Paula Daniels is this year’s keynote speaker for the University of Kentucky’s Local Food Systems Summit, hosted in collaboration for the first time with F.E.A.S.T., a celebration of food, music and art which benefits Lexington’s FoodChain and brings together chefs from across the country.

Daniels, who likes to call herself the “chief of what’s next” is both from Hawaii and part Hawaiian. She shared a bit of that story with Mark Bittman on his Food with Mark Bittman podcast in an episode subtitled “Arranging a world around good food”, published January 22, 2025, on the Bittman Project website.

Daniels described to Bittman how her own family history parallels the rise of modern industrial agriculture. Prevented by primogeniture from inheriting property of his own, her English great-great grandfather immigrated to Hawaii in the 1840s and married a Hawaiian woman.

His son, William Henry Daniels, was a lawyer and a congressman representing Maui in the kingdom’s legislative body. He was also a farmer who owned a taro flour company. When the Committee of Safety overthrew the monarchy, he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the new regime, was stripped of his office, lost his land and business, and ended up working in the ditches of the sugarcane fields.

Many other families experienced the same fate and eventually Hawaii became an agricultural backwater, dependent on importing workers from Korea and elsewhere to work on sugarcane plantations. And its diverse and vibrant ag economy was subsumed into an industrial scale one.

In her conversation with Bittman, Daniels lauds what she sees as a resurgence and revitalization of traditional Hawaiian concepts such as Ahupua’a, the term for a socioeconomic, geologic, and climatic subdivision of land from the mountains to the ocean, based on the watershed and reliant on a network of chiefs and others to manage it along the way.

All had a responsibility to steward the land and that led to (the rise of) trading partnerships. We need to think about a foodshed, and making policy decisions to protect it. We have more and better knowledge now. Why don’t we incorporate that? Can we revise our agriculture policy? We have the knowledge to do so.

As the executive director of Los Angeles County’s new Office of Food Equity, Daniels’s goal is to develop the connective tissue that’s necessary for local food systems to grow and thrive. She describes an ideal food system as one that’s local, healthy, affordable, sustainable, and fair.

Local is a little bigger for Los Angeles County than for many of us; Daniels defines it as a ten-county region within a 200 mile radius. And the county itself comprises 88 municipalities and 12 million residents with a GDP greater than Australia’s. Still, the principles remain the same, no matter how big or little your local is.

Putting principles into practice requires having systems in place. Several years ago, Daniels founded the Center for Good Food Purchasing, a national spin-off from the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. The Center for Good Food Purchasing leverages the power of procurement by channeling public funds into local food purchases through institutions like schools and hospitals.

The Center is a social enterprise non-profit similar to FoodChain, which will soon open a much-needed neighborhood grocery store. Leandra Forman, FoodChain’s co-executive director, was thrilled to do a one-on-one mentorship with Paula Daniels through the Wallace Center back in 2021.

It was during a time of big growth and development for us, coming through the pandemic and developing Nourish Lexington. We were looking at different types of leadership models and I was interested in how her non-profits were structured.

She set up her operations as partnerships between co-employees. That was very inspiring to me – to have partners, each with their own zones of expertise – instead of a hierarchy. And to hear her insights about framework for community input sessions, how they were building the L.A. network and bringing diverse partners together.

I’m so excited to have Paula here – to show off the work we do at FoodChain and how much we’ve grown since I met her. There’s a ton of opportunity for us to learn from her.

We’re all excited for this first-ever union of the Local Food Systems Summit and F.E.A.S.T. You don’t have to be a farmer or a chef, or a food service professional to attend. If you’re a person who likes to eat, and who cares about food and the local economy, you won’t want to miss it!

Paula Daniels - 2025 Keynote Speaker - Kentucky Local Food Systems Summit

Mother Land