, regardless of the collective cost. That can sound like a simple morality tale, and it isn’t one — France’s own AC shortage causes real, avoidable suffering, especially for the old, sick, and vulnerable. The point isn’t individual restraint instead of infrastructure. It’s that the infrastructure we build should be designed around the collective wellbeing from the start.

The day I left Paris, things finally began to normalize. The conversation stopped being only about the heat (or football), and I could finally enjoy a croissant while talking about how it’s made — the butter, and how much of it goes in — industrial versus natural, dairy byproducts, and how the waste gets processed.

Charles-Marie told me about cancoillotte, a runny, spreadable cheese from the Jura — my favorite wine region — made from metton, a curd produced from skimmed cow’s milk, the milk left over after the cream has been taken for butter or other dairy uses. It turns a less-valued part of dairy production into something delicious that belongs to a culture of using everything. I’d tried it once before — a strong, cow-forward flavor — and it’s apparently become fashionable again recently, maybe because it has less fat than most cheeses.

You could say it was postwar and other historical scarcities that shaped how people in that region learned to eat. I also don’t want to be puritanical, or Calvinist, or to romanticize a culture and a country in the middle of an intense debate whose current and historical complexity I don’t fully understand. But these traditions — also present in many other countries — also reflect a broader culture of recycling, of a life measured rather than lived in excess — not so different, in spirit, from the argument for cooling systems built around the collective rather than the individual unit in every window.

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When I boarded the Eurostar leaving Paris for The Hague, and my carriage had no air conditioning because it was broken, all I wanted, immediately, was air conditioning. Days later, I’m still in the process of fully rehydrating.

But I want to believe we’re preparing for something worse — a real collapse — and that when it comes, we won’t respond from a position of individual comfort and endless resources: of money, of oil, of plastic, of air conditioning, of food. I hope we respond instead from an understanding of what’s best for everyone, for the community, for the planet. If we don’t — if we keep insisting on staying inside our own personal refrigerator — we’re going to end up, together, in a communal oven.

Dori Patay is a leading researcher on food system governance — the institutional architecture that decides who actually gets to shape what we eat. A Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, she has spent years mapping how countries organize (or fail to organize) the bodies that govern their food systems.

We spoke about a ministry of food or its alternatives, and where she still finds hope — including an election in her native Hungary. Also: a gnocchi disaster, a husband she met over crab carcasses, and a 2050 dinner with sea urchin.

1. The last dish you cooked for someone — what was it, for whom?

Gnocchi filled with mushroom sauce, but it was a disaster. I accidentally mixed mushroom sauce and orange duck sauce — they were pre-cooked and were both in the freezer, looking the same brown. I only realised my mistake when we started eating, and I was wondering why there was orange peel in the mushroom sauce… My friend, for whom I cooked it, was very polite and finished her plate, but I think I will never live this down.

2. Where does your passion for food come from? Tell me about the first moment food stopped being just food.

My grandma’s love language was food, and no one could cook like her. She taught me some recipes that are still among my most cherished possessions. My passion for food was elevated to new heights when I joined my husband’s family — they lived 30 years in Hong Kong, and their religion is food. Apparently, my husband fell in love with me when, at a party, he found me in the kitchen, covered in crab juice to my ears, sucking on some crab carcass he caught earlier that day and cooked.

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3. The restaurant you always return to — and the restaurant that marked you once, forever.

I have moved around and travelled a lot, so I don’t have a single restaurant that marked me and is still there today, unfortunately. My husband is the best cook ever (I’m not exaggerating) — his dishes outdo many restaurants, so I would pick his dinner table over any other on any day.

4. The song that moved you this week and the book on your nightstand right now.

Song, Sampa the Great: Healer. Book, Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness — I love a good sci-fi.

5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

I much prefer eating with others. I love having long lunches or dinners where we just slow down and connect with each other over some good food. It’s particularly nice when the food is really good and we can savour the flavours together.

6. Picture a dinner in 2050. What’s on the table? What disappeared? What’s new?

If I’m still living in Sydney at the time, there will be some seaweed-based food and something made out of jellyfish, alongside vegetables and some form of protein. Maybe a dish of sea urchin sourced locally.

7. Is there room for hope in the future of food? What gives it to you, and what takes it away?

What gives me hope is that there’s a limit to what people will endure from bad governments and greedy corporations. When the Hungarian people decided not to vote for Viktor Orbán again in April 2026 (after 16 years of him being elected again and again), that filled me with immense hope that change is possible.

8. What’s the conversation no one in your world is having about food right now?

I used to say that people don’t talk about food system governance and the institutional structures around it. But in recent years, this topic has finally gained more attention.

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9. Most countries don’t have a ministry of food. Should they?

I would suggest a whole-of-food-system governance institution that looks more like a council or committee, instead of a Ministry of Food. This avoids duplications and overlaps of mandates with ministries that are already governing aspects of food systems. This council or committee would be headed by a supra-sectoral body, like the Prime Minister’s Office, so that it has the convening authority to bring all sectors together and override the power asymmetries usually present across ministries.

10. When you have people over, how do you set the stage for a real connection? Music, food, light, the first drink, the seating, etc.

First of all, a clean and tidy house, so the guests know that I have been expecting them and put effort into making them feel comfortable. Then music, lighting, and starting with some snacks before the dinner or lunch comes out.

On Monday, when we saw Starmer resigning — visibly moved, with his wife beside him, talking about spending more time with his daughters — I was reminded of the farewell speech as a genre. I’ve watched Nixon’s many times: “I’ve never been a quitter — against every instinct in my body” (didn’t watch it live, please). I watched Al Gore concede to Bush — “mending fences” — and how well he later became a mainstream climate champion.

Each person’s Climate Week is highly personal — shaped by which invitations arrived, which networks they move in, which priorities they carry. But there are patterns: donors are the most popular people in most rooms — well, unless you have the King (feeling the heat in a very warm room, though I wasn’t invited to that one). This is especially true now, when foreign aid and international development funds are being redirected to defense.

Like many, I carry a fair amount of skepticism into these weeks. It is easy to feel that what you’re attending is a parade — a pat on the back, celebrating collaboration and dialogue, while actual decisions get deferred and the greenwashing, nutriwashing, and socialwashing goes unchallenged (many times you encounter all three in the same room).

And then there are the people I’ve come to think of as the “look-guys” — the ones who begin every intervention with “Look, everyone,” a signal that what follows is the only valid thing in the room. Usually very confident in their knowledge and their discipline. Not entirely wrong, but their certainty tends to shut down the most useful debates.

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And yet, despite all of that, I came away holding three things particularly relevant for food systems transformation.

One: Finance for the reforms.

In food systems work, when we talk about interdisciplinarity, we tend to mean a set of disciplines talking to each other: nutritionists, environmentalists, agronomists, social scientists, governance specialists, geographers, occasionally fisheries researchers or anthropologists. Great conversation about the reforms we need, that rarely reaches the people who actually control where resources flow.

Many times, the hard-core macroeconomists, the finance ministries, the development bank economists, the monetarists remain largely outside the conversations where food systems transformation gets debated.

The risks that climate change and geopolitical instability pose to food prices, access, diversity, and quality — serious now, far worse in the future — need to be embedded in economic policy, in fiscal frameworks, in monetary institutions. FAO and other organizations do engage on food inflation, commodity prices, and transition financing. But we need to go further. Without the people who run central banks, finance ministries, and macroeconomic institutions genuinely inside this conversation, food systems work risks remaining marginal.

One of the best conversations of the week for me happened at an event organized by the Center for Economic Transition Expertise (CETEX), the London School of Economics, and the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) — an event that actually attempted to build this bridge. I contributed on agricultural subsidies, power, and food; others spoke from inside monetary institutions and on the macroeconomic implications of climate risk for growth; and others from the internal tensions of aligning finance and environment ministries. Without the resources that only these institutions can mobilize, everything else is good intention.

