Meet Keynote Speaker Michel Nischan
Nischan is owner and founder of Dressing Room, his homegrown restaurant in Westport, CT, and CEO and president of Wholesome Wave, which is dedicated to nourishing neighborhoods by supporting increased production and access to healthy, fresh, and affordable locally grown food for the wellbeing of all.
Using private funds, Wholesome Wave creates chapters in multiple states to double the value of food stamps, officially known as SNAP benefits (EBT), WIC FMNP Coupons and WIC Senior Nutrition Coupons spent at participating partner markets and farm stands across the country.
Basically, Wholesome Wave leverages existing government food nutrition programs to encourage shopping at local farmers markets, by creating an incentive; every EBT or WIC dollar spent at a WWG partner market becomes two dollars.
A proponent of sustainable farming, local and regional food systems, and heritage recipes, Nischan has long been a leader in the movement to honor local, pure, simple, and delicious cooking. Nischanës restaurant is a community gathering place, with a philosophy: "We believe that the food we grow and cook in the place that we call home defines who we are."
Georgia Organics: Forgetting about food and nutrition for a second, you have a lot of experience with the cycle of poverty. Speaking strictly economically, what do you think is the biggest perpetrator of the cycle of poverty now?
Michel Nischan: Lack of opportunity, and lack of investment in underserved communities. In the investment comes a variety of forms. There just so many ways that money and interest has shifted opportunity away from these communities, so it’s one of the biggest problems when you look at lack of affordability to be able to choose healthier food to feed your family, that stems from lack of opportunity for good paying jobs, lack of access to transportation, the only education you’ve had access to is very poor.
It goes back a century a century and a half, almost a millennium, the way we’ve re-compartmentalized society in favor of those who hold power often to the detriment of those who don’t.
Do you think it’s advantageous for those who are in power to keep the cycle of poverty going?
What I think is that most people in power are so focused on staying in power any perceived threat is something they are going to deal with in a way that keeps them in power.
A lot of the ridiculously high profit margins are made on the backs of people who are being shamelessly exploited. Often we don’t make that connection to the money that’s made our education possible to something that came at a result of putting someone else at a terrible disadvantage.
Recently you’ve talked about a new type of collaboration relate to collaboration for community ownership and equity. This seems like a new vision of a co-op or a very localized food system.
Well it’s actually in our view it has to be multiple food systems. Because right now there's an awful lot of money that attached to those tens of billions of [Farm Bill] dollars that can only be spent on food, to try to promote healthier food choices, to try to educate the broader public about food choices. I can’t venture the guess the amount of money that's gone into the food pyramids over the last few decades. [But] if they just would’ve used that money to incentivized families to make healthier food choices by choosing locally grown organic fruits and vegetables, healthcare costs could be half of what they are today. But I do believe we are going to see success in shifting the way American taxpayer money gets spent.
Would you mind walking me through this new more localized connection?
Yeah, basically the way it would work is imagine instead of a producer getting a value added producer that they could have a stake financed by farm credit in a value added processing facility that can serve multiple school districts, hospitals, other large scale users. Not only do they now have a new high volume customer that will buy their waste, and turn it into a product and create a new revenue stream.
This value added processing facility, since it’s buying just from regional producers, there’s an additional business opportunity for somebody who can get the food from the farmers into the processing facility according to a production schedule that everybody can agree on.
That same distribution company can then take the finished product out to the schools, hospitals, and institutional end users. So you’re looking at an opportunity for aggregation, opportunity for distribution, and opportunity for value added processing that can serve multiple customers, including a community-owned grocery co-op.
The whole notion is that creating a community of food businesses that would be a reasonable alternative to the big box models coming in and co-opting everything, because it is my belief that we will see a day where taxpayer dollars are getting spent on better food choices.
If we as a movement don’t come together and really put our best minds behind the types of business plans and business models, the type of business to business contracting that does exist in the corporate world today, if we don’t start innovating in that way and breaking down our own silos, and then the big boxes will come in and take advantage of those new revenue streams.