E283: Taylor Hanson's Food On The Move

Interview Summary

You know I really like the innovative nature of Food On The Move, and I'm eager for you to tell us more about what it involves. But before we do that, how does a young, highly successful musician turn to battling food insecurity? What led you to create Food On The Move?

It took me years to say I even created it. I didn't even use the term founder because I really had this sense of partnership that was a part of how it came to be. But I did found or 'start' Food On The Move because I have just a deep sense of gratitude in my life experience and also maybe a calling? I call it the tap on the shoulder that said there's more for you to do. There's more for me to do. And I didn't really know what that meant. I wanted to invest in Oklahoma and where we're from because as a musician, first you travel, you leave, you go out, you connect with people all over the world. But there's something about building and doing well for your community from the town you're from. And I was inspired by a former US ambassador. A man named Edward Perkins, who was an incredible representative of our country. He worked in some of the most difficult parts of the world representing the US and working with other nations. And his story struck me so deeply because he found ways to partner and transform communities as an ambassador. And I got to know him after his time as an ambassador because he was teaching as a professor at OU (Oklahoma University), in Oklahoma. And I asked him, I said - I want to honor your life. I want to learn from you. If I was to begin to really impact my community, Oklahoma where I'm from and maybe beyond, where would you begin? And he said, I would start with food.

That's so interesting. You know, your concept of partnership is so interesting. I'd like to dive into that a little bit deeper in a little bit. But first, tell us about your organization and what it does, how it works, what it tries to accomplish.

Yes. So, inspired by Ambassador Perkins' example, we set out to ask the right questions more than have the answers. And in 2014, I just basically cold called everyone in the community that worked in food - from the food bank to the food pantries and said ‘help me understand the gaps.’ Help me understand where it's hard to accomplish change. And the term food desert began coming up more and more. And food deserts are communities without grocery stores. So, think of it as the canary in the mine. Sort of when a grocery store goes, the neighborhood is declining. Because they're small margin organizations they have a hard time staying afloat and when they go it's hard to bring them back because you need either a company like a big chain or a small business that doesn't have a lot of resources. And oftentimes that decline continues, and it impacts the community. So, with Food On The Move I basically brought together partners to create an access point in food deserts where it's was all in kind. From food trucks that could bring great, tasty food and give people dignity and excitement and energy, to partners that are doing food safety training and teaching people to cook. And places like Oklahoma State University extension where they train people about how to prepare food because they may not know. And so, all these partners came together, and we basically spent five years just learning and serving people in those communities. And focusing on an environment that was not about raising a bunch of money; it was really about who is already in this space that we can garner relationships with and get to know the communities. And now those events continue to be flagships. We call them food and resource festivals. They are a pay-as-you-can. You show up, you get access to fresh produce, you have food trucks, you have wraparound services. You have people that are in the community, in different nonprofits, for-profits, and government organizations that we all collaborate with. And we reach people where they are while serving and getting to know them and learning from them. And through those relationships, through those events - which we still do - what it's brought us to is the innovation and education side, and ultimately transformation. We realized in order to change food deserts, end food deserts, bring grocery stores back, that we had to get to the heart of the food system. Which is we had to be teaching people to grow things again, rebuild the local foundation of farmers being trained, use new, innovative systems like indoor growing and aquaponics, hydroponics. And basically, we had to kind of build the foundation back that's been lost since post World War II in our community, like many places. And that means a food hub to bridge farmers to distributors. That means training those farmers for the future. And it ultimately means building a new model for a grocery store. So, we are at the heart of that now with a project we call Food Home, where we are building a campus that is like a microcosm of the food system. Hopefully could be the end of this year, we'll see. Construction is always tricky. But, for sure by the start of first quarter next year, we'll be opening a 10,000 square foot urban farm, which is a training facility, and producing hundreds of thousands of pounds of food every year, and this is really the launchpad for future farmers.