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Two: Solutions — operationalizing the right to food

The right to food and food sovereignty are commitments that enormous numbers of organizations and social movements work toward worldwide. But how do you actually make them real?

With the maybe soon-to-be-appointed new prime minister, Andy Burnham, some see a real opening for the UK. British organizations and groups — like the Right to Food UK Commission — have spent years doing patient grassroots work, listening carefully to what communities actually say they need in terms of food security, which is more severe there than we outsiders tend to assume. It’s a key moment to push for a concrete legal framework that moves the right to food from aspiration to obligation.

It will be interesting to watch how advocates read the political moment and the possibilities to advance concrete solutions, maybe including better school meal programs, government-supported community kitchens, public grocery stores, public restaurants, taxation of ultraprocessed foods, subsidies for healthy ones, and more.

Three: Narratives — the conversation we keep deferring

We cannot afford to be scientists, technocrats, or ideologues alone. We cannot win only by claiming the authority of our data or the legitimacy of our rights. Food systems transformation requires persuasion — of politicians, of the public, of people who don’t share our conclusions and may never read the reports we produce.

We need to build broader movements, reaching people and organizations beyond our usual networks. And we need to engage seriously with the realities that politicians and decision-makers actually face: sectoral interests, approval ratings, the realpolitik of confrontations and debates in a cabinet.

Bringing politicians into these events helps. Clim-Eat brought former Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado, and his presence was important for thinking through questions we should be asking more frequently — about the pressures that sectoral interests, budgets, and media place on those who actually have to make decisions.

It’s one thing to talk about food policy with people who already care about it. It’s another to understand what it actually takes to move an agenda through real political systems. Understanding that terrain doesn’t mean compromising values — it means understanding the conditions under which change actually happens.

There were things I missed. So many events on resilience, COP pathways and commitments, and the session on the future of protein of the Planeatry Alliance — one of the controversial topics of the moment.

The event I did make time for was the Food Systems Funeral held in a small church. There were eulogies — heartfelt, dark, and occasionally very funny: “we mourn the death of ‘Food Systems,’ ‘Foodie’ to his friends.” It was a welcome creative provocation: a space to reflect, with some humor, on what brought us to this moment, and to think about what a different future might actually look like. Another farewell — not unlike those of politicians — that left us thinking about what comes next.

It doesn’t matter that I missed most of my personal London list — the museum shows, the used bookstores, the natural wine temples I love (Brawn and 40 Maltby St, though I did make it to Noble Rot, where the British sparkling wine was exceptional, as always). But I met new and fascinating people — even in elevators — and reconnected with dear colleagues.

It’s easy to leave one of these weeks cynical: tired of the parade, convinced nothing new is being said, skeptical of the greenwashing and the flight emissions and the back-patting. But it’s also good to stay genuinely open (not like the “look-guys”): to perspectives you hadn’t considered, to positions you don’t share, to the possibility that you might be wrong about something you’ve held for a long time. And even when you know, before a corporate representative opens their mouth, exactly what they’re going to say — and we do — listening carefully still has value. Sometimes you learn something. Sometimes you learn how they think, which is almost as useful.

Brazil’s Restaurantes Populares — People’s Restaurants — were first launched in Belo Horizonte in the 1990s and later adopted as a federal strategy under the Zero Hunger program in 2003, spreading to cities across the country. There are now more than a thousand of them, run by local governments with subsidies at multiple levels of the state, serving nutritious traditional meals — often sourced from local smallholder and agroecological farmers.

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In Turkey, since 2019, nine municipalities have opened people’s restaurants — Halk Lokantası or Kent Lokantası — with fixed daily menus of homestyle dishes: lentil soup, roasted lamb, bulgur pilav. They are publicly owned and run by local governments.

In Mexico City, the Comedores Comunitarios para el Bienestar — Community Dining Halls for Well-Being — have offered subsidized canteen meals in underserved neighborhoods for years. India has its public canteens. And in New York City, food journalist Mark Bittman has been running Community Kitchen: a not-for-profit restaurant on a sliding scale, backed by philanthropy, offering what The New Yorker described as “elegant and refined” food alongside natural wines, on a pay-what-you-can model. It ran as a pilot last year, with plans to become permanent. New York is also opening public grocery stores.

The question of who is responsible for feeding people — and how — is back on the table. Nourish Scotland has been making the most rigorous case for public restaurants in the UK (and increasingly beyond i) — and Abigail McCall has helped bring that work into wider food-systems conversations, engaging many of us thinking about public restaurants as part of the food infrastructure we need. Their argument is straightforward: food needs public infrastructure, just as transport, healthcare, and education do. We build hospitals because the market alone does not guarantee health. We build schools because access to education cannot depend on what families can afford. We build public libraries, public parks, public transit. Why not public restaurants?

Food is as essential as any of these — more so, arguably, since we need it three times a day. And yet we largely leave its provision to market forces that have consistently failed to make healthy, sustainable, delicious food accessible and affordable to everyone.

In Peru, proposing this would sound almost preposterous. Or at least, my more neoliberal colleagues would treat it that way. In much of Latin America — and in many countries well beyond it — any mention of greater state involvement in the economy is met with a familiar set of accusations, a product of deep political polarization. If you argue for state support for healthy food: “communist”. If you want to fight climate change through regulation: “green communist”. If you believe in gender equality and minority rights: “woke communist”. If you think the state should be democratic and functional: “caviar communist”.

It is true that some of the most successful public restaurant models expanded during socialist or communist administrations — the Polish milk bars being the obvious example. But a functional public restaurant is entirely compatible with social democracy, capitalism, or any political system that accepts a state role in guaranteeing basic rights.

In fact, public food infrastructure already exists — through school meal programs, breakfast programs, emergency food relief, food stamps, and state support for community kitchens. Communities have also long organized to feed themselves, with or without the state.

However, this is not emergency food, nor charity. It does not compete with private restaurants. It is something more like what a public park is to real estate: not a substitute, but a complement — permanent, dignified, accessible to everyone.

And if you prefer to frame it in terms of efficiency rather than rights: unhealthy diets cost billions in healthcare spending every year. Malnourished children learn less and earn less. And though this argument strikes me as overly productivist, I’ll leave it here anyway: workers who cannot afford a decent lunch are less productive. And market forces have not aligned profit with population wellbeing when it comes to food. The food industry has been extraordinarily effective at making ultraprocessed, nutrient-poor food cheap, convenient, and omnipresent. Making nutritious, sustainable food affordable has been far less of a priority. That’s not a moral failure of the market — it’s how markets work.

Public restaurants are one tool in a much larger set of policies to improve food environments — alongside front-of-package labeling, taxes on ultraprocessed foods, subsidies for fresh produce, stronger school feeding programs. All of this can work together, with public restaurants anchoring a procurement system that sources from smallholder farmers and supports an agroecological transition. What public restaurants add is a physical space where good food is not a privilege.

The case for public restaurants goes well beyond nutrition and health.

In terms of affordability, public restaurants can lower prices through state investment, procurement at scale, and a mission that is not profit but access.

On sustainability: public restaurants, designed well, can be major purchasers of local, agroecological, seasonal produce — including native crops and underutilized species that supermarkets won’t consider, but that are often more diverse, resilient, and nutritious.

On employment and dignity: run well, these restaurants can offer decent, formal work to people currently in informal, precarious labor — drawing on the extraordinary culinary talent that already exists. They can also serve as sites of training and skills development, providing pathways out of precarity for some of the most talented and invisible people in our food systems.

Then there is taste and pleasure — which matter more than food policy discussions usually admit. The goal should be a public restaurant that serves food people actually want to eat: delicious meals shaped by chefs who bring creativity and craft to the mission. Taste shapes what people expect from every meal, and experience can change food culture far more deeply than any public health awareness campaign.

