Mel Evans/AP/File

A view of the train tunnel under the Hudson River as seen from the back of an Amtrak train bound for New York's Penn Station. President Trump has called for a new $1.5 trillion infrastructure program, but his budget also calls for Amtrak cuts, and it's unclear how much money, if any, will go toward rail projects including upgrades needed in New York.

Amtrak engineer Michael Kempf confessed recently to his brother that he had become increasingly worried about his own safety amid a string of deadly US train crashes.

Mr. Kempf, an Amtrak engineer from Savannah, Ga., was among two railroad employees killed as Train 91 from New York to Miami rolled through the South Carolina countryside early Sunday morning before crashing into a prone freight train. More than 100 passengers were hurt, most lightly.

It was the seventh major train accident for Amtrak in recent years, and the fourth incident in about two months.

Such private fears about getting hurt on the job ​– raised by a front-line engineer, and reported by the New York Daily News – symbolize a troubling set of realities facing not just Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson, but also the US Congress as it confronts a looming debate on infrastructure funding.

Since President Nixon and a near-unanimous Congress moved to create the quasi-public rail giant in 1971, Washington has saddled Amtrak with the Sisyphean task of building profitable ridership while managing chronic funding shortages that have yielded a repair backlog exceeding $24 billion in its busy Northeast Corridor alone.

Now, Mr. Anderson, formerly head of Delta Airlines, is being leaned on to fast-track new standards and equipment that can tie safety more firmly to profit incentives. Yet White House budget cuts targeting Amtrak amplify a passenger-rail paradox: an industry that runs on kinetic energy is challenged by political and bureaucratic inertia.

“How to get railroads back in the frontal lobes of both Congress and the public is a real challenge,” says MIT-trained signaling expert Steven Ditmeyer. But it may be starting to happen, he says. “I’m taking the Amtrak train on Wednesday to New York from Washington and I will be sensitive to these recent incidents, hoping that everybody is doing things properly.”

Ridership rising, safety improving

As Amtrak continues to gain passengers (total passenger trips neared 32 million in 2017) while maintaining 21,000 miles of track connecting 500 communities in 44 states, it remains one of the safest alternatives ​– far safer, mile for mile, than road travel.

“It’s actually getting better,” says Russell G. Quimby, a rail safety expert at Quimby Consulting in Omaha. Neb. The system’s safety record has improved over the past decade, he says, and the company has largely installed automated braking technology across its busy Northeast corridor, to head off accidents like the recent ones.

But “Amtrak has been underfunded for years. It’s always popular for politicians to turn around and say, ‘Hey look at all this money that’s being wasted on Amtrak.’ If they want to [keep] Amtrak, they need to face up to their obligations.”

Yes, Amtrak is subsidized, but so are other forms of transportation systems from roads to airports, Mr. Quimby notes. And rail has some compelling advantages. A train uses only about one gallon of fuel to move a one-ton load for 400 miles, he says. Whether that’s passengers or freight, “that’s a highly efficient system. We need railroads.”

Recent incidents

But three of the most recent accidents also showcase stubborn vulnerabilities, primarily the slow implementation of positive train control (PTC), the congressionally mandated GPS-centered safety system that can override technical and operator errors to automatically stop trains before they wreck.

While Amtrak has put PTC on nearly two-thirds of its tracks, freight companies that share tracks with passenger trains have been far slower, winning waivers from Congress to delay implementation as the technical challenges and costs mount.

The system was not operational near Tacoma on Dec. 18, where a train derailed over an interstate bridge, leaving railcars dangling off the track. It was also not in operation last week in Virginia when a train chartered by House Republicans hit a garbage truck straddling the track. A small railroad company that owned the tracks had been exempted from tying railroad crossings into the PTC system. Investigators are trying to determine whether a faulty crossing gate may have contributed to the crash, and could have been detected.

And on Sunday in Cayce, S.C., PTC, if operational, may have been able to warn of a switch error or malfunction that caused the Amtrak train to follow a freight train onto a siding and crash.

Confounding safety investigations like the one in Tacoma are complicated maintenance agreements between different entities that make it difficult to pin blame. On Sunday, Mr. Anderson blamed the rail owner, CSX, for the switch issue that led the passenger locomotive astray.