My God, I mean, and one of those things you mentioned would be wonderful to dive into and talk about a lot. Because I mean, each is impressive in its own right. But you bring them together, you're probably doing some of the most extensive, impressive things I know of around the country. Let me ask how you address the fundamental issue that we've actually faced ourselves. So communities often feel set upon by outsiders coming in to help. You know, it could be a philanthropy, it could be universities, it could be somebody, you know, who's just coming in well-meaning, wanting to help. But nonetheless may not know the communities or understand the realities of day-to-day life and things like that. And people from communities have often told us that 'we're in the best position to come up with solutions that will work for the members of our own community.' How did you work through those things?

Well, this is always why my story elevator pitch tends to be too long. Because I want to actually talk about that element. It's not super elevator pitchy because what it involves is building relationships and trust and what I first learned from Ambassador Perkins. I'll tell you a small story of his example and it really rocked me. I asked him where would you start if you wanted to change community? Because I'd learned from his story that he had actually done it. He was sent to South Africa at the heart of the Apartheid Movement to with a mission from at the time President Ronald Reagan, to free Nelson Mandela from prison and help dismantle the Apartheid system. This is about as high a mark as anybody could have. And he had no policy. They said you're going to make policy. And what he did was so extraordinary, and I think is the mark of his success. And that's, to answer your question, he said, I recognized that every ambassador had held court. You are one step away from the president of the United States, which means you're always the most powerful person in the room. And other ambassadors, he'd ask them to come to him. But you had this deep divide between Black and white, deep divide between economics. And so, what he did was he told his team when he went to South Africa, he said, put the American flags on the front of the car, roll the windows down and take me to the townships. Take me to the neighborhoods. They need to know I'm here. And he took the time to build real relationships and build trust with communities. Black, white, rich, and poor, you know, old and young. He really did the time. And so that model, though obviously South Africa is a deeply entrenched community that, you know, especially that time.

And this is kind of world politics, but I listened to that. And I thought, wow, we have a divide in our own community. And it's true of so many American cities. And where people, they see an area and they say that's not my community. They're going to come to me. And so, Food On The Move is built on we will build a partnership-based foundation which is like a block party where you walk up, and I'm a musician, I'm a DJ. So, we have a DJ playing music, we have food trucks. It smells great. You have smiling faces. You have a feeling that when you go there, you're not there, like, I need help and I'm in a soup kitchen. It's like there's a community party and you get invited and everyone's available to go there because if you want to give, you can go. If you don't have a dollar in your pocket, you go. And everybody leaves with the same treatment. And that foundation, the way we go about building those relationships, that is the heart and soul of how we are getting to the question and then trying to answer: we need more grocery stores, and we need more farmers. Because we heard it from the neighborhood. And I'll wrap up the answer a little bit which is to say we have multiple community farms as well as our own training farms. And we've worked in middle schools to teach young people to grow things with high-end aquaponics. You know, statistically the worse school in the city. But we've seen it just rocket people to engagement and better education and being fired up to come to school. But the community grow beds are the real test because you can't just drop a community grow bed and say, ‘Hey, isn't this awesome? Here's your grow bed.’ You have to stay engaged with community, but you also have to invite them to be participants. And so, we work with our neighbors. We treat one another as neighbors, and you are right, it is wrought with pick your cliche. You know, the complex of the outsider coming in with money. The contrast between racial issues and economic issues. It's so wrought with problems potentially. But I believe that real solutions are possible when you build relationships.

It sounds like one of the, you didn't say this directly, but one of the most important things you did was listen. Tell me about that a little more.