Healthy, sustainable, delicious food should also have a democratizing effect — not the exclusive domain of those who can afford a tasting menu in a fancy restaurant.

And public food infrastructure is, in part, a redistribution of care: the labor of feeding people, which has historically fallen on women regardless of whether they also work, raise children, and manage everything else. The entry of women into the formal workforce was never accompanied by any serious rethinking of who feeds the household.

And yet, the challenges of building this infrastructure are real and worth naming.

Public restaurants are expensive to build and run. But so are hospitals, schools and public transport. The argument that public goods generate returns — in health, equity, social cohesion — that market-only systems fail to capture is one we’ve already accepted for those domains. The question is whether we’re willing to apply it to food.

The state, especially across much of the Global South — and in many countries of the Global North after decades of neoliberal hollowing — is often too weak, underfunded, or captured to run programs like this effectively. But a weak state is not an argument for no state. It is an argument for building a better one. The answer is reform, not retreat — the same logic we apply to health and education.

Then there’s the risk of corruption in procurement — one of the most real dangers in any public food program. The answer is accountability: involving civil society and communities in oversight; making procurement transparent; building partnerships that create genuine checks on the system.

And perhaps the most personal objection: can the state actually produce something worth eating? In Peru in the 1980s, the government was producing powdered milk that smelled and tasted like rotten eggs, and a “popular bread” that was possibly the most effective method for making people stop eating flour. These failures are real, and they matter. The answer is to put taste at the center of policy. A public restaurant that serves great food is its own best argument.

There is one more dimension worth naming: what it means to eat together.

One of the things that strikes you about Poland’s milk bars or Turkey’s people’s restaurants is that they are genuinely diverse. People who would never otherwise share a table — different ages, incomes, occupations, neighborhoods — find themselves eating side by side. In deeply unequal societies, a restaurant that is genuinely accessible to everyone, that offers food worth wanting, is a rare and powerful social equalizer.

Some Mexico City restaurants have done pay-what-you-can evenings, a few days a year, as a gesture toward a city being reshaped by gentrification. The gesture is welcome. But public restaurants propose something more structural: that access to healthy, delicious food should not depend on the generosity of any particular restaurant.

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None of this looks the same everywhere. The public restaurant model is most applicable where the state already takes responsibility for health and education — much of Europe, where there is broad consensus about the state’s essential role, and a few places in Latin America or Asia with a stronger tradition of public responsibility. In countries like the United States, which has never managed to guarantee universal healthcare, the path is longer — though New York’s public grocery stores suggest the conversation is at least beginning.

In much of the developing world, the picture is more complex — and more urgent. Food insecurity is not a background condition but an everyday reality for hundreds of millions of people. At the same time, informal food systems play an enormous role in daily feeding: vendors, markets, and street stalls — run overwhelmingly by women — already provide affordable meals to large portions of urban populations, often without any formal support, infrastructure, or recognition.

The argument for public restaurants in these contexts is not to ignore what already works, nor to build a top-down system that competes with or displaces it. It is to invest in the surrounding infrastructure: better market facilities, cold storage, reliable water access, fair public procurement that includes informal actors, and legal recognition that protects rather than criminalizes. Public restaurants could be one node in a broader ecosystem of public food infrastructure — partnering with and employing the informal cooks and vendors who already know how to feed their communities, giving them stable work and the conditions to do what they already do, better.

During the Second World War, the British Ministry of Food established a network of “British Restaurants” — communal feeding centres, initially for the working poor, expanded as wartime hardship spread to a much broader public. At their peak there were thousands of them across the country, serving cheap, nourishing meals to whoever needed them.

The vision here is not emergency infrastructure. It is the opposite: permanent infrastructure, built for normal times. But the scale of what we face is not so distant from an emergency. Malnutrition in all its forms — undernutrition, anemia, overweight, obesity — is growing. Healthy diets are out of reach for billions. Climate change is reducing yields, particularly where people can least afford it. Geopolitical instability is pushing up the price of basic staples. The food system is under extraordinary stress — and it will get worse as climate change deepens and instability grows. This is precisely the kind of moment that calls for a wartime level of ambition in food policy. We showed, briefly, during COVID, that governments can act at that scale when the urgency feels real.

Public restaurants will not solve all of this. But they are a serious, concrete way to make the Right to Food real. The urgency is there. The models are there to learn from, from Warsaw to Belo Horizonte to Istanbul. What is missing is the political will — and the broader social agreement — to treat food the way we already treat education and health: as something too fundamental to be left entirely to the market.

Certain neighborhoods in Mexico City have been flooded, especially since COVID, by a wave of remote workers and digital nomads who came for the sunlight, the architecture, the Mexican joie de vivre, and — like many urbanites with disposable income to spend on “experiences” — fell in love with the food, both at fancy farm-to-table-tasting-menu restaurants and on the street. I was a gentrifier myself when I moved here fourteen years ago, and I’ve watched this happen from the inside. Like many gentrifiers, there are real differences between us — language, race, income — but the one we love to invoke is the moment we arrived: ‘before COVID,’ ‘before that quesadillas stand was full of gringos’ (mine is ‘before Art Week got popular’).

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But this street food — now so picturesque and Instagrammable to visitors — is how a lot of the city actually eats: delicious, traditional, often healthy, and affordable. The people in line at those stands are a cross-section of the city: office workers, security guards, nurses, policemen, construction workers — many of whom left home before six in the morning, will get back after nine at night, and for whom this stand is not a “foodie experience” but the main hot meal between two long commutes.

And so it goes in nearly every neighborhood of Mexico City, and in hundreds of cities across the Global South. This is the informal food economy, and it is one of the most important ways cities eat — even though food policy rarely treats it as such. It is also a major source of employment, especially for women. Tianguis and other traditional markets — the open-air markets that rotate through neighborhoods on fixed days of the week — are also often the only place where fresh fruit and vegetables are genuinely affordable for low-income households. It wouldn’t even be fair to call all of this “informal” without qualification — it’s a matter of degrees and nuances. Many of Mexico City’s street vendors, tianguis, and markets have assigned spaces, set hours, and de facto rules.

Behind these stalls and stands sits another layer of informality that is even less visible: the intermediaries who get food from small-scale producers onto the plates of people in cities. These middlemen are routinely blamed — sometimes fairly — for taking outsized margins. But they also absorb high costs: terrible roads, scattered farmers, no cold storage, no financing. Informal processors play another key role: they take raw or semi-finished ingredients — corn, fruit, milk, meat — and turn them into the tortillas, the cecina, and the “fresh” cheese that stock these stalls and markets, a transformation step the formal food industry has little interest in performing at this scale, for these margins. All these informal actors also keep alive a far wider range of crops, breeds, and dishes than any supermarket shelf or gourmet food market does.

This enormous mass of people is not passively waiting for the formal economy to offer them jobs. They are creating their own — and, at the same time, providing an essential service to everyone else. Informality is not outside capitalism. It is produced by capitalism, and it coexists with the formal economy, intertwined with it at every level.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to romanticize all this. I was born and grew up in Peru, a country where informal economies, in some sectors, have done real damage. Illegal mining tears apart rivers, ecosystems, and biodiversity; it provides income to people the formal economy has excluded, but it operates with no environmental standards at all. Low-cost private universities — many of them informal in the sense that they never met basic educational standards — used their political weight to get themselves formalized anyway, and now produce graduates with little education. The neoliberalization of public transport, built on the idea that if the state can’t run it well, the market — formal and informal alike — should, has helped make Lima and other Peruvian cities among the most chaotic in the world, their streets left to competing private lines that break every traffic rule to get one more passenger.

