TED Radio Hour - The Food Connection

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Original broadcast date: September 3, 2021. Food is one of life's greatest pleasures, yet many of our food systems are flawed. This hour, TED speakers look to the past to reconnect with what we eat, and the present to reimagine our food future. Guests include forager Alexis Nikole Nelson, chef Sean Sherman, social entrepreneur Jasmine Crowe, and environmental journalist Amanda Little.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/tedSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From Ted and NPR. I'm Minoosh Zamoroti. Oh my God, my God, oh my God, my God, oh my God, oh my God, my God. And today, we are starting the show outside, foraging for food. I have been searching this whole city, and I finally found them. Black locust trees, and they're blooming. This is Alexis Nicole Nelson. And I am a forager.

Ghost, Flores. Flowers, let's go make snacks. Which is a very fun way to say, I eat plants that do not belong to me. And I teach other people how to do the same thing. Coolest job title ever. Eat in Mulberries in Central Park. Alexis is best known on TikTok, where she has over 2 million followers. We're making dandelion root coffee.

And is kind of a foraging legend. Dig up some dandelions. Your neighbors will probably thank you. For those who haven't seen Alexis's voice. work, her videos are all about her foraging adventures, finding cool plants, teaching people all about them, and then using them to cook amazingly delicious dishes. The kitchen smells so good. Rose water.

There's a lot of singing little ditties. There's a lot of quippy fun facts and little jokes. A lot of yelling about plants and fungi. You say yelling, but actually. It's more just like hyped up enthusiasm, right? Thank you. Those are much kinder words. So sweet.

Happy foraging. Don't die. So when you forage Alexis, like you walk into your backyard or into a forest. And what do you see that I guess most of us don't? It's like a supermarket basically for you. It's like Disney World, but plants and full of much. cheaper food. You walk in and you see this very vibrant ecosystem that like we are a part of.

And there's something so fulfilling about it, right? You're just like, I pulled this out of the ground. And now it's sustaining me. Yeah. Food is a way to connect with other people. Food is a way to express love. Food is a way to express creativity. I think I look into natural spaces and I just see wonder.

Food. It's a basic need and one of life's greatest pleasures. But for many, accessing nutritious and affordable food isn't always easy. We have nearly 50 million people that are living food insecure, which means they never know when or where their next meal is coming from. And on top of that, the ways we produce. and consume food are harming the planet. Human population has doubled in the last 50 years, and meat consumption has tripled. How can we produce enough good food for a growing global population? I think that was the best place to start was just opening up my eyes and starting to see the world around me for what it had to offer.

We need solutions to secure our food for the future and reconnect with the land that feeds us. So today on the show, the food, Connection. Ideas from people who are taking lessons from the past and others who are experimenting with new technologies to change the way we eat. For Alexis Nicole Nelson, collecting ingredients out in nature has helped her reconnect to her food. She first discovered foraging when she was just five years old. I remember gardening with my mother at the house I grew up in, and just one day stands out in my mind with me probably not helping at all. And her pointing out some grass in our yard that looked different than all of the other grass, which until she pointed it out to me, I had never noticed. So my mom tells me to go and break some for her. I break it and suddenly it's the air is just like perfumed with garlic.

And she's like, that is onion grass. You know how we sometimes cook with like green onions. You can cook with that too. And warning, if you tell a five-year-old that they will just start breaking plants in your yard and seeing if magical smells emanate from them. And eating them. Yes. Okay.

So your mom was very into plants. clearly. Did you get your love of food and gardening and the outdoors from your parents, do you think? Oh, absolutely. So on my dad's side of the family, his mom is also of indigenous ancestry, Iroquois ancestry. So he was just being exposed to food ways that some of his peers weren't necessarily while he was a kid, while he was a teenager. And my dad's excellent in the kitchen. And it was really this kind of coming together of the two things that I enjoyed doing with my parents the most as a kid. And I'm very lucky to be a black kid who grew up with two black parents who were also very outdoorsy. Because not all of us get it.

There really is kind of like a, there's been this cultural separation between a lot of black folks and the outdoors. But historically, there was no separation, right? And you have been studying just what happened. Can you explain? Yeah, absolutely, 100%. So back, especially in the South, while a lot of black folks were still enslaved, there was a whole lot of kind of knowledge trading between black folks and indigenous folks in a lot of the southern states and a lot of like the Midwestern and northern states too.

