There is hubris to the Hearst Tower, even more than you’d expect from a midtown Manhattan skyscraper that strives to make New York’s seat of media concrete. The 1928 cast stone facade stops short at six storeys, stunted by the Great Depression and the first collapse of William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire (and they thought the newspaper business was in trouble then). Not until the dawn of this millennium did Hearst’s heirs finally get around to finishing what their granddaddy had started. Theirs was the first skyscraper development to be announced after 9/11, as if only another threat to the American empire could wake them from their torpor.

Last October, the James Beard Foundation moved into the Hearst Tower for a two-day conference with the theme “How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats.” (Whoever chose the title must have had a wicked sense of humour; how money and media don’t influence the way we eat would make for a much shorter discussion.) Mitchell Davis, vice-president of the Beard Foundation, a non-profit with a mission “to celebrate, nurture, and preserve America’s diverse culinary heritage and future,” was presiding over 130 of America’s most powerful and influential food experts: political attachés charged with bringing reform to the farm bill; Davos World Economic Forum alumni; Michelin three-star chefs; and bestselling, New York Times–hallowed academics.

“In the beginning there was James Beard,” wrote Nora Ephron. Or perhaps it was Julia Child; the quote has been attributed to both. Back in 1954, when the New York Times first dubbed Beard “the dean of American cookery,” the phrase “American cookery” still sounded like an oxymoron. (Of course, the same observation applied doubly to Canadian cuisine: our “first” published cookbook, The Cook Not Mad, was written by an American.) But Beard remained unapologetic, whether about cooking in the nude, his kimono flapping uselessly at his sides; or about smashing old-fashioned eggs to whip up a new culinary omelette: “We are American and we can do what we want.” You might say he took the Monroe doctrine and applied it to canapés.

When I arrived at the conference, after a delay at US customs, the participants at the twenty-five or so tables were talking among themselves. Davis had positioned himself strategically close to the door and the podium. He knows everybody on the New York culinary scene, but that morning he chose to sit alone. He has worked for the Beard Foundation for eighteen years, and he could almost pass for a slimmed-down version of Beard himself: hulking, balding, dapper. Like Beard, he is a bon vivant, a cookbook writer (with four tomes to Beard’s twenty-two), and a tireless promoter of American chefs and American cuisine. During the conference, he never stopped moving: standing up to button and unbutton his black jacket; sitting down to hunch himself, like a coiled spring, over his iPhone to tweet the foundation’s more than 120,000 followers with his large baker’s hands.

Sam Kass, chef and senior policy adviser at the White House and co-architect of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, had already spoken, and his words still hung in the air: “We have an opportunity right now to move the conversation forward.” For one woman at my table, this seemed to mean drinking more fair trade coffee and earnestly quoting her own tweets and blog posts. For others, this proved to be the moment of truth: finally, culture’s poorest cousins — those who try to make art out of a three-times-a-day necessity that ends up in the toilet — might be asked to join the dance.

“We have a tremendous opportunity,” said Davis, who holds a Ph.D. in food studies from New York University, and who gets as excited about the soft pretzel rolls he just discovered in Milwaukee (“They make the best ham sandwich”) as he does about philosopher David Hume’s writings on the aesthetics of taste. The thirty-minute session entitled “What Is Most Deeply Needed in the Food System Today” had not yet begun.

Within the culinary industry, there exists a real sense that the North American food system is broken and needs a major overhaul if we are to protect our own health and that of the planet. In 2011, the New York Times moved its best-loved recipe writer, Mark Bittman — or “The Minimalist,” as he was known to readers for almost fifteen years — from the dining section to the op-ed pages. Michael Pollan, once an editor at Harper’s, became a bestselling food writer when he exposed the system’s flaws in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, spawning a generation of food enthusiasts who talk, tweet, read, and watch food content 24-7, even if they spend significantly less time cooking than their forebears did.

Davis said the next challenge for the Beard Foundation would be to offer leadership training for chefs so they could serve as effective spokespeople for the industry. (New media and food television can now do a better job of making them celebrities.) “Chefs have the spotlight, but who knows for how long?” he asked. “How can we use the media to get the message out?”

Many so-called solutions to the food crisis focus on changing the system of delivering food from factory farms to our tables. But what if the problem runs deeper than the structure of the food chain? As Pollan has noted (drawing on the work of French sociologist Claude Fischler), we would be insulated — if not fully protected — from the industrial food system’s machinations if we had a stronger food culture to begin with, one based on tradition rather than, as Davis often observes, market research. If so, the first step could be to find a way of bolstering our nascent food culture. We might, for instance, consider how other art forms have taken shape. “Cooking is like the theatre,” Beard often said, long before the advent of the Food Network. He used the metaphor to celebrate the spectacle of fine dining, but the two disciplines share many similar challenges. How do you lay the foundations for culture and tradition in a young country? The answer may lie in the discussion of taste — something we can, and should, dispute if we hope to define ourselves.