Manoush Zomorodi

Before talking to computational social scientist Sandra Matz, I asked her to spy on me. I did some snooping around your online life yesterday night, which was extremely fun to do. Our lack of digital privacy, especially in the age of AI, and what we can do about it. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR.

Dana says that food waste has five times the greenhouse gas footprint of the entire aviation industry. and we all contribute to it every day. This is a lot of cilantro, and I feel like it always ends up at the bottom of the drawer, wilted.

Small changes at home, like the way we store fresh produce, can add up to big change. Dana's got other tips, too.

I think one of the things, certainly when it comes to climate, is people feel like, well, you know, little old me. If I do one thing, really, what difference does it make? How do you explain to people that they should pay more attention?

Clearly, we cannot grow and eat and waste food like we've been doing. But the global food system is complex, it's intricate, and different everywhere you go. And that is why some food innovators are looking to pinpoint certain problems with approaches that may take more getting used to.

Here's a peek at some of the exciting things happening in the field of food production that might help us bend the curve on our emissions from field to table. One idea, technologists are using animal meat cells to grow real beef, chicken, and duck meat in labs.

On this show, we are talking to chefs, climate experts and scientists, all kinds of people who are finding ways to help us eat sustainably and make sure it's still delicious. And to understand exactly what that means, we need to start with why things have to change.

It could be a long time before you order a lab-grown burger in a restaurant. But meanwhile, farms are using all kinds of AI sensors and robots to monitor their crops and cut down on resources. There's also a lot of talk about regenerative farming, using older, traditional techniques that till the land less, letting the soil restore itself and capture more carbon.

We'll also be introduced to more types of food that may be less familiar to us now.

It will take all of these methods, from the most high-tech to the lowest cost, to revolutionize farming. As we've heard, we'll also need a global shift to more plant-based diets and much less food waste. All of this combined can put less pressure on our planet and help us make more of what is available. We can eat within the environmental limits of the Earth, but we need to get going.

This is just the beginning of this new chapter for food, but I hope we whet your appetite to learn more about the people working hard to make what we eat sustainable, nutritious, and tasty. You can see the full talks from all of our speakers and many more at TED.com. Bon appetit.

Tools for managing our emotions. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Listen and subscribe to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

So we know food contributes a lot to climate change. But a third of all emissions? How did we get to such a huge number? Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist from Project Drawdown, breaks it down by the numbers.

So the way we produce food and the food we choose to eat certainly affects our climate. But it's also a two-way street. Our warming climate is already affecting our ability to grow food in more dramatic and personal ways than you might think. To learn more, I went to a very unusual dinner party with chef Sam Kass.

A decade ago, Sam was both a White House chef and senior policy advisor for Healthy Food Initiatives. Then, in 2015, frustrated that food wasn't on the global climate agenda, he hosted a much-talked-about Last Supper featuring foods threatened by climate change. He's been hosting these dinners ever since.

There are going to be some people listening who are like, well, boo-hoo, you and your fancy friends can't have your champagne, your cava, and your crab cakes. Exactly. How do you explain the stakes to them?

Staples.

How soon?

I think there's going to be some people who are like, oh, my God, first you told me what I needed to eat for my brain health, for my body. Then you told me I needed to go to the farmer's market and buy organic when I can. And now what do you want me to do? What do you want them to do? Yeah.

Okay, so let's talk about it. Meat. Love it or hate it, it produces more greenhouse gas than anything else humans eat. And no one likes to give up something that they love. But eating sustainably doesn't have to mean giving up on enjoying food. It does mean introducing more people to different kinds of food, which can be way more fun than you might think.

Atlanta entrepreneur Pinky Cole is famous for a chain of fast food restaurants called Slutty Vegan.

Yes, you heard that right. At a recent event, the crowd went crazy for her because she's done the seemingly impossible, made the idea of eating vegan fun.

I went to check out the secret behind the slut sauce for myself.

I mean, let's be clear. This is not, like, health food, right? Technically, no. Pinky grew up in a vegan, Rastafarian household, but she's taken pains to create a brand that doesn't equate going vegan with anything remotely pious or righteous. Taste, she believes, has to come first.

Is that what we need to do in other parts of dealing with climate change?

70%?

So changing our eating habits isn't easy, but it is doable. But what about the food that gets left on our plates? Every year in the U.S. alone, nearly 40% of the millions of tons of food produced goes unsold or uneaten. We need to waste less food.

Every day, we make hundreds of decisions about food. What should I eat for dinner? Will it taste good? Is it healthy? But we also need to ask, what's it doing to the planet? I'm Manoush Zomorodi, a longtime journalist, a TED speaker, and a mom. I care about the planet. I'm well-informed.

