Jun 28, 2026 · 24 min · 20 segments
Have you heard about the frozen food warehouse that burned for over a week in Los Angeles? Over 11 acres of food, 85,000,000 pounds, destroyed. We invited complex food systems strategist Terri Barker…
Terri BarkerGuest
Jane MarieHost
This is Terry Barker, a complex food system strategist, which is a job one can have.
Basically, if you look at the industry, you have a lot of different partners that make it so, which I will talk about some of that.
So you have your farmers, your distributors, you also have your institutions like research universities.
And so one of the things that I'm currently doing as in a consultant role is liaising with these different organizations, institutions, and types of businesses to address some of the challenges in the industry.
So the agriculture industry, which includes food, beverage, textiles, like any anything that's sort of grown on farm livestock, those those pieces, those food and agriculture.
And so that supply chain would be from from farm to the hands of the consumers and everything in between.
Terry grew up about 40 minutes away from my family farm in a much more acidified environment on the campus of Michigan State University.
get into this line of study and work? I've been in the industry for most of my life.
My mother used to be the editor, had previously been the editor of the College of Human Medicine magazine.
and so that's right across the hall from the school of vet med and so she knew some of the people over there so they would tell her about events and we would go and so i got to see it up close um and then my parents would do stuff like like people would say hey we're gonna go out to so-and-so farm and go ride some horses you know your kid likes the farm my parents were never gonna go and do that and so they were like great take her to go hang out with some horses.
This is Terry Barker, a complex food system strategist, which is a job one can have.
Basically, if you look at the industry, you have a lot of different partners that make it so, which I will talk about some of that.
So you have your farmers, your distributors, you also have your institutions like research universities.
And so one of the things that I'm currently doing as in a consultant role is liaising with these different organizations, institutions, and types of businesses to address some of the challenges in the industry.
So the agriculture industry, which includes food, beverage, textiles, like any anything that's sort of grown on farm livestock, those those pieces, those food and agriculture.
And so that supply chain would be from from farm to the hands of the consumers and everything in between.
Terry grew up about 40 minutes away from my family farm in a much more acidified environment on the campus of Michigan State University.
get into this line of study and work? I've been in the industry for most of my life.
My mother used to be the editor, had previously been the editor of the College of Human Medicine magazine.
and so that's right across the hall from the school of vet med and so she knew some of the people over there so they would tell her about events and we would go and so i got to see it up close um and then my parents would do stuff like like people would say hey we're gonna go out to so-and-so farm and go ride some horses you know your kid likes the farm my parents were never gonna go and do that and so they were like great take her to go hang out with some horses.
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