Because Amtrak has installed PTC on the tracks it owns but is forced to use tracks owned by others, “this is a case where Amtrak is not 100 percent in control of its own destiny,” says Allan Zarembski, a University of Delaware expert on railroad safety.

Undergirding those problems is an institutional aversion to change, of which Congress bears some blame, says Ditmeyer.

In 2015, former Federal Railroad Administration chief Sarah Feinberg “lectured the railroads and said, ‘Don’t wait until 2018 [to fully implement PTC,] get going on it now,’ " Ditmeyer says. “But when she did that, the railroads got upset and got Congress to [add a law] that said, ‘Well, if railroads are showing good progress, they get an extension until 2020’.... The railroads take the position of doing only the minimum required by law.”

To be sure, the four big US freight rail companies have spent $8 billion over a decade. In context, Burlington Northern Santa Fe made revenues north of $5 billion in 2017 and spent $200 million on PTC. But Amtrak has completed more of the installation despite facing chronic funding shortages, largely the result of opposition from rural GOP interests that don’t see the benefits of the system.

Debate over subsidies

Amtrak faces a $630 million budget cut as the Trump administration attempts to steer the rail giant to focus more on its profitable routes, like the ones that crisscross the Northeast Corridor.

“People might say, Well, goodness gracious, that doesn’t line up with what the president said about a commitment to infrastructure,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney during a call with the American Road and Transportation Builders Association last year. “That was done intentionally. What we’ve effectively done is try to move money out of existing, more inefficient programs and hold that money for what we expect to be more efficient infrastructure programs later on.”

The Trump administration’s moves to force Amtrak to focus on profitable routes “has a fundamental problem, which is that passenger train operations are not for profit entities,” says Zarembski. “The vast majority of railroads are subsidized just like highways.”

Amtrak leaders have made similar points.

“Look, this is basic infrastructure,” CEO Anderson told CBS News last fall. “I think the subsidy last year for highways was $40 billion, subsidy for aviation was about $16 billion and when you think about what we do and what’s sort of fundamental to public policy, it’s to fund infrastructure.” (Amtrak’s subsidy totaled $1.8 billion last year.)

And former Amtrak CEO Charles Moorman told a House Committee in October, “We are working relentlessly to improve our safety culture, modernize and upgrade our products, leverage our asset portfolio, and strengthen our operational efficiency and project delivery. [But] capital funding is not keeping pace with the risks facing Amtrak’s infrastructure and fleet.”

A friend of the other Amtrak employee killed Sunday, conductor Michael Cella, noted in a TV interview that he hopes a broader “blame game” doesn’t take over that debate. “I want [Mr. Cella’s] legacy to be that they improve safety on the railroad because of what happened Sunday.”

Staff writers Mark Trumbull and Laurent Belsie contributed to this story.

(Stefan Rousseau/AP

In London on Monday, European Commission negotiator Michel Barnier, left, warned Brexit Secretary David Davis that leaving the customs union will lead to barriers to trade.

When I started as a foreign correspondent in the late 1970s, it never occurred to me that the discipline I’d most need to call on four decades later wouldn’t be politics or economics. Instead, it’s seismology. More than at any time since World War II, the world’s tectonic plates are shifting. With a series of major jolts to the established order, and aftershocks in nearly every corner of the globe, the earth is moving beneath our feet.

The most obvious example, for Americans, has been the ascendancy of Donald Trump. But that’s only the latest. In one way or another, almost all of them can be traced back to a tremor of a different sort, on a chilly November evening that I was privileged to witness nearly three decades ago. Because I’d been the Monitor’s correspondent in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, it felt even more deeply moving to watch as the combination of a confusing news conference by an East German spokesman and raw people power toppled the Berlin Wall.

Though the fall of the wall, and former President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the USSR, were obviously going to have huge geopolitical implications, the overriding sense at the time was optimism that our world might be on the way to getting freer, more prosperous, and more unified. All that could still happen. But a combination of factors – not least the dizzying pace of technological change, and the emergence of a global economy with enormous benefits and painful dislocations – seems to have pointed us in a different direction.

