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April 19, 2017

Top Chef star uses political clout to change food industry

Latest posts by Atlantic Research Team (see all)
food industry

You may know him as the steely blue-eyed judge of Bravo’s Top Chef, the reality TV-style cooking competition now in its 14th season. Or perhaps you’ve indulged in the critically acclaimed farm-to-table fare at one of his eight restaurants scattered across the U.S. But the five-time James Beard Award-winning chef Tom Colicchio would like you to know that he’s a committed environmentalist and activist. And for the last five years, he’s been working toward a monumental goal: addressing the multi-faceted challenge of fixing our broken food system.

Colicchio’s political awakening happened in the mid-2000s, when he and his wife, filmmaker Lori Silverbush, became mentors for a young girl who struggled in school. The two helped enroll her in a private school, where they hoped she would get the extra attention she needed, only to hear from the principal a week later that she’d been found scrounging in school dumpsters for food.

Her previous school offered free breakfast to children of low-income families; her new school did not, which meant she started class on an empty stomach.

She isn’t the only child wondering where the next meal will come from. In 2015, roughly 42 million Americans were “food-insecure,” including 13.1 million children. The experience inspired Silverbush to produce A Place at the Table, her 2012 film on hunger in America. Colicchio took the issue to Washington.

“I realized people are going hungry in this country, not because we don’t have the resources to feed people, but for political reasons,” Colicchio says. “When kids show up for school hungry, they can’t learn. How can we expect them to be productive, to get a good education, to break the cycle of poverty? This is what woke me up.”

In 2012, Colicchio co-founded the Food Policy Action (FPA), a nonprofit organization with the goal of improving food access. But this was not to be just another anti-hunger campaign. Having already volunteered for several similar groups, Colicchio had drilled down into the root causes of hunger. He saw how inextricably linked they were with other challenges plaguing America’s industrialized food system: incomes too low to support farming families; egregious farmworker abuses; animal welfare abuses on factory farms; subsidies and incentives allocated for crops largely grown for livestock feed and fuel rather than for programs to make fruits, vegetables and sustainable agriculture more economically viable; and a litany of environmental assaults, including the infamous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico (a product of fertilizer runoff throughout the Midwest) and clear-cutting the Amazon to graze cattle for American fast-food chains.

 Read More at USAToday.com

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