TED Talks Daily
The recipe for a healthy climate starts at the dinner table | Anthony Myint
13 Sep 2024
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Why aren't restaurants part of the climate solution? This was the question that inspired restaurateur and systems changer Anthony Mient. He went from opening buzzy pop-ups to pushing for a shift to regenerative agriculture. But it didn't go the way he expected at first.
Lessons from trying to change the way we eat and the way we farm are coming up after the break. And now, our TED Talk of the day. I started cooking to not talk to people. At this point, I'm almost like a cross between a salesperson and a preacher for a whole new industry and movement that could maybe reconnect every business and chef to farming.
Chapter 2: Why aren't restaurants part of the climate solution?
But not in the way you'd think. I was a line cook who inadvertently became a chef when I asked, why doesn't someone just use this hole-in-the-wall Chinese takeout restaurant to serve different food? That kind of hypothetical question, asking why doesn't somebody just X, Y, Z, has kind of defined my whole career. I mean, that and then diving in and putting in the work.
And so in this case, I roped my wife into trying something that journalists would later call a pop-up. We had different menus and charities and themes for each event, a bunch of stuff that appealed to food bloggers. This was 2008, by the way.
Chapter 3: What motivated Anthony Myint to shift to regenerative agriculture?
Kara joked that it was like planning a wedding twice a week. But somehow we made it through 139 events. And then it turned into a permanent pop-up called Mission Chinese Food with my friend Danny Bo and his chef. Our second location was named Restaurant of the Year by The New York Times. Around that time, I became a father, and I just started to think a lot about the future and the food system.
And I asked, why aren't restaurants part of the climate solution? And so I roped some friends into starting a nonprofit with me called Zero Food Print.
Chapter 4: How did Anthony's initial attempts at change differ from expectations?
Together, we conducted 80 lifecycle assessments of food service operations and restaurants. And the main lesson was that the vast majority of every operations food print was the food. And I mean, really, it was the embodied agricultural scope three emissions from the ingredients. And so that means that the usual best practices, less food waste, better ingredient choices, they were good.
They were reducing harm, but they weren't really getting to the root cause. Because in order for society to make real progress on climate, the food system needed a way to change farming. And this began my obsession with regenerative agriculture and the idea that we could restore the climate while growing more nutritious ingredients.
And I think it's the answer to the dilemma of how we save the world while feeding the world. If we could just shift from a focus on extracting short-term yields and profits through soil chemistry to a focus on restoring the long-term health of the people on the planet through soil biology, we can improve biodiversity, resilience, hydrology, the prosperity of communities.
Chapter 5: What lessons did Anthony learn about the food system?
I mean, basically, that shift from farming against nature to farming with nature is probably society's biggest and most optimistic win-win-win And so once again, I roped my wife into starting a restaurant with me. But this time, the question was, why doesn't somebody just inspire thousands of chefs to support regenerative agriculture? And so we tried to do it ourselves.
But the change in farming didn't quite happen, because it turns out that we needed a different approach. So let me try to save you 10 years in five minutes. See, we went crazy trying to be good. We were showcasing game-changing ingredients like a new perennial wheatgrass that replaced 30% of the annual monoculture wheat in our sourdough bread.
We had a butchery program with carbon-ranched beef showcasing research from UC Berkeley's biogeochemistry pilots, where they were studying adaptive multipathic grazing plus compost application to accelerate the durable soil carbon sequestration and the accumulation of microbial necromass. I mean, the whole thing was a little bit ahead of its time.
People didn't even really know the term regenerative agriculture yet. Sometimes customers would get excited and ask, oh my God, where do I buy these ingredients? And I had to say, sorry, there's no supply. Journalists would kind of dig in and say, okay, so I get it, supporting the restaurant seems important, but how does that turn into the change in the field?
And I had to admit, I didn't really know how. And when we asked farmers and ranchers, what we learned was that while they really appreciated the support, buying their ingredients, it wasn't really enough to economically spur the next regenerative practice on the next acre.
This non-correlation is pretty much undeniable in the case of organics, where even though there's very clear price signals and definitions, you know, it's on the shelf at Walmart, still less than one percent of US farmland acres after 50 years. Learning this was a little bit soul-crushing, to be honest, because we had gone all in with our life savings, you know, trying to make this change happen.
only to learn that awareness, price premiums, better choices were probably never going to regenerate acres at scale. Basically, we were trying to change eating instead of changing farming. And I mean, we all kind of know how to change eating, but changing farming is different.
You can't just walk into the grocery store and hand the cashier a buck for farmers to switch from chemical fertilizer to compost. You can't just ask the waiter for a side order of cover crop planting. Society didn't even really have mechanisms to directly change farming. But why not?
That's basically the kind of question we were grappling with as we closed the restaurant and then started our next chapter. And so in 2019, Xero Foodprint roped the state of California into a pilot program for Table to Farm. It began with the chief economist overseeing California's cap-and-trade program. She brought in the Department of Food and Agriculture.
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