Wayne’s Weekly Hacks: Tomorrow’s Food Skills

But first things first: why am I doing a newsletter on food skills when there are so many courses on all sorts of food skills? 

When I started this newsletter two months ago, I thought I knew the answer. People in the good food sector need more food skills because we are being outsmarted by Big Food — even though we have our fingers on the pulse of what’s wrong with today’s food system, and things that can be done to make it better. 

This week, the penny dropped. The real reason there’s a need for a newsletter on food skills is that food skills are unrecognized, unappreciated, and unrewarded. As long as that’s so, there will be a shortage of food skills that allow us to be our best selves as advocates for good food.

The main uphill battle in labor relations (my first career) is getting the employer to recognize the union. It often leads to what is called a “recognition strike.” After that, it’s mostly downhill.  

I think it will be the same for food skills. In this issue, I make the case for recognition. Next week, I return to my checklist, already over 100 items long, of important and distinctive food skills.

My hacks come out of 55 years as a social change leader, 45 years as a writer of 13 books, thousands of articles and hundreds of broadcasts, and ten years as a coach for emerging food leaders.

FOOD’S NEW WHY AND WHEREFORES

I was worse when it came to my own food knowledge and skills, because I was so much older than 14 or 21. I started taking food seriously when I was about 50 years old.

In 1995, I figured it would take me the rest of the decade to get a whole new take on the whole topic of food. I thought I was well on my way in 1999, when two friends and I wrote Real Food for a Change, published by the world’s biggest publisher of the day, Random House.

I felt some of the humility of  21 year-old Mark Twain about five years later. By then, I realized that it would take the rest of my career to master a tiny food nook of city food policy while keeping on top of all the things a food generalist had to stay on top of. 

But it took me another five years, right up to my retirement, before I ate enough humble pie to know that modest goal was also way too high. Scratching the surface of a revolution in food knowledge intersecting with the information explosion of the Internet was going to  keep me plenty busy for the rest of my days. 

The modern food movement took the shape it retains today during those 15 years from 1995 to 2010. Food movements were among the first to embrace the understanding that knowledge and wisdom  had to move from narrow fields of specialization to comprehensive and open-ended searching. 

You can see that openness in the humble title most of the new university courses on food gave themselves – food studies, modeled on earlier disruptions such as labor studies, women’s studies, Black studies,  and equity studies. 

Back in 1995, it was enough for a well-versed food specialist to know agriculture and rural sociology (because food was mainly about meeting production targets and that was a rural matter), topped up by knowledge of nutrition and chronic disease, because food consumption was mainly about preventing physical diseases. Those were the fields of knowledge. The fields of skills were housework and cooking skills passed from mother to daughter, trade skills passed from father to son, workaday how-to skills taught in trade schools, and specialized professional skills taught at university.

By 2010, well-versed food specialists had to know all the above,  plus a whole lot more. Food was no longer a specialty unto itself. It was a connection to almost everything.  The centripetal forces took over. 

Food “specialists”  also had to know about food security and food sovereignty, local food and global trade deals, city planning and urban agriculture,  multiculturalism and culinary heritages, social determinants of health and social inequity, mental health and community development, political economy and geography, organic agriculture and green infrastructure, communication and adult education, environment and resources, sustainability and resilience, public policy and resilience, social marketing and content marketing, leadership and project management. Big enough for you?

Knowledge now had to be referred to in the plural – for Western, Eastern and Indigenous knowledges. Specialized expertise exploded into collaboration.  The how of food added on the who, what, where, and why of food. Who would’ve thunk all that could happen inside of 20 years?

Most food power brokers of today work from the knowledge world of the 1990s and earlier, raised on textbooks that held sway for entire generations. By contrast, the food jobs of the future – just like other jobs – will be based on these 21st century  transformations of skills and knowledges, updated daily on the Internet.

I refer to myself and others in the good food sector as food practitioners, in the same way that a doctor refers to medicine as a practice and a yogi  refers to yoga as a practice. You can learn skills but you never master knowledge – the same as you can learn spelling and grammar but never finish learning to write. You are always practicing but you never get there.

Food over the last 30 years has been the site of the most significant processes of creative destruction and disruptive innovation to be found anywhere at any time. Skills, knowledges and knowledge creation and diffusion are at the heart of this New Enlightenment. That is why it is timely to have a newsletter devoted to these obligations and opportunities.
 

