WASHINGTON, D.C. (FPC) — On October 28th, 2025, Food Tank held its first-ever Food and Agriculture Policy Summit at the George Washington University Global Food Institute in collaboration with Chef José Andrés and the Culinary Institute of America. The event offered a series of panel discussions that showcased the state of food policy around the United States and discussed ongoing nutritional research. Those in attendance included congressmen, scientists, chefs, farmers, educators, and social workers, as well as other policy influencers who determine how and what we eat. The first few panelists emphasized the idea that the goal of the Summit was to shift efforts away from smaller, short-term solutions such as pantries and soup kitchens, and make it clear that governmental policy-making was the only actionable, reliable, and scalable solution to food insecurity.
Topics ranged from climate justice to food insecurity, from “ethical” philanthropy to alternative proteins, and even included stories about food-related ancestral trauma. Overall, these conversations addressed many of the most popular themes in current food policy discourse.
The majority of panelists were leaders in their respective fields, which meant that the Summit took a top-down approach to the problem, featuring the voices of policy makers and researchers rather than listening to those whom policy affects (e.g., farmers, K-12 public school teachers, SNAP recipients, etc.).
As a result, much of the dialogue was difficult for those not involved in the world of food policy to understand. But, having said that, the panelists clearly intended to inspire positive, evidence-backed political action.
Below is a detailed recap of what I believe were the most important conversations—both addressed and missing—from the first Food and Agriculture Policy Summit.
Main takeaways
Food Education
Chef Andrés, in his interview, captured the tone and message of the Summit when he asked, “What do I do when a recipe doesn’t work? I change the recipe… New policies must be created, new recipes must be created to keep solving problems that are happening when we don’t have a response.” His idea was that policy needs constant attention and change to remain relevant and impactful. Yet, it was also the comparison of food policy to cooking that encouraged the audience to see policy-making as something creative, simple, and practical.
Chef Andrés stated that his goal was for us to elect more politicians who have a background in food, particularly those who have gone through his new Global Food Institute graduate program at GW. Or, as he put it, “To put a president in the White House who is a ‘Food President.’” That goal is part of the Summit’s determination to make food education about more than the culinary arts or agricultural work and to highlight the idea that food is never not political.
Despite recognizing that, in the United States, Xi Jinping, the president of China, is viewed as a controversial world leader, Chef Andrés praised his focus on food and farmers and described him as an archetypal “Food President” who was willing to step away from a G20 summit to have a call with Chinese farmers. Chef Andrés believed that food security was vital to China’s emergence as a global superpower and could well be the key to the United States maintaining its influence as a global superpower itself. Although President Xi did attend the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 2024, I could not find evidence of said call or the G20 summit that the Chef had referenced, nor did Chef Andrés share where he got this anecdote from.
What Chef Andrés did not mention is the fact that China’s ability to feed its large population and meet the ever-growing animal protein demands of its middle class is dependent on the possession and destruction of land in South America, extractive practices in Africa and South Asia, and forced labor from Xinjiang.
Robert E. Jones, the recently appointed vice president of strategic partnerships, industry leadership, and impact at the Culinary Institute of America, spoke about the fact that the CIA wants to become a “global university of applied gastronomy” by putting their “tastemakers” in the same room as “policymakers” to prove culinary education is about more than preparing students to work in kitchens.
Tufts University was represented at the Summit by Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a distinguished professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, who spoke on behalf of the School’s new Food is Medicine Institute. Dr. Mozaffarian stated that he is working to redirect education in allopathic medicine to champion a diet-first approach to healthcare. Jennifer Duck, vice president of United States public affairs for Novo Nordisk, reiterated that there is a demand from healthcare companies for more researchers focused on “preventive” medicine. In her view, the prevention of chronic diseases depends on both “investing in food systems” and students’ enrolling in programs such as those at Tufts or even the CIA.
The panel entitled “K-16 School Meals as a Lever for Healthy Change” discussed the fact that we might start to educate food policy makers when they’re still in elementary school. The panelists—all of whom were responsible for designing public school menus in the United States—discussed the importance of providing access to healthy and culturally appropriate foods starting at a young age and also emphasized the idea that school meals could be used as an educational tool to teach children about agriculture and economics. This sentiment was echoed by participants in the “Voice of Eaters” panel, a live think tank composed of urban farmers, educators, chefs, students, and social workers, many of whom relayed students’ growing excitement about getting more involved in various aspects of our food system ( urban farming, nutrition, cooking, etc.).
In “Policy Meets the Plate,” Chef Johanna Wilder cited her concerns about artificial intelligence and the spread of disinformation on the internet. She stated that proper food education requires knowing which sources and accredited individuals to believe. Her point was that the internet gives us access to oceans of information without simultaneously encouraging critical or discerning behavior online.
While Food Tank wanted us to understand that policy is the future of feeding Americans, education was proposed as the future of policy, beginning in our future Food Presidents’ kindergarten classrooms.
The SNAP “Cliff” and the 2025 Government Shutdown
The Summit took place in the midst of the 2025 government shutdown, the longest in United States history, and just five days before the shutdown would prevent almost 42 million Americans from accessing the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as “food stamps.”
