Why the Carver Center for Agriculture & Nutrition Exists
Chicago in winter. Providing food for all of America, at scale, requires thoughtful policy grounded in real-world application and evidence.
Why the Carver Center for Agriculture & Nutrition Exists
The Center is an initiative focused on affordability, access, and evidence in food and agriculture policy.
By Andy Curliss, Chairman
Food is life. The affordability of food and its broad availability are what shape health, stability, and opportunity. Each day, for all of us, food is not discretionary or optional. When food policy fails, the consequences appear immediately – at the grocery store, in household budgets, and in the ability of families to meet basic needs.
Yet the policies that govern how food is produced, regulated, and distributed are increasingly impacted by narratives disconnected from everyday reality. Decisions made in regulatory agencies, campaigns and ballot boxes, legislatures, academic institutions, and courtrooms directly affect what food costs, what is available, and who bears the burden of change. Too often, those decisions rest on sweeping claims, narrow or misapplied studies, or approaches that understate trade-offs, ignore scale, and obscure real-world consequences.
The Carver Center for Agriculture & Nutrition exists to address those gaps.
The Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, research-driven initiative focused on keeping food affordable, accessible, and nutritionally adequate for all Americans. Its purpose is to ensure that food, nutrition and agriculture policy is grounded in evidence, context, and consequence. When claims about the food system are used to justify higher costs, restrict choice, or fragment regulation, those claims must withstand scrutiny – precisely because so much is at stake.
Carver sits at the intersection of research, policy, and public understanding. Its work is not only to synthesize evidence, but to test widely cited assertions against data, identify when research is overstated or misused, and correct the record when weak claims harden into policy, litigation, or regulation. This includes examining risks that surface as demand and population pressures continue to rise.
The Carver Center’s roots are in community efforts that, for nearly a decade now, have worked to foster thoughtful dialogue, practical solutions, and evidence-based approaches across food, nutrition, and agriculture in a variety of settings. Carver is now building on that foundation with a sharper focus on research integrity, policy consequences, and the connection between high-level debates and the economic realities facing households.
The Center is inspired by the work of George Washington Carver, whose own efforts in a different time reflected a belief that innovation, service and continued progress is a necessity. Progress in agriculture was not an end in itself, but a means to sustain both those who grow food and those who depend on it. That principle remains relevant today. Innovation matters only if it preserves access, affordability, and trust.
My role as chairman is to help steward that mission, along with fellow board members who have extensive backgrounds in food policy and service to communities, and with a deep and broad network of experts and practitioners across the food system. I serve the Carver Center in a voluntary capacity with the knowledge and support of my current full-time employer, the National Pork Producers Council, alongside my other existing academic and nonprofit board service roles.
The Center is a convener and a collaboratory, and welcomes substantive dialogue and engagement across many perspectives. It evaluates claims on evidence, data, methods, and conclusions, not on labels or assumptions.
I have spent my career in environments where assumptions carry consequences. As a journalist and editor for two decades, I learned the discipline of testing claims against facts. In later work spanning data, advanced analytics, and applied research, I saw how flawed inputs lead to flawed outcomes, even when intentions are sound. In my global agriculture and food policy work, I have seen efforts to advance or solidify regulation that would raise costs or narrow choices (or both) without delivering promised benefits.
Every American has a stake in keeping food decisions connected to reality. The Carver Center exists to help ensure that connection and understanding – and to invite serious, evidence-based engagement with the policies that ultimately shape what ends up on the plate.
Curliss is Chairman of the Carver Center.