The valet made me do it. We bared our souls and talked with each other about food. We did it in the middle of the tastefully decorated lobby of a reputable Cannery Row hotel in Monterey, CA. It began as a very unexpected moment, and has become one of my all-time favorite experiences talking about access to good food. Because it was a conversation not with a chef, foodie or expert. It was with a regular person who longs to connect to food and is somehow stuck, marooned on an island alone, full of latent desire.

The valet—let’s call him Paul—asked me the very question I yearn to hear, and with him I had the discussion that I never tire of. Paul had parked my car when I checked into the hotel, had smiled professionally at me and held the door three mornings in a row when I sashayed excitedly out into the sunlight. The cause of my excitement was a food issue conference hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The Cooking for Solutions Sustainable Media Institute is an annual gathering of journalists and experts who cover food system issues ranging from sustainable seafood to GMOs. It is the highlight of my year, second only to the Ecological Farming Association annual meeting.

The third morning, Paul held the lobby door open and commented that I looked happy. I told him yes, I was happy because I spent the last three days at a conference talking and thinking about food. He immediately grabbed my arm. He looked a bit shocked at his intensity, but recovered quickly and said: “You were at a food conference. Tell me, what should I eat? And why? I know there’s a big debate now about food but I can’t follow it. I can cook, but I’m confused about what’s good for me. The grocery store? I go in there, I walk around…it feels wrong, and I come out with stuff I don’t like. Can you talk with me for a minute?”

Although he spoke quietly, his interest was so intense that the small lobby grew quiet. The receptionist, guests checking out and the other staff stood waiting for my answer. Where to start? Full disclosure: I’m a communications professional who relies on the power of my words to make a living. I know I’ve got about six seconds to keep him or lose him. Do I start with a slogan: Know your farmer, know your food? Nope, too abstract. Do I punt to Michael Pollan’s now famous: Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much? Nope, too abstract again for a lobby conversation. Marion Nestle wrote a huge book about this, like War and Peace for the American eater.

Plus, do I need a pundit or am I ready to be my own? I took a deep breath: “I like to shop at farmers’ markets because they sell food that’s grown right up the road. I bet there’s one near here. I walk around the market, talk to a few farmers, see what looks good to me and buy what I can afford and know I can handle in the time I have available in my basic kitchen. Did you know artichokes are grown in Castroville, just a few miles away from here, and you can steam them in about five minutes?” He burst into a smile. “I’m Italian, from Florida. My family loved artichokes! Growing up we’d save money to buy the good ones, from Italy, in olive oil, in a glass jar, for pasta. You mean I can get them fresh here?” Ah, what a moment.

Several contradictions bear illustration: We’re on Cannery Row in Monterey, CA, where super-green list sustainable seafood sardines had their heyday until the species collapse in 1950s. Right near Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the shrines of ocean conservation, sits the restaurant Bubba Gump, a shrine to farmed shrimp redolent of butter, garlic and disgusting chemicals like disinfectants, pesticides and antibiotics used to keep filthy shrimp ponds teetering on the brink of legal seafood production. Another contradiction: My food conference is teeming with experts on food system sustainability. A few hundred feet from that, a hotel valet wonders what to eat, and has the guts to talk to me about it. If only more people dared to, and if only we could build a real community around real answers. And buy those artichokes from right up the road.

For me, Paul is an archetype of the struggle around food access. He didn’t just open the door for me mornings. He opened the door to a conversation that needs to happen in every walk of life. Where do we find food that speaks to us? What impact might a deeper connection with food have on our local communities, our health and our environment? We all want to know how to make this connection.

Paul isn’t the only one who wants to talk. I frequently find myself drawn into these conversations. My neighbors, strangers on public transportation, and also people at farmers’ markets want to engage around food. Seems everybody always wanted to make five minute blender mayonnaise but it takes a catalyst in the community to make it happen. We should all share knowledge, not just about the joys of homemade mayonnaise, but also about why we should use a pastured egg from a farmer we know rather than an organic supermarket egg. And we should be talking how to cook a beet and why it has a low carbon footprint. It probably helps when information is shared from simple home cooks, not chefs. What’s clear to me is that engaging with each other around food is the gateway, the first step to transforming our relationship. It has to come from each other, no matter how unexpected the place or the time.

I recommended Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything to Paul as a straightforward tome featuring all the basics, then riffs, galore. But I don’t think cookbooks are the silver bullet. A community connection which starts that dialogue would be a better answer. Steps away from where Paul parks cars and opens doors every day, a food conference was trying to open the door. But it didn’t go far enough. For this movement to thrive, it will take community, connection and deeper dialogue. Let’s start a conversation about food with unexpected people in unexpected situations. I think we’ll all benefit from the results.

It was by no means Kathleen Merrigan’s first trip to the Ecological Farming Conference (EcoFarm). But when the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture stood at a podium to address last week’s annual gathering of farmers, retailers, processors, and advocates, it was clear she had never had quite such a crucial role to play at the event. Now on its 30th year, EcoFarm regularly draws a large percentage of those who have been envisioning and shaping the sustainable food movement for years.

