10 to Follow: Keep Up with Sustainable Food Trends on Twitter

This post is part of a new series that highlights ways to keep up with impact-related issues through social media. 

As the Co-Founder & Chief Impact Officer at Revolution Foods, Kirsten Saenz Tobey is a major player in the world of sustainable food. She drives the vision and the product experience for the company, developing innovative solutions to give more people access to healthy food and education. It's a challenging job, but Kirsten knows how to tackle it. In the company’s early days, she and five other people did everything from cooking the food to driving the truck that delivered it. Now a $100 million business, Revolution Foods provides jobs to 1,500 largely inner-city employees and delivers food to both schools and stores. Over 75 percent of their meals reach kids who are in free or reduced-price meal programs.

We asked Kirsten to share how she uses Twitter to stay on top of what’s happening in the quickly changing world of sustainable food, and we discovered that she uses Twitter as her main source of daily news on all fronts. "It’s so easy to curate my own focused news feed with everything from global events to local happenings," she says. These are her top food-related accounts to follow, with notes about how each pick made her list. 

1. NPR Food @nprfood – Great resource for news about studies on health, food, and nutrition.
2. Good Food Team NRDC @nrdcfood – For the latest on global food system issues. 
3. Mark Bittman @bittman – This chef and New York Times writer covers a variety of food topics.
4. Food Tank @food_tank – Stories and trends, all about the global food system.
5. Michael Pollan @michaelpollan – This author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Cooked is a leading voice for a healthier, more sustainable food system.
6. The Food Biz School @foodbizschool – A new business school focused on food entrepreneurship, they tweet about innovations in food.
7. Anna Lappe @annalappe and her mom Frances More Lappe @fmlappe – Anna is the founder of Food Mythbusters, and Frances Moore is the author of Diet for a Small Planet. I heard Frances Moore Lappe speak when I was 13 years old, and it inspired me to dedicate my life to building a better food system in the U.S.
8. Civil Eats @CivilEats – This James Beard Foundation Publication of the Year is all about food politics.
9. Marion Nestle @marionnestle – A well-known author who now writes at Foodpolitics.com, Dr. Nestle is also a professor for the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and the Sociology Department at New York University.
10. Michele Simon @MicheleRSimon — This author, speaker, and consultant on the politics of food and alcohol is also the creator of the website Eat Drink Politics.

And, of course, you'll want to follow Kirsten, too. 

More about Kirsten 

Kirsten began her career teaching and leading education programs in the U.S. and Latin America. She is an Ashoka Fellow, Aspen Institute Environmental Fellow, member of the Culinary Institute of America's Sustainable Business Leadership Council and past mentor for the Women's Initiative Fellowship Program. She founded Revolution Foods in 2006 with Kristin Groos Richmond, a former classmate at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Kirsten continues to drive the vision and product experience for the company, driving mission impact, nutrition advocacy, and food integrity, among other key aspects of the business.

With co-founder Kristin Groos Richmond, Kirsten is one of Time Magazine's Education Activists of 2011 and Fortune's 40 under 40, ones to watch. In 2010, NewSchools Venture Fund named Kirsten and Kristin Entrepreneurs of the Year. Kirsten holds an AB from Brown University and an MBA from UC Berkeley. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and three daughters.