And yet, despite all that, the benefits and the potential of informality for feeding people are enormous and largely untapped. The dominant response to informality — including the parts of it that feed cities — is not to grapple with this messy, contradictory reality. It is to look away from it, and to embrace a modernization fetish. Informal actors are treated as if they exist outside the economy altogether: invisible, temporary, often illegal — not just in the eyes of the authorities, but of neighbors too. They are seen as a problem to be eliminated, not as an economy that feeds people, particularly the people who need it most. In practice, informal food vendors are not actually outside the state. They are governed through permits, harassment, bribes, evictions, toleration, taxation, clientelism, and selective enforcement — an entire shadow regulatory apparatus that produces one consistent outcome: insecurity.

The costs of this blind spot are real. It excludes a large share of the population from the benefits this economy could offer if it were better supported. It is also one of the least understood parts of food systems — there simply isn’t enough research to grasp its potential or how to build on it. In policymaking, informal food actors are frequently absent: no access to infrastructure investment, no credit, no role in public procurement. The prevailing view of informality is that it is a symptom of underdevelopment, something to be eliminated rather than supported. Because informal vendors and markets occupy legal gray areas, they are routinely left out of budgets and urban plans, and then, periodically, swept aside in the name of modernization or gentrification.

Some of this is a kind of colonial mentality. It shows up as the adoption of Western models that were never designed for, and don’t fit, other economic and cultural realities. Development banks have been enthusiastic exporters of this model — the World Bank’s “Doing Business” rankings, which for years rewarded countries for making it easier to register and formalize a business, before the index was scrapped in 2021 amid a data-manipulation scandal, are a good example of formalization being pushed as the only road forward. What that approach mostly reveals is a failure to understand, or accept, how these diverse economies actually work.

I saw this from the inside. In the late 2000s, I was a Vice-Minister for small and medium enterprises and industry in the Peruvian government, at a moment when formalization had become something close to an obsession. Over the years, Peruvian governments across different administrations had built a model centered on “facilitation” — making it easier, on paper, for informal businesses to register. Success was measured by the number of formal registrations, not by what happened to people’s incomes or livelihoods afterward.

Peru was, and in many ways still is, deeply shaped by development-bank thinking, without ever building a development model of its own, adapted to its own reality. It’s worth being fair: many of us were pushing, in parallel, for a different approach — a new model of industrial policy, public funds for innovation, a network of innovation centers built on the ground across the country to support small-scale enterprises and entrepreneurs — even as that formalization fetish dominated the broader agenda. But it was very hard to escape the underlying idea: that the best thing the state could do was formalize and get out of the way. Peru was one of the most faithful disciples of the Washington Consensus, with its Marie Kondo-style minimalist vision of government.

Over the decades the research has moved on, even if policy hasn’t caught up. Informality used to be treated as a marginal survival activity, something people did while waiting to be absorbed into “real” jobs. But Irene Tinker showed how street food provides affordable meals and jobs, especially for women; Jane Battersby and Caroline Skinner linked informal food retail to urban food security and everyday food access; and Bill Vorley has challenged modernization agendas that assume formal value chains, supermarkets, and certification are always the future. The 2024 High Level Panel of Experts report on urban food systems, led by Jane Battersby — I was part of the team of experts who wrote it — underscored just how essential informality is to feeding cities. More recent work, including The Elephant at the Table, which I co-edited, and Urban Food Systems in Latin America, edited by Tiana Bakic Hayden and Joaquín Pérez Martín, highlights the potential and complexities of informal and traditional food systems.

The literature today points toward recognizing what informal food systems actually offer: affordability, proximity, flexibility, livelihoods, freshness, and social connection — and toward supporting them with regulation, infrastructure, and rights designed for what they are, not what we wish they were.

None of this makes the challenges go away. Food safety, precarious working conditions, and chronic lack of infrastructure are real problems, made worse by decades of neglect and invisibility. A taco stand without reliable water or some kind of refrigeration might be a food-safety risk, not because the people running it don’t care, but because nobody ever supported the infrastructure that would make it easy to do otherwise. The same vendors and market workers who feed half the city often have no contracts, no insurance, and no recourse when a stall is removed overnight. None of that is an argument for leaving things as they are — it’s an argument for finally investing in the systems that would let this economy do what it already does, but safer, more efficiently, and with some basic security for the people who run it.

So what would it actually look like to take this seriously?

It starts with investing in research and statistics, so that informal food systems are understood rather than guessed at.

It means including informal vendors and traders in the consultations and decision-making that shape the food systems they are already part of.

It implies designing regulation for the economy that exists, not the one policymakers wish existed: ad-hoc rules, legal recognition, tailored public investment, and urban planning that assumes street vendors and markets are permanent features of the city rather than problems awaiting removal.

It is partnering with and employing informal actors in public and community food spaces — public grocery stores, canteens, community kitchens — rather than competing with or displacing them.

And it means rethinking food safety itself. Current frameworks largely reflect industrial models that exclude traditional and informal actors, even though those actors feed much of the population. Instead of punitive, one-size-fits-all standards, governments should adopt risk-based approaches that improve safety without destroying access or livelihoods — investment in decentralized infrastructure, flexible certification, participatory guarantee systems, and co-regulation with the people who actually run these markets and stalls.

Back in la Colonia Roma, the tourists and gentrifiers — myself included, actually — will keep enjoying these stands, highlighting the experience of “authenticity” in this crazy, chaotic city, exoticizing the colorful tortillas in their social media posts. That’s not really the problem. The problem is that almost nobody treats this economy as what it actually is: the way much of the city feeds itself, every day, with almost no support, and very little recognition. The question isn’t how to formalize it out of existence, or romanticize it into folklore. It’s whether policy can finally see it for what it already is — and start building around it.

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Actually, Persepolis reopened another world. I had grown up reading comics — superheroes, mostly, plus Archie, that cheerfully illusory portrait of United States that was white, happy, and entirely disconnected from reality. Somewhere during adolescence, I left comics behind, until Marjane got me back.

I often think about what graphic novels do that other forms cannot — or cannot do in the same way. It is different from literature. Mario Vargas Llosa, in his Nobel Prize lecture, described literature as allowing us to live the lives we will never live. Graphic novels do something slightly different: imagination that arrives through a different channel. Yes, they carry you back to the childhood experience of cartoons. But more than that, they are stories that arrive through the eye before they reach the mind. They reach fibres that prose cannot.

Thanks to Satrapi, I explored. My idol for many years has been Adrian Tomine, whose The New Yorker covers I had long admired — those dense portraits of New York loneliness, of people staring at phones on the subway, or watching their neighbours through windows. He sees the city with an introvert’s precise eye. His graphic novels — Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, Killing and Dying — have been a gift for the introvert I carry inside me.

Then came Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This. Radtke takes the ruins of Detroit and uses them to think about all the other kinds of abandonment: of relationships, of places we loved, of earlier versions of ourselves. Her drawings are breathtaking — beautiful and sad at the same time. Her later work for The Believer brought more beauty to an already visually rich literary magazine.

I have a habit, in cities that take reading seriously, of disappearing into comic book shops. New York, Brussels, Buenos Aires — wherever enough people think that literature can also include graphics. My fellow geeks in these places are usually after fantasy epics or more superhero sagas. I go for the literary graphic novels, and I almost always emerge with something I didn’t know, from different parts of the world.

That has led me to mix it with another hobby. Natural wine pairs well with funny and thoughtful graphic novels. Mimi, Fifi et Glouglou, the French strip series by Michel Tolmer, is essentially a roast of the Parisian wine scene, including the wine snobs — like myself — who take wine too seriously and have the ability to bore others about fermentation and terroir.

Les Ignorants, by Étienne Davodeau, is something else. Davodeau, a cartoonist, spends a year working alongside Richard Leroy, one of the cult natural wine producers of the Loire Valley. The result is an ode to the soil, the artisanal high-quality process, the vineyards. Leroy’s wines — now prohibitively expensive and nearly impossible to find — taste like all of that complexity at once. They are nothing like the industrial wine most of us grew up drinking, which are closer to a Coca-Cola than to the real thing.

