Chef and food activist Tom Colicchio achieved celebrity on the TV show “Top Chef” and now is food correspondent for MSNBC. In an interview with Edible DC in partnership with FERN, he said the MSNBC program will discuss issues such as hunger, food sourcing, labor and environment. “So I want to take some of these issues around food and tell the stories about them, not so much the policies and politics around them. If you lead with the story, there could be some policy fixes, but I think people are more interested in stories. And there’s a million stories out there. Food stories are everywhere.”
A program that stuck only to policy and politics would “bore the hell out of people and it’s too polarizing,” said Colicchio. During the interview, he lamented the huge amount of food that is discarded uneaten. “We don’t value food because from the 1960s onward, it became about processed food, cheap food and fast food. There’s no value on it, so you just toss it. It’s one of those food topics that people can really relate to.”
Besides working as a food correspondent and operating restaurants, Colicchio is head of Food Policy Action, an advocacy group.