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. The disruptions of COVID-19 intensified isolation, while social media and digital communication increasingly replace interactions that once took place face to face. More people live alone; populations are ageing; and more adults are growing older without children or other close relatives nearby. At the same time, public spending cuts, rising rents, and the commercialisation of urban space are eroding the places that sustain everyday social life — from libraries and community centres to neighbourhood cafés and markets.

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 is soft, sentimental — perhaps another “woke” concern. That reaction tends to show up wherever mental health becomes a policy conversation, in societies where admitting to it still feels shameful. It comes from an old, mistaken idea that strength means not showing feelings. That taking loneliness seriously is a form of weakness, especially for men.

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 networks of mutual support, usually run by women who pool ingredients, money, and labor to feed their own families and their neighbors, building trust, solidarity, women’s leadership, and collective capacity along the way. 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 similar programs more expensive, just as public budgets get squeezed from every direction. Political instability, higher defense spending, and the long-delayed bill for climate adaptation all make social connection look nice to have, not essential. And yet many of these initiatives can run on kitchens, markets, schools, and community spaces that already exist, while tackling several problems at once: food insecurity, nutrition, mental health, isolation.

There’s also a risk that attractive local projects end up substituting for harder reforms — on poverty, housing, working conditions, access to healthy food. The answer is to embed these programs within those reforms.

And food doesn’t automatically create connection: people can eat next to each other without exchanging a word, and the most isolated are often the hardest to bring in. Good design matters — enough regularity for trust to build, openness to different kinds of people, and more than just serving food.

Programs to promote social connection should measure whether people come back, feel less isolated, and get more involved in community life. Public support should come with real evaluation, so successful models improve and grow without losing whatever mechanisms made them work.

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 luck, 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’s not just about our psychological well-being, though that matters plenty on its own. 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.

But we are not graduating. The Iran war’s food shock looks quite similar to Ukraine’s. Urea up more than fifty percent. Phosphate prices rising sharply. The Strait of Hormuz a “chokepoint for global food,” as the Black Sea was. And as in 2022, the bill will be paid in hunger and malnutrition. Another crisis, another wake-up call.

Since the U.S.-Israeli strikes of February 28, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen from roughly 130 ships a day to a trickle – often in the single digits, and recently around a dozen – with some vessels paying two million dollars to Iran for the privilege. Through that channel moves, in normal times, a third of the world’s seaborne urea, half of seaborne sulphur, a quarter of seaborne ammonia, a fifth of liquefied natural gas. Major nitrogen and sulphur producers in Qatar and Bahrain have declared force majeure. Brazil’s urea imports are already a third lower than last year’s. India approaches its main monsoon planting window — when fertilizer demand peaks — with supplies suddenly uncertain.

What follows, in the standard arc, is the familiar prescription: modern agriculture is hooked on fossil fuels and we should unhook it. Accelerate agroecology and genuinely regenerative practices (not greenwashing around the concept). Diversify diets. Build domestic input capacity. Build resilience.

And that is the heart of the problem. The diagnosis is mature. For those of us calling for change, the remedies are familiar. And yet the loop turns again.

Better arguments and refined models are not what is missing. Phil Connors escapes February 2nd by becoming a better Phil Connors. But the food system will not escape its loop by becoming a better-explained food system. What the loop is made of is power.

Consider what has actually happened in the four years since the last “wake-up call.” Russian fertilizer exports got bigger. Saudi Aramco, ADNOC, and QatarEnergy have moved further down the hydrocarbon value chain, using state-backed surpluses to vertically integrate into ammonia, urea, and sulphur — the chemical foundations of modern agriculture. ADNOC’s Fertiglobe today claims to be the world’s largest seaborne exporter of urea and ammonia, and quietly runs a controlling share of Egypt’s nitrogen capacity besides. Dubai’s Jebel Ali, the world’s largest human-made harbor, is among the top food re-export hubs on the planet. The grain trade — ABCD plus COFCO — grew more concentrated.

These are not new patterns. Producers of fossil fuels have been producers of fertilizers for decades; operators of ports have long doubled as brokers of food. What is new is only the price of the disruption when their fragility is exposed. The political pattern matches the corporate one. In Brussels, the EU’s Sustainable Use Regulation was withdrawn under farm lobbies and industry pressure; the Farm to Fork strategy was steadily weakened in successive negotiations; the Carbon Border Adjustment came under sustained pressure to exempt fertilizers the moment fertilizers became politically costly. At recent COPs, agribusiness delegations have grown large enough to overshadow many public-interest and small-farmer voices. The same firms whose pricing power makes the system fragile are the firms whose lobbying ensures it stays that way. “Feeding the world,” a phrase that works very well for those who repeat it, is invoked to defend the very inputs that make the world less feedable.

The transition many of us recommend does not happen because that transition costs the people with the power to stop it. That is the fact the conversation keeps stepping around.

I have been reading, alongside the war, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume — the four volumes published so far in English from a seven-book sequence. Its protagonist, Tara Selter, is trapped not on February 2nd but on November 18th. Unlike Phil Connors, she does not improve her way out. There is no piano lesson, no romantic reckoning that earns her release; whether she escapes at all is a question not yet settled. What they offer instead is something Hollywood didn’t with Groundhog Day: slow, existential reflections on seasons, on routines and monotony, on our abusive consumption of resources, on the evolution of relationships, loves, and needs.

That, it strikes me, is the more honest analogy for the food crisis we keep waking into. We are not Phil Connors, sharpened by each pass and on the way to release. We are closer to Tara Selter — slowly admitting that the loop is not a problem that better arguments can solve, but a structure to be confronted: a wicked arrangement of interests, dependencies, institutions, and narratives that keeps returning us to the same place. Not concentration alone, not lobbying alone, but the deeper architecture of power.

What ends this structural loop is the redistribution of power. Antitrust, with teeth. Real curbs on industry presence inside the multilateral processes — at COPs, at the WTO. Reclaiming food itself as matter of public responsibility, rather than leaving them to the firms that profit from fragility. Public investment that builds alternatives instead of feeding old power. Land, seed, and credit sovereignty for the farmers who actually grow the food. None of this is “win-win”; all of it is somebody losing. Which is why none of it happens until enough other people — finance ministers, labor, social movements, voters, even the parts of the private sector that have grasped where this is going — show up at the table where it would.

Somewhere right now, an analyst is opening the document called Wake-Up Call (Final, Revised 2022 2026) and beginning to type. The diagnosis will be excellent. Whether anything moves between this iteration of the loop and the next depends on something that diagnosis cannot supply: enough of us, in enough places, willing to address the elephant at the table. Until then, February 2nd.