Paula Daniels co-founded the Center for Good Food Purchasing, a national initiative promoting sustainable food systems, building on her work as founder of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. With a career spanning private law and public service, she focuses on transforming food systems and advancing environmental policy.
Paula Daniels spoke with Ashley Hopkinson on October 16, 2024. Click here to read the full conversation with insights highlighted.
Ashley Hopkinson: Can you introduce yourself, tell me a little bit about yourself, and what brought you to the work you do today?
Paula Daniels: I’m Paula Daniels. I’m a co-founder of the Center for Good Food Purchasing. I started that organization about 10 years ago with Alexa Delwiche. We had previously been part of the LA Food Policy Council, which I founded. I started the work for that in 2009, and it opened its doors in 2011.
What brought me to that work was seeing the challenges in the food system in terms of these disparate impacts that were being addressed by different groups, all of whom were working on their own. At the time, we were seeing environmental impacts, labor impacts, animal welfare impacts, nutritional impacts, local economies impacts, and small farm impacts, including the loss of farmland.
I was concerned about all of those impacts and wanted to create an initiative for the city of Los Angeles. At the time I was at City Hall as a senior member of the administration of Mayor Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. I was working on water policy, and I was seeing the use of agricultural land in California, particularly the Central Valley, draining the groundwater and the rivers. I was concerned about that and had been thinking about how we could influence it. I was also concerned about the local economies, the small farmers, and the loss of farmland.
Those were my particular endpoints. A lot of people who cared about those other issues were out working on them. I thought it was really important to bring everybody together to work on it as a stakeholder group for all these issue areas. I recommended this to Mayor Villaraigosa, and he agreed that we should create a food policy council that was city-led, and we did that.
I got into this work in general and began caring about these issues first through caring about the environment and water. I had been involved in many appointed positions around water. I had been appointed by Governor Davis of California to be on the Bay Delta Authority Board. I was reappointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to that board. It oversaw the State Water project, which irrigated the Central Valley of California, and most of the water use was through agriculture. The water went to other places after that, to Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Water District, which serves a big Tri-County area around Los Angeles and throughout Southern California. I was seeing water use there, and I was involved in other state-level appointments.
A lot of people care about this issue because caring about it is the right thing to do. My particular entry point is that I’m from Hawaii, and I’m part Hawaiian, and Hawaii’s whole story and my own family story are tied up in this. We had a nation overthrown. We lost a nation because of Big Agriculture because there were American sugar barons who had worked their way into control of Hawaii’s government and worked their way into being able to overthrow our government, the Hawaiian government, by force, by gunpoint.
It was illegal. It was declared illegal by the United States government, and yet they didn’t back down, and Hawaii became a territory of the United States. Now, there’s lots to be said about where we are as a state. I’m just saying that my own family history was tied up in this. Hawaii was once a nation and was once able to feed a population of similar size to what it has right now within a sustained environment of those islands, without needing imports. They did it within the islands. They exchanged and traded among the islands.
They were able to sustain themselves with a thriving partnership with the land, and once this was eclipsed by Big Sugar, that was not possible anymore. Hawaii became dependent on imports and was used only for export. It’s that linear process of we’re going to extract and sell, extract and sell that seems to me wrong and off base. It is an old design that comes from an era of erasure and interruption. I’m going to call it interruption and I’m going to call it the Great Interruption, not that it’s good, but it’s large in the way we say Great Recession or Great Depression.
It was a Great Interruption. It was an era, the industrial age, let’s say the 19th century to the mid-20th century, when things were just clawed away from a right-size or proportionate relationship with Earth and how it functioned. From that, our own sense of being human turned into something different. We’re realizing now, in the 20th century, that this was not a good way to look at the world, at our relationships to each other, or even at ourselves, and we needed to come back to it in a different way.
When I look at the food system, I see all those things invoked, and I want to work toward a more holistic food system that works in partnership, that understands where the food comes from, how it gets here, and how we relate to it in all aspects.
Ashley Hopkinson: What would you say is really distinctive about the work that you do now, that sets it apart from the status quo of how we think about food and inequities and reshaping the food system? How would you describe it?
Paula Daniels: The Center for Good Food Purchasing has a theory of change that focuses on a particular aspect of the food system, using it as a leverage point to move other nodes of the system. We try to influence the purchasing of large food service institutions by rating and scoring them on how they’re doing on their purchasing, and then helping them make shifts to change their purchasing along the five value categories of this issue: local economies, supporting smaller farmers in environmental sustainability, fair labor, animal welfare, and nutrition.