By that time with federal workers had not received missing paychecks for almost four weeks. The mood in the Capital was already sombre, sleepy, and sluggish. And, as one local Uber driver put it, “Every day here feels like Sunday.” In light of the shutdown and with the upcoming SNAP “cliff” (the date when federal funding would be cut off), the Summit turned out to be both an anxious and timely gathering of some of the most important food and agriculture policy influencers in the United States. Surely, if any group of people could prevent the next SNAP cliff crisis, it would be these folks.
Even though it had been planned long before the SNAP cliff was announced, almost every one of the Summit’s panels included a comment or conversation about the looming deadline, with resounding hums of agreement and nods of acknowledgement from the audience. One of the most in-depth discussions on federal food assistance programs was that between U.S. Representative Shontel Brown (D-OH) and Politico food journalist Marcia Brown (no relation).
Congresswoman Brown stated that “food isn’t represented as a lifeline in Congress” and posed an important question to her colleagues on the Hill as well as the roomful of experts in front of her, asking how many congressmembers had used SNAP while they were growing up, and adding, “I don’t know that the majority of my colleagues, particularly on the other side of the aisle [the GOP], have ever been in a position where they would have to depend on such a program.”
Representative Brown then went on to explain that, even before the shutdown, SNAP barely covered the necessities in some states. She said that the program filled a “need” even though some Republican leaders viewed it as a “want,” that the government had contingency funds to support SNAP during the shutdown, and that the GOP was using the cliff as a way to turn food into a tool for manipulation.
Although the government shutdown formally ended on November 12, 2025, the future of federally funded programs such as SNAP remains murky. Toward the end of her panel, Brown remarked to attendees that food-security programs will be facing a steep challenge even after getting back up to speed because “Calories are cheap, but nutrition is expensive.”
Food is Medicine, the EAT-Lancet Report and the Right to Food
At some point, someone on almost every panel mentioned the phrase “food is medicine.” No one explicitly defined what that meant, but they all alluded to its vague applications in healthcare, education, and policy.
Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian and Jennifer Duck proposed food as a potential form of therapy or treatment that could eventually be incorporated into healthcare policies funded by the government, and they put forth the concept of food is medicine as a bipartisan issue that could appeal to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s interest in food policy reforms—an idea with which both Representative Shontel Brown and Marcia Brown voiced their agreement.
Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) advocated for hospitals to provide “medically-tailored meals” that would help to make patients less dependent on the currently overburdened American healthcare system. Chef Johanna Wilder called for “produce prescriptions” for fresh fruits and vegetables that patients could fill the same way they fill prescriptions for pharmaceuticals.
Michael W. Twitty, culinary historian, educator, and author of The Cooking Gene, looked at the concept a bit differently and proposed that we view food as a form of metaphorical and emotional healing achieved by reconnecting with our ancestral traditions and cultural practices.
The “food is medicine” initiative is related to the recent release of the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission report, which Roy Steiner, senior vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation Food Initiative, quoted in the course of the panel titled “Feeding 10 Billion.” The report details evidence-based guidelines for policymakers to follow in order to foster a “Planetary Health Diet” that aims to solve the ongoing climate, nutrition, and hunger crises in a sustainable, ethical, and culturally appropriate manner.
Steiner saw the difficulty in changing our diet as a “motivation” problem, stating, “No one wants to be told what to eat,” and asking, “Do we really want the world we all say we want?” His question was provocative, but it was unclear whether the “we” he was referring to meant the audience, the Hill, the American people, or the multi-million-dollar corporations and institutions represented on the Summit stage. Steiner wants to motivate people to adhere to the EAT-Lancet diet by framing it “in a vision of the future that we want,” that is a future with fewer chronic illnesses.
Other panels, such as the conversation between The Good Food Institute President Bruce Friedrich and the Meat Institute President and CEO Julie Anna Potts in collaboration with Meatable, about access to protein sources, surprisingly reflected the EAT-Lancet’s plan for a Planetary Health Diet as well. The diet recommends the consumption of small portions of animal-sourced protein. Friedrich and Potts suggested that we consider animal-sourced proteins “inefficient” rather than “unethical,” citing that meat is both satiating and nutritious and will only grow in demand as the world’s population expands. They believed eating animal protein would be more “efficient” if we could instead culture their muscle and fat cells in a lab to meet the demand for animal products.
The Rockefeller Foundation has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the food is medicine initiative since 2019 by funding institutions, policy influencers, and government agencies to implement food is medicine “solutions.” While the Foundation does not explicitly define what a “solution” is, examples include “medically-tailored meals” and “produce prescription.”
Many of the institutions represented at the Summit, including The George Washington University’s Global Food Institute, Tufts’ Food is Medicine Institute, the EAT-Lancet Commission Report, and Instacart, as well as the Summit itself, were funded at least in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.
