By: Chelsea Radford, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student. 

Have you ever worked in a restaurant and noticed the amount of waste produced daily? The endless cycle of taking bag after bag of trash to a dumpster at the end of each night? Well, Steve Short noticed and decided he could do something about it. In December of 2022, the Sustainable Food Systems master’s students at ASU were lucky enough to taste Atlasta’s delicious creations when they catered an event during the Food and Farm Immersion course in Arizona.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.

Read on for an interview with Elisabeth llboudo Nébié, assistant professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

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By: Sarah Williams, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student.

Nestled in between Buckeye and Goodyear, Arizona, is a 1,200-acre certified organic farm specializing in leafy greens and compost. This farm started in Arizona over 30 years ago with Arnott and Kathleen Duncan at the helm. Arnott, a 4th generation farmer, started Duncan Family Farms on just a few hundred acres of land, and has since grown it into a multi-state operation with the mission to responsibly manage and maintain the land.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.

Read on for an interview with Jose-Benito Rosales Chavez, Assistant Professor at the School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning and Senior Global Futures Scientist. 

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By: Kaysey England, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student.

Throughout the Sustainable Food Systems graduate program food and farm immersive opportunity in the Fall of 2022, an overwhelming topic was discussed at every stop along the way: water security. During this experience, our cohort got the opportunity to listen to Dr. Dave White share his knowledge about the Arizona water supply. With over 20 years at Arizona State University, he currently serves as the Director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. Dr. White shared his belief that water is the lifeblood of the American West and is the foundation of all social, environmental, economic, and cultural amenities. He is right; with a rapidly growing Arizona population, time is of the essence to ensure a sustainable water supply is protected and used efficiently.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.

Read on for an interview with Robin DeWeese, Assistant Teaching Professor, College of Health Solutions.

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By: Amy Mattias, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student.

When Chuck Backus first arrived at his newly acquired ranch in the Superstition Mountains in 1977, the land wasn’t anywhere close to what it is today. Driving out to Quarter Circle U Ranch is driving through a beautiful Arizona desert with cacti and mesquite lining the roads to a backdrop of craggily cliffs. After miles of windy dirt roads, we crossed a cattle guard and the landscape subtly shifts to an undiscerning eye, like most of us in the cohort coming out from ASU’s Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. To more discerning eyes, like Chuck, his daughter Amy, and their ranch manager, Jordan, the change is profound. Over the last 50 years, Quarter Circle U has been managed in a way that heals abused land, allowing more grasses to grow, more birds to soar, and more native plants to flourish despite the lessening supply of precipitation.

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By: Kaley Necessary, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student.

Note: Angie Rodgers has now transitioned into a position with the Arizona Dept. of Economic Security, and is no longer CEO of AzFBN. The team at AzFBN is eternally grateful for her leadership and is incredibly excited for the continued support of its Friends of the Farm Program through the recently allocated Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA).

As part of a week-long Arizona Food and Farm Immersive Course, my fellow ASU Sustainable Food Systems classmates and I heard from various speakers representing different components of Arizona’s local food system. Joined by ASU Swette Center faculty and staff, one evening, my cohort gathered for a reception and heard from Arizona Food Bank Network’s (AzFBN) President and Chief Executive Officer, Angie Rodgers.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.

Read on for an interview with Maureen McCoy, Associate Teaching Professor in the College Of Health Solutions and faculty advisor for the Pitchfork Pantry. 

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By: Leanne Kami, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student.

“What are you doing to be the ancestor you want to be?” Upon arriving at Spaces of Opportunity in South Phoenix, Arizona, that question greeted us, scribbled on a chalkboard under a farmers market tent.  In early December of 2022, our ASU Sustainable Food Systems Cohort visited Spaces of Opportunity as part of our Arizona Farm Immersive course.  As we assembled for introductions, other signs like “Climate Justice Now” and “Inmigrantes somos Essentiales,” which translates to “Immigrants are essential,” caught our attention and shook us out of our mid-afternoon brain fog.  

