Add Passion and Stir

There are over 13 million kids heading back to school this month in the U.S. that are living with hunger. Please be inspired by two episodes from our 2022 series on Food is the Most Important School Supply. Hear directly from kids affected by hunger and teachers and school administrators witnessing hunger in the classroom, as well as changemakers from federal, state, and local government that are...

Ashley Graham, Development Director at New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Foundation, and Rhonda Jackson, Louisiana Director for the No Kid Hungry Campaign, describe the path from deep social inequities to Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans’ recovery and resurgence. Graham talks about Share Our Strength’s role in sparking collaborations and initiatives to support the rebuilding efforts, including bringi...

Chef, food writer, food critic, and author Ruth Reichl discusses the transformative power of food and culture. “One of the great things to me about food is that you have the ability to touch these moments of grace throughout the day simply by biting into a perfect peach and going, ‘oh my God, I'm glad I'm alive,’" she marvels. Her new book, "The Paris Novel,” explores the connection between food a...

On this very special encore presentation of Add Passion and Stir we will revisit our conversation Pierre Ferrari, the former President and CEO of Heifer International, and Matt Bell, chef and owner of South on Main restaurant in Little Rock, as they share insights about creating value in poor communities. Since the first airing of this episode, Pierre has now retired and is writing a book about en...

Activist, author, and nonprofit founder Sam Daley-Harris has been using and training people on transformational advocacy for almost 50 years and is optimistic about America’s future. “With transformational advocacy, you're trained, encouraged, and succeed at doing things as an advocate you never thought you could do, like meeting with a member of Congress and bringing them on board to your issue,”...

Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion, talks about how his nonprofit is providing access to financial systems for people all over the world who currently do not have access to tools like bank accounts, loans, or digital financial transactions. “Two billion people are left out of and poorly served by the global financial system. Their lives are so much harder than they have to be, and we're...

Mayor Sharon Weston Broome of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Mayor Mattie Parker of Fort Worth, Texas are Chair and Vice-Chair of the Mayors Alliance to End Childhood Hunger, a bipartisan alliance of almost 400 mayors from across the country. “I think the first thing that the Alliance capitalizes on is a firm understanding that the most powerful thing Americans can use is their bully pulpit to any cau...

India’s children are hungry. Gauri Devidayal, Co-Founder and Director of The Food Matters Group, and Pankaj Jethwani, physician and Executive VP at W Health Ventures, are working to solve that problem. Devidayal is using her platform to draw attention and funding to the cause while Jethwani is helps run holistic nutrition programs. “I think India's one of the greatest nations when it comes to hosp...

Charles Watson, CEO of Tropical Smoothie Café, talks about how the restaurant industry is uniquely positioned to make a difference on child hunger. “The American consumer is demanding and one of the things that they're demanding - which is good - is purpose,” says Watson. “[They’ll] give you their money… but [they] also want to see that you're giving back and that you're doing something positive.”...

Jamila Robinson, the new Editor-in-Chief of Bon Appétit, discusses her vision for the magazine and more broadly how food can be a powerful force for good in the world. “I'm very curious about how other people experience food and how food drives culture for other people, and that curiosity allows for other people to feel seen, and so it also changes the way that we approach stories,” she says. She...

Well before the school year ends for American children , advocates like USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services Stacy Dean and Hawaii-based consumer advocate and substance abuse counselor Zahava “Zee” Zaidoff are planning how to feed kids over the summer. “The experience of hunger, in and of itself, is a terrible thing. But hunger amongst children is so much more dev...

Food and culture writer Alicia Kennedy and chef advocacy trainer and Table81 founder Katherine Miller discuss food justice and how we can make important improvements in our food system. “We operate with this idea that we should be able to have any [food] we want whenever we want it, at whatever price that we wanna pay for it,” says Miller. “It's an artificially constructed system that keeps our fo...

Daron Babcock, CEO of Bonton Farms located in a low-income neighborhood in South Dallas. Bonton Farms is one of the largest urban farms in the United States and its programs are addressing a variety of barriers residents face including housing, education, nutrition, and economic self-sufficiency. “[Systemic inequity] is built on the faulty idea that there's this American dream that everybody can a...

Jimmy Chen, founder/CEO of Propel and Ofek Lavian, founder/CEO of Forage, explain how they are harnessing the power of technology to ensure more people can easily access government food benefits. “We believe that well-fed people have many problems, but hungry people have only one,” saysk Lavian. Both companies make it easier for people to access and maximize benefits online and through apps. “We b...

Bestselling author Thomas Kostigen talks about climate change and specifically how we can all decrease our carbon footprints by making different food choices. “If we were to embrace more types of food rather than what is just basically pushed upon us by the food system, then we might have a chance to change things in a bigger way,” he says. ““It isn't that easy to understand how much [each] food s...

The pain and suffering children in poverty endure, is a choice.  NOT their choice, not their parents’ choice, but a policy choice made by politicians in Washington DC.  In this very special episode of Add Passion and Stir, we will examine the plight of the millions of American children who live in poverty and struggle with hunger.  We provide a 360o view of the issues from many pers...

In this very special episode of Add Passion and Stir, we are going to talk about challenges and solutions in the fight for equity in America. We found three incredibly compelling stories that address the solvable problem of inequity in all its forms in the United States. We will hear from Bonton Farms CEO Daron Babcock, Investigative Journalist Aldore Collier, and Dr. Michael McAfee...

In this special encore presentation, we re-visit our conversation with CNN political commentator S.E. Cupp, who shares her perspectives on the current events in the Middle East, her own mental health challenges, and ending child hunger. “Stand up for your friends, because they're hurting right now, and they need every voice they need, every hug they need, every text or email or call you can make,”...

Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, talks with us about the science around trauma and toxic stress in child development. “I never talk about toxic stress or excessive stress activation without also talking about adaptation and resilience and the fact that you can build resilience against that,” he says. “There's huge variability and sensitivity to t...

CNN political commentator S.E. Cupp shares her perspectives on the current events in the Middle East, her own mental health challenges, and ending child hunger. “Stand up for your friends, because they're hurting right now, and they need every voice they need, every hug they need, every text or email or call you can make,” she says about the war between Israel and Hamas. “Problems like hunger and...

Dan Pallotta talks with us about the conversation he ignited with his 2013 TED Talk about the way nonprofit organizations are funded. “We want the nonprofit sector to solve huge problems. We want the nonprofit sector to be able to dream gigantic dreams,” he says. However, there are still many problems with how nonprofits are evaluated and how people and other entities choose to fund them. “I would...

Aldore Collier, former editor at Ebony and Jet magazines, speaks with Billy and Debbie Shore about his recent expose article about the racist roots of health problems in Metcalfe Park, Milwaukee, WI. “Residents talk about being stifled by an “invisible net” that blocks advancement and makes it nearly impossible to maintain good health,” Collier wrote. He describes the inaction by local and state g...

Daron Babcock, CEO of Bonton Farms located in a low-income neighborhood in South Dallas. Bonton Farms is one of the largest urban farms in the United States and its programs are addressing a variety of barriers residents face including housing, education, nutrition, and economic self-sufficiency. “[Systemic inequity] is built on the faulty idea that there's this American dream that everybody can a...

James Beard Award-winning food writer Mark Bittman talks about the relationship between food and critical issues like climate change, public health and social justice. “You can’t fix any justice issues, environmental issues, nutritional issues without fixing food. Food is at the center of just about everything,” claims Bittman. “It’s not going to happen from the top down. The push has to come from...