And for a lot of people who were enslaved, the way that you beefed up, like, the meager meals or the scraps that you were given was often by supplementing with foraging, with trapping, with fishing. So that was knowledge that was a huge part of, like, early black culture here in the Americas. after they were emancipated, suddenly laws were getting put in place very rapidly about only being able to kind of reap the benefits of land that you owned. And if you are newly freed, odds are you do not own land. No. So if you can't hunt and forage on public property and you don't yet have private property to your name, boom, that is a part of your life that you are not partake.

in anymore. And it doesn't take a whole lot of generations passing for that knowledge to just kind of fall away completely. Huh. And is this true then that like when there was an opportunity to go foraging, it was kind of like, well, I don't have the handed down knowledge in any way. Only poor people would do that. Yeah. Then you, yeah, you have this really weird thing happened in the 20th century where everyone is like wanting to show off wealth. So then foraging kind of. became taboo, even if you did have the knowledge, and that was regardless of race. Foraging very much got looked down upon because why would you be, you know, heading down to the

creek to gather pawpaws when you can go to the grocery store and get a banana. And in the 1950s and 1960s, being a black person out in nature, out in the woods, out in predominantly white spaces, was like a very scary thing to do. for the sake of your safety, that that's not a space that you would want to necessarily be in. And it was kind of like a three-combo punch to us culturally moving away from getting to know our natural spaces. And I am one of a myriad of people who is actively trying to combat that. And do you feel like it's working? Like, what kind of feedback do you get?

from your followers. Yeah. One of the best days I think I've ever had in my life, I was out foraging. And a girl who also happens to be black, probably a teenager, she runs up to me, and she's like,

you are that girl from TikTok. And I was like, oh my God, yes. And she was so excited. And so I got to take her and show her what I was there, harvesting, I got to give her and her mom like a cut leaf toothwort leaves so they could taste like the spicy brassica e-ness from it. And the way that her and like her friends and her mom's like face lit up, I went home and I cried. I cried for like a solid 20 minutes because that's, oh my gosh, it's like almost overwhelming. And the thing that's still. And the thing that's

stuck with me was she was just like, you're doing this for the culture. Man, I'm starting to tear up just thinking about it now. In some ways, through foraging, you are helping people reconnect with their own history. And the ways that people used to eat off the land, like in a seasonal, sustainable way. Yeah. So many of us have such a fraught relationship with food. and a lot of that is due in part to like societal pressures. A lot of that is due to how processed food is. And I personally, I have had a historically very fraught relationship with food.

I grew up very overweight and so I was always being pressured to eat less, cook less. I, full disclosure, like, dealt with an eating disorder in my early and my mid-20s in which food was like very much the enemy in which I had to like train myself to stop thinking about this subject that I had loved thinking about and dreaming about my entire childhood. And in a way, diving back into foraging was the way that I fell back in love with food. It was not on purpose. I was super poor after college, living in a house with five of my friends and wanting to eat things other than ramen and canned vegetables. And so I was like, oh, well, you know, let me turn to some of that weird knowledge that I had just been amassing for no reason as a kid. And it just brought me this joy and this connection to place that I didn't have at that point in time. So much so that I went out and I sought out more information and I got more bold with my cooking and, you know, started being willing to put like flour and bread into my food again and, you know, was willing to put like flour and bread into my food again and, you know, was willing to.

willing to make sweet things again. I just, there's something soul-nourishing about caring about what you're nourishing your body with. That's Forager Alexis Nicole Nelson. You can find her on TikTok at Alexis Nicole and on Instagram and Twitter at Black Forager. On the show today, The Food Connection. I'm Manus Zamerodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour. from NPR. Stay with us.

Friends, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about TED Radio Hour Plus. When you become a plus listener, you get bonus episodes made just for you, with more ideas from TED speakers, and you'll go behind the scenes with our producers. What you won't get, though, are those sponsor messages interrupting the show.

