How Naomi Starkman’s Using Journalism to Change Food Policy

With all the recent hubbub surrounding the food-and-politics website Civil Eats—which raised $100,000 on Kickstarter in 2013 and snagged the James Beard Foundation’s Best Publication Award the next year—it would be easy to mistake editor-in-chief Naomi Starkman for an overnight sensation. Her path to new-media success, however, has been neither short nor narrow. A law-school graduate, the 45-year-old has served as deputy executive director of San Francisco’s Ethics Commission, handled communications and policy for slow food nation, and even managed a 50-acre organic farm in Washington State—all before finally becoming a full-time editor. “I realized I could move the needle faster as a journalist,” says Starkman, who was awarded a prestigious John S. Knight Journalism fellowship at Stanford University last fall.  She prizes quality over quantity. Civil Eats produces only one article a day. “We don’t aggregate stories [from other sources],” Starkman notes. “We focus on original content, with the common thread being our voice. Our job is to raise important questions that you’re not hearing asked by other news outlets.” She hopes to change the story, not just report it. “How do we harness this communal energy building around what we eat and make big systemic change?” asks Starkman, who wants politicians to get cracking on climate change and farm labor.