Food Security is 
National Security

May 11, 2026 As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, I’ve been thinking about an old and unsettled question: what does a functioning republic actually require of its people? We feel the weight of that question at Arcadia. Many of the founders — including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and especially George Washington, whose land we now farm — believed agriculture was never just about producing food. They believed tending land could cultivate the habits a republic depends on: responsibility, restraint, cooperation, practical problem-solving, and investment in the common good. These ideas were literally revolutionary: they believed people rooted in land and community would be more resistant to tyranny and more capable of self-government. Stewarding land was understood as practice for stewarding the republic itself. The contradiction, of course, is who was permitted to participate. Washington and Jefferson were enslavers; Franklin came to abolitionism late in life. The early republic extended political power and economic independence primarily to white male property owners, while enslaved people, women, and Indigenous communities were systematically denied many of the freedoms and forms of civic participation tied to land ownership. In America, land has never been merely land. It shapes agency, stability, and belonging. At Arcadia, we are exercising the democratic possibilities embedded in this land by giving George Washington’s old farm new life as a commons — a place where stewardship builds connection, resilience, belonging, and a shared commitment to the common good across our differences. Our Route 1 Community Farm is a place where people who would otherwise never meet work shoulder-to-shoulder toward something tangible and necessary. Military veterans garden next to recent immigrants. Young children water seedlings alongside retirees. Families speak different languages, come from different faith traditions, hold different political beliefs, and work in entirely different professions, yet share tools, harvests, recipes, advice, and responsibility for common space. In an age of fragmentation and abstraction, we need places that root us in mutual obligation — to one another, to the land beneath us, and to the fragile democratic experiment we hold in common. Everybody eats. That is a powerful place to begin.

April 2, 2026 The White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon all say so.* Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. It is enshrined in law and policy. But we don't treat it like one. The food system sits alongside the electrical grid, water systems, transportation networks and 12 other sectors as infrastructure essential to national security. This has been true for 30 years. As the Cold War ended and the internet emerged, the Pentagon began wrapping its head around a new kind of threat: asymmetric attacks. Not missiles or bombs, but disruptions to civil infrastructure – attacks designed to disable critical systems. Bring down the electric grid. Poison water systems. Shut down ports with a dirty bomb – low-level radioactive material meant not to destroy, but to contaminate and render infrastructure unusable. I was a Pentagon reporter back then, covering the debate over how to defend these systems. It required a paradigm shift. The old guard argued for what they knew: perimeter defense. Build a fortress around critical systems and repel attacks. The younger generation of officers proposed something different, shaped by the architecture of the then nascent internet: decentralize. Build in redundancy. Create networks of critical infrastructures that are so flexible and distributed that attacks become disruptions, not disasters. Here's where the food system comes in. If we think of it at all, we think of the American food system as diffuse and diverse – there are millions of farms, countless products, thousands of grocery stores. But once food leaves the farm, it moves through a narrow set of chokepoints: a handful of companies control most meat processing, and similarly concentrated firms dominate canning, freezing, grain milling, and distribution. The result is a system where a disruption at a few key nodes can cascade nationwide. That food system is efficient. It is powerful. But it is brittle. We saw that in the spring of 2020, when COVID ran a real-world stress test of our heavilty consolidated food system. Stores, restaurants, long-haul trucks shut down in the pandemic. Farmers plowed under crops. They dumped milk. They euthanized animals because slaughterhouses were closed. And alongside that failure, local farms blossomed. Small and mid-sized farms, often dismissed as too small to matter, pivoted almost overnight. They moved from wholesale to direct sales. They built online ordering systems. They packed food boxes and rebuilt distribution in real time. They fed people – not in spite of their size but because of it. Arcadia helped.** I am not arguing against large-scale agriculture. This is an argument against relying on a highly centralized system to feed a nation. Resilience requires redundancy. We need both a national food system that can produce at scale, and a regional food system that can adapt at speed. That means investing in small and mid-sized farms growing the food we actually eat – fruits, vegetables, and proteins. It means rebuilding the missing middle: regional processing, cold storage, and distribution scaled to serve these producers. And it means creating stable demand – not just for the cheapest food, but for food that strengthens the system. The federal government has levers to make this happen. The Defense Commissary Agency alone operates roughly 235 stores worldwide, with about 180 in the United States, serving millions of military families and selling billions of dollars of food each year. By law, commissaries sell groceries at cost plus a 5 percent surcharge, with taxpayer funding covering most operating expenses.*** My modest proposal: require military bases, commissaries, and other federal food purchasers to source a meaningful percentage of their food from regional producers and processors instead of the lowest bidder Done right, this could: Stabilize or expand markets for small and mid-sized farms Support regional processing infrastructure Build distributed capacity that can surge in times of crisis This would not compete with the national and global supply chain. It would strengthen it. Taxpayers already pay to make food more affordable for those who serve, for veterans and their families. It’s time we also put that money to work in making the food system resilient enough to serve us all. *https://www.cisa.gov/national-security-memorandum-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resilience#:~:text=The%20NSM%20also%20includes%20the%20following%20provisions:,progress%20against%20national%20priorities%20and%20national%20resilience** https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/presidential-policy-directive-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resil **Arcadia's Mobile Market program was primed for this moment: a huge network of local farmers growing great food with no restaurants or markets to sell to; thousands of customers' phone numbers; a flexible and dynamic delivery system, and importantly, a funder in the Bainum Family Foundation that understood the imperative of getting farmers paid and people fed quickly. Arcadia's Mobile Markets were the first open air markets approved by the DC mayor. ***https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/2484

