This piece is part of the weekly series “Growing Forward: Insights for Building Better Food and Agriculture Systems,” presented by the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the nonprofit organization Food Tank. Each installment highlights forward-thinking strategies to address today’s food and agriculture related challenges with innovative solutions. To view more pieces in the series, click here.
Dan Glickman has spent his career at the intersection of food, policy, and public service. As U.S. Secretary of Agriculture during the Clinton administration, a long-serving member of Congress, and later the head of the Motion Picture Association and a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, Glickman has seen firsthand how the food system has evolved—and where it still falls short.
In this conversation with the Global Food Institute’s Priya Fielding-Singh, Glickman reflected on the shifting politics of food and agriculture, the critical role of science, and the urgent need to align food policy in the United States with public health and climate realities.
Looking back on your time as Secretary of Agriculture, what do you see as the biggest shifts in the food system since then?
The biggest change is that food issues and food policy have become much bigger topics of conversation among policymakers. Historically, agriculture and food weren’t part of everyday discussions the way the military and education were. That’s completely changed. Now we’re talking about things like dietary health, supply chain issues, fertilizer—things that used to hardly get any widespread attention at all.
What do you think is responsible for this change?
The focus on individual health has been a big factor. People really understand now that old expression—you are what you eat. And young people are growing up interested in these issues. They’re asking important questions, like, where is this food grown? Is it good for us? What are the additives?
It’s a great thing that these issues have taken on a life beyond the traditional agriculture community. Napoleon once said, war is too important to be left to the generals. The same is true for food and agriculture policy: it’s too important to be left solely to people in the food and agriculture industry.
If you were Secretary of Agriculture today—in a moment when the climate crisis, nutrition security, and food safety are top concerns—what would your priorities be?
One priority would be making sure we don’t fall behind on doing the kind of good, thoughtful science we need to address key issues like agricultural productivity, nutrition, and the threats we’re seeing to modern agriculture. We don’t want to fall behind as leaders on these key issues, nor do we want to lose an important talent base of researchers.
I would also work to avoid turning food and agriculture issues into a political battle between left and right. Agriculture research is still very bipartisan, and land-grant schools get a lot of bipartisan support in both Congress and from industry. But we want a research portfolio that is broad enough to deal with the modern issues of our times—and I worry that issues like climate and weather variability have become increasingly political.
The fact is that agriculture is more vulnerable to climate and weather variability than pretty much any other segment of the economy. Whether we’re talking about drought, heat, excessive rainfall, or related pests and diseases, the agriculture industry needs to deal head-on with where the threats are.
I’d also focus on continuing to improve school meals, which are—for the record—much better than they once were. When I was in school, we had roast beef for lunch, and it was sliced so thin and greasy you could see the colors of the rainbow in it. That’s changed—school meals now meet nutrition standards that exceed what many of us eat at home. And people are recognizing the importance of school meals as a nutritional foundation for a lot of kids in this country.
In a world where you could remake the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), what would its charge be with respect to the food system?
There’s always a lot of discussion about whether the USDA should have jurisdiction over food safety versus the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. I won’t comment on that, but I will say that we need to pay attention to food safety, whether it’s fresh produce, processed foods, or meat and poultry. The USDA does a good job, but they’re not focused enough on what happens to food between processing and when it reaches the consumer.
The USDA is also not particularly involved in education, marketing, and advertising, but they should be. I’m not saying we should regulate what people eat—but getting good information to consumers is important, and that requires cooperation between the government, private sector, nonprofits, and universities.
Finally, the USDA needs to be an active environmental agency. Today, anything that smells of climate creates an enemy. But climate impacts agriculture. The fact is that we need to grow different crops and livestock—and we need good science to understand how best to do it.
There’s a lot of fear around GMOs (genetically modified organisms), CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), etc. But I’ve never been afraid of those kinds of innovations. People take genetically modified drugs every day. We can’t be afraid of science in food and agriculture while embracing it in medicine.
When you think ahead to the next decade, what innovations do you think will matter most for the food system?
The first thing is precision nutrition. We’ll develop foods that can prevent or treat disease. There’s work being done to enhance nutritional value—not only in fruits and vegetables, but also in row crops and livestock.
The second thing is water. In some parts of the world, we have more water than we need; in others, far less. Technology can help solve the problem of water utilization in crops and variability from year to year. We’ve got to figure out how to manage that variation better without depleting aquifers and groundwater everywhere.
Desalination is the final issue. We’ve never quite figured out how to desalinate water at scale because it’s very expensive and requires high energy use. In some places you can do it in small quantities, but scaling it up has been hard. The oceans offer all the water in the world—if we could figure out how to do it well!
Do you think our current food policies are aligned with our nutrition goals? What needs to change?
I’d give us a C-plus right now. We haven’t flunked, but we’re doing just okay. As a matter of national policy, the relationship between food, nutrition, and health has long been a low priority.
I give credit to Secretary Kennedy and his group for at least raising these issues. I don’t like a lot of their solutions, but they’ve recognized that there’s a problem. One issue is that our federal feeding programs have not historically been directed toward nutrition, though things have moved since my time at the USDA. Both WIC and School Meals have requirements to be updated to reflect the latest nutrition guidelines. But we can do more. For instance, nutrition may be the second letter of SNAP, but that’s not its main focus.
It’s also worth noting that nutrition simply hasn’t gotten the national attention other public health issues have. The Advertising Council of America has covered high-priority public health issues—like seat belts, motorcycle helmets, and smoking—and that’s helped move the needle. But in the food area, there’s been nothing like that.
What have you learned over the course of your career—working across politics, policy, and the private sector—about what it really takes to improve food and agriculture systems?
My mother used to say, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listening is a very good trait—and one I’ve used as much as possible throughout my career to get things done.
The second thing is that consumers have great power. They may need help, but they can significantly influence the policy debate. So when it comes to fixing the food system, it’s important to never underestimate what public demand can achieve.
Photo courtesy of David Trinks, Unsplash
