The Most Important Question
Important, Not Important
Listen to Recent Episodes
Table To Farm
Apr 14 2025 • 56 mins
Sometimes you buy organic, sometimes you hit a restaurant that's plant-based, or at least you choose the veggie option.
Maybe the fish option at the market or the restaurant is marketed as being sustainable. Maybe you compost. It's all useful. But we've been doing it for a while and it's not moving the needle for climate, for restaurants, for farmers, for our health.
So anyone who gives a shit wants to know, what can I actually do to scale regenerative agriculture to benefit everyone?
My guest today is Anthony Myint.
Anthony is the executive director of Zero Foodprint, where he and his colleagues work to mobilize the restaurant industry and allies in the public and private sectors to support healthy soil as a solution to the climate crisis. Anthony's also a chef who won the 2019 Basque Culinary World Prize for his work with Zero Foodprint. He is known in the restaurant industry as the co-founder of Mission Street Food. The San Francisco Chronicle called it the most influential restaurant of the past decade, Mission Chinese Food, which the New York Times named the Restaurant of the Year in 2012. And The Perennial, which was Bon Appetit's most sustainable restaurant in the country.
Anthony is currently on the board of trustees for the James Beard Foundation, and I am so excited to share this conversation with you because food is such a huge part of everything and we're doing it wrong and we can do it so much better.
And sometimes, like Anthony and his crew have, you've gotta fail a bunch of times and then take an end around before you can really start to make a difference.
-----------
Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.com
New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.
Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth
-----------
INI Book Club:
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley RobinsonBraiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall KimmererFind all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
Take action with Zero Foodprint https://www.zerofoodprint.org/take-actionRead Zero Foodprint's position paper on Collective Regeneration to Accelerate the Shift in Agriculture
Follow us:
Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.comSupport our work and become a Member at a href="https://www.importantnotimportant.com/upgrade"...
History's "Viral" Lessons We Keep Ignoring
Apr 07 2025 • 44 mins
We've spent the last few years learning up close how a crisis like a global pandemic reveals and deepens all of our faults, inequalities, biases, and outright failures of empathy.
But here's the kicker: it's not the first time. Plagues and epidemics have always shown us who we really are. And they've left footprints, good and bad, on our institutions and the stories we tell ourselves.
So why do we keep missing the lessons?
My guest today is Edna Bonhomme, a historian, author, and public health expert who looks at disease in captivity through her own story of near-death illness, Haitian migration, and a lifetime of asking: Why does our world blame instead of heal?
Edna is the author of the new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shaped Us From Cholera to COVID-19.
If you've ever wondered how pandemics warp our social fabric and what it would take to heal old wounds and stop repeating the same mistakes, stick around.
-----------
Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.com
New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.
Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth
-----------
INI Book Club:
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül SavaşFind all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
Read Edna's book A History of the World In Six PlaguesKeep up with Edna's other workSupport global and public health with Partners in Health and Doctors Without BordersSupport independent journalism at places like Democracy Now, The Intercept, and Jacobin Magazine (US), or Novara Media and the Guardian (UK)
Follow us:
Find more ways to take action at whatcanido.earthSubscribe to our newsletter at a...
You Might Also Like: The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women
Mar 31 2025 • 23 mins
The United States has long been the largest aid donor in the world, accounting for about 40 percent of humanitarian assistance globally last year, according to the United Nations. But that is quickly changing.
Most U.S. foreign aid is currently on hold. Thousands of projects are at risk of elimination. And nearly all staff from the U.S. Agency for International Development are on administrative leave.
How did we get to this moment? And what has been the impact of the foreign aid freeze so far, including on women and girls?
In this episode from The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women, hear a conversation taped at Foreign Policy magazine’s Emerging Threats Forum, an official side event of the Munich Security Conference, about the economic and security implications of halting overseas development assistance.
Foreign Policy editor in chief Ravi Agrawal spoke with Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli, the president and CEO of the One Campaign, and Umulkher (Umi) Harun Mohamed, a member of Kenya’s National Assembly.
The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women is a podcast from Foreign Policy, supported in part by the Gates Foundation and Northwestern University’s Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
Follow and listen to more episodes:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hidden-economics-of-remarkable-women-hero/id1572532247
-----------
Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.com
New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.
Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth
-----------
Follow us:
Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.comSupport our work and become a Member at importantnotimportant.com/upgradeGet our merchFollow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImpFollow us on Threads: www.threads.net/@importantnotimportantSubscribe to our YouTube channelFollow Quinn: on Twitter - twitter.com/quinnemmett; Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/quinnemmett.bsky.social; Threads - www.threads.net/@quinnemmettProduced by a...