April 21, 2026 Why veterans? Why farming? We get this question a lot. Why does Arcadia focus on training veterans to become farmers, and not open its training program to everyone? Let's start with the problem we’re trying to solve: There is not enough access to affordable, healthy food in this country, especially for low-income communities, but increasingly for everyone. You can see it in rising rates of chronic disease, in the cost of groceries, and in how unevenly good food is distributed. Solving that problem takes many lines of effort. For us, it starts with but doesn’t end with increasing the supply. We do that by growing good food on a once-fallow historic farm. And just as importantly, we increase the number of people growing food by training veterans to be farmers. The country needs a wildly large number of new farmers to take up the plow. The average American farmer is nearing 60, and an estimated 700,000 farmers will retire in the coming decades. So why veterans? Veterans bring an uncanny mix of skills that farming demands: mechanical, electrical and construction know-how, problem-solving, long-range planning, the ability to work as a team or independently, and the discipline to keep going in tough conditions. They are not freaked out by crisis. But there’s another piece that often goes overlooked, and it’s a game changer: Career servicemembers receive a pension and long-term health care as veterans. In an industry where most farmers rely on off-farm income to survive, that financial stability allows veterans to focus on building their operations, especially in the early, most fragile years. That’s not a small advantage. It’s the difference between trying to farm on nights and weekends, and having the time and stability to make a farm succeed. So yes, we also train veterans because we are neighbors to Fort Belvoir. And yes, we train veterans because George Washington once farmed the land we now steward, and we like that poetry. But most importantly, we train veterans because they are uniquely positioned to do this work -- and we need them to. The common narrative around veterans is that they need to be fixed. Arcadia's experience has been the opposite: these are people who are ready to fix a system that isn’t working. If we want more food, more farmers, and a healthier food system, this is one of the smartest places we can invest. So that's what we do.