And that's because you are directly supporting our work at NPR. So if you'd like to show your support, Learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shumeroody. On the show today, the food connection. If you visit Sean Sherman's restaurant, Awamni, in Minneapolis, you will find a pretty unique menu. So we've got a lot of duck, a lot of geese, pheasant. venison, elk, things like that. Dishes like preserved rabbit, bison tartar. Lots of wonderful lakefish from across this region and around the Great Lakes.

Grilled root vegetables with dandelion pesto and hand-harvested wild rice. We have many varietals of corn, beans, lots of wild berries, lots of wild foods in general. So there's a lot of cedar, there's a lot of bergamon, things like that. But what you won't find is anything that isn't native. to North America. We cut out colonial ingredients of things that didn't exist here before, so we don't use any dairy, any wheat flour, any cane sugar, and we're not using beef, pork, or chicken for protein choices.

So we just try to cook and make food taste like where we are and get people to think about the history of the land that they're standing on. Sean is a restaurant owner, chef, and the founder and CEO of the company, the Sioux Chef. As an S-I-O-U-X, since I'm a part of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe. When I called Sean on a Monday, the restaurant was closed, but he was prepping for the week ahead. Okay, so what are you doing? What are you cooking right now? So we've got a big pot of choke cherries today that my mom brought to the restaurant.

She was just in the Black Hills, and I was probably cooking about 20 pounds of choke cherries. And that smell of wild choke cherries cooking just something that always just shoots me back to being a young kid in my grandmother's kitchen. Sean, Hulamni sounds unlike any restaurant I have ever been to. And that is kind of the point, right? It is, you know, it's kind of unfortunate that we're, you know, one of the only restaurants of this kind out there. It opens up a lot of conversation, you know, it opens up that question, why aren't there more native restaurants out there? And it does start with history. I mean, it's just the relations of indigenous peoples and primarily the United States government.

You know, it's going to be important overall to know these pieces in history that. have happened to us and have really kept us down for a long time. Here's more from Sean Sherman on the TED stage. I think what's most damaging for us and why we don't have a lot of indigenous restaurants out there was the loss of our education. Because this whole generation, like my great-grandfather's generation and my grandfather's generation, they should have been learning everything their ancestors intended them to learn. You know, how to fish, how to hunt, how to gather, how to identify plants,

how to live sustainably utilizing plants and animals around us. But instead, we went through a really intense assimilation period. The boarding school systems stripped this whole generation of all that knowledge and education, and we're still reeling from that in our communities today because of this direct link to the trauma that happened there. And being indigenous in the 1900s was much better. My grandparents were born before they were even citizens, which doesn't happen until 1924.

We couldn't vote until 1965. we couldn't celebrate religions until 78, you know? So what does it look like for me growing up in this? Like, I was born in the mid-70s, and growing up in post-colonial America, like, what kind of foods was I eating? People in the media are always like, you're native, like, what kind of foods you grew up with? Because I want to hear a cool story, like, oh, I'd get up in the morning, take down an elk with a slingshot I made, would have a big family feast, you know?

But that wasn't the reality, you know, because, like, I grew up with the commodity food program because we were poor, like, a lot of people on the reservation, and it's just the way it was. And we didn't even have the pretty cans when I was growing up. We just had these like black and white cans, just beef and juices and that's dinner, you know, and that sucks. We could do better than this. There's so much more to learn and more to offer with indigenous foods. Sean, I just want to emphasize this point that, as you say, indigenous foods, like the ones you are serving today in your restaurant, they weren't really around when you were growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Yep. We did harvest things.

like this wild prairie turn-up color that we called timsula and choke cherries. And there were some elders that have held on to some recipes. But a lot of it was colonized. I remember my mom giving me a cookbook. She's like, oh, we already have a cookbook featuring all the Lakota foods. And it just kind of read like a Lutheran cookbook. So it's just like, no, mom, I'm looking for recipes without cream of mushroom soup, you know. So I wanted to know, like, what kind of wild foods were we utilizing.