Brussels is the world capital of comics — Tintin was born there, and so were the Smurfs and Spirou. It was there, at the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, that I once found myself giving a keynote at the Global Think Tank Summit 2018, while the building simultaneously hosted a major comics exhibition. I had not intended to present any of this. The project felt too modest. Ethos — the think tank I directed at that time in CDMX — had used El Libro Vaquero, the widely popular pocket comic in Mexico, as a vehicle for communicating an anti-corruption reform. The idea was that the reform’s message would have more impact in this visual language. The press had found it novel enough to cover.

But the late Jim McGann — who built the global think tank network and taught at UPenn and loved wine, though he could never quite forgive me my enthusiasm for natural wines, which he drank with great thirst while criticizing them for being too funky — couldn’t accept no for an answer. He wanted creative communication for think tanks. So I stood in front of an audience of policy wonks and told them about Satrapi, about Tomine, about Radtke, about the visual language that reaches the places that reports cannot.

I have been thinking about that room a lot lately, as I try to understand how to say what I believe about food to a broader audience — about why the transformation of food systems matters, about why what we eat connects to nearly every other crisis we are living through, about why healthy food affordability or the repurposing of agricultural subsidies should be at the top of every political agenda.

Our language of systems, transformation, and policy coherence serves us well in the world of experts, international organizations, bureaucrats, governments, and social movements. The problem is that we need other languages and other narratives to move more people. To make them feel that everything we are pushing for — that food transformation — has anything to do with their lives. I am not suggesting we use comics and graphic novels to translate our policy reports for a wider audience (it has been done on various development topics, with mixed results).

But the fact is that comics work differently — in some ways the way food works: directly, sensorially, as much through the body as through the mind. A drawing of Richard Leroy’s vineyard, with its untidy grass and its vines, tells you something about terroir that inspires you more than any tasting note ever could. The food movement needs more of this. Not fewer arguments, but different ones. Not less rigour, but more humanity — more connection with people, with what actually matters to them about food. Not preaching to the choir, but expanding the circle of those who care deeply about what is on their plates. Those of us who work in food have the advantage of working in something already on everyone’s table. It already nourishes the body, connects us with others in the shared joy of flavours and sensations, and reminds us where we come from. All of that is emotion. We need to link it more to what we do — to inspire more people to understand it. The way Marjane Satrapi made us understand what Iran had suffered, the deep roots it would always carry, and what that meant for her freedom.

Those of us who work on global food systems follow Thin Lei Win’s newsletter and reporting closely because she asks the questions we keep trying to put at the center. She reports on what is often left out — power, labor, climate, health, and the conditions behind the food we eat — without losing the warmth of food.

In this conversation, Thin talks about growing up around food in Yangon, following her grandfather through wet markets, and why rice will always be on her table. She also talks about eating alone with a book, feeding friends as an act of love, and why food systems remain one of journalism’s biggest blind spots.

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1. The last dish you cooked for someone — what was it, for whom?

It was for my husband and my mother-in-law, who was visiting from Iceland. I made three dishes. In Southeast Asian cooking, it is never really starter, main, and dessert. It is communal: all the dishes come to the table at the same time.

There was oven-grilled broccoletti with salt, pepper, and pumpkin oil. I love pumpkin oil — you find it in places like Austria and Romania. A Shan-style tomato salad with peanut oil, chili flakes, soy sauce, shallots, and mint. And my signature Burmese-style stewed chicken salad, a recipe I inherited from my sister. It is made with shredded chicken thighs, shallots, lime juice, fish sauce, fresh chili, coriander — and, of course, rice.

2. Where does your passion for food come from? Tell me about the first moment food stopped being just food.

I am incredibly lucky to have been born and raised in a family of foodies. We would have breakfast and talk about lunch. We would be having lunch and talk about dinner.

When I was growing up, we often had big gatherings at home to commemorate special days and occasions. People would come throughout the day — sometimes as many as 200 — and we would feed them.

We always had dinner together around a big round table, with a Lazy Susan in the middle: rice, soup, salad, a vegetable stir-fry, and either meat or fish. Burmese soups are often either sweet or tangy, with tamarind used as a souring agent.

I also used to join my grandfather on his Saturday grocery runs to wet markets in Yangon, or Rangoon, where I grew up. I loved watching him bargain with fishmongers, butchers, and vegetable sellers. He chose what was freshest that week and planned the menu around it.

3. The restaurant you always return to — and the restaurant that marked you once, forever.

There is not a single one. It depends on where I am.

When I used to go home to Yangon, in Burma, there were a few places I always returned to, though they were not really restaurants: a street-side stall selling meat on a stick, a place with amazing roast duck, and a little eatery I loved for Shan noodle salad.

Now, in Torino, Italy, I have a few places I keep returning to: a Sichuan hotpot place, a handmade noodle place with xiao long bao, a Thai place where they know I used to live in Thailand, a nearby osteria run by a young local couple passionate about food and wine, and a small award-winning restaurant with amazing leek pasta, panna cotta, and anchovies.

As for a restaurant that marked me forever — that is difficult. There are so many I have really loved.

4. The song that moved you this week and the book on your nightstand right now.

This morning at the Oslo Freedom Forum, we heard Tenzin Choegyal, a Tibetan-Australian musician in exile, perform with a Norwegian string quartet. I found the performance incredibly moving.

I have two books on my nightstand: In Good Taste by Mallika Basu, a book about food systems, and Peacemaker by Thant Myint-U, about U Thant, the Burmese diplomat who served as Secretary-General of the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Congo crisis. It is a piece of history that connects my country to the rest of the world.

5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

I love both. I know people who do not like going out to eat on their own, but I really enjoy it. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Just a good meal, alone, with a book. I love the solitude. It gives me a chance to really enjoy the food on my own. But it can also be social in unexpected ways: you end up chatting with the wait staff, or with the people serving you, and sometimes you overhear very interesting conversations.

Eating with others gives me something different. Of course the food matters — I am a self-confessed foodie — but what it really brings is companionship and memory. It is the feeling of not being alone, of sharing an incredible moment with people you care about. In Burma, we have a saying that if you eat together, you are less likely to be antagonistic toward each other. I truly believe that.

6. Picture a dinner in 2050. What’s on the table? What disappeared? What’s new?

You are talking to a Southeast Asian whose nickname is PBR — Powered by Rice. So one thing that definitely has to be on that dinner table in 2050 is a plate of beautiful, steaming rice. Not necessarily pure white rice; I like mixing brown and white rice together.

And hopefully that rice is grown by farmers who enjoy what they do, live dignified lives, and are properly compensated. To borrow from Slow Food and Carlo Petrini, I hope the food on the table is good, clean, and fair.

Beyond rice, I do not want to predict exact ingredients. What I want is food that is seasonal, sustainable, and healthy — food that still feels like food. I do not want us to be eating something generated by mashing together multiple chemicals. That is not me being a Luddite, or against technology. I just hope the table still has a variety of dishes made from real food.

7. Is there room for hope in the future of food? What gives it to you, and what takes it away?

I think there is always room for hope. But there is a difference between hope and optimism. I do not mean blind hope, or faith. I mean informed hope. Things are not going well. We still have hundreds of millions of people going hungry, billions unable to afford nutritious food, and a small group of individuals and companies with too much power over our food systems.

But we are naming it. We are organizing and mobilizing against it. We are no longer silent. More and more people are talking about the “elephant at the table” — power — as you do in your report. We are no longer just tinkering around the edges. We are talking about changing the system itself. That gives me hope.

I worry that those of us who want healthier, fairer, greener food systems can sometimes become too purist. That frustrates me. We need to give each other space and grace. I worry that we get so caught up in purity, and in wanting everything to be perfect, that we become unwilling to compromise or listen to one another.