March 13, 2026 Today, March 13, marks my 13th anniversary as Executive Director of Arcadia. And this year it falls on Friday the 13th. Superstition says that’s unlucky. But these three 13s add up to the luckiest day of my life: the day I was entrusted with this extraordinary organization. Before Arcadia, I spent nearly 20 years covering national security, in the Pentagon, at the CIA, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those years taught me something that shapes how I think about food today: Food is critical infrastructure. Our food system sits at the intersection of public health, geopolitics, energy, and economics. Much of what we eat travels thousands of miles to reach us—by ship, plane, train, and truck. When the world destabilizes, those systems feel it immediately. Napoleon famously said an army runs on its stomach. Nations do too. During COVID, we saw what happens when global systems fracture. Supply chains stalled. Grocery shelves emptied. And suddenly it was local farmers who fed our communities most reliably. Years ago, when I covered critical infrastructure protection at the Pentagon, there was a debate about resilience. Some argued for perimeter defense—protect every node at all costs. Others argued for distributed systems: build networks strong enough that if one node fails, another can take its place. Local and regional agriculture works exactly that way. It strengthens national security. It improves public health. It builds local economies. And it makes our food system more resilient in an unpredictable world. The news today is full of chaos and destruction. My old world tugs at me. I still know too much about missiles and warplanes. But here’s what I know even more deeply: What Arcadia does knits the world back together. We plant. We grow. We train and support farmers and gardeners. We feed people. We connect communities with the land that sustains them. If we’ve ever spoken more than six words to one another, you’ve probably had to listen to me prattle on about the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher. Last summer, I made a pilgrimage to see her former home on a hillside overlooking Lake Geneva called Le Paquis. No one was home, so I stood in the driveway clutching one of her books to my chest, and looked out over the green vineyards, gray mountains, and silver water, the same ones she did as World War II closed in around her. She left Le Paquis in 1939. She has words that are especially meaningful for us now. “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?” Growing food, sharing meals, and caring for the land are not small acts. They are how we build resilience, community, and hope. And that’s why March 13 will always be the luckiest day I know.

March 24, 2026 Most of the conversation about the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz is about oil. It shouldn’t be. This crisis is just as much about modern farmers, the same farmers whose images are co-opted for political ads, gazing out over verdant fields of corn and golden wheat. To understand this, you need to know ground truth on American agriculture: More than 95% of U.S. farmland is not used to grow food that ends up on your plate. It produces commodity crops, the raw ingredients for ethanol, animal feed, textiles, and other industrial products. About 3% of the remaining acreage grows what the industry calls “specialty crops”: fruits, vegetables, nuts, herbs – the food that actually nourishes people.* And nearly all of it depends on synthetic fertilizer.** About one-third of the world’s fertilizer trade moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Why? Liquefied natural gas. Hang with me here: Back in 2004, when I was covering the war in Iraq, I embedded with British troops in Basra. One chokingly humid dusk, I saw what looked like a dozen setting suns blazing on the horizon. I asked what I was seeing. It was natural gas being flared off the wells so the more valuable crude oil stored in the same fissures could be pumped out. In more developed operations across the Middle East, that gas isn’t burned. It’s captured, cooled into a liquid, and shipped around the world. That’s where American farmers enter the picture. Liquefied natural gas is a primary building block for nitrogen fertilizer. Through something called the Haber-Bosch process, it is turned into hydrogen, then is mixed with nitrogen captured from the air to become ammonia, then urea or ammonium nitrate – nitrogen fertilizers that are the backbone of modern agriculture. From there, about ⅓ of the world's nitrogen fertilizers which roughly half of global food production relies on moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Until now. Prices are spiking. Supply is tightening. And it is spring planting season. Agriculture is not a spigot you can turn on and off when a shipping lane closes. Farmers are preparing soil and planting right now. They are making decisions in real time, against a geopolitical backdrop entirely outside their control: what to plant, how much fertilizer to apply, whether they can afford to plant at all. The impact of those decisions will land in about four to six months. Lower fertilizer use will likely lead to lower yields. Lower yields tighten supply. Tighter supply raises prices – on food, on fuel, on everything. Because every good dirt farmer knows this: There is no such thing as an isolated system. What happens in the Strait of Hormuz does not stay in the Strait of Hormuz. We can keep pretending foreign policy operates in a silo, or we can think like good farmers do: systemically. And start making policy based in reality. If you're curious, we're good dirt farmers at Arcadia. We are part of a very small minority of American farms that don’t rely on chemical fertilizers. Instead, we build soil fertility through cover crops, crop rotation, and compost – practices George Washington once used on the very same land we now farm. He lacked the scientific understanding to put words to it, but he observed that cover crops did wonders for the tobacco-exhausted soil. Animal manure did too. The Rodale Institute has demonstrated in a 40-year Farming Systems Trial that farms managed organically can match the output of chemical fertilizer-reliant farms under normal conditions, and dramatically outperform them when there is drought. *Despite occupying just 3% of American farmland by acre, and grown by 10% of all American farms, specialty crops account for about 15% of national agricultural receipts, a total of $84 billion annually, according to the 2022 USDA agricultural census. This includes cut flowers and horticultural products, like potted plants. **Only 40,000 farms in the U.S. report organic sales out of roughly 1.9 million total farms. There are more farms that use organic or regenerative practices to grow specialty crops but are not certified organic, like Arcadia. These are not captured in this data.

