Employee of the Month (Ratina Blue Bell)

RM WEEKLY · SPECIAL ISSUE

We're here with Ratina Blue Bell. She is not a rat person. She teaches. One of her classes is about how a country sitting on more food than it can eat still manages to leave its own people hungry. That is her life's work, and the real version of the problem I keep circling with a spreadsheet. She could have laughed at me. People with serious work and serious titles usually do. She did not. She looked at the same numbers I keep putting in front of you and she took them seriously, because feeding people has never once been a joke to her.

I cannot send her milk. I have never been able to send anyone milk. What I have is a mug with a rat on it and the words Employee of the Month, so I handed it to her.

Then I asked her a few questions. You ought to hear from somebody who works the hunger problem for a living, and not from somebody who only runs the numbers at it. Here is what she had to say.

Q: Most of the world laughs at this, and then it writes me off. You did neither. I'd like to know what you heard that the rest of them didn't.

I used to sit through pitches for a living. You develop an ear for the tell. Most people who walk in with a wild idea are selling the wildness itself, because a dazzled person won't check their math. Conversely, you led with the arithmetic and dared me to laugh anyway.

I saw a man who had run the numbers and couldn’t un-run them. I stand in front of a room every term and teach the same uncomfortable fact: this country grows more food than it could ever eat, but it still lets its own people go hungry. The fundamental trouble is finding value in the cost to move a single calorie from where it sits to where it’s needed. In a corporate, profit-driven culture, very few see any value in this cost.

Most of my colleagues would sooner publish nothing for a decade than be photographed near a solution that looked undignified. You were not worried about looking undignified, and that alone put you ahead of people with three times your funding.

So no, I didn’t hear a crank. I heard somebody who noticed that the densest, most stubborn little protein engine on the planet was already living in our walls. A man said what he saw as the obvious solution out loud, while everyone else was too embarrassed to. Embarrassment is expensive and you aren't willing to pay that particular bill.

Q: I've spent this whole newsletter bragging about efficiency. Less land, less feed, less waste, more out of every pound. You work on the actual problem of people who can't get fed. So tell me straight: down where the hunger really is, does any of that bookkeeping matter, or is it just numbers that flatter men like me?

Numbers flatter. Of course they do. That is half of what they’re for. I spent years in rooms where a number was a wardrobe choice. You put the right one on, and the cruelest call starts to look respectable, even visionary. Only engineers reach for numbers to learn if they’re right. Most reach for the ones that prove their own ambitions. I’ve watched people justify a layoff, or a price hike, with an outright indifference to who goes without, and go home feeling like a steward. So yes, be suspicious of any number that makes you feel good. I am.

A number can be dressed to mean anything, but you cannot adjust the assumptions on a glass of milk. Down where the hunger is, nobody has ever been fed by a ratio. A child doesn’t get less hungry because the feed conversion was elegant. Efficiency is only worth anything if, at the far end of all that arithmetic, something real comes out that a person can swallow. Cynics miss this reality when they laugh you off. You used the math as your guide to a more efficient product. Milk is this product. Milk nourishes.

You asked me straight, so I’ll answer you straight. Bookkeeping for bookkeeping’s sake is flattery, and you should trust it about as far as I trust a quarterly projection. But yours does not stay on the page. Yours ends in a substance that reaches people. Most of the numbers I have spent my life around never made that crossing. They were admired, and got funding, but nobody ate. Yours is at least trying to become food. That is rarer than you think, and it is the only math I respect these days.

Q: This is the first one of these I've ever done, and I mean to do it right, the way a real company should. What made you sign on to this unglamorous work, and what keeps you in it?

I spent my career in the rat race, so I know one when I see one. The rooms I came up in were full of rats. The ones in good suits who could sniff out a sinking ship a quarter early and were down the line before the deck tilted. I learned to smell a rat in a forecast from clear across the table, and I got very good at it. It paid well and it fed no one but me.

Then somebody hands me the actual animal, and the actual animal turns out to be more honest in comparison. A dam who turns a fifth of herself into milk every day and asks for nothing back. A mischief that took the worst ground on the continent and made a living off what the rest of us threw away. The rat in the wall never once lied about what it was. That is the part that signed me on. After all those years among the figurative kind, somebody handed me the literal one, and it had better manners.

What keeps me doing, as you say, the unglamorous work, is simpler. Hunger is real, and reality is seldom glamorous. I have no romance left for the clean version of this problem. So I will take the dam over the boardroom, and the litter in the wall over one more elegant projection that won't feed anyone but the executives.

Q: Many of the people who write in are sure I've lost my mind. You're a serious person, and folks listen when you talk. What would you say to the ones still at the edge of this thing, wondering whether we're insane.

I would tell them they have the question backward. Sane, is the boardroom that can prove, on paper, that feeding a hungry person does not pencil out. I sat in those rooms. Everyone was sane, and nobody but them ate. If that is the floor for sane, I would rather stand with the crazy.

Every real thing I’ve ever seen looked insane the morning before it worked. The line isn’t genius on one side and lunatic on the other. It’s the same person, and which you choose to call them depends entirely on whether their idea comes to fruition. I believe you are on the right side of that line. I have checked your math.

So to the ones at the edge, still deciding. You are not at the edge of madness. You are at the edge of being early. And I have never once in my life been sorry I got somewhere early.