We have a unique proprietary rating and scoring system through which we collect their information and give them that feedback and say, “Look at where your purchasing is going, look what trend lines are here and here are some changes that can be made.”
At this point, we’ve been analyzing well over a billion dollars worth of purchasing data from mostly public institutions. The concept here is that there’s public money going into this purchasing, and public money should be for the public good.
We’re in 25 metropolitan areas across the United States, from Hawaii to Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Denver. We have a lot in California, which is where we started, and also Florida and Boston. We’ve been analyzing 70 institutions, and about half of them are schools. We also have correctional facilities and entertainment venues like museums, the Red Rock Theater, and the Greek Theater in LA.
We’re analyzing all that purchasing. What’s great about it is that you have these institutions that are committing to being involved in this rating and scoring because they understand how important their purchasing power is, and how it’s more than putting something on a plate.
It’s about what they’re engaging in when they buy something; they’re engaging in the whole system. Something I want to emphasize is that a lot of folks think from purchase to plate. What do I get? What does it cost? What does it take to get on my plate?
That purchase to plate is a small part of the whole system, and there’s a lot to be said about that whole system— how it works, and what it took to get that to the plate. Thinking about how that purchase dollar is spent makes a huge difference.
To help illustrate that, I was part of advising on a study that the Rockefeller Foundation did on the true cost of the U.S. food system. We wanted to look at the negative externalities of the food system itself. What they found was that the U.S. food system is about a $1.1 trillion economic chunk. The way that $1.1 trillion is currently spent creates $3 trillion worth of negative impacts that have to be addressed in other ways, by our governments or others. We’re paying for it one way or the other. It’s about a trillion dollars worth of health impacts. It’s close to that in terms of environmental impacts. There are definitely negative impacts on workers and labor. They quantified it in that report, which shows how systemic the whole problem is and how honestly, it would be a mistake just to look at the food system from purchase to plate.
Our program’s first node asks: How are your purchasing dollars spent? How can you make sure your purchasing dollars are spent on things that reinforce a better food system? It’s like an acupuncture node, which we hope will start moving the system. Another way in is to think of it as a flywheel concept. It’s a small wheel that moves a bigger wheel that moves a still bigger wheel. It’s a node that, when you start making a shift, will make other shifts all along the supply chain.
There are about a billion dollars worth of food going in a certain direction, and that approach will shift the supply chain. It will help build up the infrastructure, create markets for smaller farmers, and change practices to ensure that the relationships between large institutions and smaller farmers who are making high-quality produce are robust and durable, and are not just seasonal, but continue. They will be able to create a lifetime career on it, they will be able to bank on it and buy equipment on this newer set of relationships. That’s our theory of change.
Ashley Hopkinson: That’s wonderful. As you were illustrating it, I see you have food up at the top, but then you think about livable wages over here, planetary health over here, all these different things that are connected to what is actually on your plate.
Paula Daniels: Absolutely. Every purchasing choice we make— we call voting with your food dollar. Every time you buy something you’re saying, “I’m going to reinforce that system that produced it and put it on my plate.”
One of the things that I work toward is having a goal of 30% for a better food system. I think it would be great to have a 100% better food system, but I think aiming for a 30% more local food system that has a lot of these values embedded in it is a reasonable goal for now. I find 30% important because it more than doubles the impact in most instances within those value categories we’ve talked about.
A lot of places may be able to get to 15%. To get to 30% would mean you’d have to double down on the infrastructure work. If you get to 30% of everything else, you start making some changes. The point I’m making here is that there’s some value in having this global supply chain. There’s value in having these efficiencies of scale, so you can buy something that was created with some economies of scale, but it shouldn’t be the whole thing. You need to have some resilience.
During COVID, those global supply chains broke. They’re like spiderwebs. They’re everywhere, but they have this fragility to them. They broke, and while you found people waiting in line at food banks to get food, you also found farmers having to throw away food. Why? Because those intermediaries that would have these relationships set up to use the food in different ways didn’t know how to talk to the places that needed it. A regional food system would create a system where you know where the need is and where the supply is. If something breaks somewhere, you can fix it. It’s a net more than a spider web. You can fix that part of the net because everybody knows it.
Ashley Hopkinson: What do you think is missing from the conversation we’re having about the food system in the U.S.? What do you wish we were talking about more?