April 22, 2026 Years ago, I spent two weeks traveling with the Secretary of Defense just after the bombing of the USS Cole. Because of the heightened threat, it was a stripped-down trip – an uncomfortable C-17 cargo plane with electronic countermeasures for transport, long days, and for food: bologna and cheese sandwiches, over and over again. On the last day, ragged, hot, and cranky, we waited under guard in a Middle Eastern airport while the Secretary wrapped a meeting. An American diplomat mentioned that just outside the gates was an incredible falafel stand. It was off limits, of course, due to operational security. And then they handed us each a bologna and cheese sandwich for lunch. Reader, I had a moment. Not my finest. (I cried into my hoagie.) A Marine public affairs officer took pity. A man on a motorbike was dispatched. And then, as if by magic (but really, motorbike) it arrived: hot, freshly fried falafel and hand-made hummus, slick with young green olive oil, for all of us. It was, as advertised, excellent. But what I remember most? The mood shifted. Everyone – foreign service, military, civilian, press – relaxed. We giggled. We gathered together to eat. The edge came off. The falafel changed everything. That’s the thing about food. It’s not just fuel. It’s care. It’s dignity. It’s connection. It can reset a room, a team – even a hard day. When we change what’s on the plate, we change much more than a meal. That's what Arcadia has been getting after for 15 years. (But with veggies, not falafel). More food. More farmers. Happy eaters. And thousands of folks with their hands in the soil.

March 20, 2026 Today is the first day of spring, and the third week of our war with Iran. Despite my years in the (literal) trenches as a national security reporter, I'm sorry to say I don't have any special insight into what will happen next. But I will tell you one thing for sure: Food security is national security. And it is being actively undermined. First, some history. In 1940, as World War II threatened, Congress instituted the draft. Generals were shocked by what they saw: Roughly one-third of young men called up by the Selective Service had to be sent back home. They were unfit to serve. In 1945, while the battle for Iwo Jima raged, Major General Lewis Hershey testified to Congress that the reason these men could not defend their nation was food. One third of American recruits were malnourished. Alarmed, Congress swiftly responded with the national school lunch program, because it understood free school lunches to be a facet of national defense, not charity. The nation evolved a system to ensure children had enough of the right food at school to grow, learn, and, if needed, defend a nation. A critical piece of that system was ease of access: if a family qualified for food stamps, their children automatically qualified for free school lunch. Easy. Simple. Bureaucracy proof. But last year, in the name of anti-corruption and deficit reduction, Congress approved the One Big Beautiful Bill. It made SNAP (food stamps) harder to access for all Americans – tightening eligibility, increasing administrative hurdles to sign up, and expanding work requirements for adults. (This was over the objections of some 170 retired general officers, who entreated Congress to protect SNAP and Medicaid for children). You see, when families lose SNAP, they don’t just lose food at home. Their kids lose automatic access to meals at school. They face paperwork and systems that many never complete. Hungry children fall through the cracks, not because they are less in need, but because the bureaucracy got harder to navigate. Up to 2 million children will lose access to school meals because of the One Big Beautiful Bill. And now the readiness crisis is even worse than it was before World War II. Roughly three-quarters of high school students are not fit for military service, most of them because of the food system: obesity, malnourishment, and associated chronic conditions. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, this should be clear: School lunch matters. For public health. For educational outcomes. And for national security. Good food is the building block of health. The strength of any nation is its people. Our future is being shaped right now, in school cafeterias, in grocery aisles, in the farm bill, in Congress -- all of which determine whether a child has access to good food, and enough of it.