So it just was a long path of self-study to try and figure it out because they're, you know, was no joy of Native American cooking out there for me. No. So where did you turn to your sources for information about this? Was it people? Was it, I don't know, archives? Yeah, a little bit of everything, you know, because I would just talk to people, some of their memories, try to filter what might have been indigenous and what was obviously

brought on later, spent a lot of time outdoors and really just trying to understand what are the purpose of all these plants that my ancestors would have known. You know, is it food, is it medicine? Can you craft with it? Or can you do all three? And I think that was the best place to start was just opening up my eyes and starting to see the world around me for what it had to offer. So you run the restaurant, but you also founded something called the Indigenous Food Lab, where your goal is to teach people the fundamentals of Indigenous food education. What are those fundamentals?

So I think the first thing that you do is just identify what does the term Indigenous education mean. So to break down that, first off, Indigenous education was something. thousands of generations of knowledge being handed down family member after family member, community after community, giving people the, basically the blueprint to live sustainably utilizing plants and animals of your region and all the tradition that goes along with it and understanding the immense amount of diversity out there because indigenous peoples obviously isn't one group. You know, there's still 576 tribes federally recognized in the U.S. 622 in Canada, 20% of Mexico identifying as indigenous.

So when we're breaking down indigenous knowledge, we're looking at. looking at the wild foods, permaculture, agriculture, seed saving, regional histories, medicines, food preservation, fermentation, nutrition, health, spirituality, sustainability, cooking techniques. Like, it just goes on and on. Like, it's a whole education because that's what all of our educations were. You know, we have a community garden that we do ourselves and we're growing a lot of heirloom seed varietals, whether they're corn, beans, squash, amaranth, tobacco, chilies.

And our goal is really utilizing our food lab as a place where tribal communities, especially around us can work with us so we can help them develop healthy indigenous culinary projects for their community and share a lot of this knowledge base and education with their own community too and just help grow it. And that's why we should have Native American food restaurants all over the nation run by indigenous peoples, right? And for us, we just want to get this food back into tribal communities, especially and make people healthy and happy and break a lot of the cycle of, you know, government

reliance on food and huge rates of type 2 diabetes. and obesity and heart disease because of this low nutritional food base that the government's been feeding us for too long. Indigenous diet is really kind of the most ideal diet. It's healthy fats. It's diverse proteins. It's low carbs. It's low salt. It's a ton of plant diversity. And it's seasonal, you know. It's just really good. It's like what the paleo diet wishes it was, really, when it comes down to it. Like, because it just makes sense, you know. If we can control our food, we can control our future. And for us, it's an exciting time to be indigenous because We are taking all of these lessons from our ancestors that should have been passed down to us,

relearning them, and utilizing the world today with everything it has to offer and becoming something different. You know, this is an indigenous evolution and revolution at the same time. You have said, Sean, in the past, that sharing culture through food is healing. What do you mean by that? I think that, you know, again, like it just opens up people. So if you think of the first time you maybe have experienced sushi or Ethiopian food or something like that and how that affected you, the flavors and, you know, the thoughts and how it changed your perception of that country or that culture of whatever it might be. And it creates curiosity and you want to know more and you want to learn more. And I think that for indigenous peoples who have had such a rough time, especially with the U.S. government, and we've had so much stripped away from us that it's really important to experience some of these flavors that are true.

representation of where we are. If you can taste these foods and have places to taste them and understand, it's going to open up a lot more people for compassion, understanding, and, you know, we can live in a better world. That's Sean Sherman, co-owner of Awamni in Minneapolis, and founder of the Sioux Chef. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas on reconnecting to what we eat, and solutions. for some of our biggest food problems, which includes hunger.

There's a lot that has to do with just access, which is why I have always said that hunger is not an issue of scarcity. There's more than enough food. This is social entrepreneur, Jasmine Crow. For the last four years, she's been trying to figure out how to redirect healthy food that might be wasted to the people who need it. ever since she visited a food bank in 2017 and saw what was on offer. I always remember the biggest thing is they were giving away a gallon of barbecue sauce. So I just think like a whole gallon of milk, but it's filled with barbecue sauce. And then no meat.

They had Weight Watchers, ding-dongs, some Belveda breakfast biscuits. There were these superhero-shaped macaroni noodles, a couple of canned goods, like a very small can of corn, a can of peas. a can of refried beans, some kettle potato chips, french fried green onions. And that's what they were giving people. That was it.

