Food for Thought: The Impact of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic in Conversation with Professor Emily M. Broad Leib

Written By Avani Rai, and originally published in The Harvard Undergraduate Law Review‘s Spring 2024 Edition.

Emily M. Broad Leib is a Clinical Professor of Law, Director of Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, and Founding Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the nation’s first law school clinic dedicated to addressing the diverse array of issues within the U.S.’ food system. Through a hands-on approach focused on policy-driven solutions, she has championed community-led food system change, reduction in food waste, food access, and equity and sustainability in food production. In this interview, Broad Leib explores the nuances of the novel field of food law, the successes she’s experienced with her Clinic, and opportunities for students interested in the field.

The interview below was conducted in the Spring of 2024. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): You’ve served as the Director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy clinic since 2010 — how would you define the field of food policy and law and its primary objectives and principles?

Emily Broad Leib (ELB): I graduated law school in 2008, and then I spent two years in rural Mississippi doing a fellowship doing community-based work at the intersection of universities working in the Mississippi Delta and then community-based organizations. That’s where I got into food, and a lot of the work that I did started there. I came back to Harvard in 2010, and then during that academic year, started the clinic because I realized there’s a lot to do in food.

Food law is really a functional field. And what I mean by that is that for too long, we didn’t really think about food law and policy or study it as a whole. But I think to understand the major forces and policies affecting what we buy, eat, waste, and produce, you have to look at the laws regulating every aspect of the food system. So, I think that is what’s been novel over the last 150-20 years in this field –– looking at the agriculture side, food safety and labeling, how food is presented to the consumers, the consumer health and wellbeing side, and the waste side of it. And we’re teaching it in a way so that students are understanding that there exists this array of laws that are regulating each of those elements of the food supply chain.

HULR: You spearheaded HLS’s Food, Law, and Policy clinic. What was it like leading that at HLS but also nationally, given that at the time it was a fairly novel idea?

ELB: When I was initially explaining to my former professors, who are now my colleagues, that I was interested in this area of food law, a lot of them would say, “that seems like that’s such a small, niche area.” When I said that, they were thinking, “you’re helping people get more arugula at farmer’s markets or something.” They just couldn’t really wrap their head around what it all entails. I think we’ve actually seen a fair amount of growth in the US since. My clinic was the first one in the country, but we’ve seen a fair amount of growth in courses and clinics. And the biggest takeaway there has been that the US and Canada are the regions with the most teaching and kind of focus on this in academia, but there’s something going on in every single region.

HULR: Putting yourself back in your shoes in 2010, considering that the field was relatively new, how did you navigate developing the curriculum or the legal frameworks and regulatory structures around that notion of food policy and law?

ELB: The idea of a law school clinic is that your law students are getting to learn how to do hands-on, real-world things at the same time that they’re providing resources to real people and organizations. So, a lot of our initial projects were small projects. For example, I do a lot of work on food waste and food recovery, and the first project was one individual, social entrepreneur, who started the Daily Table here in Boston. He’d been the President of Trader Joe’s and had brought Trader Joe’s from a California West Coast company to a national one. Through his time in retail, he saw these challenges and wanted to start a nonprofit that was able to focus on how we can sell food that otherwise would be wasted at a very low cost, and he had all these legal problems. So, for years, we were helping him, but then we would help him answer a question and realize this was an issue for everyone.

I think we learned from being willing to take on the individual projects, and had confidence that through those projects, we’d be able to help one person, but also identify these bigger policy barriers that could change and impact the field. The way that I then thought about it from the curriculum side of it was if in the clinic we were taking in these projects and aspects of the food chain, what students need to learn in the classroom would then be how all of these aspects connect to each other. So, in the classroom, I start with food safety – what do we regulate at the FDA and the USDA. We then go to agriculture, environmental regulations of food production. We’re covering all of that so that when students are working on one project, they have a sense of how it relates to the bigger goal.

HULR: What are the students that are actually opting into some of the classes that you teach or doing the work with the clinic interested in? Why are they invested in food policy? And have you seen that demand grow over time?

ELB: I would say that there’s a hodgepodge of students that are enrolled in my clinic. There’s certainly some students who are really interested in food and I’ve seen that grow over time, I think in part because it’s now more apparent to students that this is a field. When I was starting the clinic, nothing like this existed. So I’ve seen a growing number of students who, before they go to law school, actually are saying, ‘I’m interested in food law.’ And I have a number of students whose primary interest is more health or environmental. It’s increasingly on people’s radar how big of a role the food system plays in emissions or could play in carbon sequestration.

And then, there’s actually a number of students that are just really interested in how you make a policy change. When I was in law school, there weren’t real hands-on ways to work on drafting legislation or writing comments to agencies. The traditional clinics mainly did direct representation of individuals, so there weren’t as many opportunities to do that. I think there are still a number of students that are asking, “how do I change policy?” So, a number of students that come in are thinking, “food is as good a tool as any, I just want to learn the skills of how to do this.”

HULR: When you think about food policy as a field overall, what would you identify as the most pressing challenges that are facing the food system today that people are working to address?

ELB: The two big buckets –– I’d say they’re environmental and health. On the health side, it’s no surprise that we have a pretty unhealthy population. The food environment that we live in is unhealthy. There’s a growing awareness of that, but the challenges with fixing it are really hard. Whenever policies are approached, issues surrounding equity arise –– how do we make food healthier without raising the price in a way that is inequitable? The food industry really balks at the stringent food regulations, so, it makes it difficult to solve. But I do see incremental progress and I think there’s a lot more awareness. I’ve been really involved on the FDA side to have a healthy label and to try to get doctors to learn about nutrition. HLS now has a huge Food as Medicine Initiative, and we’ve been really involved in supporting food as medicine and using health insurance to support food for people who need it.