8. What’s the conversation no one in your world is having about food right now?

Outside the worlds of academia, activism, and food systems work, I have many friends who love food. But the conversation usually stays at the level of ingredients, cooking, and taste. It rarely goes deeper: Where does this food come from? Who grew it? Under what conditions?

I think that is the enduring struggle for those of us working on food systems: getting people interested in what happens beyond the beautiful dish on the plate. People often do not want to know how the sausage is made.

9. What are the biggest challenges of reporting on food systems — and what makes the work most rewarding?

One challenge is that food systems remain a massive blind spot in general reporting. They are deeply connected to climate, the environment, human rights, public health, and nutrition — yet food itself is often missing from those conversations.

At the World Health Assembly, there was far more talk about GLP-1s and pharmaceutical solutions than food systems. In agriculture debates, we discuss yields, trade, fertilizers, and pesticides, but not enough about ownership, corporate power, or the causes of shocks. And in environmental debates, we still talk more about fossil fuels, energy, and transport than food, despite its enormous impact on ecosystems, biodiversity, and the climate.

The second challenge is the perception that food is a lifestyle issue, a trade issue, or a technical question about commodities. But food is not soft, and it is not just technical. We can live without mobile phones, cars, or flying. We cannot live without eating.

The rewarding part is that people are often surprised when I say I investigate food systems. But once I explain what that means, they become fascinated. Many become converts. That is the most rewarding part: helping people see that food is not a side issue. It is integral to our lives..

10. When you have people over, how do you set the stage for a real connection? Music, food, light, the first drink, the seating, etc, etc.

One of my favorite things on this planet is feeding people. Not just cooking — feeding people.

I grew up in a house where food was an act of love, but I only really learned to cook as a broke student in the UK, around 2004 or 2005 — and soon discovered how much I loved cooking for others..

I regularly cook for friends, whether it is two people or twelve. I used to want everything ready and perfect before they arrived, but over the last few years I have learned to let go. Now I tell people, “Food will be ready at eight, but come from six or six-thirty if you want.” Some come early, sit in the kitchen, have a drink, and sometimes help me peel, chop, fry, or grill.

I usually cook Asian-style food, so there is no starter, main, and dessert — just many dishes on the table for people to share. For me, that is how connection begins: making people feel comfortable, letting them see me not as the perfect host, but as someone taking joy in cooking for them. And I always cook too much, because my biggest fear is that people will leave hungry. If they finish the food, I am incredibly happy. That is the best compliment.

José Luis Vivero’s passion for food is impossible to miss when he speaks. He is also, almost always, one of the best-dressed men in the room — usually in colorful suits that match his warm personality.

His book, Food as Commons, has inspired many of us to think with more hope about a different food future. In this conversation, he moves between memory, politics, pleasure, and critique — from family meals in Spain and Georgian hospitality to the right to food and the fight against the industrial food system.

1. The last dish you cooked for someone — what was it, for whom?

It was pasta — rigatoni I had brought back from Italy. I made it with tomato sauce and zucchini, for my wife and two friends. We are moving away from Cameroon, so it felt like a kind of farewell meal, made with a lot of affection.

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2. Where does your passion for food come from? Tell me about the first moment food stopped being just food.

Comes from home. My mother, my grandmother, my aunts — they all cooked very well, and they always devoted a lot of time to food. But it was not only them. My uncle made spectacular barbecues, and my grandfather was a fanatic of sardines.

I always remember those moments with my family. In Spain, food is one of the centers of family life. Families are organized around meals, dinners, and celebrations.

Then, professionally, the first time I went abroad to work in cooperation was in Georgia, in 1998. There, I saw that food was also an essential part of culture and hospitality. People offered food, shared meals, and had very special rituals around eating. That was when I realized that this was not only true in Spain. In Georgia too, food was a central axis around which much of society was organized.

And because I was working with displaced people, I also understood the power of food as a means of subsistence — and as a force for social mobilization.

3. The restaurant you always return to — and the restaurant that marked you once, forever.

There are specific places I always return to.

In Rome, Pizzeria Formula 1, which was close to where I lived. In Galicia, there is a place called El Sur, specialized in pork tripes — a Galician dish I love. In Málaga, our favorite is Chiringuito El Merlo, where they make spectacular sardine espetos. And in Cameroon, in Kribi, near de Lobé waterfalls, there is a beach chiringuito where they serve the best fish in the country — right by the sea, with your feet almost in the water.

And the restaurant that marked me forever was ReComiendo, in Córdoba. It was the first Michelin-starred restaurant I ever went to, and I still remember that experience.

4. The song that moved you this week and the book on your nightstand right now.

This week, my Spotify favorites have been Brigitte Calls Me Baby and Fontaines D.C. I’ve also been reading The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, by David Graeber — a collection of short texts by a thinker I like very much. What I take from Graeber is this idea that much of what we have is a social construction. And if it was constructed one way, it can also be constructed differently. We can imagine other alternatives, other narratives, other political models — and, of course, other food systems.

5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

I have no doubt about this: I don’t like eating alone at all. I do it when I travel for work, of course, but for me eating alone in a restaurant is one of the saddest, most depressing things. Eating is a convivial act. It is about being with people, talking, sharing.

6. Picture a dinner in 2050. What’s on the table? What disappeared? What’s new?

If I am still alive, I imagine there will be a lot of synthetic and ultra-processed products on the table, and very little fresh food. Many of the things I ate when I was young may have disappeared: sunflower seeds, licorice — regaliz or paloduz, as we called it in Andalusia — lupin beans (altramuces), olives. Even fresh products like seafood and fish may no longer be served as they are today. What would be new? Processed, technological foods made from chemical substances. They may look like many of the foods we eat now, but they will not really be the same.

7. Is there room for hope in the future of food? What gives it to you, and what takes it away?

Yes, there is hope. Hope is the last thing we lose.

I find it in Indigenous communities, alternative movements in cities, traditional agriculture, and in the resistance of small farmers, peasants, and fishers who continue to produce, fish, gather, and cultivate with respect for nature and its cycles.

What takes hope away is the industrial agri-food system’s obsession with short-term profit. It destroys the very means of production it depends on, feeds people excess calories of worse quality and less diversity, and makes us sick while destroying the planet.

8. What’s the conversation no one in your world is having about food right now?

In my world, we still talk too little about the right to food as an enforceable right — a right citizens can claim, and a duty governments must fulfill.

I would like to see it much more clearly included in European legal frameworks: the European human rights system, the Council of Europe, national constitutions, and domestic legal systems. Europe could learn from countries in the Global South — Guatemala, Colombia, India, Nepal — where the right to food is entering the legal order in more concrete and enforceable ways.

That matters because enforceability changes everything: it creates accountability, forces governments to respond, and can increase public budgets for food and nutrition.

9. Is food-as-a-commons a vision you’ll see in your lifetime, or one you’re planting for someone else’s?

I would love to see it in my lifetime. And in fact, the idea of food as a commons already exists. It is not my invention.

What I did was bring together my professional experience and my readings on Indigenous food systems and traditional agriculture — systems that already understand food as more than a commercial good or commodity. They see food as a public good, a common good, because it is a necessity for all human beings. Later, in academia, I translated those ideas into a theoretical framework, as many other colleagues have also explored. It differs from the dominant view of food as a commodity: something sold in the market, whose value is determined only by its price. I am convinced it will take time for food-as-a-commons to become the dominant narrative — and the basis for a fairer and more durable food system.

10. When you have people over, how do you set the stage for a real connection? Music, food, light, the first drink, the seating, etc, etc.

I am a fanatic of conviviality — of conversations around food, of cooking for others, of inviting people out for a drink or a meal. I love dancing, music, food, and sharing drinks. I also love sharing the dishes we learned from our parents. All of that is fundamental for creating relationships between human beings. Singing, dancing, drinking, and eating are basic ways of making social connections — and, in some way, of feeling more human.

