Impact Interview: Rebecca Gildiner

Name: Rebecca Gildiner

Role/Function: Director Of Sustainability, Daily Harvest

What She’s Currently Working On: 

I’m working with the incredible team at Daily Harvest to scale organic, regenerative agriculture and get more diverse, nutritious ingredients into people’s diets. Since my arrival in March, I’ve been working collaboratively across the company to build our sustainability program, measuring our impact and evaluating how we can make progress and drive transformational change in the food system. I’m particularly excited about the sourcing program we’re building to help address barriers that farmers face transitioning land into organic production. We’re taking a place-based, crop-specific, farmer-centric approach by engaging farmers and values-aligned suppliers that we hope will result in market creation for transitional crops and an increase in organic land growing fruits and vegetables in the US.

In my spare time, I’m running a Women in Sustainability book club where I get to pontificate on the tensions of capitalism and sustainability with some of the most intelligent, female sustainability leaders that I look up to and learn from constantly. Right now we’re reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and I’m devouring every word of it. I’m also on the Junior Board of the Food Education Fund, which enriches the lives of public high school students in NYC through phenomenal, student-informed culinary training and programming. These students are going to change the way food looks in very important ways, and it’s humbling to be a small part of their journeys.

1. What was the “aha” moment that sparked your interest in social impact? 

A part of me always knew that my career would focus on impact in some form, but it took some time for me to realize that it would manifest through the food system. I can point to the perhaps cliché experience of watching the film King Corn in a college classroom. This was in 2008, pre-Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and arguably before the groundswell of the popular food movement. At the time I was studying neuroscience, gender studies and eating disorders and was intrigued by the cultural influences of our relationship with food, but writing a paper on corn subsidies was like a big ‘click’ in my young, expanding mind around all the influences that shape our environment, our health and those cultures I was so deeply examining. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, in hindsight it was watching that film and writing that paper that were my awakening to the concept of a food system – that connected the dots between my social, environmental and economic understanding of diets, and that sparked my intrigue in understanding and improving it.

That film may have been the lightbulb moment, but I’d say the ink really dried after I took an independent year of international travel after college, volunteering on farms, engaging in paid commercial harvesting work in the fruit industry of New Zealand, and seeing the way people engaged with their food in places like Tonga, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. A glimpse into the backbreaking, sun-baking and even pesticide-exposing work of being a farmworker, the reward of preparing meals for people with vegetables from our backyard and the experience of eating food cooked under the ground on a tiny Pacific island brought that academic study of food systems to life for me in a way that meant there was no turning back. Simultaneously, my love and appreciation for nature was intersecting with my love and appreciation for food, and I recognized a need to take on work that acknowledged this connection and protected both. 

2. How did you break into the social impact space? 

My first job was in NYC education policy, but I knew my calling was food, so I found ways to engage in my local food system through volunteering with grassroots organizations like the Brooklyn Food Coalition and Battery Urban Farm. I soon found a way to bridge my exposure to and learnings of the education system into a role at Red Rabbit, a social enterprise working to fix the school food system. There I was able to build and scale a food education program that, while meaningful, inspired me to explore how to drive change more on the systems level. I returned to school to pursue my Master of Environmental Management to focus on the environmental impact of food systems and understand how to put the responsibility more on companies rather than consumers. It was this postgraduate experience that allowed me to pivot into corporate sustainability, bringing my experience and education across food systems together with my skills in strategic thinking and collaboration to drive change in the food industry.

I’m a big believer in the Japanese concept of Ikigai, or “reason for being.” A job in social impact isn’t just about the cause you’re passionate about. You’ll best find your way by knowing yourself. In graduate school, I did a lot of work to identify my strengths, beyond just my passions, which gave me the self-awareness and confidence to find a career path that was impactful because I was best suited to drive change in this way. I think it’s easy as a young person to feel like one job will always be your job, but I’ve explored roles across the food system and each has gifted me with learnings that led me to the next and made my strengths clearer. My advice would be to pursue each role you get with curiosity and an open mind, paying attention to what you’re good at, what you enjoy and where you’re suited to drive change in a way others are not. Follow those learnings and no doubt you’ll find your way.

3. What most excites you about the social impact space right now?

I’m really happy to see soil getting its long-overdue moment in the spotlight. While I have skepticism about the way regenerative agriculture is being co-opted and greenwashed in some cases, I do feel a groundswell of attention towards the soil that for years our extractive, yield-focused food industry overlooked. This understanding of soil health over just quality, an awareness that there is so much more life and interactions below ground than meet the human eye and the realization that if we care for our soil it will help absorb the carbon consequences of our human activities – it feels like it’s all finally making the headlines. (Dirt to Soil is a great place to get an entry-level soil education). In general, I hope this is getting us closer to understanding our need to have a more appreciative and reciprocal relationship with the planet and its resources, an indigenous approach to life that we would be smart to work hard to return to and which I highly recommend reading about in Braiding Sweetgrass (no regrets about referencing this book twice now). [Ed. note: Braiding Sweetgrass was also featured in Reconsidered’s 2020 Sustainable Business Summer Reading List]

Lastly, I’m feeling hopeful that our awareness of environmental justice is increasing. For a long time we’ve had a very white-centered way of looking at social and environmental problems, and the fact that the words “climate justice” are coming out of our President’s mouth feels like progress. It’s time to center the most vulnerable communities in our solutions and bring an intersectional lens to every problem. I recommend reading All We Can Save and Farming While Black, and watching A Growing Culture’s Hunger for Justice Series to expand your knowledge in these areas. If you’re more of a social media person, be sure to follow Leah Thomas’ @intersectionalenvironmentalist.

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