Paula Daniels: Let me provide a little context and say that the Biden administration is putting a lot into exactly what I’m talking about. They are putting a lot into building the local food supply chain. In the last three years, we’ve seen the USDA do a lot to support local food systems, local food processing, smaller farmers, and climate-smart agriculture. It’s been really impressive. I say that to highlight that the conversation is happening at the policy level. We need more of it.
It reminds me of when I was involved in water policy, and we were saying we were worried about the impact of drought. We were in a sustained drought, we were running out of water, and we were going to have fires. Alot of people understood this. Environmentalists were saying it, people were worried about it, and although the policy conversation was happening, the policy changes weren’t happening. People would say, “Yes,” but then it rained, and they said, “We’re fine.” They’d ignore it. Then it gets to the point where it’s crisis time and then all of the levers change and people say, “Now we’ve got to do something about it. ” What I think needs to happen is that more policymakers, and more of the public, more people in general, need to understand it.
It’s growing. I would say since I started this work in 2009— I was thinking about it a long time before that, but I actually started doing the work in 2009, so let’s use that as a benchmark— the amount of policy change I’ve seen has been incredibly gratifying, but it’s not enough. We still don’t have a farm bill with enough of the right policies in it. I don’t want to get too political, but the Senate version came out with some really good provisions, but they’re not matched by the House. We don’t have everybody seeing this in a way that helps us shift these big policy levers just yet.
There are a lot more politicians on board. I think there’s a lot more public awareness. But what we need to do about it hasn’t sunk in to the point where everyone feels, or sees, that it is inevitable. Politicians have to campaign on it. Every mayor’s office and every governor’s office has to have a food policy director and they need to work across these areas.
It used to be that there weren’t positions for climate, but now they’re everywhere. Every mayor’s office and every governor’s office has one. I think we need something like that for food systems. It’s not just about getting the SNAP dollar out. We need that, but we also need to change the system that makes SNAP so necessary. We need to work on that system more.
Ashley Hopkinson: What do you think it will take to demonstrate the value of this work? What has worked for you in the rooms that you’re in?
Paula Daniels: I think COVID really helped people understand the need to build a localized supply chain. In a crisis like that, the food system breaks down along with everything else. Hawaii is a good example. In Hawaii, COVID created a problem in the food supply because Hawaii is dependent on imports; 95% of their food is imported and imported in a very visible way. It comes in on cargo ships and cargo holds on airplanes.
When those supply chains break down, what is left? Hawaii has had COVID, and it’s had hurricanes and fires during which the supply chains broke down. The motivation to make the change is high in Hawaii.
You still have that gap where the politicians are not ready to spend the money on it, or to make big changes, or to move from what was to what can be because that means land use, it means infrastructure investments, it means shifting your money around. What would make them feel like they need to make a difference? The inevitability is so clear to me.
It’s similar across the United States. You find fairly durable support for supporting local economies and job creation; it’s the rest of it that’s a problem. When you have smaller farmers who are BIPOC, who deserve a chance to farm, who want to farm, you see things break down along the same cultural and political lines that everything is breaking down in our country right now. If you say we want to fund climate-smart agriculture, you see the same divide that we see everywhere. We need to solve that problem, too, in order to be able to solve this.
Back to the question you asked: it’s an important one because it falls into the culture wars and the polarization we’re seeing, but let’s just assume we’re all in alignment. In Hawaii what would make a difference? I think people really need to see the inevitability of this change. If they’re going to spend the money fixing the problem, they should spend the money to create a better system instead; that needs to get into their heads.
The public needs to be willing to back that, too. It will take investments in land, conservation easements or adding conservation easements on land to give more access to land for producers, and it will take investments in local infrastructure. Basically, you’re investing in your own community. It may mean that some funding has to go there, but you have to see how important it is to do that and not keep throwing the money at fixing a problem by putting a bandaid on a broken arm. At some point, you have to fix the broken arm.
Ashley Hopkinson: The costs you spoke about are tough to sit with. Sometimes the crisis can be the catalyst.
Paula Daniels: One thing that needs to happen is a mindset shift to recognize that food is a public good. It is necessary for life. Where else in our country do we recognize something as a public good? We’ve recognized water as a public good, so we make sure that water is available to people. We make the necessary investments to have water distributed equitably so it’s available to folks. We recognize electricity as a public good. Electricity was once a private idea. Our people were burning whale blubber and oil to make their own light. Then electricity came along. It was private at first, but somewhere along the line, it was realized that everybody depends on it, so we need to make it available equitably.