Starting today, on alternate Mondays, we’ll look behind the headlines for the patterns and connections in what often looks like an unstable and disconnected world. If that sounds familiar to more seasoned members of the Monitor family, that’s because it was the approach pioneered by Joseph C. Harsch, one of the Monitor’s, and journalism’s, most insightful observers of world affairs throughout the cold war years. Now, the system of post-World War II international relations, and the institutions that underpinned it, are creaking. So, too, are the domestic political establishments in a range of countries. Joe Harsch’s determination to look beyond the ostensible chaos around us remains particularly relevant today.

This week, for instance, will mark an important stage in determining the future of Britain, America’s closest European ally, in the aftermath of its own political earthquake. The roots of Brexit – Britain’s move to end decades-old membership of the European Union – lie in a decision by then-Prime Minister David Cameron to hold a national referendum in June 2016. As the last in a long line of Conservative Party leaders to face incessant parliamentary pressure from its strident, anti-EU minority, he hoped to lance the boil. He expected to win, not just out of confidence in his own abilities as an orator and politician, but by rational argument. Whatever the emotional appeal of the leavers’ argument – essentially to “make Great Britain great again” – he couldn’t imagine a majority would want to cut ties with a single European market of half a billion people, with which Britain does most of its trade.

He was wrong. And the daunting complexity of the vote to separate has become clearer with each passing month. The referendum posed a simple yes-or-no choice, inviting voters to assume the details would take care of themselves. Many of those who voted to leave, moreover, seemed to be acting on a basic urge to strike out at Britain’s political establishment. Such was the atmosphere that no matter the referendum issue – even an end to double-parking on alternate Saturdays – the “no” camp would probably have prevailed.

The question facing Mr. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, has been how to make Brexit work. Ahead of meetings this week with key cabinet colleagues to agree on a negotiating position, the reality remains that a clean break with the EU will mean significant economic pain. With a deadline this autumn to come up with a transitional arrangement, ahead of a final Brexit in 2021, not just business leaders but many of Prime Minister May’s own parliamentarians favor a “soft Brexit” that would limit EU immigration while still retaining trade terms with the EU that are as beneficial as possible.

That will be challenging enough, since any agreement needs ratification by the remaining 27 EU members. And domestically, for her party’s Brexit ideologues, any “soft” approach would represent a betrayal of the referendum result.

At a time when President Trump is extolling “America First” – and rival powers like China and Russia are acting more assertively to project their national interests beyond their borders – May’s conundrum acts as a timely reminder: No matter how frustrating it can be for individual countries to deal with the wider world, the notion of opting out, however alluring it can be made to appear, carries challenges of its own.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Manager Paul Jones [foreground] and line operator Brett Jones check on a pipes near a water tower outside Minco, Okla. The installation is part of a new well system funded by a $13 million federal loan that enabled Grady County Rural Water District #6 to become independent from neighboring Chickasha, which used to pump water uphill to serve the county's needs.

Each day, the United States loses an estimated 6 billion gallons of clean drinking water to leaks – roughly enough to supply all the homes in Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle combined – some 15 million households in total.

That’s according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which gave the US a D+ for drinking water in its 2017 Infrastructure Report Card.

It sounds unbelievable, especially for one of the world’s most developed countries. But Paul Jones wouldn’t be surprised in the least.

For the better part of the past decade, he’s been bending his ear to the 700 miles of pipes that cover Grady County Rural Water District #6 in Oklahoma. The sweet spot for listening is between midnight and 4 a.m., when just about no one is showering or watering their lawn, and you can be relatively sure that the sound of rushing water means only one thing: a leak.

When Mr. Jones first started his midnight crusades, the system was losing close to half its water to leaks. Jones’s team has gotten those losses down to as low as 15 percent, providing a model for rural Oklahoma. It’s also a testament to the methodical, persistent work that’s needed to safeguard what is arguably America’s most vital resource.

“They’re probably the premier system in the state as far as being proactive when it comes to water loss,” says Richard Deshazo, a leak detection specialist with the Oklahoma Rural Water Association (ORWA), who credits Jones’s leadership. “He’s done tremendous things in trying to keep water loss down.”

