From An Inconvenient Truth to Climate Underground:

Why We Can No Longer Separate Soil, Food, and Health

What if part of the climate solution beneath our feet is also part of the health solution on our plates?

Years ago, I sat in Washington, DC, watching An Inconvenient Truth. Like millions of people, I watched former Vice President Al Gore make an invisible crisis visible, using science, images, data, and storytelling to help the public understand that climate change was not simply a distant environmental concern. It was a profound threat to the systems that sustain everyday life. I could not have imagined then that years later I would be invited to Tennessee to join farmers, scientists, philanthropists, investors, advocates, health leaders, and food system innovators at Climate Underground, hosted at Al Gore’s regenerative farm with Alice Waters.

For me, attending Climate Underground was more than a conference invitation. It was a full-circle moment and a lesson in how communication can build public understanding, political will, and ultimately action. It also reinforced one of the central ideas behind WANDA: many of the challenges we treat as separate problems are actually part of the same living system. Climate, agriculture, nutrition, chronic disease, culture, economics, and health communication are interconnected whether our institutions organize themselves that way or not.

We Built Silos. Nature Built a System.

Climate change is often assigned to environmental agencies and organizations. Agriculture occupies another institutional space. Nutrition and chronic disease are treated as matters of public health and healthcare. Economic development is placed somewhere else, while communication is too often introduced at the end of the process to explain decisions that have already been made. But a tomato does not live in those silos.

Its journey begins with soil, seeds, microbes, water, weather, labor, land, farming practices, capital, and public policy. It continues through harvesting, processing, transportation, marketing, retail, household purchasing, preparation, and culture before eventually becoming nutrition inside a human body. Research reinforces the scale of these connections. In 2015, global food systems accounted for about one-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, with agriculture and land-use change representing the largest share.

Our institutions fragmented the food system but our bodies did not. That was one of the clearest messages I took from Climate Underground. Vice President Gore walked the audience through how rising temperatures, drought, flooding, soil degradation, input costs, climate volatility, and changing growing conditions affect agriculture. Yet his presentation did not end with catastrophe. It moved toward regeneration, resilience, and action. Particularly meaningful to me was the connection between soil health, plant health, nutrition, and community health. Emerging research suggests that agricultural management practices that improve soil health may also influence the nutrient and phytochemical composition of crops, although this area still requires larger and more rigorous studies.

Gore closed with another idea that stayed with me: political will is itself renewable. For someone trained in health communication, that matters. Scientific evidence alone does not automatically produce public action. People must understand an issue, trust the information and the messengers communicating it, see how it relates to their lives, and believe that their actions can matter. In other words, alongside the physical infrastructure needed to transform food systems, we need the social infrastructure of change: trust, belonging, credible information, compelling stories, relationships, and agency.

Regenerative Agriculture May Be New Language for Old Wisdom

Climate Underground's opening also acknowledged an important tension in contemporary conversations about regenerative agriculture: many practices described today as innovative are rooted in relationships with land that Indigenous peoples have maintained for generations.

Indigenous environmental scholarship has long challenged the idea that climate adaptation and sustainability can be separated from history, culture, land relationships, sovereignty, and colonialism. Some experts, for example, describe Indigenous climate knowledge as arising from living histories, collective experience, adaptation, and long-standing ecological relationships rather than simply representing an alternative set of technical practices.

That raises an important question for WANDA: When we innovate, whose knowledge are we remembering?

Across Africa and the Diaspora along with Indigenous communities, food has rarely functioned only as a commodity. Food can carry knowledge about seasons, healing, preservation, spirituality, family, migration, land, celebration, and survival. Industrialization brought extraordinary efficiencies and scale, but it also helped create distance between eater and farmer, child and soil, healthcare and agriculture, traditional knowledge and scientific institutions, and economic price and ecological cost.

The next agricultural revolution, therefore, should not simply ask how to produce more. It should also ask what knowledge needs to be remembered, protected, restored, adapted, and valued.

Alice Waters and the Power of Institutional Demand

One of my favorite moments at Climate Underground was the fireside conversation between Al Gore and Alice Waters. Waters described what she calls school-supported agriculture: using schools not only as places where children eat but as institutions that can create reliable demand for local, regenerative food.

