‘Happiness is Being Locally Famous’

I have recently had the unusual experience of bringing an unexpected idea from conception into everyday use by governments and international organizations.

What we invented is a new way to measure food access, by calculating the lowest cost of a healthy diet to meet a population’s nutritional needs. Our computational tools can help decision-makers improve food supplies all around the world. I hope this new nutrition policy metric developed at Tufts continues to be even more widely used, guiding investment and policy choices towards healthier diets for everyone.

More importantly, I hope the story of this innovation inspires people to keep looking for more useful ways of understanding the world. In the Food Economics textbook that a former student and I just wrote, one feature is to trace big ideas back to their authors. For example, the U.S. and other governments now measure food security using a new kind of questionnaire developed by Kathy Radimer for her PhD dissertation in the late 1980s. We tell that story because solving problems calls for all kinds of innovation, not just new technologies and better policy choices, but also new concepts that help us set goals and monitor progress.

And most importantly of all, stories about innovation are great because they start with individuals’ curiosity and ambition, then show how lots of teamwork, collaboration and adaptation is needed to succeed. Individuals on their own can’t accomplish much. We need a whole community with different skills and perspectives, so people can specialize and take turns in each role.

My goal is to recognize what each person brings to the collective effort. Happiness is being locally famous—to have the people who know you appreciate what you’ve done. To me, that’s the basic point. Everyone has something to offer; we just need to keep trying new ways to help each other reach our full potential.

—Will Masters is professor of food policy and economics at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

Our Tufts is a series of personal stories shared by members of the Tufts community and featured on both Tufts Now and Instagram.