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“Food is my passion,” says Leilani Leszkay, who will graduate with her MA in Environmental Policy and Management this spring. “It’s such an important topic in terms of the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis; estimates are it’s responsible for between 21 and 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And it’s not on the table, so to speak, as much as it should be in terms of the conversations happening around climate action.”

From Animal Advocacy and Nutrition to Environmental Policy

Leszkay’s background in animal advocacy led her to nonprofit work and becoming a plant-based nutritionist. But something was still missing.

 “Advocating for more sustainable eating was always my angle—I just wanted to do more of it and on a bigger scale, so I decided coming back to graduate school was the right thing for me.”

While investigating her options, Leszkay came across the Institute and was intrigued, but unsure if it was a fit for her goals.

“There isn’t a food program, but I thought it might be worth talking to them anyway. I reached out and talked to Jason Scorse [EPM program chair], and we just clicked right away. It’s been a tremendous experience. My advice to prospective students is, if you have interests that aren’t listed on the website, look into it anyway.”

Leszkay’s passion for all things related to food led her to a project helping make the Institute campus an even planet-friendlier place.

Healthy Food for People and the Planet

The is a national nonprofit founded in the wake of a 2004 National Geographic study that identified the places on the planet where people live the longest: Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya and Montezuma, Costa Rica; Loma Linda, California; and Okinawa, Japan. The study uncovered common traits shared across each of these regions, including primarily plant-based diets, lifestyles that encourage movement and connection with other people, and a sense of purpose. The project’s goal is to foster and encourage those traits through collaboration with workplaces, institutions, and restaurants around the world, including here in Monterey.

In fall 2024, the Institute brought in a new food vendor,, to manage the on-campus café. Leszkay stopped by and struck up a conversation with the café staff, who shared that Ardent’s other site at Monterey Peninsula College had been approved by the Blue Zones Project. They mentioned they were interested in doing the same at the Institute.

“I thought that might be a really cool project to work on,” says Leszkay, whose proposal for a directed study was immediately granted by Professor Scorse. Working with staff from Ardent and Blue Zones, as well as Facilities Director Andrew Hernandez, Leszkay crafted a strategy for incorporating Blue Zones principles into the café in a student-friendly way.

“We recreated a lot of the menu items and renamed things to try to make them more appealing,” she says. “We also moved things around on the menu—there’s a lot of behavioral science around menu design and we moved the things we wanted to highlight to the more ideal spots on the menu.”

The redesigned menu and other changes were implemented in January and earned the café Blue Zones approval. Now Leszkay is looking ahead to the evaluation phase of the project. 

“Toward the end of the semester I’m going to pull some sales data—I’m very curious to see how it performs!”

From the start, Leszkay had both personal and career goals in mind for her project. 

“One of my areas of focus is menu change implementation—working with corporations and companies so they offer more sustainable items more prominently. My larger career goal is to encourage people to eat plant-based food on a large scale. Ideally I’d like to work with food service companies like Sodexo and Aramark who are providing food to millions of people, in schools and prisons and national parks and state parks. There’s a big opportunity there to leverage change.”

An event celebrating Blue Zones approval for the café is in the planning stages for sometime this spring. Leszkay, who also serves on the Institute’s Sustainability Council, is looking forward to graduating in May, but says she will miss the “awesome” campus community.

“I’m ready to get my career in motion, but I’ve loved my experience here. Students, faculty, and staff at MIIS are all so motivated and passionate about what they do. It’s contagious; there’s an energy that happens here. I feel like we’re this small but mighty group that goes out into the world and really makes an impact.”