Santa Barbara County Foodbank CEO Erik Talkin is a loud voice in the crusade for food security. With appearances on the California Association of Food Banks’ Board of Directors, Feeding America’s National Advisory Council, and at Feed the Children’s regional advocacy conference, where he gave the keynote speech last month, the anti-hunger maven speaks with a subtle British lilt and obvious passion. He gave a TED Talk — cleverly titled “Why Giving People More Food Doesn’t End Hunger” — just before the pandemic. But Talkin is about action. Between the 10 million (!) pounds of food his 50-strong team has routed to county residents in 2023, to the Foodbank’s multiple-award-winning nutrition programs, the man is on a mission, and he seems as fit as anyone is to accomplish it.
You won’t hear that from him, though. Talkin is constantly moving, unruffled with the wins when one in four in Santa Barbara County still relies on the Foodbank. More than a third of those 100,000-some-odd people are children. As he told me over the phone last week, “There’s lots of food insecurity in this county. Only 15 of California’s 58 counties see more. The upside here is all of our fresh produce grown in the Santa Maria Valley, but you need to be able to want to eat that food — to want to eat produce and know what to do with it.”
Sir Francis Bacon’s observation that knowledge is power could be Talkin’s tagline too — in 15 years as CEO, he’s invested heavily in food literacy via in-school presentations, cooking classes, farmers' market programs, and gleaning (a kind of foraging-lite), all of which serve preschoolers to seniors.