The Book That Brought Me Here: On Feeding the Future and What Comes Next
For those who've been asking how my forthcoming book Feeding the Future: Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves came to be, this is the story behind it. It's about the questions that have followed me across law, policy, and advocacy; the un-learnings that reshaped how I understand systems change; and the conviction that food is not just about sustenance, but about relationship. Writing this book over the past three years has been my way of finding orientation in a time when old maps no longer fit.
Why I Wrote Feeding the Future
My path into food systems work was never linear.
I began as a lawyer trained to break complexity into manageable parts. Food insecurity here, obesity there, and soil degradation somewhere else. Each problem had its own policy lever, its own technical fix waiting to be pulled. My first real entry point was researching how corporate strategies shape what children eat and what parents are led to believe is nourishing. What I found wasn't just about advertising. It was about power and the stories we're sold. Food marketing preys on trust and familiarity, using emotional appeal and gaps in regulation to shape consumption while sidestepping accountability. It was my first lesson in how deeply food is entangled with everything else—health, culture, power, belonging. The problem wasn't just bad actors or poor oversight. It was the way of thinking that built these systems in the first place.
Learning to See Differently
When I moved from the urban Northeast to teach law in Indiana, surrounded by endless fields of corn and soy, my understanding shifted from abstract to visceral. These fields weren't feeding local communities. They were feeding industrial livestock and distant markets. Living beside them, not just studying them, made the system impossible to ignore. It was the air, the soil, the water, and the neighbors. Working with people resisting factory farms and building local food systems, I saw that food is never a single issue. It's where economic logics, environmental harm, and social disconnection converge. It's also where renewal can begin. Immersing myself in the full cycle of food, from production to waste, revealed a sobering pattern. This isn't just an environmental crisis. It's a planetary one. Humanity is now using about 1.7 times what Earth can replenish each year. But the numbers only tell part of the story. Beneath them lies a deeper truth: our economies borrow from the future while concealing the costs. Like a planetary Ponzi scheme, we call this progress while deferring the reckoning.
When Knowledge Isn't Enough
For years, I believed that once the evidence was clear, change would follow. That policymakers would act. That corporations would align profit with health. That reason and data would be enough. So I wrote policy papers, taught courses, and joined others calling out injustice and ecological harm. But over time, I realized that knowledge doesn't automatically lead to change. Systems built on extraction and denial don't transform because of better information. They transform when relationships, incentives, and imaginations shift. That realization led me out of academia and into advocacy—first as Policy Director at the Good Food Institute, which championed technological alternatives to animal agriculture. The idea was seductive: if we could produce meat without animals, we could solve climate change, hunger, and cruelty in one stroke. It was innovation as salvation. But soon, I began to see the cracks. The same industrial mindset that had created the problem was now being sold as the solution. We were still separating life into controllable parts—farmers from land, animals from ecosystems, ethics from economics. That's when I realized that we can't fix a relational crisis with technological control.
Seeing the Pattern Beneath the System
Stepping back, I began to study the "polycrisis," the interlocking breakdown of ecological, economic, and social systems. What I found mirrored what I had experienced firsthand: fragmentation everywhere. In the U.S., more than twenty federal agencies oversee different parts of the food system. One handles meat, another vegetables, another advertising. None see the whole. That bureaucratic fragmentation mirrors our mental fragmentation—the belief that we can address food insecurity, chronic disease, or soil loss separately. But these aren't isolated problems. They are symptoms of disconnection: between humans and land, health and economy, culture and ecology. And I realized that I had been part of that fragmentation by studying one aspect at a time, advocating for one solution, while never quite grasping the wholeness that was breaking down or the wholeness that might be restored.
What Feeding the Future Is About
Feeding the Future is an invitation to see differently by stepping out of the industrial mindset of control and efficiency and into a relational one grounded in participation, reciprocity, and care. Rather than offering a blueprint or steps to follow, it asks: What becomes possible when we stop trying to fix the food system and instead learn how to live well within it?
The book explores the false narratives that define our food conversations:
That we must "feed the world" rather than repair the relationships that sustain it
That progress means more technology rather than more reciprocity
That sustainability is a technical goal rather than a cultural practice
That agriculture is inherently destructive rather than an act of stewardship
And it asks the deeper question beneath them all: What if the real work isn't to save or fix the system, but to restore our capacity to belong within it?
Through stories from regenerative farmers, Indigenous food sovereignty movements, and unexpected coalitions, the book documents what's already emerging at the edges: ways of growing, eating, and relating to land that don't require extracting from the future to nourish the present.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for people who sense that the stories we've been told about food, health, and progress are too small.