Nothing was fresh, nothing made sense. I couldn't think that someone would be able to take those items home and actually make a meal of them. I learned that it was ultimately the case for a lot of food banks and a lot of food pantries. They would receive donations of whatever it was going to be that week,

and that's what it was. And what I saw that that was doing is it made people have to go to a lot of different food banks because they never knew what they were going to get. It to me was a real eye-opening experience of there being a huge difference in this country between access to food and access to meals. So Jasmine started to investigate

why food banks weren't solving the U.S.'s hunger problem. She continues from the TED stage. And almost every major U.S. city The food bank is viewed as a beloved community institution. Corporations send volunteers down on a weekly basis to sort through food items and make boxes of food for the needy. In can drives, they warm the hearts of schools and office buildings that participate and fill the shelves to food banks and food pantries across the nation.

This is how we work to end hunger. And what I've come to realize is that we are doing hunger wrong. We've created a cycle that keeps people dependent on food banks and pantries on a monthly basis for food that is often not well-balanced and certainly doesn't provide them with a healthy meal. Yet we're wasting more food than ever before, more than 80 billion pounds a year to be exact. And as this food sits, it gradually rots

and produces harmful methane gas, a leading contributor to global climate change. You have the waste of the food itself, the waste of all the money associated with producing this now-wasted food, and the waste of labor with all of the above. All of this made me realize that hunger was not an issue of scarcity, but rather a matter of logistics. I mean, Jasmine, that is staggering. I cannot even picture how much 80 billion pounds of food.

Like, what does that even look like? We are wasting so much every year. And I want to stress that this is not food that's also coming from our households, because if you factor that number in, it's even greater. But from consumer-facing businesses, every year, 80 billion pounds of perfectly good food goes to waste. So these are the restaurants, these are the grocery stores you go to, the hotels, all that food gets thrown away. While at the same time, we have nearly 50 million people that are living food insecure, which means they never know when or where their next meal is coming from. And I just couldn't believe that we were living in a society that was allowing that to happen.

All of those things combined ultimately led me to start this company gooder. So in 2017, I created an app that would inventory everything it is that a business sells and make it super easy for them to donate this excess food that would typically go to waste at the end of the night. All the user has to do now is click on an item, tell us how many they have to donate, and our platform calculates the weight and the tax value of those items at time of donation. We then connect with local drivers in the shared economy, to get this food picked up and delivered directly to the doors and nonprofit organizations and people in need.

I provided the data and the analytics to help businesses reduce food waste at this source, and they even saved millions of dollars. Our mission was simple. Feed more, waste less. And by 2018, our clients included the world's busiest airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson, Cornel, Chick-fil-A, and Papa John's.

We've worked with over 200 businesses to divert more than 2 million pounds of edible food from landfills into the hands of people that needed it most. So you create this company, you build an app, and you do well for a few years. But as we've seen, the pandemic upended all kinds of supply chains and particularly magnified the vulnerabilities in our food systems, did you need to change how you run your business as a result? So the app still exists.

But what we did in 2020 is we made a pivot. A lot of the businesses that we were serving had closed their doors. Airports, convention centers, stadiums and arenas, colleges and universities. So what I started thinking is, how can we be the helpers? Our first big customer was actually one of the public school districts in Atlanta, where there were somewhere near 50,000 students that rode the bus to school every day. Again, logistics. And at school, they received.

breakfast and lunch. So that's where they were eating. And now when schools were closing, how are these kids going to get access to their food? And so what Goader came in and did is we started delivering food directly to these students' homes. We then took that same concept, and we started working directly with food distributors and manufacturers purchasing food at cost and then delivering it in bulk to seniors across the city. So rather than take excess food or wasted food and make sure it gets to people who need it, you are actually buying the food that people need. In one segment of our business, yes, but we are also buying food from distributors and manufacturers that would otherwise go to waste or that they can no longer sell. We're really

helping to make sure that food doesn't go to waste at the manufacturer and distributor side. We're also still helping businesses address food waste. And at the end of the day, we're making sure that people have access to food at no cost to them. In 2016, France became the first country to ban supermarkets from throwing away unused food. Instead, they must donate it, and they're fine if they don't. Denmark now has a mandated food waste grocery store. It's named WeFood. They recover excess food from local grocery stores and sell it at up to a 50% off discount.

