The Politics of Your Dinner Plate with Eddie Hill and Robert Paarlberg

Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

The food that Americans eat says a lot about the political culture they live in. An expert panel discusses what the country's diet is telling us now.

Food is something that human beings think about every single day. It is the most intimate way we engage with the outside world – by ingesting parts of it – and the need to eat requires us to make choices. What makes it onto our dinner plates, then, says a lot about who we are and what we value, in a nutritional sense as well as a social sense.

To a certain extent, this perspective has become widely accepted. The rise of organic foods in the grocery aisle and farm-to-table on restaurant menus speaks to this kind of understanding. But the system that’s delivering that food to our plates is so much more complex than a label. And that’s what this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast is about.

We invited two people who think a lot about food to share what they see when they look at our food systems. Eddie Hill is a co-founder of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition and director of the Black Farm Bureau. Robert Paarlberg is the author of Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat.

In conversation with Grist staff writer Kate Yoder, they tangle with the food system’s biggest problems, discuss whether a focus on local and organic foods are actually solving some of those problems and share what they see as the best course toward a healthier future for everyone.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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