Cutting down on intolerable losses

Over the past 18 months, a pilot project run by Oklahoma’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has given a boost to managers like Jones. An initial audit of 40 community water systems in 2015 found losses of 1 billion gallons a year, or enough to fill more than 1,500 Olympic swimming pools – that’s $6.4 million worth of water at consumer prices. Some systems showed losses as high as 70 to 90 percent.

“There’s no other industry where inefficiencies on this scale would be tolerated,” says Brandon Bowman of DEQ, who says water-loss auditing has become a hot-button issue in the water industry. “We’re riding the front of the wave.”

Since 2011, the US has seen elevated levels of drought around the country, particularly in the Southwest. Though that eased in 2017, with the lowest levels of drought so far this century, a number of states affected by the prolonged dry spells – including Oklahoma – have moved to address water loss more systematically.

Some states have mandated such auditing, including California, Georgia, Hawaii, and Texas. But Mr. Bowman, recently returned from the second annual North American Water Loss Conference, says many states either haven’t tried to take stock of their losses or are just beginning to, making it difficult to gauge the precise scope of the problem on a national level. 

Like Grady County, most rural water systems were installed in the late 1960s and 1970s by the Farmers Home Administration, the precursor to the US Department of Agriculture. Others were installed well before that. Today, America’s water pipes, which have a life expectancy of 75 to 100 years, are being replaced so slowly that it would take about two centuries to upgrade the country’s water infrastructure, according to the ASCE report. 

“You’ve got valves that have been in the ground 55 years and they’re frozen shut,” says Mark Matheson, field operations director for ORWA. “The big key is deteriorating infrastructure – it’s no different from roads and highways.”

During his State of the Union address, President Trump called on Congress to pass an infrastructure plan of at least $1.5 trillion. He hasn't revealed the details, but a leaked document obtained by Axios suggested that as much as a quarter of the appropriation could be devoted to rural infrastructure, including drinking water.

But even in rural Oklahoma, where Mr. Trump won 70 to 80 percent of the vote or more, there’s little faith in Washington politics. Instead, they’ve taken matters into their own hands.

$800,000 in savings so far

Jones’s approach was to embark on a grand project to learn his system and overhaul it – to map each valve, located 18-24 inches underground; to add line meters that enable him to pinpoint leaks; and to implement a $13 million project, funded with federal dollars, to drill their own wells and become independent from the nearby Chickasha system. In the last few months, some unexpected challenges – some frozen pipes that burst, and a river bank’s erosion that destroyed a water line – pushed his loss rate back up to 23 percent, but he’s confident that by spring his team will have it back down to 15 percent again, or better.

Other rural water systems have been more focused on keeping rates low than on making upgrades. Some have become so rundown that in one case a water manager resorted to shooting icicles off a rusty water tower that was in danger of tipping over because of the weight of the ice formed through leaks. 

DEQ, working in tandem with ORWA leak specialists like Mr. Deshazo, often has a tough sell when it talks with community water systems in need of repairs. In the case of Atoka, Okla., the water manager didn’t even want their help, says Michelle Smith, who was the bookkeeper at the time.

“He wasn’t happy about it, but I went ahead and done it anyway,” says Ms. Smith, who provided the necessary information to DEQ and ORWA leak detection specialists Deshazo and Mike Westmoland. “I thought it would help him out to know where our loss was going.” 

Two weeks in, the district’s board of directors spent half an hour debating whether to purchase a single 4-inch valve. But as the leak-busting team was able to demonstrate how much water – and money – they were saving the district, the board became increasingly supportive. The board approved all recommended repairs, the manager was fired, and Ms. Smith was put in charge.

The end result? Atoka, which had been losing more than a million gallons a month (39 percent) is now down to 40,000 gallons (7 percent). ORWA estimates yearly savings to Atoka of more than $50,000.

Overall, the DEQ pilot program, which costs $220,000 per year and is funded through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has saved Oklahoma water systems $800,000 in its first 18 months.

Despite such results, however, the team still faces resistance. And many involved in maintaining water infrastructure – and the safety of drinking water – express frustration that water operators are paid the least of all utility operators and don’t get the respect that other public safety workers receive.  