I’m not suggesting that food become a utility, but I think we need to consider the ways it is and can be available to folks equitably.
We’ve already agreed as a country, for example, that we need to pay a certain amount to make sure food is available in schools to people who can’t otherwise afford it. That’s an equitable approach, but it could go further. Universal meals is one idea, but it can go further. We can say, “If we’re going to have universal meals, we’re going to recognize that children are important to our future…so we need to invest in children wherever they are.”
We need to make sure that even though parents can afford to pay for a kid’s meal, wouldn’t it be easier if these meals were available at school, so they don’t have to take the time to pay for them? Let’s just make it available to everybody because children are important to us. Giving them good food is important to us as a society, and as a public good. Then how that food is grown and produced becomes thought of differently and invested in as a public good.
Ashley Hopkinson: Going back to your five categories, how have you, as an organization, measured progress for yourself? What have been your internal metrics as well as your external metrics to measure that you’re advancing toward the goal you set to help these organizations and entities that have public funding?
Paula Daniels: We measure their progress and report it back to them, but we also have our own way of tracking trends and seeing if it’s making a difference. We work with a number of partners. We have national partners, we have local partners in every area where we have presence, and in 25 major metropolitan areas. We work with everyone to see if we can make these changes. We’re measuring progress by assessing if these changes are actually being made. Are we seeing the needle shift? By and large, yes, it goes up and down for different places depending on circumstances.
Overall, we’re definitely seeing progress. For us, the more institutions that are enrolled, the better because that means more institutions are committing to making these changes, and we can help them track changes. Generally, they’re enrolled because they want to make the changes. They’re open to making the changes.
Ashley Hopkinson: What has been an insight, takeaway, or lesson learned from doing this work that might be valuable for someone else? Have you learned anything over the years that has stayed with you?
Paula Daniels: Yes. The main thing is to reorient toward a community-first food system design. I talked about the Great Interruption, about the industrial age and the manner of thinking of commerce, about the GDP being a dominant measure of growth starting in the mid-century until now, and how we need to keep growing our mindset about economies of scale.
At first, our mindset was we need cheaper, faster, better. I thought that the food service operators could procure better food working within that sort of model. In other words, they could say, we’re going to issue a request for proposal [RFP], and we hope that everybody else can rise up to this, that it’ll work, and that you can fit within our way of purchasing. We were offering a high volume, long-term commitment that can work for you all by itself.
What I’ve learned is you need a lot more relationship-based management of the system than that model offers. You need a community-first design. That model I mentioned can still work, but you need more intermediaries. You need folks who can help the supply chain get to the institutions that have the demand. That means more people, and maybe it’s a different cost in the system. It’s also jobs that are local, and it’s a cost that’s worthwhile because it creates a better-designed food system. When I say it’s more of a community-first design, the other design was a monetary design. It was a profit design, and the food system design is still currently based on profit.
If you have a community-first design, you’re looking at how you support the farmers who want to grow for the community. How do you make that work for 30%? How do you make them be able to feed the community, and then also make money so the system has profit for exports? A community-first design would be reorienting toward that.
Ashley Hopkinson: You mentioned the idea of more regional food systems. Do you think the system we have now is ready to adopt that kind of innovation? What are some of the challenges that come up in trying to bring this kind of innovation into a system that’s been around for so long? How have you worked to overcome some of the challenges of trying to bring new things in?
Paula Daniels: Yes, the system has been around for at least a couple of centuries, if not more, from the agricultural standpoint. From an extraction standpoint, even longer. We’re definitely more ready than we were before, and I feel like there are lots of opportunities. It depends to a large degree on who’s in office, so much flows from the federal government. We’re on a good path. If things change, and we lose backing from the federal government, we’d have to go state by state.
It’s an uphill battle. It takes public and political will, and I do feel like the wheels are turning in that direction. I think there are sometimes headwinds because there are costs that require investments. Those investments are important. When we recognize that something is important for the public, we put money into it. I’ve already talked about utilities. We can talk about affordable housing, hospital care, healthcare, and things that we think are really important.
More and more of that needs to happen. California has been a good example. We’ve been able to get some things passed in California, like an incentive fund for school districts to be able to buy more climate-smart, local food. There are other places that are willing to do that. New York has an incentive fund, Oregon does, and a number of other states do, too. The bottom line is that it does take a commitment from all levels of government, as well as advocacy to point the way and show that these changes are necessary.