What grew from that day in Rome was a global community of farmers, fishers, cooks, foragers, scholars, and enthusiasts, held together by a conviction that good food matters, that it connects us to each other and to the land, and that it is worth defending.

By the time he died, Slow Food had catalogued five thousand endangered foods, expanded to over 1,500 local chapters across the globe, launched Terra Madre — a biennial festival in Turin that gathers small producers from over a hundred and fifty countries — published the Slow Food and Slow Wine guides that became bibles for a generation of eaters (like me!), and built the University of Gastronomic Sciences. I visited Bra and Pollenzo last year — both Slow Food HQ and the University — and it was like meeting my soulmate: the place breathes food and gastronomy from every corridor, including a wine cellar at the University stocked with bottles from every region of Italy.

Not bad for a protest that started over a plate of local pasta vs. an industrial burger.

Slow Food began as a defense of taste, quality, and connection — a pushback against fast life and bland industrial food — and became, over the following decades, something more expansive: a movement to protect biodiversity and strengthen small producers. He acknowledged, at one point, that for years Slow Food had been perceived as a club for gourmets. But he said the movement had outgrown that image. In fact, Slow Food now champions agroecology, structural reform of food systems, and its current president, Edie Mukiibi, is a farmer from Uganda who drives a clear vision of transformation rooted in social justice.

The critics back then, however, were persistent. Across decades of scholarship and journalism, they argued that a movement organized around taste and slowness was easier to practice if you were wealthy, educated, and had time to spare — that it was, simply, elitist. That its romanticization of pre-industrial food ignored just how scarce, monotonous, and hard-won that food often was. That its efforts to protect heritage foods sometimes subjected them to the same standardization and commoditization it claimed to oppose. That its dominant aesthetic was European, even colonial, and insufficiently concerned with social justice.

Even if critiques go too far, it is important to have academics and intellectuals who constantly question the coherence and logic of visions for change. But critiques can sometimes be so devastating that they move too quickly from “this version was flawed” to “therefore abandon the ambition.” And that is where the argument loses its footing: it leaves the industrial food system standing, unchallenged, as the only practical alternative — one that reaches more people than our narratives of structural food system change currently do.

The answer is not to abandon the vision and the ambition. We need something to fall in love with: a food world that brings us together, that delights the senses, that makes us want to fight for it — not only out of obligation, but also with joy.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Indignation at the state of our food systems — at a concentrated, extractive, fossil-fuel-dependent industry that makes cheap calories abundant and healthy diets structurally expensive; at the millions of people who cannot afford real, nourishing food; and at the way wars and invasions still turn hunger into a weapon — is legitimate and necessary. The barriers to transforming food systems can seem insurmountable: concentrated power, captured regulation, vested interests dressed in the language of feeding the world. Collective anger and frustration are a fundamental ingredient of change.

But Petrini’s contribution was something different. He insisted that pleasure — the actual, sensory, convivial pleasure of eating well — was part of the political argument. This is where his critics, in my view, got it exactly backwards. The accusation that joy at the table is a luxury for the privileged — that caring about taste, human connection, and where your food comes from is an indulgence of the comfortable — is not a progressive position. It is a profoundly discriminatory and excluding one. It assumes, at its core, that pleasure belongs only to those who can afford to slow down.

But this is not only an argument about pleasure. It is also an argument about hope — and about what hope does politically. Any vision worth fighting for has to offer people something to move toward, not just something to move away from. Anger at the system is necessary and can mobilize millions. But we need a bigger movement. A hopeful vision broadens the coalition, makes the argument legible beyond the already-converted, and shows people not only what is wrong but what could be different — and how their lives could be fuller and richer for it.

And for this, we need to remain connected to food — to its taste, its quality, and how we share it at the table with people around us. This is what Petrini grasped, and what made him effective in creating this broad movement in a way that many sharper critics of the food system were not.

“Those who sow utopia reap reality,” Petrini liked to say. The point is not that utopia arrives without a fight. The point is that you have to be able to imagine it — concretely, lovingly, in sensory detail — before you can build it. Not the gray efficiency of a corrected system. A joyful life worth fighting for.

Emma McDonell recently published The Quinoa Bust, and her work on superfoods has helped many of us think more clearly about the promises, contradictions, and politics behind these foods. I met her in Hamburg, when we collaborated at THE NEW INSTITUTE on The Elephant at the Table.

Emma talks about hope as a duty, the childhood glimpse of a CAFO that stayed with her, and the restaurants where she learned about food, work, and humanity. She prefers eating with others, and in her free time makes beautiful collages.

1. The last dish you cooked for someone — what was it, for whom?

Fish tacos with fresh tortillas, last night, for my family, before leaving for a trip.

2. Where does your passion for food come from? Tell me about the first moment food stopped being just food.

When I was about 10 years old, we were on a family trip, driving from where I grew up in Northern California down to visit family in Southern California. On Interstate 5, we passed Harris Ranch, this giant CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation).

I was so horrified by the sadness of it all: thousands and thousands of cows packed together in basically a giant mud pit, and how sad their lives were. I didn’t eat meat for about 15 years after that. That was the moment I really woke up to how broken our food system was, in the mind of a 10-year-old.

3. The restaurant you always return to — and the restaurant that marked you once, forever.

So many different restaurants come to mind, including places I would love to return to that no longer exist. Sad thing about restaurants.

When I was about 12, my mom took me to Greens, in San Francisco, on the marina. It was established, I think, by the San Francisco Zen Center, and they made incredible, beautiful vegetarian food with ingredients from the farm the Zen Center runs. As a 12-year-old vegetarian, I was used to the main attraction at restaurants or barbecues being a defrosted veggie burger — just eating whatever was available that didn’t have meat. To see that kind of care, attention to detail, beauty, and taste put into plant-based food was really incredible for me.

The restaurant that marked me most was the one I worked in throughout high school and some summers in college, in my hometown. I learned a huge amount about the food industry, and also about humanity, from being a busser, host, and then server.

4. The song that moved you this week and the book on your nightstand right now.

I was listening to this beautiful piano song, “Ballerina,” by Yehezkel Raz. I usually read both fiction and nonfiction. Right now, it’s 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber, which is about pirate societies in Madagascar.

5. Eating alone vs. eating with others. What does each give you?

I don’t like eating alone, and I avoid it. Eating with others makes me feel nourished in all the ways.

6. Picture a dinner in 2050. What’s on the table? What disappeared? What’s new?

It’s hard not to fall into the trap of thinking in utopias and dystopias. My dystopian meal in 2050 is something akin to Soylent Green: joyless, tasteless, highly processed, and prepared by asoylent machine. The more hopeful version is a meal with fresh fruits and vegetables, eaten in good company, and prepared by people who have the conditions to put care into the meal and take pride in their cooking.

7. Is there room for hope in the future of food? What gives it to you, and what takes it away?

We have to find hope. We owe it to younger generations not to give up, and to keep finding hope, as hard as that can feel. I find a huge amount of hope in collective action of different kinds, and in bold policy moves that bring things that once seemed like pipe dreams into reality. This week, I’m thinking in particular of the first public grocery store opening in New York as something that gave me hope.

So many things take hope away: especially the way bold ideas and visions get co-opted and end up serving the maintenance of the status quo.

8. What’s the conversation no one in your world is having about food right now?

I wouldn’t say no one is having this conversation, but we’re all having it in different ways. In so many contexts where democratic institutions are unraveling or splintering, efforts to build better societies are undermined — including in food systems. The uphill battles to build more just and sustainable food systems become less and less possible as political systems become less responsive to the needs of everyday people.

It’s not that people are not talking about it. It just feels like this overwhelming and intractable problem looming in the background of every discussion about transforming food systems for the better.

