Healthy Food, Healthy People, Healthy Communities: A Conversation with Food Safety Advocate Zen Honeycutt and Former California Secretary of Agriculture A. G. Kawamura
“There are no sides, only angles and when we see it from the right angle, we’re all on the same side.” -- Swami Beyondananda We have three founding principles at Front and Center: From political battlefields to cooperative playing fields.Seeking the whole truth together.Putting the government on the side of the people. Each one is a challenge, to be sure, in these politically polarized times. Number two is particularly challenging because most political “discussions” devolve into dueling narratives. So, in this “conversation for possibilities” we brought together two passionate advocates for abundant, healthy, nutritionally-dense food. On one hand, we have A.G. Kawamura, a third-generation produce farmer in California who served as Secretary of Agriculture under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2003-2010, who advocates “big agriculture” as necessary to feed 8 billion people worldwide. On the other hand, Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, has seen how switching her family to an organic, non-GMO diet transformed her children’s health, and she has built a formidable organization to promote regenerative agriculture that heals the soil, and doesn’t cause the kinds of health conditions she observed in her children. In “seeking the whole truth together”, we had three goals. First, a “humanizing” format that acknowledged good intentions, personal passion, and mutual respect. Second, an opportunity for both Zen and A.G. to share their viewpoints and expertise into a “listening” instead of a debate, so that participants and listeners would emerge with a broader and deeper perspective. Third, we were looking for areas of agreement, and even opportunities for collaboration. And …we succeeded on all counts! You’ll have to watch the full interview to experience this for yourself, but we ended up with a vigorous, impassioned and ultimately kind conversation that might have turned “opponents” into agreeable colleagues who disagreed on certain points. A.G.’s focus was on preventing the worst food disaster of all – starvation. A century ago, the world’s population was “just” 2 billion; today, we have four times as many people, meaning we need to insure we have four times as much food. Zen pointed out that while food scarcity is a disaster we all want to avoid, another burgeoning disaster is a society that cannot function because there are too many sick people. She points out that during the growth phase of industrial agriculture, “there’s been an explosion of sickness”. GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers have led to not just the health problems her children experienced (severe allergies and early autism symptoms, all of which disappeared when she went organic and GMO-free), but problems like infertility. “A young man today,” she says, “has 50% less sperm than his grandfather.” Both A.G. and Zen agreed that the food industrial complex was NOT providing nutrient-dense foods, and that increasing locally-grown food is essential for our health and wellbeing. (In fact, years ago, A.G. sparked one of the early “food gleaning” programs in California, bringing food that would normally be thrown away to feed the hungry. He is also an advocate of neighborhood and urban gardens.) As someone whose entire life has been spent growing food, and then helping to manage the distribution of that food, A.G. prefers seeing the glass as “half full” – that we give proper credit to a system that has in his view prevented worldwide hunger. Zen, on the other hand, points out the “shadow side” of this industrial food system. She says, “Syngenta makes the largest amount of pesticides and agrochemicals in the world and their sister company is AstraZeneca, which produces 400 pharmaceutical products that treat the very same symptoms that their pesticides and chemicals cause!” We hope you will tune in, listen to the conversation, and hopefully c
