- The food system being broken is a really common phrase that you'll hear.

And I remember I was once in a room with a group of people and somebody said the food system isn't broken, it was built.

(soft music) - If you think about crop insurance and what crops are like more desirable from a federal standpoint, you got corn, you got soybeans and wheat.

And you see a lot of those ingredients in the more fatty foods.

So there's like a lot of support for that.

Whereas if you're growing a variety of vegetables, there's less support.

- When you look at issues that are big like how things are distributed in a community, right.

You get into a lot of issues of power.

We didn't get here by accident.

How we subsidize things, what we choose to invest in they're really values decisions.

A ton of years of public policy has shaped kind of where we stand now, we're not starting from zero.

- The food insecurity conversation is really rooted in what I see as an intentional disinvestment in communities that have been characterized, if you will, less than or not as important or of equal value.

- We have a system that was designed.

It was designed to benefit some groups at the expense of other groups.

- A lot of it is rooted in these very systemic and institutionalized practices.

We have to start to reframe how we define worth.

Healthy food access and investment in community is these basic necessities that no community should go without.

- For me, it's really about investing.

And so it's about investing dollars to sort of correct some of those imbalances.

And strategic investments can happen at a really big P policy level or they can be done at an organizational level.

So like at The Food Group, what we're thinking about a lot is how do we purchase from farmers of color?

How can we buy their food at the wage that they deserve and distribute that out to folks who need it.

- As a country there's such a focus on like profit over people and it has to be the other way around.

It should always be the people first.

That like mindset switch needs to be promoted.

- Food access is certainly systemic and but that doesn't mean that the things that we do every day will not change or impact.

Humans created this space and we also have the power to change that.

So.

- [Sophia] When I look at how change happens it happens in partnership and collaboration.

And there are so many great organizations in the food space.

That's a really powerful opportunity that we have here to think differently, to think bigger and to really innovate together about what the next wave of the food system needs to look like.