The people are hungry, and food that gets tossed usually ends up in a landfill where it's covered with other garbage, emitting massive amounts of planet-warming methane. Someone who understands the full scope of this problem is Jasmine Crow Houston.

Instead of getting tossed, Goodr workers sort them into three broad categories. If they haven't expired, Goodr puts them aside to take to food kitchens, schools, and churches. If the food isn't rotten, it gets delivered to farms for animals to eat. The rest gets composted and turned back into good dirt. Jasmine says companies pay for waste management anyway.

They might as well pay to have their excess food donated. Plus, this way, they get a tax deduction. The goal is to turn food waste into a win-win-win. Better for hungry people, the climate, and businesses.

But I didn't know until recently that as much as a third of emissions that are warming the globe come from food. A third. The way we grow, process, package, transport, all we eat and throw away is a problem for the climate. But changing what we eat can go a long way. Food can also be a solution.

Jasmine's got a great solution to get food that would be wasted to those who need it. But what can we do? How can each of us waste less food? At a grocery store in New York City, I roam the aisles with food waste expert Dana Gunders.

It was a big surprise, Aisha, because this site is tucked behind a strip mall. It is New Jersey after all. So there's like a Lowe's hardware store and a Chick-fil-A and you drive around the bend behind the mall and there's this beautiful museum with a huge pit in front of it. And Ken took me down into the pit and you're there and you're like, well, there's just a pile of dirt down here, right?

But actually, it is full of tiny fossils, mostly of sponges and clams and snails and oysters, but also bone fragments of turtles, sharks, mosasaurs, and even, yes, an occasional dinosaur.

So Ken's actually a Jersey boy, but he spent most of his career traveling all around the globe, discovering some of the biggest fossils ever, including a dinosaur in Argentina that he named Dreadnoughtus. It is bigger than the T-Rex. Anyway, so about 20 years ago, Ken decides to come home and become a professor at nearby Rowan University in New Jersey. And then he hears about this site.

It's a mining quarry. So he starts taking his students down there to get some digging experience, see what they can find. And they would follow the bulldozers around to see if any fossils would turn up. And occasionally they would. And then finally, in 2007, he rented a corner of the pit and he really excavated it, like, properly. And that is when he realized he had a huge discovery on his hands.

Well, at the bottom of the pit, Ken discovered a 66 million year old bone bed. This is a six inch deep layer of dirt that runs across the width of the quarry with over 100,000 fossils from 100 different species from the Cretaceous period. So Ken calls this the extinction layer. This bone bed, Aisha, essentially documents the day that the asteroid Cretaceous

hit the Earth, and caused the fifth extinction. It is the most significant intact fossil record to date of the death of the dinosaurs. I mean, I did not know all these details of what researchers think happened that day. Is it okay if I play you an excerpt from our episode?

The ground is teeming with fossils, if you know how to look for them.

But in addition to all those fossils, the other key thing that Ken and his team have unearthed is a metal called iridium that's usually only found in asteroids. Ken explained the latest thinking on exactly what happened that day, 66 million years ago, when an asteroid slammed into the Earth.

Eight and a half minutes after the asteroid hits, a magnitude 10.3 earthquake rolls across the continent, probably knocking the largest dinosaurs down. But the deadliest moment comes about 16 minutes after the asteroid.

An hour? Do we know that for sure?

Several hours later, Ken says a tsunami likely over 130 feet high would have crashed into the coast right here, sweeping the dead dinosaurs out to sea where they'd sink down to the ocean floor, creating a bone bed.

We walk around the site to get a different vantage point. And Ken says that the fallout from the asteroid, tiny pieces of it, have been found in over 350 sites around the world.

Why here?

Are there any others?

How do you stop yourself from just, like, wanting to dig up everywhere here?

I love that show.

Yeah, so the museum and the pit, they just opened to the public. And what he really wants is people to come and touch the earth and really get a sense of just how long this planet has been around, you know, this idea of deep time. Ken likes to use this analogy. So like, let's say you have a thousand page book that represents the entire history of the planet.

When it comes to the human experience, he says we would be the last word, the last word in the whole book. That is how limited our time here has been. And even though we haven't been here for very long, we humans have used that short time to wreak havoc. And He says we have actually started the next mass extinction with climate change.

But he thinks that if you love something, if you know something, you will work to protect it. And he hopes to help people get to know and love planet Earth.

Well, yes, I needed a little coaching from Ken, to be honest. So let's hear my big moment here.

Okay.

You see them?

That's it? That was easy.

Yeah. He wants to give that to everyone, especially kids, and start to feel this connection to time, to history, to the planet, really in a tactile way. And that is exactly what I got.

Glad to be here.