They then use all the proceeds and donate it to emergency aid programs. and social need issues for the people in need. And last year, the world got its first pay-what-you-can grocery store when feed it forward opened in Toronto. Their shelves remained stocked by recovering excess food from major supermarkets and allowing families to simply pay what they can at their grocery store. This innovation we need more of.

Hearing you give examples from other countries makes me wonder where the U.S. government is in all of this. Like, why isn't this a systemic solution? Are city officials reaching out to you and saying, Jasmine, how can we put you out of business? I mean, why do you have to start a company to solve what it sounds like we need laws for? I agree with you. I think 100% it should be a systemic solution.

And I think last year should have lifted the veil off of everybody's eyes of the plight of hunger in this country and just how close to being hungry, a lot of people are. When you ask me how many people in policy decision makers have reached out to me and asked, how can they help? Their reality is none. I've been waiting for one city to say, let's make sure that we have food hubs that exist where families know they can go and get meals for their family if they're missing a little

bit of money. We need less food deserts. We need more affordable grocery stores. We need more people to have access. access to snap. We have to understand inflation is happening, right? And until we get cities and more governments involved in actually trying to solve these problems, we're going to continue to have a hunger problem. That's social entrepreneur Jasmine Crow. She's the founder and CEO of Gooder, and you can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, the food connection. I'm Manushe Zamoroti,

and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. On the show today, the Food Connection. We've heard about a TikTok influencer making a personal change to her diet, an indigenous chef bringing the old ways of eating back to the dinner table, and an entrepreneur who wants to make sure good food isn't wasted. But with so many people and a planet that's so maxed out,

how will we be able to produce enough food in decades to come on a global scale? What is the future of our food? We have a growing global population. We have growing demand for meat. We also have decreasing arable land. We have increasingly brittle and antiquated food supply chains. And all of this is combined with these increasing climate pressures. And there has to be a new approach.

This is journalist Amanda Little. And like a lot of us, she's trying to make ethical food choices for herself. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. Land of barbecues. I am a shark-and-chummed waters, and it has been very hard for me to remove meat from my diet. And that's just one reason why Amanda wrote a book called The Fate of Food. It's an investigation into what needs to happen to prevent future food emergencies. The International Panel on Climate Change has said that by mid-century, the world may reach a threshold of global warming beyond which current agricultural practices will no longer support large human civilizations.

And I've committed that to memory. It's an actual quote from a 2014 IPCC report because it's just such a staggering statement. When you put it like this, Amanda, like part of me is like, oh my gosh, it's enough to. want to turn off the radio and cry. But I don't want people to do that because you, you know, you've spent all these years traveling and talking to people who are trying to fix it. Yeah, this is a deeply troubling story. How do you feed the world?

This is a question that has propelled and troubled civilization for the better part of 13,000 years, right? And you have one side saying, let's go back to the way things were. Industrial farming screwed everything up. You know, we need to de-infant our food supply and go back to sort of pre-industrial agriculture. Those are folks who are composting and sort of going back to the land and no pesticides, those sorts of things. Yes. So they want a return to this sort of pre-green revolution, organic, biodynamic, regenerative farming practices. And then you have on the other side, the techno optimists who are saying food is ripe for reinvention, right?

Let's throw technology at this problem. And then you have this other side that's saying, oh, no, no, no, I'd like my food de-invented, thank you very much. We've seen how technology has caused this problem. Why would we bring more technology to bear? So you've got the techno optimists on one side, and then opposing them is a kind of back-to-the-land camp. Yes. And I, as a sort of detached observer of all this, and not someone who had a dog in either fight, was really perplexed. Like, why is it one or the other? The rift between the reinvention camp and the de-invention camp has existed for decades. But now it's a raging battle. Amanda Little continues in her TED Talk.

One side covets the past, the other side covets the future. And as someone observing this from the outside, I began to wonder. why must it be so binary? Can't there be a synthesis of the two approaches? Our challenge is to borrow from the wisdom of the ages and from our most advanced science to forge this third way, one that allows us to improve and scale our harvests while restoring rather than degrading the underlying web of life.

