the GoodEater Collaborative

Author: Joshua Levin (33 Articles)

Joshua Levin is a consultant to non-profits and their corporate partners in sustainable agriculture business development and sustainable food markets. Joshua holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business, where he was a Catherine B. Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship, and a BA from Harvard University. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn, NY.

The food supply crisis and the proper counterattack is emerging as one of the great debates of our time. In the last two weeks alone, the UN hosted a major (if not failed) hunger summit, and the USDA announced that one-in-six Americans went hungry last year. The multi-disciplinary thinking demanded to confront this challenge reveals the clash of worldviews between those faithful in techno-fixes, and those focused on social, economic, and historical context.

In October, I wrote about unanswered questions on the biotech and food debate.  Particularly timely is a great video that many missed last year: Google.org hosting a discussion between Hugh Grant, CEO of Monsanto, and Michael Pollan, on how the world can feed itself. It’s hardly as predictable as you might think.

Is Grant’s enviable cool-headedness and data-mastery trumped by Pollan’s complexification?