On the environmental side, it’s similar. The more that you try to regulate it, the more pushback there’s been. If you look at, for example, the COP process, food was more involved than ever last year, but I think that some of the resolutions that came away at the end of it were minor steps compared to the scale of the problem. On the other hand, I mentioned that I do a lot of work on food waste production. This is a really important area, and we’re at a tipping point where there’s a real opportunity to hold businesses accountable. It’s hard to hold consumers accountable. It’d be nice to educate consumers more, but you’re not going to penalize them. But we’re at a point where there are enough opportunities out there to hold businesses accountable for the negative externalities of their over-purchasing or over-wasting.

HULR: When it comes to actually addressing those challenges, some of which you’ve identified through the clinic, what would you say have been some of your most rewarding experiences or successes this past decade?

ELB: There have been so many –– I find all the work we do to be really rewarding. There’s certainly been these high moments where we’ve had tangible policy success. But I think the first thing — the most important thing — to say is there’s so much reward in delivering a product to our client that is what they wanted. A project that I was doing over the last few years was for a small nonprofit in East Cleveland. East Cleveland is a small majority BIPOC town outside of Cleveland –– super under-invested. There’s not a lot of tax dollars coming in, which means that the local government does not have a lot of money to use. We’ve been working with a community-based organization working on food sovereignty that wanted guidance on the foods that they could produce and sell from their own gardens and kitchens. We delivered a really helpful policy paper and toolkit to them and met with community members and got them jazzed up about it. Simply putting information and knowledge in the hands of people that otherwise would not have it is really rewarding.

As far as some of the policy successes, I can give three quick examples. The first is when I started working in Mississippi. While I was there, I helped start a food policy council for Mississippi to bring voices together and we were able to work with them over a period of four years to pass seven different laws that promoted the local farmers market, local growers, and small scale producers that otherwise were being cut out of the food system. On food waste, the proudest moment I’ve had so far has been a couple of pieces of legislation that got passed through Congress. One was the 2018 farm bill that included a set of provisions on food waste for the first time, and then the draft Senate Farm bill that just came out this week, which included a number of other provisions that we recommended for this time around.

Most recently, we’ve done a lot of work with a group of doctors and Public Health faculty to figure out how to change the teaching in medical school to incorporate nutrition so that physicians actually make referrals. There was a data point that 75% of physicians believe food is important to health when they initially enter medical school; when they were graduating, less than half of them believed that food was important to health. We need registered dieticians and nutritionists to actually do the hard work. But if our doctors, whom everyone trusts as the quarterbacks of their healthcare, don’t understand the importance of food, then we’ve lost a really important opportunity. So, we were able to work with Congress to get a resolution passed in the House of Representatives a couple years ago that spurred a lot of activity in the accrediting agencies that are now in HHS to really try to bring that to life and make it a core part of the education.

One other thing about all of these projects is that students work on every single one of those. The resolution I mentioned, a student drafted that. We received input from a number of people, but she drafted that. The Farm Bill was a small team of students –– we researched all of the elements of the Farm Bill and came up with the recommendations. I think the hard thing with students is that things don’t change in a semester. So, I try to always write to them and say, “this happened, you should feel great.” All of these things were really a part of the learning and seeing that anything’s possible if you really put your mind to it and bring the ecosystem together.

HULR: As you continue to move throughout your second decade with the clinic, what are your future ambitions for food policy and law at Harvard, and then also nationally or internationally?

ELB: As we’ve seen, I really believe that having university students to be leaders in this space can lead to change. And I’ll say a number of my former students and fellows are now working on the Hill -–– one of them is working at the White House, a former intern of ours is the legal counsel for the House Agriculture Committee on the Democrat side. They’re in important positions. Similarly, as we look globally, there’s a real opportunity to train the future leaders that understand how important this is and are able to make change. Food impacts everyone every single day, both through what you’re consuming but also through the way our production impacts the environment and ourselves. From the Harvard side, we’re doing a lot more global work. For example, with food waste and food donation, we’ve been exploring how we can learn what the best practices are and share them across countries to help move international policy more quickly.

HULR: And my final question on behalf of the students, specifically the undergrad students –– what are some opportunities you would suggest here on campus to get involved in this area?

ELB: One really cool thing about Harvard is we have Harvard University Dining Services. One of the reasons Harvard gives them the contract is because they have this commitment to not feed people but also get out into the campus and educate, so I think there’s a lot of cool opportunities through that, such as the Food Literacy Fellows Program.

I’m also involved in the university-wide President’s Committee on sustainability. There’s a lot of effort to think about what are the ways to use Harvard as a laboratory for sustainability to then show other universities and institutions what to do. I’ve had some undergrads take my course or enrollment clinic or do summer internships with us.

The last thing I would say is that food is so interdisciplinary. Everything that we’ve done that’s actually been successful has been because we’ve been working with other disciplines. In this work with doctors and nutrition professionals, they really understand what everyone needs to learn. So, I think finding those opportunities to do interdisciplinary work to solve problems helps you. It’s a muscle that you work on and that I think we’ll be able to be put towards future work in this space.

HULR: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you for speaking to us about this incredibly important topic.