I belong to neither camp. I'm a failed vegan and a lapsed vegetarian and a terrible backyard farmer. If I'm honest, I will keep trying at this, but I may fail. But I'm hell-bant on hope. And if my travels have taught me anything, it's that there's good reason for hope. Farmers and entrepreneurs and academics

are radically rethinking national and global food systems. They're marrying principles of old-world agroecology and state-of-the-art technologies to create what I call a third way to our food future. So what is this sort of third way, this middle ground? The middle ground is to find a synthesis of the traditional and the radically new. The answer to food security is not technology alone, and it's not traditionalism alone, but it's technology combined with the wisdom of ecology, right?

It's technology in cooperation, not competition with the natural world. And as kind of theoretical as that sounds, there were so many examples of innovators who were really bearing this out. One of those innovators is a farmer named Chris Newman. When we called Chris, he just corralled some of his runaway cows. When it rains, crazy things happen on ranches, especially when it hasn't rained in a while. So they wind up in the highway. And nice to get them out of the road for the sheriff finds out. So Chris and his partner, Annie Newman, are two farmers in the northern neck of Virginia.

We farm the land at Stratford Hall, which I guess it's claimed of fame as being the birthplace of Robert Lee, which is an odd place for a black farmer to be farming. But we have an opportunity to be on this landscape and to pursue black and indigenous-led food sovereignty from here. I first encountered Chris through his writing. He's been chronicling his. his own adventures as a new entrepreneurial farmer who has come up against a lot of the profound hypocrisies in sustainable food production. And he wrote this manifesto, clean food. If you want to save the world, get over yourself. By get over yourself, Chris means that organic farmers need to be less precious about their methods. They need to embrace new ways of growing healthy food that everyone can afford.

I grew up around poverty and grew up around people who were food insecure and who were financially insecure. And this movement is never going to gain traction or take off or become a mass movement if we're not appealing beyond people who are in the luxury sector. To make his food more affordable,

Chris uses old and new tools to farm. His farm is a really fascinating blend of traditional approaches to farming. and technology. And the more time I spent with Chris and Annie, the more I began to see what, you know, they describe as this kind of personal Wakanda, this food-rich forest ecosystem that he imagines will be managed and tended by intelligent machines, by robotic harvesters, a place where technology exists to serve and elevate nature. He has, drones and electrical fences for managed grazing and cameras and software. But what he really

envisions is weaving together these old forms of agroecology, of food forests, of crop production, of livestock production, in harmony with the natural world, in harmony with ecosystems, alongside technology that can help him scale his enterprise and make it possible for him to produce his food for more people more affordably. Amanda traveled the country and the world, meeting dozens of pioneers working toward this third-way approach. In Arkansas, she witnessed the maiden voyage of an army of weed-destroying robots. I had the sense that this robot was going to look like C-3PO,

like some glittering gold battalion of, C3POs, who would see marching out to the fields and have little pincers and be plucking weeds from the ground. But in fact, it was this big sort of hoop skirt on the back of a tractor, under which there was a bank of 24 cameras using computer vision. And the computers could distinguish between the crops and the weeds. And in a fraction of the time, it takes you to blink. These computers deploy with a tiny little jet, a squirt of concentrated fertilizer that's too strong for a baby weed to tolerate, but spare the plant itself. And so this intelligent weeder has the potential to cut the use of agricultural chemicals by up to 90% or more. Amanda, you mentioned in your book that in 2017, the guy who developed these robots, Jorge Harad, that he sold his company to,

the tractor company, John Deere. Did that deal raise some eyebrows? Yeah, my question to him was, you're, you know, a paradigm shifter, you're a disruptor. Why are you selling out to the old guys? And he said, because we need to scale, because we need to get these things out into the fields, because they're great at building really good machines and we have no time to waste. Harad is the embodiment of third way thinking, right? robots, he told me, don't have to remove us from nature.

They can bring us closer to it. They can restore it. Increasing crop diversity will be crucial to building resilient food systems. And so will decentralizing agriculture so that when farmers in one region are disrupted, the others around you can keep growing. Here again, we see innovators borrowing from

and perhaps even elevating the wisdom of natural ecosystems. Development in plant-based and alternative meats are also profoundly hopeful. Uma Valletti fed me my first plate of lab-grown duck breast harvested fresh from a bioreactor. It had been grown from a small sampling of cells taken from muscle tissue and fat and connective tissues, which is exactly what we eat when we eat meat. This lab-grown or cell-based duck meat has very little threat of bacterial contamination. It's about 85% lower CO2 emissions associated with it, eventually can be grown in decentralized facilities

that aren't vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. Folletti started out as a cardiologist, who understood that doctors have been developing human and animal tissues in laboratories for decades. He was inspired as much by that as he was by a 1931 quote from Winston Churchill that says, we shall escape the absurdity of growing the whole chicken in order to eat the breast or the wing by growing them separately in suitable mediums.