April 12, 2026 New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for municipally funded grocery stores is not radical. It is the practical application of our national critical infrastructure policy. Here’s why. Food is one of 16 critical infrastructure sectors designated by the White House, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over the last 30 years. That designation isn’t symbolic—it reflects a clear principle: when a system is essential to national stability, government has a role in ensuring it works. We’ve done this before. When a service is essential – but not sufficiently profitable – government steps in to ensure no one gets left out. In the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped bring electricity to rural America. Today, it is helping bring broadband to those same communities. We publicly fund water systems because the market alone will not guarantee safe, universal access. We invest in roads and ports because the economy cannot function without them. But we treat food differently. We assume the private sector will distribute it efficiently and equitably. It does not. Grocery stores – the kind that support a healthy diet – follow the money. They cluster in higher-income communities, often suburban, often white, where larger stores, higher margins, and car-based access make the business model work. Washington, D.C. offers a stark example. In Ward 6, where I live, there are 10 full-service grocery stores serving about 84,000 residents. Across the river in Wards 7 and 8, there are just 7 stores serving more than twice the population. The difference is not demand. It’s income. Median household income in Ward 6 is about $138,000, roughly double Ward 7 and more than double Ward 8. That is not just inequitable. It’s deadly, and incredibly expensive.* If you map where grocery stores are in D.C., then map where rates of diet-related chronic disease are highest, you will see something important: the two don’t line up. They diverge. The neighborhoods with the least access to affordable, healthy food bear the greatest burden of chronic illness.** The “grocery gap” is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a market system that clusters access where returns are highest and leaves entire communities underserved. That is where Mamdani’s proposal comes in. Municipal grocery stores aim to fill the gaps the market leaves behind—places where stores do not open because they cannot generate sufficient profit, even though the need is clear. Critics, including grocery industry groups, don’t dispute the problem but they do dispute the solution. They argue that government-run stores could distort the market, undercut small grocers, and put taxpayers on the hook in a notoriously low-margin business. Their position is that policymakers should fix the underlying economics – through incentives**, regulation, or antitrust enforcement – rather than replace the market altogether. It’s a fair question. But we already know what we do when markets fail to deliver essential goods: we step in. The Department of War has already shown us the way. The Defense Commissary Agency operates more than 230 grocery stores around the world for service members, their families, and veterans. These commissaries sell food at near-wholesale prices, with a small fixed markup – five percent. Taxpayers fund the difference. They weren’t created because military bases are remote. They were created 160 years ago because private food vendors overcharged soldiers for low-quality foods. The government stepped in to sell groceries at cost both to supplement low wages and to ensure readiness. Why? Because we decided it is in the national interest for the military community to have reliable access to affordable, high-quality food. We built a global, publicly funded grocery system for the military because food security is national security. Mamdani is simply asking: what if we did this at home, too? *About $1.6 trillion annually. The American Heart Association journal Circulation estimated that cardiovascular diseases (many driven by poor diet) alone cost about $1.1 trillion annually in health care and lost productivity combined. The American Diabetes Association reports that diabetes, strongly linked to diet, costs $327 billion annually in direct medical costs and lost productivity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates annual medical costs of obesity at $173 billion. **The 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill” cut SNAP funding by about 20%, tightened eligibility and work requirements, and shifted costs to states, which will reduce participation and further destabilize the already fragile grocery ecosystems that serve low-income communities.

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