Since Merrigan’s appointment to the USDA, she’s been under a great deal of pressure to make big changes happen quickly. She began Friday’s address with a direct plea for patience, much like we have heard from President Obama in recent months. “I come to this job with great ambition — and a great history with many of you in the audience — but also with an understanding that change takes time,” she told the audience.

What follows is a run-down of the major issues Merrigan touched on in her address and in response to audience questions.

National Organic Program Expansion

Last fall, Merrigan played a personal role in appointing Miles McAvoy to head the National Organic Program (NOP) — the program she once helmed. Before Merrigan’s address, McAvoy ran through an in-depth PowerPoint presentation detailing his plans for creating what has been dubbed the “Age of Enforcement” in this regulatory program. After years of making do with a severely limited staff and budget, a shift will be made possible by a recent expansion of the NOP budget, from $3.8 million in 2009 to $6.9 million in 2010.

“We needed to pull in some new leadership and we need to keep working on that budget, because it’s really important,” Merrigan said, “not only for organic [producers] but for all American agriculture, because our organic farmers have, in many ways, been research pioneers.” She also stressed that the whole USDA should be integrating organic into their work. “It’s about time that everything that has to do with organic is not just sent to NOP.” She described her plan to go to all 27 agencies within the department, and say “what are you doing for organic? Who’s your organic point person and what’s your organic agenda?”

Every Family Needs a Farmer

Merrigan has high hopes for the recently launched Know Your Farmer Know Your Food program. She talked about traveling the country examining efforts to reestablish local and regional food systems, taking notes on what needs the department’s support.

When asked by a member of the audience where she sees the program in five years, Merrigan responded: “I’m hoping that it is like what ‘sustainable’ is now. We won’t have to sit around doing creative brainstorming about what it is we need to do to reconnect consumers with their food; it will be embedded in the agenda of every agency in the USDA.”

To ensure that this happens, Merrigan appears to be focused on systematizing the local food infrastructure. The day she spoke, for instance, she and several USDA staff members had just come from visiting a mobile slaughter unit, and she described the lack of small scale meat processing options as “a big structural barrier to sustainability.” The biggest challenge for small meat producers, she continued, is the fact that “Food Safety Inspection Services (FSIS) rules about mobile slaughter aren’t written down anywhere…and that puts a lot of risk into the equation.” Within the month, she added, the USDA will release a mobile slaughter compliance manual along with several instructional webinars. “That should let everyone know the rules of the road,” said Merrigan.

Reaching New Audiences

Merrigan and her staff also appear to be focused on communicating to new audiences using methods that might have sounded strange for an official branch of the government just one year ago. She described the suggestion on the part of her new-media-savvy staff to launch the Know Your Farmer Know Your Food program by inviting a group of bloggers to a small farm, rather than staging a formal press event. And, she also announced plans to start participating in new technology more directly. “They’ve convinced me,” she said. “I’m going to start tweeting, even if I’m not even sure what that means.”

She also described her efforts to engage college students, as she travels around the country, as a way to address what she sees as, “a profound disconnect between consumers and American agriculture.” The night before her arrival at EcoFarm, for example, Merrigan had spoken to an audience of Stanford students, where she employed “a colorful slideshow, combined with multiple choice questions the audience could answer with transmitter devices…handed out before the talk.”

Part of her intent in reaching young audiences, is engaging would-be-farmers, and figuring out how to begin meeting their needs in new ways. “I was at Iowa State, and I can’t tell you how exciting it was for me when a bunch of students stood up and said, ‘I want to be a farmer.’ But when I asked, ‘how many have a business plan?’ maybe two hands were raised. So one big question is how to bring young people — especially those who have grown up on farms and ranches — back into American agriculture. The desire is there, we just need to help them find the pathways.”

Farm to School and Vice Versa

Merrigan described the farm-to-school tactical team she established. “It’s a group of USDA employees from both the food and nutrition and agriculture marketing departments that are currently traveling the country taking stock of the dos and don’ts of farm-to-school programs.” As important as recording the successes, she said, will be documenting what hasn’t worked, so that school systems with stretched budgets can make wise decisions from the get-go, based on models that work.

“USDA really has an opportunity to help farm-to-school programs,” said Merrigan. “We see that as part of Know Your Farmer Know Your Food. And at the same time we want get our research agencies to think about what it means to go school to farm. What can we do in terms of curriculum and connecting farmers and schools? I think that needs to be part of the equation.”

Stimulus Dollars

Merrigan fielded a number of questions about stimulus funding, and addressed the USDA’s use of the money directly. The answer? The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program (formerly know as food stamps). “You know as well as we do that there are a lot of people whose only source of survival is food stamps,” she said.

“The recovery act has allowed for $80 more a month for every [qualifying] family of four,” she continued. “We have an incredible upsurge in participants and we expect that to continue. So we are spending that recovery money in a way that is very meaningful.”