The idea sounds simple, but its implications are far-reaching. If schools purchase from local and regenerative farmers, school meals simultaneously become nutrition policy, agricultural policy, economic development, climate action, education, and community investment. Waters described the lessons she has learned through decades of work with the Edible Schoolyard, including the importance of sensory learning and helping children understand food through growing, cooking, eating, and sharing it.

Gore added an important economic perspective. The apparent low price of institutional food often fails to reflect health consequences, environmental costs, lost opportunities for local farmers, and other externalities. Research on food systems similarly demonstrates that evaluating food only by its retail price can obscure substantial environmental and health impacts occurring elsewhere in the system.

Their conversation prompted me to expand a question we frequently ask at WANDA. Instead of asking only, “How do we get healthy food to people?” we should also ask: How can the institutions already feeding people become engines for healthier farms, stronger local economies, healthier families, and more resilient communities?

Schools can do that. Hospitals can do that. Universities can do that. Community health centers can do that. Government can do that. Institutional food purchasing is therefore not simply procurement. It can become a lever for systems change.

When Food Is Medicine Meets Regenerative Agriculture

The Food Is Medicine discussion at Climate Underground was particularly important for WANDA because it brought healthcare and agriculture into direct conversation. Food Is Medicine is increasingly used to describe interventions such as medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, and produce prescriptions that are integrated into or coordinated with healthcare to prevent, manage, or treat diet-related disease. The Rockefeller Foundation and other national leaders have helped accelerate discussion of how these interventions might be more systematically embedded in healthcare financing. But the question that interested me most was what comes before the prescription: Where does the prescribed food come from?

If healthcare becomes a significant purchaser of food, those dollars could reinforce existing industrial supply chains, or they could create new markets for smaller, local, culturally relevant, and regenerative producers. That distinction matters because Food Is Medicine has the potential to influence not only individual clinical outcomes but also agricultural markets, community wealth, and environmental health.

Recent research provides particularly compelling evidence for another issue central to WANDA: cultural relevance. In a 2026 randomized clinical trial involving 206 adults with heart failure in rural Navajo Nation, participants receiving a community-designed Food Is Medicine intervention featuring culturally and medically tailored traditional Diné foods had significantly fewer hospitalizations or emergency department visits than participants receiving usual care. The intervention also improved measures of food security and several health outcomes.

That research challenges the assumption that cultural relevance is an optional addition to clinical nutrition interventions. Culture can be part of the intervention itself.

It also raises the question WANDA has long asked: Whose food is our medicine?

Food Is Medicine will not reach its full potential if communities are prescribed foods disconnected from their histories, preferences, identities, cooking practices, local economies, and cultural knowledge. Clinical efficacy matters, but so do trust, relevance, feasibility, and the ability of people to incorporate recommended foods into everyday life.

The Missing Ingredient Is Often the Connection

Dr. Steven Chen of Alameda County at Climate Underground described one of the greatest barriers to Food Is Medicine as “siloed mindsets.” That observation resonated immediately with me. Doctors work in healthcare. Farmers work in agriculture. Food hubs manage distribution. Community organizations operate within neighborhoods. Insurers finance healthcare services. Researchers study outcomes. Policymakers regulate systems. Communicators attempt to influence knowledge and behavior. Yet someone still has to connect the pieces.

Research on Food Is Medicine has similarly identified sustainable financing, clinician training, organizational capacity, and coordination across healthcare and food systems as important challenges to broader implementation. The problem, therefore, is not always a lack of interventions or evidence. Sometimes the problem is that institutions have been designed to operate beside one another rather than with one another. I smiled during that conversation because this is why I often describe myself as a silo smasher.

The future of Food Is Medicine will require more than physicians writing food prescriptions. It will require farmers, registered dietitians, chefs, community health workers, doulas, health systems, insurers, researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, storytellers, technologists, and community members working within a connected ecosystem.

What Climate Underground Means for WANDA

WANDA was founded around the belief that food can become a pathway to health, agency, economic opportunity, cultural restoration, and leadership, particularly for women and girls of African descent. Climate Underground did not change that vision but sharpened it.

Through NOURISH Maternal Food as Medicine, we ask how culturally relevant nutrition education, cooking, trusted relationships, and food access can support healthier pregnancies and families. Through WANDA Scholars, we ask who will become the next generation of nutrition, agricultural, and food-system leaders. Through WANDA Academy, we are exploring how to prepare health and community practitioners to lead and advocate within Food Is Medicine while using communication, culture, and our emerging Narrative Nutrition framework to translate evidence into everyday life.

