Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
new shows new music new movies keeping up with pop culture sometimes feels like a full-time job thankfully over at pop culture happy hour it's literally our job we break down what's actually worth watching listening to and pretending you already knew about so the next time someone says did you see that you can say yeah obviously follow npr's pop culture happy hour wherever you get your podcasts this
I literally feel like I'm a different person. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi.
Hello, everybody.
How we doing? So a while back, I went to a pretty unusual event.
I'm really excited to be here.
This was a dinner and TED Talk given by former White House chef Sam Kass, who presented us with a four-course meal.
Let's start with the crab cakes.
Crab cakes with crispy capers. Let's turn to fruit. Then came mini tarts.
That beautiful little peach jam in the little mozzarella cup you had.
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Chapter 2: How does climate change threaten our food supply?
I mean, I'll say it was very good. But Sam calls this meal the last supper, not like in the Bible. More because many of these dishes are under threat because of climate change.
Now, this menu has been put together with ingredients that experts and models predict will not be around for our kids and our grandkids. And you'll see that it's many of the foods that we hold dear.
Sam first gave this dinner over a decade ago at the Paris Climate Accords, when he realized that food and agriculture were not on the agenda.
When we say the words climate change, what do the words climate change actually mean? But the point here is not to depress you or to scare you. It's not. It's not. It's to try to make an emotional connection in a way that I think food, only food can, to understand really what's at stake when we're having these conversations.
Now, the good news is on our plates really does hold some of the biggest both problems but also potentials to solve these challenges of anywhere that we have. And that's the part that gives me a ton of hope.
There's a movement afoot to change the way we grow our food and eat. Because right now, global food production is a huge contributor to climate change. And the warming planet is making it harder for farmers to grow ingredients we take for granted. We've learned that eating local and organic foods are good for us and the environment, but it's just not enough.
Agriculture needs to change drastically if we want to continue eating the foods we know and love and nourish the planet's billions of inhabitants. And so today on the show, figuring out the complicated future of food. A chef, a farmer, and a biotechnologist share how they're searching for solutions. So back to Sam Kass.
He was cooking for the Obama family in the White House when he started working with them to get Americans to rethink how they eat and ended up getting into food policy as well.
Most people didn't even have a basic connection at that point to their health and well-being and food. The idea that it was having such a big impact on so many people's health, we hadn't connected those dots. And it was a lot of work to do to just try to say, like, how do we shift the culture and put these issues and how we're feeding ourselves sort of front and center.
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Chapter 3: What innovative solutions are being proposed for sustainable agriculture?
So for me, it's one big set of issues that we have to grapple with. But if we don't solve climate, all of the other things we care about in food are going to be just deeply impacted. And a lot of the progress that we've made are just going to be undermined by climate.
Sam Kass picks up again from his last supper dinner in 2024.
Our oceans are really on the front lines of climate change. In the Pacific Northwest, two years ago, they closed the snow crab fishery for the first time in its history. They did that because that fishery had gone from 11.7 billion crabs in 2018 to to 1.9 billion last year. That's over an 80% collapse of that population in just five years.
Now, there was hope that, you know, nature is resilient and that population will rebound. But just about a month ago, officials announced that that fishery would be closed for the second straight year because the population just had not recovered. That absolutely decimates those fishermen who have depended on that fishing grounds for generations. Now, let's turn to fruit.
That beautiful little peach jam in the little mozzarella cup you had. Last year, we lost 95% of the Georgia peach crop. 95%. And when you start to look at the models and how our environment is changing, in our lifetimes, I don't believe we'll be growing peaches in Georgia at all. And what's Georgia without a peach? But I'm going to go to a fruit that is even more important, at least to me.
And this is where these issues start to get pretty serious for me. That fruit is wine. The National Academy of Sciences predicts that by 2040, assuming we hit two degrees or if and when we hit two degrees, the world's wine growing regions will be cut in about half in terms of what can sustain wine.
Just a few weeks ago, one of the largest cava producers in Spain announced that they were laying off 80% of their workforce, about 615 people for a big operation, because they simply were not going to have grapes to harvest this year.
There are producers in Champagne that are buying land in England because they do not believe they will be able to make Champagne in Champagne in the foreseeable future. Now, you know things are really bad when the French are buying land in England to make Champagne. It's like, sound the alarm. We got a problem here.
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. How do you explain the stakes to them? Why do you think this is an effective way to show people?