Well, yes. I mean, I said it. I kind of coined this phrase now because I realize it's so true. We really started with I think good questions, not good answers. And so, the listening... first of all, the listening started with people that were doing work. So, if you went to the food bank, the question wasn't, ‘hey, we're here to help.’ This is what we want to do. It was what's going on? You're the food bank, you guys have been here since the '80s. And hey, you're the health department. Hey, you're a food truck, like, what do you see? And I determined early that we needed to always have three pillars. We need to always have representation of for-profit, non-profit, and government agencies at some level. And so, a food truck is a business, right? They understand how hard it is to get people to show up and make a living, right? And you know, a nonprofit or an agency they know about service, they know about the stats. And frankly, however you are on the political spectrum, the government agencies, whatever they happen to be, they have a role to play. They have, whether big or small. Again, people of different walks of life have different views on that. But they should be a part of the conversation no matter what. And so, that was the first step. And then I like to say, an example Kelly, of kind of the dynamic shift is - if you walk up to somebody you barely know, you're not going to tell them like, ‘hey man, I'm not sure about that shirt. Or you got something in your tooth,’ you know? Or, ‘have you really considered redecorating your house? Like, it's kind of dated.’ Those are things you get to say to friends. You know, you tell a friend, ‘hey man, you know, suck it in. You're taking a picture.’ You know? And so at the foundation, the questions we were asking were also why do you think this has happened? Why is a neighborhood that was a thriving new neighborhood in 1965 now dangerous and in decline. And talking with elders. And they became and have become some of our greatest advocates. And you know what? It's not flashy. You show up and you just keep showing up. And you show up when it's rainy and you show up when it's cold. And at some point people go. Wow. Like they're actually going to do this. So, you know, we're still doing it. We're not there. There's no finish line on this.

So consistent with what we found in our own work about the importance of showing up. I'm happy that you raised that particular term. Speaking of terms, when I introduced you there, I used this term that I pulled right from your website about the legacy issues created by food insecurity. What do you mean by that?

Yes. So legacy issues. You know, people develop heart disease, diabetes, frankly anxiety, ADHD/ADD things. A lot of stuff that's diet and a lot of things that's habit. So, if you grow up in a house that nobody ever cooked really. Because the neighborhood lost its store. Mom and dad were busy. Maybe a single parent home. You know, look, my wife and I have blessed, we have seven children. Wow. And we have a full house. And even with, you know, plenty of resources and plenty of support, it's still hard to do right. It's still hard to eat well. You know, you're running and you're gunning. And so legacy issues are habits. Eating habits. Consumption habits. By the way, poverty does not discriminate on race. Poverty hits whoever it hits, right? And so, Black and white, different backgrounds you'd be speaking with somebody that, 'like I've never seen a red bell pepper. I didn't know that existed. I've never seen What is That's a kiwi. What's a kiwi? I don't want to eat that.' You know? And so, the legacy issues are health, habits, education. Also, if you've never had access to resources, if you've never had an uncle that became an attorney or somebody that knew how to manage money because your neighborhood was a history of decline. You just don't know anybody. Or even worse, you have communities because of poverty that everybody in your family knows somebody that was in jail or was headed to jail because of their climate, their environment. And things that occur because of limited, you know, resources. And things that happen among, you know, communities with less available to them. And you have to take judgment and just throw it across the room. Just completely eject any sense of judgment. And recognize that somebody that's grown up with those different parameters, they're carrying those around. So, you're trying to restart. You're trying to begin again. And say, you know, let's get us back to having as little baggage behind us. Let's get diabetes out of the way. Let's get heart disease (out of the way) and we're going to do it by eating good food. Or getting educated. And it's not going to happen quick. It's going to happen through probably an entire generation if we're lucky.

Now, let me ask a related question about dignity because this comes up in the way you've spoken about this. And in the way our country has addressed hunger. I mean, going back to when the War on Hunger began really in the 1960s, it was a nation's compassionate response to a very real issue that so many people faced. But the solution wasn't to try to give people more financial means so they could buy their own food and not have to face this. It was to give them food. But to do so in ways that really did destroy dignity in many ways. How are you addressing that and how does that term figure into the work you're doing?