I make that analogy to climate change because it’s similar. I’ve been around long enough to remember when people weren’t taking climate change seriously, and people were trying to get the politicians to care about it, and now they do. The food system is linked to climate. I don’t know how many more food shortages we’ll have to face for them to get real about this.
Ashley: Is there a story of impact you can share, perhaps a story you find yourself sharing with people to highlight what you do, why it’s important, and why your work has so much value?
Paula Daniels: A lot of big stories can be told by small stories or small examples. We did get a $100 million incentive fund in the California budget in 2022 to enable school districts to buy more local, sustainable, climate-smart food. We’ve talked to the school districts about how they’ve used it and some of the stories coming back are really gratifying because they’re able to make the changes that we imagined would be possible with the fund.
One school said that the amount they got for reimbursement for school meals was so small that they were forced to buy in the competitive market. A lot of their money goes to labor costs, which are obviously necessary and important. They said with this incentive fund, they’re able to buy real food for the kids. They’re able to buy and source organic chicken so they don’t have to buy from the commodity shelf.
Some of them were able to reduce food waste because, they said, one of the wastes is milk, which is an absolute dietary requirement from the USDA. The kids get these cartons of milk because it’s required that they have a percentage of their meal as milk. They don’t want it, and they throw it away. If they have bulk milk dispensers they can take exactly how much they want. Those small changes can make a lot of difference in the long run.
We provide more money for schools not only to buy food, but to buy it in a way that reinforces these public values.
Ashley Hopkinson: Have partnerships and coalitions played a role in the work that you’re doing, and what kind of role? What have you found has helped to maintain partnerships?
Paula Daniels: Partnerships are huge in the work we’re doing. We operate somewhat like a backbone organization, like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design [LEED certification] from the U.S. Green Building Council, or something like that. There are a lot of folks on the ground who advocate for our work to be adopted in cities and municipalities. We’ve had them advocate for motions to be passed. In a lot of places, our work has been adopted through City Council motions, executive orders, or Board of Supervisors motions or by declaration or resolution. That all comes through partnerships.
We have a lot of organizations that we work with in each of the areas where we have a presence. We’ve also worked with a lot of national organizations that back our work. Some of them became part of the Federal Good Food Purchasing Coalition with us. The Federal Good Food Purchasing Coalition has a website where you can learn more. The gratifying thing to me is that when I started this work in 2009, I was at city hall, and I was thinking, “I want a purchasing program. I want us to have goals to move the needle because if we’re cities, what do we have? We’ve got purchasing power, so let’s use it.” That’s why I was focused on purchasing. At the time, not a lot of organizations were. It’s spread. Now, there’s a whole Federal Good Food Purchasing Coalition.
You never arrive; you just hit your milestones. It’s always a journey. That’s the key milestone. I can pass it along to everybody else. Basically, if you look at the website, there are 30 or 40 members of this coalition who all agree that purchasing is the right policy focus.
Ashley Hopkinson: Can you talk about what strategies you use to maintain partnerships? You talked about the importance of community-focused work. Are you meeting with people regularly? How are you maintaining good relationships that are beneficial to the work you do, even after you’ve left that city, or when the work has grown in a different way?
Paula Daniels: We maintain close touch with our partners. One of our directors, one of our senior staff, is committed to that along with her team. We also have peer-to-peer network meetings. We have lots of interaction with the partners on different levels. We might have a joint project, or we might have them as part of a bigger grant that we apply for. They’re working different pieces of it in so many more ways than I can even describe. But we stay in touch, and we spend a lot of time in the community.
Ashley Hopkinson: Is there anything I didn’t ask you about the work that you want to add?
Paula Daniels: I’ll mention that we have an impact hub. With the data that we’ve collected, we’ve created an impact hub where institutions, academics, community groups, or whoever wants to look at it can log in. They can look at what kind of impact you can have if you make shifts in your purchasing. Let’s say you wanted to reduce pesticide use. You could input it into the impact hub and see what shifts you would need to make, and how much pesticide use reduction you would get.
Ashley Hopkinson: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for your time and insights.
Click here to read the full conversation with insights highlighted.
Ashley Hopkinson is an award-winning journalist, newsroom entrepreneur and leader dedicated to excellent storytelling and mission-driven media. She currently manages the Solutions Insights Lab, an initiative of the Solutions Journalism Network. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.
* This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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