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Chapter 4: How can consumers influence climate-friendly food production?
It's greenwashing. There's some companies that are really trying to figure it out. So there's a bunch of nascent emerging brands that are doing a great job and trying to prove like it's possible. But the big companies right now, people aren't buying climate friendly. It's not a driver of sales. So right now for them, they look at their math.
They're like, I need to invest how much money in changing my whole supply chain? And the CMO is like, I can't sell that. The mass market's not buying that.
And presumably, it's at a premium as well.
Right. There's a premium. There's a cost to this transition. And one thing we haven't figured out is who's going to pay for it. And consumers have to start sending a very strong signal to these big companies, especially, that I'm going to choose products that are at least claiming to try to do a better job with the environment.
Next, more foods need to be developed that don't increase global warming, but actually help reduce it.
So with the right practices and some tools, food and agriculture can be sequestering megatons and gigatons of carbon, like really bend the global emissions curve.
So you start doing practices like cover cropping and no tilling, so you're not turning up the soil and you're helping to build the ecological health around, that ecosystem, those microbes in the soil will start pulling down carbon through the plants and storing it in the soil. One company I'm very excited about has fungi microbes, like little fungi, that you coat seeds with.
And they're pulling down like three tons of carbon per acre per year and storing that carbon more permanently in the soil. So shifting our practices with a different mindset and starting to incentivize and pay farmers to solve some of these big problems is the answer.
The problem right now is like we're asking farmers to make all these changes and take on all the risk in those changes and with no real short-term economic benefit to them.
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Chapter 5: What role does biotechnology play in the future of food?
It will be too dry and too hot. And again, this year, chocolate prices are up by 50% because those production ecosystems have been hammered by drought and extreme weather. Raise your hand if you've had a cup of coffee today or a cup of tea. Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I know.
Much of coffee is grown, it's sort of in the valleys around mountainous areas, shade-grown coffee, and as it started to warm on the bottom of those mountains, it's just become simply too hot. About 75 of the 124 wild varieties of coffee are on the verge of extinction right now.
And that's really a problem because much of the genetic material that we will need to try to produce hybrid varieties that could thrive in much more volatile climate are going to be lost.
You said earlier that back when you were in the Obama White House, that there was sort of a sense that people were ready for a change when it came to how they thought about their food, the cultural implications, the way that they understood how it related to their neighborhood, to their community. Are we ready for this next sort of way of thinking about food?
Do we still have a lot of work to do before these changes happen?
There's mixed signals. When we were in the Obama administration, the big ag groups, first of all, did not engage with us. And if you said the word climate change, it was like you were spitting in their face. It was like the greatest offense. There was no discussion.
Now, you have the biggest, most conservative ag groups sitting down and forming formal coalitions with some of the most well-known environmental groups to figure out how to galvanize agriculture to start solving these problems. And I would have bet every dollar I would ever make that that would never happen. On the other hand, you know, you still don't see the mass consumer rallying on this.
You see parts of politics starting wanting to still go backwards on these things, which is like, you know, there's reasons to feel good and there's reasons to feel concerned. I think we have no choice but to figure out how to galvanize more people. And I'm father of two boys, Sai and Rafa. They're six and five. And
Our ability to hand to the next generation the quality of life, the richness and deliciousness of life that we were given is truly at stake. And that's why these issues matter. And that's why working to make some better food choices matter. That's why voting matters.
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Chapter 6: How is the future of meat being redefined?
No, it's not. I mean, I remember it like it was yesterday. We drove to the bank and didn't have two nickels to rub together. And we got a FHA beginning farmer loan and took off. So my brother and I rented a farm. Here's Jim Whitaker on the TED stage. Farming is a very capital-intensive business. My dad couldn't help us. He didn't have the finances. He could not help us get started.
And let me tell you something about renting a farm when you're 22 years old. No one rents you a farm unless no one else wants to rent it. It was a big piece of land. It was cash rent. I mean, the states were set. We were doomed to fail. And we weren't focused on environmental sustainability back then. We were focused on economic sustainability. How do we make higher yield?
How do we use less fertilizer? How do we get to the next year and feed our family?
In my mind, I mean, when you say rice farming, I mean, sorry, it's such a cliche, but I'm picturing, you know, rice fields in Vietnam or, you know, where there's water everywhere and people picking the rice. And is that what it looks like?
