By Deborah Kane

Summer internship season is here, and I find all the young energy and talent dedicated to making the world a better, more delicious place to be incredibly inspiring. It makes me reflect on my own start in this work. Really, I just got lucky, I think.

In 1997 I was a graduate student in conservation ecology at the University of Georgia studying community-supported farms in the Southeast. The Internet was a brand-new thing and I had the standard university email account. (ASCI text emails were our only option.) One day a job posting was circulated. In the Northwest, a new nonprofit called Food Alliance was looking for an executive director.

I drew up a resume that downplayed the fact that I was still in college. I applied and was invited out to Portland for an interview. I spent the day before the interview at the coffee shop at Powell’s Books reading the equivalent of The Idiot’s Guide to Being an Executive Director. As a cost-conscious graduate student, I couldn’t afford to buy the book and take it back to my hotel (the Ben Stark Hotel, the much seedier precursor to the Ace Hotel), so I memorized everything I could over nonstop cups of coffee.

The next day I regurgitated facts and figures and strategies for nonprofit fundraising as if I’d been doing the work for years. I was somehow still very caffeinated, and likely seemed quite energetic. I got the job. I’ve moved on, but Food Alliance celebrated its 10th anniversary this year (Back of the House).

Graduates everywhere this summer are just getting started on their path to being future leaders and innovators, and many of them will end up in professions focused on food. Makes you want to throw your hat up in the air and celebrate. In this issue we profile three graduates of Portland State University, each one making an indelible mark on the food and farming culture in our community (Portland’s New Wave of Educators).

We’ve also got an amazing profile of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, the legendary memoirist/food writer known as M.F.K. Fisher, who would have turned 100 this year (The Legendary M.F.K. Fisher). The article was originally written almost 20 years ago by Portland-based journalist Heidi Yorkshire, who still counts the experience of meeting Fisher as one of the highlights of her career. As the story goes, Fisher, who was born on July 3, 1908, would have been named Independencia if she’d been born a day later. Now there’s a woman who got lucky.

But not everyone is so lucky. Read our cover story on farm labor and you’ll understand (Hand Picked). A reasonable response, when face to face with the fact that farmworkers are excluded from the basic worker protections and rights available to everyone else in this country, is “No, that can’t be possible.”

But it is. And while it is an impossible situation, luck will play no role whatsoever in fixing it.

Deborah Kane is the Vice President of Ecotrust Food & Farms, a Food & Society Policy Fellow, and the publisher of Edible Portland.