Well, I love the way you couch that. And unfortunately, among these discussions, people glom onto certain aspects if they have their own sort of paradigm that's ingrained. And one, you have to throw out ideology and focus on, I think, common sense. And the short answer is we believe in teach a man to fish as the philosophy. There is no way to ultimately change things if your goal is not aligned with creating opportunity, creating, transitioning folks that have not been able to support their families, to finding ways to transform that. And that comes by getting to know one another. That comes with creating education. And that comes with looking at the whole system. And so, when I brought sort of to my team this answer or this proposal of why we need to build Food Home. The Food Home campus. It wasn't just that I had some epiphany that I walked into the desert and came back with an idea. It was built around the work we were doing. And we already had somebody that wanted to build a grocery store. We already had somebody that was farm focused, thinking about food hub to bridge the gap with farmers. We had a study that was done by a local foundation that said we don't have enough farmers right now to get all the local food. And we need local because it's more affordable. We shouldn't be paying for our lettuce to travel from California to Oklahoma. We don't need to do that. And so, dignity and building the transition, the future, is about looking at the whole and being willing to do, I think, the hard work. Which is to realize our food, our food economy has to change. And recognizing that opportunity is not a bad word, you know? Economic investment in communities. These are good things. And at the same time, you meet people where they are. You meet them right where they are.

And when COVID happened, our pitch about building Food Home and building the food systems and training people to grow things, it pivoted a little bit. Because people saw for the first time in a generation what it's like when the food's not there. Like you're in Oklahoma and we were the distribution partner for the USDA doing Farm to Family boxes. Food On The Move was. We had trucks that were designated for us from farmers that had been supported by government purchasing to bring food to food banks, and to resources, to communities. And we had a truck that was a state away and we were supposed to go get that truck and give it to people that needed it in our neighborhood in Oklahoma. And we were going guys, if we had a food home, a food hub, a bridge between local farmers, every community would know where their food is coming from. And so there is a food security side of this discussion as well which is that we need to have sovereignty. We need to have structure that gives us access and that builds long-term economic sustainability. And Oklahoma is a great example of this. We used to have a very thriving local farm community system. All my grandparents, my parents, they went to farmer's markets. They bought great food. And many of those folks working in that land because there's not a food hub that bridges this medium farmer to the distributors - they've lost economic ability to scale. And they do better to sell their land to a developer and grow sod or put a bunch of houses on it. And that has got to change.

You know, you reinforce the idea that there's a lot of ingenuity in communities. And lots of good ideas about how to solve the problems. And many times, the people that are wanting to help communities can be helped best by just supporting the ideas that are already there. Because, as I said, we've encountered so much ingenuity from people in the communities who've been thinking about these issues for a long time. Let me ask something. You kind of began this by talking about food deserts and grocery stores leaving areas. And you've come up with a lot of creative ways of compensating for the loss of grocery stores. But what about correcting that problem. What about getting more grocery stores back into these areas? Is that something that you guys deal with?

That's ultimately our mission. I mean, I say the mission is the solution so that I don't want to put it into one square box called a store. But the store departing is at the heart of the key question we're asking. Why? And so, the Food Home campus is a four phased vision. And the first two phases are underway, or about to be open with the food hub and the urban farm. The second two are a community hub, which is teaching and training people to prepare and cook food better, getting urban and rural together. And the last phase, which started as the first, by the way. It began as the first thinking we're just going to get a store. We realized you had to get the food chain right before you could build a better store. And so the model for a store, we believe, is going to be probably a hybrid between a fresh delivery and a physical place that is there living right at the heart of a neighborhood. Let's do an update on this here as we get to opening that door, because I believe what we've seen is the umbrella that allows the small store is still needed. That's, kind of, we're stepping in with a food hub. We're stepping in with a bigger footprint, buying power, larger volume, purchasing local. But really entrepreneurs where single operators are invested in owning and operating that store. They're also committed more to that store. It's not just a corporate line item. I'm interested in studying, frankly, some of the really smart food franchisees that have understood the power of creating economic models that are sustainable. But you have to connect them to a bigger umbrella to help support that medium grocer. It's going to be a combination of those things. But yeah, we have to get stores where you can actually buy your food and it is affordable and it is quality.