“It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I still have to go, the more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough; to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”

Anthony Bourdain

 5 Top Skills for Future 
       Food Jobs

1. Marr puts emotional intelligence right at the top. EQ now beats IQ. People smarts beat book smarts. Because this is a world where every major project requires teams and partners. Because you can’t just bark orders to underlings, you have to understand them and bring them onside. 
   
   Does this mean EQ will beat hierarchy and centralized power over at HQ? The parade of soft skills definitely doesn’t describe today’s commercial kitchens or civil service. But it does describe creative organizations that will have impact.   

2. Marr puts creativity second, rating it higher than innovation. I agree that innovation should not own the franchise on progress. It is a narrow and banal way to channel creativity, which is so much more…creative. We need to be creative about gardening, not just innovative about  hydroponics, about cooking from scratch, not just take-out deliveries by robots, about artisanal cheese, not just 3-D cheese printing. Creative is the habit and turn of mind that will produce smart, clever, useful, resource-respecting, and heritage-worthy ways of doing food.

3. Marr puts flexibility and adaptability third because change is going to be the new normal. I would amend that by naming the virtue of tomorrow’s valued workers and citizens as resilient. People who are resilient have agency, and do more than simply fall into line with external changes. They are resilient because they are open and have multiple skills with which to make the best of changes. Being open and having many skills are the qualities we need, not go-along-to-get-along adaptability.

4. Data literacy is Marr’s fourth valued quality of future employees, because “data is the fuel of the fourth industrial revolution.” Obviously, future food workers will need their equivalent- – food literacy. Knowing and understanding food holistically – its provenance, its heritage, its many impacts on the world – will be foundational for all food employees. Chefs, for example, can no longer get by with cooking skills. They need to be public educators. Policy wonks will no longer get by without social skills because policy of the future will be based on collaboration, which puts a premium on street smarts and social skills. 

5. Marr says successful workers of the future must be tech-savvy. That’s undoubtedly true for food—savvy about hand tools, mechanized tools, artificially-intelligent computerized tools, and which ones are best for which job. We may no longer put down food skills as “manual skills,” rather than brain skills. They will all take equal amounts of savvy, and one set of skills will not necessarily be privileged.

Concentration Interruptus

I like to think that the place where the typical food skills of the future will be rehearsed is within food movements of today. At any rate, this newsletter will strive to provide these skills now.

With so much to learn, the crucial enabling skill is time management. You’ll learn here that you lose way more time being distracted by a distraction than you spent dealing with the distraction. There is no such thing as a “quick interruption.” So one key to time management is closing your open door policy toward distracters. Block time for deep thinking and planning around skill and knowledge creation that will boost your effectiveness.
 

“To know that you do not know is best. To think you know when you do not is a disease. Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.”

Lao Tzu

The Spice of Life

Because everyone needs to eat and loves to eat, food has the potential to speak to everyone. That means food movements need to be inclusive in everything they do – race-wise, gender-wise, class-wise, culture-wise, age-wise, ability-wise, food sensitivity-wise, and just generally wise.

Inclusivity is a major driver of the knowledge and skills explosion inside food movements. 

Here are some smart tips on being inclusive in media posts and outreach.

Big Picture

The knowledge revolution around food comes from seeing food in the foreground of the Big Picture – a driver of changes in culture, political economy, social movements, and more. Wendell Steavenson sees food this way. 

Here’s how he starts his review of a new book on the history of British cheese: “For years, I have sought to persuade people that food is much more than recipes and restaurants, that it is not just the social glue that gathers people around a table. It is the great universal that connects agriculture and climate to trade and exchange to traditions and cultures to identity and politics.” 

He closes by celebrating the new rise of artisanal foods, including cheese: “from craft brewing to bean-to-bar chocolate making, we are finally emerging from a century of industrialized homogenization and paying attention to provenance and process and the healthiness and ethics of our food supply chains.” 

We need the knowledge to understand and the skills to communicate this trend.

(If the newspaper won’t give you free access, try googling Wendell Steavenson, British cheese)

A Little Birdie Told Me…

Just to while away a few moments, I updated an old blog of mine on why and how small food companies and organizations can use Twitter: Please show it some love if you find it helpful.

Request for Action