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office clearly shows who and what Jim values most. There are photographs of Gandhi and Nehru, Vinoba Bhave, Mother Teresa, Rabindranath Tagore, Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Dorothy Day, esteemed philosophers, singers, musicians, and more. There is also a framed question posed by his older daughter Mira when she was a little girl to remind him of his calling: “How come you aren’t talking about the hungry children?”
    It all started after Harvard, when Jim led the Krokodiloes, the college’s a cappella singing group, on a 1964 trip to India. There he became fascinated by the Gandhian movement and its offshoots, especially their commitment to social justice, economic opportunity, and sustainable agriculture. He was supposed to go to law school after college but “jumped ship” and took a job with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) instead. For the next five years he worked on a project in India to reduce child and maternal malnutrition. Then, he headed to Cornell for his doctorate in agricultural economics and nutrition with a focus on policy and planning.
    In 1972, when he was just thirty years old, Jim was invited to head a new program in international nutrition planning at MIT. His first marriage (to Mira’s mother, Sati) having ended, Jim met and married Louise Cochran, who went on to a divinity degree, a fascination with Eastern religions, and team building counseling using the Enneagram, a personality assessment tool. Altogether, he has three grown children in what he considers his “joint family.” All three work in the public health field.
    After four years at MIT, he went to Washington, DC, to head USAID’s worldwide office of nutrition. This was when Henry Kissinger was departing as secretary of state and Jimmy Carter had become president. Shortly thereafter, he was posted to Bangladesh to work on nutrition for two years. Bangladesh, in Jim’s estimation, proved to be an unhealthy working situation, one that brought out the worst in people. That posting led to what he experienced as a midlife crisis, one reinforced by an evaluation finding that USAID’s development program in Bangladesh had the net effect of widening not narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots, an assessment that gave no major USAID program in the country a grade better than “D.” Shortly afterward, an assignment in the Philippines only reinforced this sense of disillusionment: our government seemed to be more eager to support President Ferdinand Marcos than the desperate people who needed help to escape poverty. Jim concluded, “I’m on the wrong side!”
    Small wonder that Jim soon came under the influence of activist Father Daniel Berrigan and Catholic Worker leaders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. He moved with his young family to Haley House, the Catholic Worker house in Boston, where he and his wife joined other activists in providing food and hospitality to homeless people and the elderly.
    Jim and Louise also performed acts of civil disobedience that landed them in jail, such as protesting the nuclear arms race and South Africa’s apartheid. Ironically, Jim’s father, who ran a steel company in Pittsburgh and had been in the forefront of civil rights struggles in that city, was at the time serving on the board of a company seeking to export nuclear technology to South Africa. Father and son, who had been unusually close in earlier years, clearly did not see eye to eye on this one.
    In 1982, after two years at Haley House, the family, along with two other families and several individuals, created Catholic Worker’s Noonday Farm in Winchendon, Massachusetts, where they farmed organically, supplied soup kitchens and shelters, and lived as a community for ten years. Jim also resumed nutrition work for the World Bank in Africa, which allowed him to contribute financially to the farm.
    Because the Catholic Worker communities were interfaith, Jim also met Quakers,