Rebecca Gildiner is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Leading Harvest. She serves on the CCOF Foundation Board of Trustees.
Rebecca Gildiner experienced the importance of organic agriculture firsthand during her post-college gap year, when she participated in both a WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) program to learn about organic farming and worked in non-organic commercial fruit picking operations.
“That was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done,” she says. “We [other backpackers and laborers] worked eight-hour days, often six days a week, in the sun.” After picking conventional strawberries and apples, Rebecca would come home at the end of a shift with her skin and clothing covered in pesticide residue. She recalls, “My friend’s hands broke out in hives. It opened my eyes to what working in the fields really meant.”
After returning to the U.S., Rebecca worked for Whole Foods and learned more about organic food and the retail side of the industry through nutrition and sustainability staff education. She now serves as the Director of Strategic Partnerships for Leading Harvest. For the past 14 years, she has been a member of a local food co-op where members contribute labor and support local farmers.
“Throughout my career from community-based food systems to corporate sustainability currently, I’ve focused on how agriculture affects human beings and the environment. I’ve learned about the impact of chemicals. The more I learn, the more I imagine an organic future,” Rebecca says. “I think anyone you speak to doesn’t want chemicals in or near their food, but it’s seen as essential at this moment in time to feed the global population. For me, imagining a world where we don’t need chemicals to grow our food is pretty logical; we just need to invest in figuring out how to get there instead of accepting it as an indisputable, eternal fact.
“When I think about the amount of money we’ve poured into research and development in our food system and what fraction of that has gone into growing food organically, I know we can do better,” Rebecca says. “I hope we come to a realization of the true social, economic, and environmental costs associated with the way we’re growing food now, and that the industry and our government can see it as essential to figure out how do it with fewer or no chemicals.”
Rebecca urges people to dream big. “We give up and say things are too hard, without doing the work of figuring out how to do it. Rather than throwing our arms up in the air in defeat, let’s invest our tremendous resources into finding a way to do things better.”