For farmers and food workers building alternatives in the cracks of the current system.
For parents trying to nourish children in a toxic food landscape.
For policymakers and practitioners tired of polarization and superficial fixes.
For activists shifting from resistance toward regeneration.
And for anyone longing for coherence amid collapse, and for a way to act with integrity in complexity.
The industrial food system is collapsing under its own weight: soil erosion, water scarcity, chronic disease, corporate capture. But new patterns are already emerging including regenerative farms, Indigenous food sovereignty movements, regional cooperatives, and mutual aid networks. We are already living in the transition. What we need now are navigational tools and ways of seeing, sensing, and acting that can help us find coherence when old maps no longer fit. Feeding the Future is my offering toward that work.
What I’m Learning Now (and What Comes Next)
Feeding the Future explores what I learned over fifteen years working within food systems: how separation became our dominant paradigm, and how regenerative alternatives are already taking root. But finishing the book didn’t bring closure; it opened new questions. If we can now name the problem and glimpse the alternatives, how do we actually navigate the space between them? Not just as individuals making different food choices, but as communities learning to build coalitions across the very divides that keep us locked in extractive patterns.
What inner and collective capacities do we need to work with complexity rather than trying to control it? To form unlikely alliances? To hold both power analysis and openness to emergence? To stay in relationship through tension, uncertainty, and difference?
These questions have become the frontier of my current work, what I call post-partisan practice. It grows out of everything I’ve learned through food systems, law, peacebuilding, and coalition work, but it extends beyond food into every arena where transformation depends on working through complexity together including democracy, health, education, and climate. In that sense, Feeding the Future is the foundation: it names what must change and why. The next work is about how we change, together.
An Invitation
If you read Feeding the Future and find yourself asking, yes, but how do I actually do this? How do I navigate polarization in my community? How do I build coalitions that can shift power? How do I hold complexity without collapsing into simplicity?—those are the very questions I’m living into now.
This spring, I’ll be offering the first cohort of Post-Partisan Pathways to Human and Planetary Health, an eight-week journey for practitioners ready to deepen their capacity to navigate complexity, facilitate dialogue across difference, and build regenerative coalitions in their own contexts. The book establishes why new ways of seeing are needed; the course cultivates the practices to live them.
(More details coming soon. If you’d like to be notified, email me at negowetti@gmail.com or leave a comment.)
Writing this book taught me something simple yet profound: we can’t think our way out of relational breakdown. We have to practice our way into relational repair. The book is an offering of what I’ve learned so far, but it’s also a threshold. The work that follows is more embodied, more relational, and more emergent.
Food was the great teacher that revealed how power, culture, and possibility interconnect, but it was never the endpoint. Now I’m asking: How do we help more people make these shifts? Not just in food, but in how we practice democracy, health, education, and economic life? How do we learn to live together differently on this Earth? That’s the work I’m here for now.
A Shared Threshold
I share this story of my meandering path, the painful unlearnings, the sense of both completion and beginning, because I believe many of us are in a similar place. We’ve spent years building expertise in one domain whether its food, climate, health, education, or organizing. We’ve studied the problem deeply, earned the credentials, written the papers. And yet, we’re sensing that the real work is something else. It’s no longer about having the best analysis or the sharpest critique. It’s about cultivating capacity in ourselves, our communities, and our systems to stay in relationship through complexity. To bridge divides without erasing difference. To trust emergence more than control. It’s about becoming the kinds of people who can midwife the transition we’re already living through. If that resonates, you’re not alone. Feeding the Future, and the work emerging from it, are for us.
Feeding the Future will be published by Georgetown University Press on January 6, 2026. But the conversation begins here on this Substack, in the gardens, kitchens, classrooms, and meeting rooms where people are already seeding regenerative futures. If you're here, you're part of that work. Thank you for staying curious, for asking difficult questions, and for believing that regeneration—the real, messy, imperfect ongoing process of regeneration—is still possible.
I'm deeply honored to be on this journey with you. And I'm excited to see what we build together beyond the book, into the lived practice of transformation.
With gratitude,
Nicole
P.S. If you’d like to pre-order Feeding the Future, you can do so here. Every pre-order helps the book find its way to the readers who might most need it. And if this essay resonates, please share it with someone you’re in conversation with. Paradigm shifts don’t happen through persuasion; they happen through relationship and through conversation and connection. Thank you for being part of that work.