“You walk into a restaurant and they’ve got a sign – 5 percent discount for fire, police, military. To this day, I’ve never seen one that says: water operator or wastewater professional,” says Kelly Matheson, operations director for ORWA. “But in reality, these are the people who are keeping these communities going. Because without them, we don’t need police, we don’t need fire, because people are not going to be able to live there.”

Eduardo Porras stands in the middle of his flatbed pickup truck, sweeping coffee in shades of red and maroon off the edge. The small fruit, encapsulating precious coffee beans, shower down into large wooden boxes that are tallied up and paid out to his family.

Mr. Porras, who works with his mother and two sisters, hopes his future children will one day join the family tradition of cultivating coffee. But sometimes, he says, he wonders if it will still be a viable business.

“The plants have been going crazy lately,” he says, describing changing weather patterns like weeks without rain during the traditional wet season, or deluges when it’s typically dry. Last year seemed to be 12 months straight of rain. “The plants are flowering and have fruit at the same time,” he says, something no one here has seen before.

“The climate is changing in every sense,” says Porras, who is a member of the coffee cooperative Coopedota. “I’ll make whatever changes I can to” to keep his livelihood.

Costa Rica has a global reputation for prioritizing the environment, turning 25 percent of its land into protected forests and marketing itself to tourists as an ecoparadise. In 2007, it pledged to become carbon neutral in 14 years, setting the stage for other nations’ net-zero pledges at the Paris climate talks in 2015. It's a lofty goal that requires big changes in everything from how goods are moved across the country to the electricity, water, and chemicals used to produce them. But a handful of companies and sectors have emerged as national leaders here – including coffee. And Coopedota is leading the way. 

Costa Rica’s identity is tightly intertwined with the cash crop. The green bushes with red fruit flank government buildings in the capital, and historic sites, like the National Theater, were built with imported materials like Italian marble thanks in large part to coffee export taxes. These deep roots could easily have created resistance to change, but coffee companies and cooperatives became some of the first in Costa Rica’s agricultural sector to go carbon neutral. Agriculture contributes just under 40 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions; coffee alone makes up about 9 percent.

In 2011, Coopedota, the cooperative where Porras is an associate, became the world's first certified carbon-neutral coffee. It has since worked closely with others in the coffee sector, as well as with producers of other crops such as pineapples and bananas.

The changes started gradually for the nearly 900-member cooperative. They switched out their wood-burning ovens for ones that burned coffee-plant waste, and conducted soil surveys on associates’ farms, which allowed them to use fertilizer more efficiently. But for businesses to buy in, going carbon neutral has to be about more than love for the environment, says Adrian Cordero, who has led environmental management at Coopedota for the past 17 years. 

“I can be a big environmentalist, but if I can’t justify the cost of a project [to reduce carbon emissions], no company will sign on to it,” says Mr. Cordero, sipping a cappuccino in one of Coopedota’s on-site cafes. “We were always looking for ways to be cost effective.”

But as these projects started piling up, Coopedota realized their environmental benefit as well. In 2004, they started formally recycling and focusing on reducing water consumption. They teamed up with Yale and other universities to identify opportunities to reduce emissions and, in 2011, they were certified by The British Standards Institution as the world’s first producer of carbon-neutral coffee, from plant to cup.

Coopedota works with farmers to ensure their planting and growing processes are in line with reducing emissions, encouraging them to plant more trees and use the shade-cover to protect coffee plants. The cost of transporting the beans to and from the cooperative is offset with carbon credits.

“Our goal is to train the farmers. Many have generations of experience growing coffee and because of that they rely on techniques from 60 years ago,” Cordero says. But with the changing climate, which has reduced coffee yields nationwide by 39 percent since 2000, farmers are eager to learn new techniques.

In 2015, Costa Rica became the first country in the world to have a coffee-specific Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions plan, which lays out the steps needed for industry members to reduce carbon emissions. The work involves guiding and training the nearly 6,000 coffee producers nationwide.

Down a steep ramp and just beyond an area where coffee beans clatter through machines that sort them by size, weight, and color, Kyoko Yano and Vincent Wang are sampling coffee with silver spoons.  

The husband and wife behind Black Gold, a coffee import-export company that sells unroasted Central American beans to buyers in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, are taking notes on a digital application that helps track their impressions of the coffee.

