Matt Rothe
This week’s Tastemaker grew up on a Colorado farm and, after getting an Environmental Earth Science degree from Dartmouth, took a job as the Director of Operations at the well-known sustainable meat purveyor, Niman Ranch. After a few years learning the tricks of the trade, Matt left to get his MBA at Stanford. Following his degree, and after a brief interlude at a food startup, Matt joined Stanford Dining as their Sustainable Food Coordinator. Today we have part 1 of our conversation.
Foodia: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Matt. Let’s start off with an easy one: what did you do today? More generally, what’s a day in the life like?
Matt Rothe: Well, you caught me on a trip home to the eastern plains of Colorado, which in some ways is a representative sample of daily life in my role at Stanford. I’d convinced my mom a few years ago, by way of some help from Barbara Kingsolver’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, that she should raise some heritage breed turkeys for our family and friends. She agreed on the condition that I come home in the spring to help get things cleaned up and prepared and that I come home in the fall to slaughter and dress them. So, to your question, this morning I mucked the coop and then modified it to accommodate chickens (new animals to the farm this year), in addition to the turkeys. This afternoon my brother and I mended a fence that our hogs (new animals to the farm last year) tore up and then we filled in an inconveniently located wallowing hole they dug with five tons of river rock.
As Stanford’s Sustainable Foods Coordinator, you’re tasked with not only sourcing sustainable eats for the Stanford population, but also with communicating those decisions to each student, faculty member and Stanford employee. What’s the most exciting part of your job? What’s the most challenging part?
Stanford DiningThe most challenging part, unequivocally, is that not everybody cares where their food comes from, or who grew or raised it, or how it was grown or raised, even in the face of clear and compelling information. Moreover, many people who do care do not always, or even regularly, express congruent behavior when they decide what to put on their plate. Fortunately, and this is the most exciting part of my job, there are a substantial number of faculty, staff, and students on campus who are interested in collaborating with us to better understand food behaviors. This has led to some really unique opportunities to test how communication and design interventions can lead to healthier and more sustainable food consumption. By the same virtue of being surrounded by intellectual resources and curiosity, we are also challenging and exploring the definition of sustainable food as it relates to being “fairly traded” and we are working to understand how social equity is, or can be, created in the global food economy. Although we’re still sorting out our understanding and have quite a bit of work yet to do, we seem to be on the leading edge of thought on the matter, which is also very exciting.
How does it compare with some of your past jobs?
Functionally this job is very different than the jobs I’ve had in the past in that I have a much more customer oriented (students namely) role and the decisions I make on a day-to-day basis are not as directly tied to a profit and loss statement. Much of the work I do involves educating others, which has been new (and wonderful), although not altogether different than managing people and teams. Like all the jobs I’ve had, I feel that this one was a natural next step in what for me has been an evolving career in the food business.
Let’s take a step back. What does it mean to “know your food”?
Until recently, I would have said that to “know your food” is to know at least some of the particulars about who grew, raised, or processed it, how they grew, raised or processed it, and whether the people and entities involved in getting it from the farm to your plate were treated equitably. I think that still holds, but I am increasingly inclined to say that to “know your food” is simply to slow down and recognize that the matter one puts in one’s mouth for sustenance is food.
What steps can consumers take to get to know their food? What questions should they ask?
I think the single most powerful thing a consumer can do to get to know their food is to grow, raise or process some of it themselves, even if that means growing a single tomato plant in a pot on the north facing balcony of an apartment. Being just a little more involved with your own food forces you to learn the simple things about it, like when certain things are in season or even what the plants look like. You learn that growing food can be really difficult and it opens your eyes to the vast quantity of resources that are required just to feed you, let alone 6.5 billion others. Invariably you’ll have to make a decision about whether to use synthetic chemicals to deal with a pest problem or to pursue other less toxic, but perhaps also less immediately effective measures.
Having at least some experience and first-hand knowledge of how things grow also provides a deeper meaning and understanding of what things like “organic” and “free range” really mean in the context of one’s health, the health of the environment, and the health of the animals on which one depends for food (I could almost guarantee that any person who has endeavored to raise chickens would never eat a conventionally raised bird again). Most importantly, anybody who has grown, raised or processed their own food will tell you their food tasted infinitely superior to any similar food they ever bought in a grocery store. And the often resulting pursuit of better tasting food is, in my opinion, the most compelling and enduring point of entry into eating more sustainably, as the conventional food system has done such a complete job of evolving with little or no regard for flavor, variety, and heritage.
As for questions to ask, every consumer should go to the closest farmers’ market this weekend and ask one of farmers there, “can I come visit your farm?”
Tastemasters is a weekly series from Foodia.org. Foodia sifts through the clutter to help you find eats that are fresh, healthful, and (most of all) tasty.