Our policy work asks who has the right to nourishing food and who has the power to shape the food environments affecting their lives. Our health communication work asks the question underneath all of these initiatives: How do we create enough trust, belonging, meaning, and agency for people to see themselves as the heroes of their own Food Is Medicine story?

Climate Underground helped me see these efforts less as separate WANDA programs and more as components of one ecosystem.

From Farm to School to Farm to Health

For years, we have talked about farm-to-table. Then farm-to-school helped institutions reconsider the relationship between local agriculture, children, and school meals. Food Is Medicine now makes possible something even broader: Farm to Health.

One of the unexpected joys of Climate Underground was reconnecting with Drew Glover of Earthseed Farm and Jennifer Siebel Newsom, First Partner of California, whom I first met at the California Farm to School Summit. Seeing them again in a climate-focused setting felt fitting because their work reflects the very connections this moment requires. Jennifer has been a visible champion of Farm to School and California’s recent investments in building the infrastructure needed to connect schools with local farms. Drew’s work at Earthseed Farm brings an Afro-Indigenous agroecological perspective to regenerative agriculture, grounding climate resilience in culture, land stewardship, and ancestral knowledge.

That reunion was another reminder that Farm to School, regenerative agriculture, and Food Is Medicine should not evolve as separate movements. They are part of the same continuum.

• Imagine health systems purchasing food from regenerative and local farmers while community health centers connect patients to food hubs and community-based organizations.

• Imagine pregnant mothers receiving culturally meaningful foods alongside nutrition education and support from trusted birth workers.

• Imagine schools teaching children not simply what to eat but how soil, climate, culture, agriculture, and health connect.

• Imagine universities translating agricultural research into community-owned businesses, products, technologies, and solutions.

• Imagine young people seeing agriculture not as a relic of the past but as climate science, public health, entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence, culinary innovation, and economic possibility.

• And imagine Black women, whose agricultural, culinary, caregiving, and healing knowledge has frequently been overlooked or extracted, helping lead this next chapter.

  
  

That is more than a nutrition intervention. That is community infrastructure.

The Next Inconvenient Truth

Nearly two decades after An Inconvenient Truth entered the public imagination, I left Climate Underground thinking about another inconvenient truth: We cannot sustainably heal people while ignoring the health of the food system and the planet that nourishes them.

The evidence increasingly supports a systems perspective. Food systems contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, while agricultural practices shape soil health and potentially the nutritional quality of our food. Food Is Medicine research demonstrates that well-designed food-based interventions can improve health outcomes, and Indigenous climate scholarship reminds us that sustainable solutions must also honor culture, history, relationships, and community knowledge.

That is why one of my meaningful conversations at Climate Underground was with Tennessee State Representative Justin Jones of Nashville, who serves on the House Agriculture Committee, and Will Barber III, whose environmental justice work has included collaboration with Kareena Gore. We talked about how we can better amplify the experiences of communities and farmers who often live at the intersection of climate change, food insecurity, environmental injustice, and economic inequity and how their voices must help shape the policies and narratives intended to address those challenges.

That conversation is especially timely during the International Year of the Woman Farmer 2026. At WANDA, we bring an intersectional lens to this moment because women farmers do not experience agriculture, climate, health, race, gender, land ownership, financing, and political power as separate issues. Regenerating soil can strengthen agricultural resilience. Supporting farmers can strengthen local economies. Preserving traditional food knowledge can reinforce culture and identity. Food Is Medicine can connect healthcare resources to nourishment, while health communication can help communities turn evidence into understanding, agency, and action.

Climate action can become food action. Food action can become health action. Health action can become economic action. And when the people most affected including women farmers and historically marginalized farming communities have voice and power, community action can become public will.

The challenge is no longer simply demonstrating that these connections exist. It is building institutions, policies, and movements capable of acting like they do.

A Call to Build the Ecosystem

At WANDA, we want to work with partners across healthcare, agriculture, universities, philanthropy, technology, government, community development, and media who are ready to move beyond parallel conversations and build the connective tissue between sectors.

If you are working in regenerative agriculture, Food Is Medicine, maternal health, local food economies, culturally relevant nutrition, health communication, climate resilience, or community innovation, we invite you into this conversation. Because the future of food will not be built by one profession, one institution, or one intervention but will be grown by an ecosystem. Learn more and partner with WANDA at iamwanda.org.

By Tambra Stevenson