Do I have hope? Yes, I have hope because, as Michael Pollan wrote in "The Omnivore’s Dilemma," what it means to say that something is “unsustainable” is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply.

The speaker is Joan Dye Gussow, "the mother of the sustainable food movement," as ID'd by writer Paula Crossfield, setting up her interview on Grist (and, previously, on  Civil Eats).

In a sign I'm late to the game and still catching up, I have to say I was heretofore unaware of Gussow, just as I once acknowledged I had no idea who Aldo Leopold was. It's OK, I do know now.

I'm heartened by Gussow's expression of hope; the long view of a landscape sharpens the view. Here's the sort of oh-so-obvious observation that comes from such a perspective:

[Yet] here we have this abundant food supply ... and this incredibly unhealthy population. The level of obesity, the level of diabetes—all these things are shocking.

It's the different, but echoes the adage, "water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink." Meanwhile, her expression of hope, it turns out, is at least partly an act of will, not of observation:

Oh [agribusiness has] many more gasps left. I believe that’s the reason that you have to keep hope alive, you have to keep moving along the way you believe in and keep telling the truth and trying to get the word out. Because the reality is that the pressure is on the other side. There’s a lot of money at stake, and they’re not giving up their livelihoods.

Hope by any means is hope, I guess, but I am buoyed less by it.

You can read the whole interview here. I did.