Mr. Wang says this will be his third year buying from Coopedota. And although he personally likes that they’re taking steps to consider the environment in their business model, his decision to buy comes down to other factors.

“The quality is very good,” he says. “It’s in style to be socially conscious and to think about the planet when buying products in the US or in Europe, but that trend hasn’t quite reached the Asian consumer yet.”

National Congressman Marco Vinicio Redondo Quirós, who plans to work in agriculture after finishing his time in office this year, says Costa Rica should be doing more to distinguish its products, like Coopedota’s carbon-neutral coffee, on the world stage.

“We’ve put so much focus on becoming carbon neutral or creating products that are produced responsibly, but there hasn’t been enough emphasis on creating a global market and presenting our goods with a different vision,” Congressman Redondo says. If that were the case, Costa Rican producers could charge far more for the environmental benefits of their exports, he says.

Despite leading the way on carbon neutrality, many agree Costa Rica could be doing more. It’s unlikely the nation will meet its 2021 goal, a date that coincides with its 200th anniversary of independence from Spain. The government says it’s still committed to 2021, but submitted a document in the lead-up to the 2015 Paris climate talks noting that Costa Rica was “looking to accomplish zero net emissions by 2085.”

“When I mention this to people they say, ‘Oh, they’re putting this off,’ ” says Julia Flagg, who teaches environmental studies at Connecticut College and has written extensively about national pledges for carbon neutrality. “But it does potentially mean that they are also taking this more seriously. They’ve reexamined the science and this [new date] is what is realistic.”

Costa Rica is far ahead of most countries when it comes to generating clean energy. The country was able to meet electrical generation needs without fossil fuels for almost all of last year, according to the Costa Rican Electricity Institute. But anyone who sits in the ubiquitous traffic of the capital, San José, realizes there’s immense work to be done on reducing reliance on gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

“For as many problems as there are with Costa Rica’s pledge, it’s amazing that its stuck around this long and that they wrote a whole national strategy on climate change around this. There’s substance there,” says Dr. Flagg.

Back at Coopedota, Porras hops into his truck, scooching beside his sister, ready to return home to his farm. “Costa Rica is ready to take action” on the climate, he says through the open window. “Coffee has been important for [the country] from the beginning, funding schools, hospitals, and infrastructure.”

“We all have our role to play in the environment, but here, I’m happy that my coffee can set an example.”

On a recent weekday, head chef Irene Li glides around Mei Mei’s restaurant in Boston before it opens for lunch, pausing to fluff the curtains just inside the door with the care of an attentive mother. While the clatter of dishes in the kitchen signals the work of busy line cooks prepping that day’s menu, half of her staff is finishing up a finance class in the dining room.

A casual, hipster vibe permeates the small restaurant with its square wooden tables, exposed brick, and earnest messages stenciled in chalk on smooth black walls.

“We love food and spend a lot of time thinking about how we can use it to make the world a better place,” reads one. “We form reciprocal relationships with farmers we trust & work hard to make their products and wisdom shine!” reads another.

The scene at Mei Mei hints at how Ms. Li is constantly considering ways to improve an interconnected food system. The innovations she’s already put in place have touched an array of people, including regional suppliers for her restaurant and her employees.

Her work is being noticed. Under her guidance, Mei Mei has drawn accolades for its creative Chinese-American cuisine, made from locally sourced and sustainable ingredients. And she herself is becoming increasingly well known among the next generation of the restaurant world.

In short, Li is gaining recognition for helping to change the game – farm by farm, restaurant by restaurant.

“Irene has such inspiration and passion for doing what is right and understanding the whole food system and how everybody who has to work together has to take care of each other, essentially,” says Niko Horster, who operates Shire Beef in Vershire, Vt., and is one of Mei Mei’s suppliers. “She is a complete standout because she gets it.”

When she was a college student in upstate New York, Li had a weekly custom that laid the foundation for her mind-set. It was something that helped her feel grounded and connected, but it wasn’t participating in a sports team, an academic club, or even community volunteer work. It was going to the farmers market.