9. Should I feel guilty buying quinoa?

No, you should not. If anything, you should feel less guilty about buying quinoa than about many other globally traded commodities. But consumer guilt will not fix the food system.

10. When you have people over, how do you set the stage for a real connection? Music, food, light, the first drink, the seating, etc, etc.

Over the last few years, as the parent of a now 3-year-old, I’ve had to learn how to host people without putting so much time and energy into preparing an elaborate meal or making sure the house is clean. I’d much rather have people I care about over regularly, even if the house is messy or I only have time to make something simple, than wait for perfect conditions and end up hosting very irregularly.

This is an opening. But it will matter for food only if politics moves beyond the price of “groceries” and asks a harder question: can people afford a healthy diet?

The numbers are stark. More than two and a half billion people worldwide cannot afford a healthy diet. In the United States, almost seven in ten adults say price hikes make it harder for them to eat healthily. Governments already pay for unhealthy food systems — through hospitals, diabetes treatment, cardiovascular care. Healthy diets remain a private choice; the diseases linked to poor diets have become a public expense. And yet, decade after decade, the politics of food affordability has been organized around the price of staples — bread, rice, tortillas, cooking oil — not the price of a healthy plate.

That is not an accident. Affordability in food has been kidnapped by cheap calories.

For most of the post-war period — through famine, reconstruction, and the Green Revolution — food policy was built around rice, wheat, maize, and soy as national-security crops. Governments subsidized them, funded their research, and built infrastructure around their distribution. By the 1990s, the world produced more than enough calories to feed everyone.

The problem is that the system kept running long after the underlying problem had changed. The narrative of urgency — that we must keep producing more staples to “feed the world” — survived. We kept subsidizing the cheap calorie even as obesity and diet-related illness became major drivers of the nutritional crisis in most of the world. Today, about 87 per cent of the half-trillion dollars in annual global agricultural producer support is either price-distorting or harmful to nature and health. Much of what we produce with that support isn’t even eaten as food: large shares go to animal feed, biofuels, and ultra-processed products. Fruits, vegetables, pulses, eggs, fish, and the other foods public-health authorities recommend receive a small fraction of public support and remain structurally more expensive to grow, store, and move.

The price gap is real. Healthy foods are perishable, labor-intensive, and require expensive logistics — cold chains, refrigerated transport, fast-moving retail. Ultra-processed foods are designed for the opposite: long shelf life, factory-scale production, low spoilage. They are also intensely marketed, with ads, discounts, and promotional budgets that vegetables cannot match. The result is a food environment that makes the unhealthy option the cheap, fast, and convenient one — especially for households short on time, money, or access to fresh-food retail.

For decades, the response has been some version of “it’s the market.” Affordability, in this view, is a matter of individual choice, and any government attempt to make a head of broccoli cheaper will only push its price up. This is the neoliberal fundamentalism on food, and I am not arguing against it on ideological grounds — I am arguing against it on empirical ones. Governments already intervene heavily in food markets: agricultural subsidies, public procurement, food stamps, school meals, price stabilization for staples. The question is not whether the state shapes food prices. The question is what it shapes them toward.

The problem also sits at the intersection of policy domains and is owned by none of them. Agriculture ministries focus on production, exports, and farm incomes. Health ministries focus on nutrition guidelines and chronic disease but have little control over food prices. Social-protection ministries handle poverty but rarely ask whether cash transfers are large enough to cover the healthy diet their own colleagues recommend. The result is that “healthy-diet affordability” appears in many speeches and in almost no budget.

The political opening of the present moment is a chance to fix this. Affordability is no longer a left-wing slogan; it has become a cross-partisan demand. It is one of those rare issues — unlike identity politics, immigration, or even climate change — where voters across ideological lines recognize the same basic problem. A wealthier slice of urban life may still be absorbed by foodieism and wellness — two-hundred-dollar tasting menus, longevity podcasts, supplement obsession — and may continue to attract disproportionate media attention. But the rest of the population, on the left, right, and center, is asking a simpler question: why is it so hard to feed my family well?

That breadth makes a serious healthy-food affordability agenda politically feasible. It would include several concrete steps.

First, repurpose agricultural subsidies. The public money that currently underwrites cheap calories and ultra-processed feedstocks should be redirected toward fruits, vegetables, pulses, eggs, fish, and other nutritious foods, and toward sustainable production models — such as agroecology — that reduce dependence on volatile fossil-fuel inputs. We should not need another war to remind us of the price of our addiction to chemical fertilizers. Redirecting current support, most of which is harmful, is the single most powerful lever available.

Second, invest in the infrastructure fresh food requires. Cold chains, wholesale markets, rural roads, clean water, electricity, and food-safety systems are the difference between spinach that reaches consumers at a reasonable price and spinach that rots in transit. Small efficiency gains in these categories translate directly into lower retail prices.

Third, use fiscal and competition policies. Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages and ultraprocessed products reduce their consumption. Subsidies for fruits and vegetables increase purchases among low-income households. And serious competition policy against concentration in food retail, processing, and trading would protect both farmers from being squeezed and consumers from paying more than they should for healthy food.

Fourth, treat food access as public infrastructure. Schools, libraries, parks, and public transit are not left entirely to the market. Healthy food, for some reason, is. Municipal grocery stores, public food halls, subsidized canteens, school meals, mobile markets, and neighborhood food hubs do not need to replace private commerce. They need to set a floor — a guarantee that healthy, affordable food is reliably available, particularly in low-income neighborhoods where private retail has failed to provide it.

Fifth, use the state as a market-maker through public procurement. Schools, hospitals, prisons, care homes, and food assistance programs already buy enormous quantities of food. Aggregating that demand around healthy, sustainable, locally produced food can stabilize prices, build predictable markets for small producers, and shift entire supply chains. Procurement can also keep superfoods like quinoa on school trays and hospital plates rather than only on the menus of the urban elites, and bring neglected but nutritious foods — like small fish that are diverted to fishmeal — back into everyday diets.

Sixth, upgrade — rather than displace — the traditional and informal food economy. In much of the Global South, the most affordable fresh food is sold in wet markets, public and municipal markets, by street vendors, and in small neighborhood shops. These markets and vendors need water, sanitation, refrigeration, and proportionate food-safety rules; they do not need to be regulated out of existence in favor of supermarket chains.

Seventh, make large retailers and delivery platforms responsible for the food environments they shape. If they profit from selling ultra-processed products at scale, they can be required to keep affordable healthy baskets stocked, limit junk-food marketing to children, and reform manipulative promotional practices.

None of this is utopian. The FAO has been tracking the cost of a healthy diet for years in its annual State of Food Security and Nutrition reports; the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition has flagged affordability as one of the “critical, emerging and enduring“ issues (in a document in development, to which I’ve contributed); and a growing body of work, like “The Elephant at the Table,” which I co-edited and where Chris Vogliano contributes a chapter on healthy diets, sets out specific recommendations for getting it done.

Affordability politics has limits, of course. Producers want higher prices; consumers want lower ones — many of the proposals here are designed to address precisely that tension. Inflation, trade wars, and geopolitical conflict will continue to disrupt food systems. In places where conflict or extreme hunger makes any food vital, the priorities are inevitably different. And we cannot separate healthy from sustainable — climate change is already making food more expensive. Ultimately, food affordability depends on what people earn, not only on what food costs. But those are reasons to take the question seriously, not to keep avoiding it.

The deeper shift is one of framing. For decades, we have treated the price of a healthy diet as a private problem — a matter of personal choice, willpower, or taste — and therefore as someone else’s problem. Treating it as public means asking what we, together, can do about it: what we are willing to pay for, build, and require.

The price of eating well belongs at the center of the affordability agenda. The job now is to put it there — and make it impossible for any serious candidate to leave it off the menu.