Given that it takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, I think we can also go a long way toward ending hunger and saving the environment as well.

The thing that I think about most often is the loss of biodiversity. We talk about these food issues so often with concern to historically excluded communities, but I'm concerned with everyone having access to healthy foods. Consumers across the board are being robbed of biodiversity.

I think there needs to be a general consciousness raising among consumers. So many consumers aren't aware of the backstory. They see the end product in the supermarket but don't know all the steps that it took to get it there, who helped to get the food there.

Oran Hesterman is a brilliant philanthropist. He had so many progressive ideas about shifting the way that money is given out. He wanted to focus on the creation of healthy, community-based food systems in historically excluded communities and now an advocate, an ally, and obviously lots of capital won't be able to go into these communities now.

I got a call one morning from Oran Hesterman, who was the president of the Fair Food Foundation, saying that the Fair Food Foundation was shutting down effectively as of that day, because they'd been caught up in the Madoff scandal. It affected me because the fellowship that I had was actually funded in part by the Fair Food Foundation. That meant that my fellowship was pretty much null and void.

In restaurants across America we see Latino workers in the kitchen who are being paid substandard wages. The saddest thing to me is that if we think about these workers, these are the people with the least access to good food. Yet they're often suffering from the highest rates of obesity and diet-related illnesses.

I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee; I went to college in New Orleans before moving to New York City for graduate school. Both sets of my grandparents grew up in rural Mississippi and brought a lot of agrarian knowledge to Memphis, which is an urban center in the South. Both sets had amazing backyard gardens. My paternal grandfather, practically every inch of available space was green.