Quality becomes an interesting issue here. And I haven't looked at the research literature on this for a little while. When I did, there was some research looking at what happened to the quality of nutrition in neighborhoods where grocery stores had left or had come back in. And it didn't seem to make a lot of difference in terms of overall nutrition profile of the people there. It provided some real benefits. Access. People didn't have to go a long way to get their groceries. Costs tended to come down, so there were some real benefits aside from nutrition. But just focusing on nutrition, of course a big supermarket brings more fresh fruits and vegetables. But it also brings aisle after aisle of highly processed, highly calorie dense foods that aren't necessarily helpful. So, the fact that you're working on the healthy food part of the equation and finding ways to get foods from farms to people, not necessarily from a big food processing plant. From farms to people, is really an important part of the overall picture, isn't it?

Fresh produce is the sort of heart and soul of the food dilemma. And so yes, it is very, very tricky. You know, a little bit like how do you raise a child to have good habits? We're all trying to have good habits and we still eat hamburgers and fries because they're delicious. So, going back to dignity, I do not believe, and this is my perspective mixed with the data and the experience. I don't believe, the opinion side, in deciding whether or not people deserve certain things. And early on when we started the food pop-up events, I suggested, 'hey, call the food trucks. Have the pizza truck come have because they're awesome and they're mobile and they can show up.' And we had some folks that were partners that kind of went well, but that's greasy food and that's, you know, it's X, Y, and Z. And this is what I said to that: it's like, look, our job is first to meet people and treat them like we would want to be treated. And then we work on the produce. And so, with a grocery store, you're absolutely right. You can't just drop good food somewhere and think everybody's going to get healthy. Most people are going to eat what they like. But mostly the barrier to entry on healthy food is economics. People do not have the dollars to buy the kale or to buy the fresh tomatoes. Most people actually do, find that they will, you know, consume that food. But you have to get the generational conversation happening where families have grown up seeing fresh produce. Cooking with fresh produce. And they can actually buy it. And that's not going to happen unless we get food closer. Because the closer food allows us to cut down the margin that's going to transportation and make quality food more affordable.

Makes good sense. So you've been at this a while. What have you learned? How do you look at things differently now than when you started?

I learned that creating change is not for the faint of heart. First of all, you better really sort of revel in a challenge. And also, we've touched on several of the elements of what I've learned. You have to build trust. You can't expect people to just change just because you say so. You also have to be really interested in learning. Like, not just learning because you have to, but you have to be interested in understanding. And I think that's at the heart of getting to solutions. It's not even just asking the right question. It's actually being interested in the answer to that question. Like it's wanting to genuinely know. And so, these are all things I put in and I'll say the last, which is not the sexy one. It's difficult to build a good organization that's sustainable. And we've spent the second half of the Food On The Move journey building a strong team, hiring the right CEO, building a great board, having governance, having sustainability in your culture. I mean, these are business things and you know, I'm the founder. I'm a board member. I'm at the heart of who we are, but we've had to build a team. And so, anybody that wants to make things sustainable or create sustainable change, and this would be my last takeaway to your question, is you have to grow past yourself. You have to be anticipating giving that away. Growing much, much further than the bottleneck of the big idea person. But you also have to stay in stewardship mode. So, that's kind of where I am now is how do we make this continue to grow towards the solutions we're hoping for? And how do I stay engaged, fired up, focused, inspired to get the team involved, but also trust people on the team to do what they have been asked to do.