Like Harrod, Valletti is a quintessential third-way thinker. He's reimagined an old idea using new technology to usher in a solution whose time has come. This is some futuristic meat, Amanda. Okay, just to be clear, though, they take cells from animals, they culture them, and then grow these cells in a lab into meat that you got to taste. I did. I tasted duck breast, which had just been produced in a bioreactor. And a bioreactor is like a giant, sophisticated crock pot.

It basically creates a sort of warm environment in which these growing cells can replicate. And they pulled it out, and their company chef put a little salt in that. pepper and a little oil in a pan and mashed the thing into a little meatball and sizzled it in the frying pan and it smelled like meat. And I'm going, oh my gosh, what have I got myself into? In part because I had just signed a document that said, this is an experimental product that has not been that has not been approved by the FDA. And what wet your appetite? Yeah. But what was so moving, was that Voletti said to me, as I was sort of digging into this bioreactor meatball, he said, you are participating in history. We are working on this to change the lives of billions of humans

and trillions of animals. Welcome to a paradigm shift. And then I said, thank you, thank you. I can't think of a better grace. This feels very profound and moving. And right as I was digging into this thing with my knife, he said, no, no, no, pick it up and pry it apart with your finger so you can see the texture of this thing, which I thought was so interesting. I mean, I've never been encouraged to, you know, pick up my meat and rip it apart. And what was it like? Well, at first it was a little bit like a sort of rubber ball, and I was kind of thinking,

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. But as I pulled it apart, I saw these stri-ed. layers of muscle that clung to each other and pulled apart just as you pull apart the meat on a chicken breast. So I pull off this little chunk and start chewing it. And it was a whole different experience than an impossible burger or a beyond meat burger or certainly a black bean burger. It was meat. You write in the book that you keep wondering what will be on the table when you hopefully visit your grandkids for Thanksgiving dinner in the year 2050. What do you think that meal might look like? Yeah, I, you know, I spent all this time roving around the world trying to find

an answer to this question. And I arrived at, I think, a probably inappropriate request, which was to spend it with Chris and Annie Newman. I would love for Amanda to be able to come to our Thanksgiving, and it's like a week-long thing where people who participate in the eating part of Thanksgiving also participate in the provisioning part. You know, lots of non-traditional foods that are prepared by all the hands that are at that table, and I would love it to be a real, real big damn table. I love the possibility of eating at Chris and Annie's table

because they want their... farm to be honoring and producing the full spectrum of foods that are a part of his and Annie's family tradition. Turkey and duck, heirloom varieties of corn and green beans and potato grown at the margins of their food forests, sauces of cranberry and elderberry, and the plants of Chris's Piscataoian ancestors, paw, persimmon, chestnuts. But every element will have been made possible. by the next level technologies that he plans to bring into his farm. You know, it's not so much that the foods of the future will be unrecognizable to us, but the means by which they are grown will be potentially totally different

from the way that foods have been grown in our lifetimes. That's Amanda Little, author of the book The Fate of Food, What Will Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World. You can watch her full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today called The Food Connection. To learn more about the people who were on this episode, go to ted.npr.org and to see hundreds more TED talks, check out ted.com or the TED app. If you've been enjoying the show, we would be so grateful if you left us a review on Apple Podcasts. It is the best way for us to reach new listeners.

which we are really trying to do. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, Fiona Guren, Rachel Faulkner, Dima Motisham, and Sylvie Douglas. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkampur and James Delahousie. Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, Matthew Cloutier, and Harrison V.J. Choi. Our audio engineer is Daniel Shukin. Our theme music was written by Romteen, Arablewey. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feeleyn, Michelle Quint, and Micah Eames.

I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The Ted Radio Hour from NPR.