Since being hired as the city’s food tsar two months ago, Benjamin Thomases has spent much of his time fielding questions about trans fats.

Apparently, New Yorkers know little about the job Mr. Thomases is pioneering, as it has nothing to do to with trans fats.

“I find it challenging to explain to people,” the city’s food policy coordinator said recently over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Lower Manhattan. With 17 city agencies that provide food services, Mr. Thomases said, city government needs to coordinate its efforts to deal with New Yorkers’ main food-related problems — obesity and not having the means to consistently afford sufficient food. That is where he comes in.

“There’s a lot of departments, but there’s not a department for food,” Mr. Thomases, who started in January, two months after Mayor Bloomberg announced the new position, said. So far, he has found that communication is a main component of the job. “The Department of Education provides people with an education — you wouldn’t want it any other way. But they happen to also be doing more essential work providing food to low-income people than almost any other city agency.”

So far, he said, the learning curve has been “steep.”

A Brooklyn native, the 31-year-old attended New York City public schools, and then Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Columbia Business School. His previous jobs were in the anti-poverty arena, most recently as president of First-Source Staffing, a job placement firm. Mr. Thomases is the nephew of Susan Thomases, a confidant of Senator Clinton.

With no background in food policy, Mr. Thomases has had to rely on his entrepreneurial experience. “I’ve always loved thinking about large organizations and what makes them work,” he said.

His new position has made him think in new ways about food, Mr. Thomases said over his lunch of com tho ga, or clay-pot chicken.

“I’ve read so much about the national obesity epidemic that I think of my own eating habits,” he said, describing his heightened awareness of the issue of the oversized portions served by some restaurants. “Having that thought before I pick up my fork makes it easier for me to somehow leave some of the food on the table,” he said. “This was a reasonable amount of food,” he said, pointing to his empty plate. Mr. Thomases, who lives in Manhattan on the border of Morningside Heights and Harlem, said he has witnessed first-hand the challenges grocery shopping can present. The closest supermarket to his apartment closes at around 7 p.m., he said, and he sometimes races home from work to find it dark. “I grew up in Park Slope, and in Park Slope you don’t have that problem,” he said.

As food policy coordinator, one of his duties is to staff a food policy task force to address such issues. So far, seven city agencies are represented on the task force, including the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Human Resources Administration, and the Department of Education, which serves 860,000 meals each day, he said. Representatives from the City Council speaker’s office also are involved. Mr. Thomases reports to Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs.

After an initial task force meeting in early February, Mr. Thomases described an agenda still being defined, but one that he said will focus on boosting enrollment in food support programs, improving the quality of food that city agencies already serve, increasing access to healthful foods in poor neighborhoods, through initiatives like the healthy bodegas program.

He will build on existing work by encouraging collaboration. Currently, he said, “If you were someone at another agency that services food … how would you ever know about a partnership between the Health Department and the Department of Education?”