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This fall, the Masters of the Environment Graduate Program welcomed new faculty member Nicole Civita. With a background in law and passion for social justice, Nicole leads MENV’s Sustainable Food Systems specialization in addition to teaching International Food Systems and U.S. Food Policy graduate courses. Read more about Nicole’s background here.

MENV staff caught up with Nicole to discuss her journey to MENV, the Sustainable Food Systems specialization, and what future students can expect from the program.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Masters of the Environment (MENV) Staff

Thanks for sitting down with me, especially as we near the end of a busy semester. First, I’d like to get into your background – you were a corporate lawyer before jumping into the food systems realm. How did you get here?

Nicole Civita

It is not necessarily a straight path, which is something that I focus on with students. When you’re pursuing professional education, you often think about how to get to the next thing you want to do. Some people have a strong clarity of purpose and vision, and they are able to walk down that road. I was not like that at all.

I was a lawyer practicing traditional law, but unhappily. I really wanted to find a way to take my skills and angle them so that I could pursue sustainability justice and equity, which wasn’t happening in corporate defense work and advising.

I came from a family that worked across the food system. My grandparents farmed in Queens, in what is now Forest Hills, New York. That was what they did when they got here to America. My dad’s family is made up of restaurateurs, and he works in a private school food service and overall food service consulting. Given that history, food was always in my space – but I wasn’t interested in it because of that. I became interested in food when I learned how to see it in systems and how food connects to the climate crisis and other environmental problems. I also learned to see it as connected to social justice and equity, income wage inequality, public health, and community well-being. Once I saw that I wanted to figure out how to use my skill set as a lawyer to make a better food system.

MENV

Was there a specific event or catalyst that sparked your passion for the food system?

Nicole Civita

There’s not a single event, but I think it was connected to a couple trends and life factors.

Being a lifelong urbanite and, at times, a snooty New Yorker, I had interacted with food mostly as a consumer. I became increasingly aware of the disconnect in our current system: I took clients out to expensive lunches for my law firm and the food just appeared. But who was serving it? What were their conditions of work? What did their financial situation look like? What are their opportunities for advancement?

I was always keenly aware of these factors, but then I started thinking further back in the chain. It coincided with my disillusionment with the very hectic, intentionally busy nature of high achieving professional urban life, and wanting a little more space and connection to nature. And so my husband and I started to have these dreams of getting a couple acres and supporting ourselves with them. We tried our hands at raising alpacas, and then we wound up living on a six-acre homestead in Vermont. This all happened a little later, but there was this dawning awareness of the fact that food just doesn’t show up on a plate.

I always had this very strong social justice orientation, which was the reason I went to law school in the first place. The food system employs 21 million in the U.S., most of them in very low-wage jobs and often patchworks of part-time jobs. So even though there was a period of disconnect in my life, I see that as very much a connection for me.

MENV

What brought you to the MENV program?

Nicole Civita

One of the really important things is that MENV is training professionals by example. I have never really been a traditional academic – I got my first position in a really funny way and I went to a non-traditional undergraduate institution to create an interdisciplinary food systems program. MENV’s combination of a fresh approach to graduate education, interdisciplinarity, the thematic focus, and the location here in Boulder are all really exciting factors for me.

MENV

What sets the sustainable food specialization apart? In other words, why should students choose to join the specialization?

Nicole Civita

I would actually start with the challenges. The challenge of studying and learning food systems is that they’re huge. There’s so much to cover and there are so many connections to map and to see. Plus the students are coming from so many backgrounds and want to go in so many different directions. That can be challenging as an educator, but it is tremendously exciting and stimulating.  

The food systems approach at MENV is also fairly unique. Even food studies as an academic discipline are newer in terms of getting respect and recognition, and it’s often a combination of anthropology, cultural studies, geography, ethnography, and ethnic studies. Food systems is different than that. While we draw from all of the studies I mentioned, we’re also looking at the way the systems function: how they evolved and what factors are influencing their continued development.

When you add the word sustainability on top of that, you’re explicitly standing behind the idea that food systems ought to do more than just provide a ration of calories for a growing planet. That’s what’s really exciting to me about studying sustainable food systems.

When you’re talking about professional education you can find this sweet spot – a mix of applied experiential work and grounding in the big picture understanding. We do a good job of that through the Capstone structure, but also with the way we’re teaching and creating the curriculum and innovating that curriculum.

I also think that I come to this with a real reverence for food. Food as an intimate commodity. Food as a conduit for connection. Food as an expression of culture. We’re not just talking about widgets or unit of production. We’re thinking in its exalted privilege, but very essential place.

MENV

What do you want students to get out of this specialization?

Nicole Civita

The food system discipline is so broad that are so many directions to head in. What each student needs in terms of skills and deeper substantive knowledge is going to be different. Part of what I love about this program is that the size allows me to do that kind of work with them and help them build their networks.

I want students to have a keen appreciation of the power of food and of making changes in the food system. Things like how reducing our food waste by fifty percent and dramatically decreasing the consumption of animal products can provide tremendous reductions in greenhouse gasses. These are tremendous reductions that we could collectively agree to, without making major changes in international policy. I also want students to understand the power of food and the consequences of our choices – not just our individual choices but also our collective choices.

Finally, I want students to see food in systems, and to be on the hunt for leverage points where they can make small shifts to create change for the better. I want them to be very attuned to issues of power, privilege, and positionality in the food system in order to understand the history of colonialism in the food system. They need to be able to question the prevailing agrarian myths around food, but at the same time understand why agriculture, though an industry, is also different because of its essential basis in the biological and ecological systems.

MENV

What’s in store for future sustainable food systems cohorts?

Nicole Civita

There’s so much possibility here. It’s been fun to jump into teaching while simultaneously reviewing the curriculum, whether it’s talking to current students, faculty members, or professionals across the local, national and international food systems about how can we can shape this program to prepare our students to be problem solvers.

I have an evolving plan for the curriculum that isn’t ready for primetime, but in a general sense, I’m interested in creating additional experiential opportunities that leverage students pre-existing knowledge and experience to enrich our classes. I’ll be spending a lot of time at the beginning of a cohort’s first semester to figure out who is in the room, what they bring to the table, and how they can teach each other. I feel like that’s something that I’ve already started and I want to do more of.

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If you would like more information on Sustainable Food Systems, visit the specialization's pageor contact Nicole Civita at nicole.civita@colorado.edu. For general questions about the MENV program please contact Laura Fisher at laura.d.fisher@colorado.edu.