As chef and scholar Jenny Dorsey pointed out, however, there is a justified concern about the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in the “food is medicine” campaign, largely because the Rockefeller fortune, built on oil, has profited from the use of petrochemicals in pharmaceuticals at the expense of indigenous and traditional medicines—such as food. And for that reason, Dorsey wants us to consider their current “food is medicine” campaign as a kind of greenwashing initiative.
Most of the panelists who used the phrase “food is medicine” were academics, politicians, researchers, or other experts in the food and agriculture industry. The live think tank, comprised of teachers, students, chefs, and social workers, did not mention the term. The think tank panelists’ primary concerns were about the right to food education, the right to access healthy, culturally appropriate food, and the right to ethical labor practices—all of which they believed were possible only with the implementation of a “litany of policies.” The live think tank demonstrated the wide gap between the concerns of policy influencers and makers and those of the people they represent. It’s not that policy influencers aren’t important, but they should be making policy for the people it serves, as opposed to policy for policy’s sake.
What I would have liked to hear more about
When it comes to summits, panels, education, and other professional gatherings, it is important to ask what is not being talked about or taught. It would be unrealistic to assume that Food Tank’s Summit would cover every aspect of current food and agriculture policy. That being said, however, I felt that some pressing issues were not discussed as fully as they should have been.
Save for the think tank panel, there was no talk about protecting the labor rights of food workers and farmers. Despite the EAT-Lancet report’s advocacy for including ethical consumption as key to a Planetary Health Diet, policymakers and experts at the Summit were primarily focused on getting food into people’s stomachs and food education into people’s heads. And while those advocating for increased fresh food initiatives on a national level are often concerned with cost to consumers, they do not seem to consider how the people growing and/or preparing said food are treated.
To that point, while ICE raids on farms were briefly mentioned in Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg’s opening address, the topic did not resurface for the remainder of the Summit. The silence on the subject of ICE and immigration in the United States, as related to food policy, was odd considering that half of all food workers and farm laborers are immigrants.
Most attention was devoted to those on the receiving end of our food system. When we use the word “system,” it implies a macro view of the way food ends up on our plates, but the Summit championed the creation of policies that targeted what we eat, rather than how it gets to us.
Another common denominator among the panels was an implicit America-first ideology. The title of the event—the “Food and Agriculture Policy Summit”—would have one assume a more global approach, but all of the politicians and most of the experts who attended were from the United States.
This America-centric approach might have been expected when Chef José Andrés praised American farmers as “the best” in the course of his interview. This, coupled with how Nierenberg’s opening remarks concerning the status of “the world we live in” were mostly about U.S. domestic food politics, laid the groundwork for a narrow approach to meaningful policy.
But even if the Summit was intended to be specifically about American food policy, it would have been more effective to invite an international perspective on what the United States, its policy makers, and its food workers could do differently. While each government and culture around the world has its own food system, we in America have implemented plenty of policies, such as the European Union and the United Kingdom having banned some petroleum-based food dyes thirty years before us, that did not originate on this continent. The fact that Europe adopted stricter policies related to food production three decades ago means the United States is much further behind in food safety than it might believe.
Marion Nestle, NYU Professor Emerita of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, was one of only a few panelists to point to actionable and tested solutions to the problems with our food systems—solutions such as subsidies for farmers who grow fresh fruits and vegetables in addition to those who grow corn and soy. And she was one of only two panelists to recommend the adoption of policies such as regulating the use of salt, sugar, and fat in prepared foods, advertising to children, and ultra-processed foods, which are recommended by many Latin American countries. The other panelist to quote policy from a foreign country was Hank Cardello, the Executive-in-Residence at George Washington University’s Business for Impact Center, who cited the efficacy of policies targeting obesity in Chile.
When I say that this Summit focused on American food policy, I should be more specific and say that it focused on domestic American food policy—because the United States has historically been involved with food policy—in addition to trade deals—on an international level. There were brief mentions of Hurricane Melissa’s touchdown in Jamaica, but no significant talk of the now-defunct USAID. Neglect of our involvement in foreign food policy has already cost six hundred thousand lives as of November 2025, most of whom were children, according to The New Yorker.
And to address a sizeable elephant in the room, I might as well add that there was no talk of Israel’s recent systematic destruction of Gaza, a food-based genocide that the United States has supported. It is important to remember that starvation is just as much a policy as feeding people.
National Public Radio correspondent Allison Aubrey, a member of the “Feeding 10 Billion” panel, brought up the relevance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famously having said, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply.” She was, however, quickly eclipsed by a discussion of “quantifying hunger,” perhaps foreshadowing the future of American food policy as congressmen and think tanks spend more time and effort theorizing about the best ways to keep the country fed instead of implementing proven solutions that have already worked in other countries.
You can watch the full First Food and Agriculture Policy Summit here.
List of Food and Agriculture Policy Summit Sponsors
The sponsors of the First Food and Agriculture Policy Summit include, but are not limited to:
Food Tank, The George Washington University Global Food Institute, the Culinary Institute of America, the José Andrés Group, Driscoll’s, Meatable, Oatly, The Rockefeller Foundation, Sprouts Healthy Community Foundation, Instacart, Cava, Blue Diamond Almonds, Farmer’s Fridge, among others.