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By: Kelly Sheridan, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student. 

Did you know that 90% of leafy greens (i.e., lettuce, kale, spinach, etc.) produced/consumed during winter in the US and Canada are grown in Yuma, Arizona[1]? That means the odds that you have consumed lettuce from Desert Premium Farms are very high!

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By: Mauricio Cordova Flores, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student. 

OnePointOne vertical farm start-up focuses on the power of plants that can help address food insecurity worldwide. When brothers Sam and John Bertram learned that 1.1 billion people began this millennium suffering from food insecurity, they started on a journey to create technology that can help address this world problem; that is when together they decided to start OnePointOne.

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By: Elizabeth Reilly, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student.

It’s said that there are “five C’s” that power Arizona: climate, copper, cotton, cattle, and citrus. Mark Kuechel, owner and operator of Kuechel Farms, comes from a long line – four generations, in fact – of experts in one of these C’s: citrus. But, after spending the afternoon with Mr. Kuechel, it’s clear another C could be added to the list: conservation.

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By: Connor Kaeb, ASU Sustainable Food Systems graduate student.

The 2022 cohort of Sustainable Food Systems graduate students from Arizona State University got the opportunity to get a first-hand glimpse of the Arizona dairy industry with a visit to Kerr Family Farms in Buckeye, Arizona. During the visit, students met with Wes Kerr, a fourth-generation dairy farmer.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.

Read on for an interview with Paul Coseo, Senior Global Futures Scientist at Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and Assistant Professor in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

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Today, the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at ASU is proud to announce the release of Grow Organic: The Climate, Health, and Economic Case for Expanding Organic Agriculture, a joint report co-written with Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians for Pesticide Reform. Dr Kathleen Merrigan, our Executive Director and author of the 1990 law that established organic agriculture standards in the United States, Esteve G. Giraud, Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, Lena Brook, Allison Johnson, and Sarah Aird are all contributing authors.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center-affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.

Read on for an interview with Sarah Martinelli, Clinical Associate Professor, College of Health Solutions at Downtown ASU. 

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Tomorrow, the White House is hosting the first conference in over 50 years that focuses on food, nutrition, and health. With the ambitious goal of ending hunger and diet-related disease by 2030, President Biden and his team of Cabinet Secretaries, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, have released a national strategy today. It includes five pillars addressing the challenges we face in meeting the stated hunger and nutrition goals. Check out the strategy here.

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We are thrilled to introduce Arizona State University’s Food Policy & Sustainability Leadership 2022-2023 class. This is our fourth cohort of students for this graduate program and every year it continues to grow. With a commitment to shaping food and farm policy in the public interest, this cohort of leaders hail from across the country including Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Washington D.C., Washington state, and Wisconsin.

To create the inclusive, diverse and resilient food systems of the future, we need bold and knowledgeable change agents to transform public policy. These rising stars represent business, nonprofit, and academia, modeling the community necessary for food system transformation. They’re passionate about reducing food waste, regenerative and organic agriculture, and local food systems. They’re dedicated to school food reform, racial equity, and food sovereignty.

They are the future of food.

Meet the Leaders:

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By: Allison Perkins, ASU Food Systems graduate student.

It was an honor for our graduate cohort to meet with Deputy Secretary of USDA, Dr. Jewel Bronaugh, during our DC Immersive trip. As a graduate student of Sustainable Food Systems, I was inspired by Dr. Bronaugh’s intersectional work which I can learn from to enhance impact across my academic, professional, and personal life. Deputy Secretary Bronaugh spoke as both a leader and compassionate individual aligned with our cohort’s mission to drive sustainable food systems. Bronaugh created space for an open dialogue to discuss our backgrounds and experiences as we learned from her wealth of knowledge in agricultural policy. The meeting was unique, and it was quickly evident that being Deputy Secretary of USDA is not just a job for Dr. Bronaugh but a role she takes responsibility for and accomplishes with grace.

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