“I realized how much U.S. policy actually decides how farmers in places like India and around the world live and die,” she recalls. For these reasons, bridging the sustainable farming world and the food justice worlds has always been a priority for Khanna.

At the farm-focused U.C. Davis, she says, “I would be the lone voice bringing up social justice.” Then when Khanna moved to Oakland and worked as a food justice and food security organizer, she says, “I wasn’t hearing people talk about the ecological aspects of food culture.” But, she says that gap is beginning to close.

With the HEAL Alliance, the goal is to cast the whole food system—with all of its often opposing challenges—as a single challenge worth tackling as a unified group.

HEAL is also working with Washington, D.C.-based group Food Policy Action, which rates members of Congress based on their food votes, to get the food system on the presidential candidates’ radar with the Plate of the Union campaign. The group was at both political conventions this summer, where it kicked off a food truck tour, and they also have a campus challenge, a petition and social media campaign underway.

It has also hired campaigners in five states—Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina—who are working closely with groups already making local change on the ground in areas such as agriculture, food access, and food workers’ rights. The organizers are attending town hall meetings and community forums for both candidates to highlight the fact that food is deeply tied to other big election year issues, such as national security, health care, and income inequality.

“What we want to hear from the candidates is that they understand that there is a whole food system and that it is something they need to be taking on,” says Khanna. “In the last few years, we’ve heard some candidates talking about single issue campaigns—like GMO labeling—but we want to avoid the single-issue pieces and get at the whole system.”

The group’s work was echoed by the much-read calls for “a national food policy” made by Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, who were joined by Union of Concerned Scientists’ Ricardo Salvador and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter. The authors argued that “the production and consumption of food has a bigger impact on Americans’ well-being than any other human activity” and therefor deserves a forward-thinking set of policies. In other words, what Khanna and the HEAL Alliance are cooking up.

“A lot of people have been talking about the need for something larger,” says Khanna. “So the time is right.”

This article originally appeared on the Food &Wine website in partnership with Civil Eats.