Okay, so rice around the world is grown in a flooded environment. This is for weed control purposes. When they plant the rice in the water, grasses don't grow well in the water. So that's why people use water all these thousands of years to grow rice is for weed control. Now, you know, I was in Bangkok a few months ago and a farmer was on his back porch.
I'm like, well, how do you know if that's right? He said, well, that's the way we've always done it. I say I'm a fifth generation farmer. He's probably a hundredth generation farmer. I mean, they've probably been farming rice there for 2000 years in that same field. It's just the way he's always done it.
For thousands of years, rice has been grown in tiers of flooded fields. You've probably seen the photos. They look like massive green staircases. But about 20 years ago, Jim and his family started wondering what would happen if they didn't grow rice this way. They started experimenting with different methods, like getting rid of those tiers.
So one of the first things we did on our rice fields was, we adopted a technique that's a little different. We leveled our fields completely flat. This is called zero-grade. Rice all over the world is grown in a flooded environment, and most people use the natural contour of the earth to cascade the water down and let the water flow downhill. We call it continuous flood.
They continuously put water on their fields. And we leveled ours flat with a perimeter road. And what that perimeter road lets us do is capture rainfall. So we're actually pumped less water. We're actually able to use less water. We have less runoff, less erosion, less nutrients leaving our field. Nothing leaves our field unless we want it to.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of lab-grown meat for the environment?
in just an Excel spreadsheet. We didn't know what we were doing. But you knew you were onto something. Yes. So we started recording everything. Let's add more data points to that. Let's add our fertilizer. Let's add our fuel usage. And so we didn't know what was important or how it would be important.
That's when Jim and Jessica began to question the other fundamental tenet of growing rice, keeping the fields flooded. They decided to cycle the fields between flooding and letting them go dry. So, okay, that's what's counterintuitive, right? Is because people think that rice needs to be in water all the time?
It's got to be submerged all the time, and it doesn't. And they think if I let it dry up, I'm going to hurt it some kind of way. So the varieties we're using are hybrids, and they're very resilient.
So they can take it when the field gets dried out?
They can take it.
Not only did the rice do surprisingly well, this new method had other advantages for the climate because... The soil is full of microbes. Microbes that multiply if crops are underwater.
And what they're doing in the soil on a basic level is they're down there chewing away, eating up the biomass that's left over from the crop before. So they're digesters. And out of that comes methane. the same way it happens in cattle operations or whatever.
Methane is a notorious greenhouse gas, and rice farming accounts for 8 to 11 percent of global methane emissions.
So when we dry the soil, that anaerobic microbial that's living in that soup, that mushy soil, either dies or goes dormant. So we break his life cycle. And then it stops emitting methane, but it doesn't hurt the rice. It actually helps the rice when you use less water.
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Chapter 8: How can art contribute to agricultural conservation?
So we need to expand the price of rice just a little bit. And I'm working with a lot of companies that have that mindset to get more money to the farmer and help them do the stuff we're talking about doing.
Our town has 4,000 residents and one stoplight. The nearest airport, Starbucks, shopping mall, Whole Foods is two hours away in any direction. Without places like this and farmers like us, you'd be hungry, naked, and sober. We are going to work with farmers in southeast Arkansas to educate them about the benefits of growing sustainable rice.
We're going to work with veterans, immigrants, limited resource and socially disadvantaged farmers, farmers that aren't so different from my family just a few generations ago. We will then implement pay-for-practices such as alternate wetting and drying, cover crop, no-till and low-till.
We will then help them learn about and document their greenhouse gas benefits, monitor, measure, report, and verify them, then market and sell that rice at a premium to help them realize the benefits of producing sustainable rice, the economic advantage.
Let me tell you why that's important. There are 400 million acres of rice grown globally. It is the largest emitter of methane gas. It is the largest user of irrigation water. And our methods, if used, can reduce greenhouse gas by 50%, reduce water use by 50%, increase yields to feed a hungry world.
So let's say there's a farmer watching this and thinking, like, I don't know much about these practices. Or you meet someone and they're like, how do I even begin to do this? What right now is the way that they learn to put some of these more sustainable practices to work?
So you just got to get plugged in and sometimes challenge the this is the way my dad always did it mentality.
What would your dad say to that?
My dad wouldn't even recognize the farm today if he was still alive. It's changed that much. I mean, when he retired and when my brother and I went back to the family farm, he could ride around every day and tell us what was wrong with everything and then be happy and go home. But you could tell he was thrilled to have us there. And we immediately did the makeover to his farm.
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