“My family isn’t religious, but when I went to the farmers market I thought, ‘Oh, this must be what it feels like to go to church on Sunday. You are here with your people; there is a routine; you are celebrating community and beauty and nurturing each other,’ ” Li says. “Building those relationships and sense of belonging in the community was really important to me.”

Taking the time to nurture relationships may seem nearly impossible in an industry that emphasizes volume, speed, and the bottom line. But Li has proved that such an undertaking can be as appealing as Mei Mei’s signature dish, the Double Awesome (cheddar cheese and two poached eggs tucked inside crispy scallion pancakes that are smeared with pesto made from locally sourced greens).

“There is a whole other level of care and concern that we get from Irene and the rest of the staff at Mei Mei for us as farmers,” says Tristram Keefe, a farm manager at Boston’s Urban Farming Institute and one supplier of the restaurant’s greens. “So whether that is having a conversation during the winter about the potential things that we could grow for them the following year or ... [how to make the] relationship work from both ends is kind of unique.”

‘Little sister’

Mei Mei began as a sibling-run food truck imagined by Li’s older brother, Andrew. Both Li and her older sister, Margaret, got on board with the idea right away – but the youngest Li had a single request: that all their menu items be locally and ethically sourced, including humanely raised meat.

Her siblings agreed and named the food truck Mei Mei, which means “little sister” in Chinese.

A typical restaurant may have only a few mainstream suppliers. And working just with regional producers demands daily ingenuity to devise menus centered around what’s available. But true to her vision, Li spent most of her time in the early days of the food truck developing relationships with more than 40 small-scale suppliers across New England and upstate New York. She explored how to get their goods delivered and how to get other Boston restaurants to sign on to make their trips worthwhile. She has since persuaded larger distributors to create new accounts for small farms.

“A lot of that is from sheer force of will from Irene,” says Caden Salvata, Mei Mei’s business manager, who started as a line cook for the restaurant’s food truck. He offers the example of The Piggery in upstate New York, which pasture-raises its meat and has its own butcher shop. Li lobbied hard for Baldor, a large-scale distributor, to deliver Piggery meat to Boston. It finally agreed. “It required a lot of work to get it set up,” Mr. Salvata says.

Mei Mei met with almost immediate success – a surprising result for three people who largely had no prior professional food experience. After the food truck rolled out in 2012, Boston magazine quickly deemed it the city’s best meal on wheels. The following year, the Lis opened their own bricks-and-mortar restaurant, located on the edges of the Boston University campus. The online publication Eater named it Boston’s restaurant of the year for 2014.

Today, Li is the only family member overseeing daily operations at the restaurant as Andrew and Margaret pursue other projects but remain co-owners.

A diverse staff

Li is keenly aware of what it means to be a minority woman at the head of a restaurant majority-owned by women. While women made up 53.5 percent of the labor force in the food industry in 2016, less than a quarter of all head cooks and chefs in the United States were women and just more than 10 percent were Asian, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So it’s no coincidence that Mei Mei’s staff is 50 percent people of color and more than half women, Li says.

Most staff members are in their 20s or early 30s, such as Dolly Stanger, a line cook. This is her 10th restaurant job – and at seven months, it’s the longest she’s ever held. She responds to the trusting environment, the commitment to ethical sourcing and practices, and the opportunities to try new things.

“The fact that I am working in so many different areas in the restaurant is practically unheard-of” in the restaurant industry, Ms. Stanger says. “It makes sense to me. It just makes sense. That’s why I am here.”

Li’s efforts have caught the attention of the food industry. She’s been a semifinalist three times for the James Beard Foundation’s rising star chef award, and she’s been recognized as an Eater Young Gun – an up-and-comer in the restaurant industry. She was also recently honored as a top hospitality professional on Zagat’s “30 Under 30 National” list.

What’s next

But Li is the first to say that the philosophy that launched Mei Mei isn’t going to get it to the next business level. Even excellent relationships with dozens of farmers won’t sustain the restaurant in the long run, she says.

“I’ve been especially interested in [food] hubs and aggregators” that serve as distributors for small farmers, she says. “If local food is going to be sustainable, it actually needs that kind of infrastructure.”