I'd like to pick up on something that you mentioned along the way, which is work that you're doing on urban farming, and you mentioned things like hydroponics and aquaponics. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Wo we came across hydroponics and aquaponics because when you look at growing methodologies, one of the challenges we have is our eating habits have changed. People don't just eat seasonally. We've become accustomed to getting strawberries year-round and getting all these different flavors. And you can't expect that that's just going to happen. We're not just going to change that and make everybody eat the harvest of Ohio or the harvest of Tulsa. Like we all expect good food when we do go to the store. The economics of food means people are ready to buy certain things. And for a sustainable grocery store, you need to have the things that people will buy. So, aquaponics and hydroponics are new technologies that were pioneered to create high production and high volume in areas that might have different climates. You can grow year round. The things that grow best are leafy greens, but you can grow all kinds of things. Tomatoes, you know, vining plants. Cucumbers. You can grow incredible amounts of food. A large portion of your food can be grown through these indoor systems, and they cost more to start than a traditional dirt farm. But once established they produce year round, they are more resilient with obviously pests and weather and things like that. With aquaponics and hydroponics you have systems that naturally are organic. They need to be organic because that's how they function, you know? Fish tanks, you know, that are naturally fertilizing. The fish are giving the plants what they need. This is cool stuff. So, we were led to those systems because sustainability and better food and more of it for small communities in a place like Oklahoma where you have hot and cold, and if you can grow year round, then you could have a cash crop that somebody could build a business with and provide better for that store. And not be buying it from Mexico or California. I mean, God bless Mexico and California, but we're putting too much food on a truck. And it's older than it should be, and it's sprayed with stuff because it needs to look good when it shows up, and that's hurting everybody. So, we need new methodologies.

Well, and not only are you producing food, but it's a community driven solution because it's right there. People in the community can own it, can run it, can work at it, and things like that. And just it's mere presence probably signals something very positive that is good economically good nutritionally, but also good psychologically, I think. So, let me ask one parting question. Hunger has been an issue in the United States for a long, long time. And it continues to be. And now there have been even more cutbacks than before and the SNAP program and things like that. Are you optimistic that we can address this problem and do you think a local very creative and innovative local solution that you're talking about in Oklahoma, can that be exported and replicated and are you optimistic? Let me just ask you that.

Are you optimistic is an interesting question because I don't think we can afford not to be optimistic. If you ask a parent, are you optimistic your child will eat, there's no choice there. Your child will eat. Or you will die trying to feed them. And I've spoken to, you know, leadership groups and rotary clubs and nonprofits about different aspects of my journey. And I think the heart of this issue is to not make it an option that we don't solve this. We cannot talk about feeding our community. And by the way, I don't mean feeding them just like I said, through nonprofit, but changing the culture and eliminating hunger in this country. And really, it's facing hunger. We can't make it an option that we don't. My perspective is, I think it's going to take, solutions like what Food On the Move is doing, which is at the heart of understanding our food systems. And we are definitely building. Everything we're doing is to try and have a model hoping that what we're doing in Oklahoma, which has a lot of parallels to, you know, whether you're talking about North Carolina or Ohio or Missouri, or Houston. All these communities have a lot of similarities. We believe that if we can show that you build trust, you then develop models, you then train future farmers. You build an infrastructure to launch and bridge the gap between small and medium farmers. And then here's a model for a better store that's sustainable. We believe that we're going to be able to show that that is a long road, but the road that is maybe less traveled but needed. And that could be the difference that's needed. So, it's fingers are crossed.

BIO

Tulsa native Taylor Hanson grew up in a home where artistic expression was encouraged and celebrated. At the age of nine he, along with brothers Isaac and Zac, formed the band HANSON. Just five years later their debut album was released and the lead single, “MMMBop”, hit number one in 27 countries, and earned the group 3 GRAMMY nominations. At the age of 20, he co-founded 3CG Records, allowing the band to produce music on their own terms, and is recognized as a longtime advocate for independent music globally. The group continues to produce meaningful music for its ever-growing fanbase. Hanson possesses a deep commitment to social change. In 2007 he inspired others to make an impact through simple actions, co-founding non-profit Take The Walk, combating extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2014, he founded Food On The Move, which provides access, education, and innovative solutions, to transform food deserts and the legacy issues created by food insecurity. Since its founding, Food On The Move has distributed millions of pounds of fresh produce to members of the Oklahoma community, and is a leader in the movement to reshape sustainable local food systems. He has been instrumental in a number of community-oriented music initiatives, including contributing to “The Sounds of Black Wall Street”, to commemorate the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, spearheading “For Women Life Freedom” highlighting the human-rights atrocities taking place in Iran, and currently serves as is a National Trustee of the Recording Academy. Hanson, his wife Natalie, and their seven children, make their home in Tulsa, where he was recently named Tulsan of the Year.