Now Li is driving efforts at the restaurant to implement an open-book management policy and improve the work-life balance of the staff. For Li this means maintaining a supportive work environment in an industry known for high turnover rates, toxic kitchen cultures, and wage gaps between the servers and kitchen staff.

In conjunction with ReThink Restaurants, a consulting group with a mission to improve industry practices, every member of Mei Mei’s staff – from business administrators to dishwashers – is paid to participate in a 36-week financial training class.

“We really teach them about how the business works,” Li says. “The first thing they learn is that we are not as profitable as they think we are. It gives them context for why we can’t pay everyone $5 more per hour. The next thing we do is empower them to make changes in the business,” she adds. That could mean coming up with a new menu item or experimenting with marketing ideas.

Her ultimate goal: improving finances to the point at which a profit-sharing plan with the staff can be launched.

“Creating opportunities and changing the lives of the team is something that is really important to me,” says Li. “I think we are doing pretty well now, but I think we can do a lot better, so that’s where I want to be going.”

• For more, visit meimeiboston.com.

How to take action

UniversalGiving helps people give to and volunteer for top-performing charitable organizations around the world. All the projects are vetted by UniversalGiving; 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the listed cause. Below are links to three groups that support the growth of various adults:

The Small Things creates care plans for orphaned children and at-risk families in the Meru district of Tanzania. Take action: Help pay for supplies for adult education workshops.

Helen Keller International aids vulnerable individuals by combating blindness, poor health, and malnutrition. Take action: Donate money to empower women through gardening.

Let Kids Be Kids is an advocate for those who are poor, homeless, sick, displaced, or looking to improve their lives. Take action: Support indigenous peoples.

AP Photo/file

A man walks past a Wells Fargo location in Philadelphia. The Federal Reserve is imposing more penalties on Wells Fargo, freezing the bank's growth until it can prove it has improved its internal controls. The new penalties were announced Feb. 2 on Fed Chair Janet Yellen's last day at the central bank.

The directors of financial institutions in the United States should be on high alert after a surprise move by the Federal Reserve. On Feb. 2, the regulator slapped a harsh penalty on Wells Fargo, the third-largest bank by assets, for its board’s inadequate oversight of ethical and legal risks in the company. Until the bank improves its governance and replaces some board members, it will not be allowed to grow in total assets.

“We cannot tolerate pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank,” said Janet Yellen on her last day as the Fed’s chair.

The Fed has hinted for months that it wants better risk management by bank boards. In effect, it sees them as independent watchdogs of management, assigned to foresee problems and prevent them as well as be proactive in creating a culture of integrity. No longer can a board merely assign blame to underlings when things go wrong. Preventive action is now presumed.

“Across a range of responsibilities, we simply expect much more of boards of directors than ever before,” said Jerome Powell last August. He took over as Fed chief Monday.

Wells Fargo was likely chosen to set an example. It is still reforming its ways after being caught in 2016 for creating fake bank accounts for millions of customers and overcharging on consumer loans. But it is not alone in being the focus of public calls for more accountability.

“One defining feature of 2017 has been seeing corporate directors and officers being held personally responsible for illegal behavior at their companies,” stated the Harvard Business Review in a December article.

Volkswagen’s board, for example, still faces scrutiny over the company’s cheating on emission tests and other scandals. And the trustees of Michigan State University are fending off charges that they should have done more to prevent the sexual abuse of young female athletes by gymnast doctor Larry Nassar.

In its new demands on bank boards, the Fed is not going as far as the central bank in Hong Kong, which has proposed that banks set up a special committee for ethical conduct in corporate culture. Still, banks may be left wondering what further steps are needed to head off adverse surprises by their managers and employees.

Merely selecting highly moral directors for a board may not be enough. Such members may be role models or even help write good ethical codes. But are they probing company practices, encouraging employees to speak frankly, and otherwise promoting good values and being a moral manager?

And it is not only top leaders that need to be proactive. “In hierarchical cultures, it is critical to empower employees at all levels to speak up and take action,” says the Harvard Business Review article.

Such diligence in upholding a company’s ethical practices requires foresight to recognize potential problems and then act to prevent them. Like many corporate boards, the board of Wells Fargo missed warning flags about bad practices. Its new directors are racing to learn skills in moral leadership. The Fed would just like them to move faster.