The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Obesity, Hunger, And Malnutrition Are Found Together In The Same People with Tom Colicchio

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Why Obesity, Hunger, And Malnutrition Are Found Together In The Same People | This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market and AirDoctor Coronavirus has got us thinking about a lot, including many parts of daily life that may not have crossed our minds before. A big one of those topics is food, and with unemployment at an all-time high, we’re seeing many people who need to utilize food stamps to help make ends meet. Unfortunately, the SNAP program (food stamps) caters to the purchase of cheaper, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods over healthy, real, wholesome foods. We see that people who are food insecure and rely on programs like this are actually much more likely to be overweight or obese. The “N” in SNAP is for “nutrition,” and while there are SNAP benefits at beneficial food institutions like farmers’ markets, the program still has a long way to go to serve public health.  Our food system is in desperate need of change, and as we look at current conditions in our world from COVID-19, we also see that the restaurant industry is in desperate need of help. The two actually go hand in hand. Today on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I talk to Tom Colicchio, the chef and owner of Crafted Hospitality, which currently includes New York’s Craft, Riverpark, and Temple Court; Los Angeles’ Craft Los Angeles; and Las Vegas’ Heritage Steak and Craftsteak. In an effort to broaden his long-standing activism around food issues, Tom served as an executive producer to the 2013 documentary A Place at the Table about the underlying causes of hunger in the United States. This eye-opening experience led Tom on a journey to Washington DC where he has been a mainstay in our nation’s capital in the years since. From holding members of Congress accountable on their voting records around food to working with former FLOTUS Michelle Obama on the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, Tom has established himself as the leading “Citizen Chef” advocating for a food system that values access, affordability, and nutrition over corporate interests. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market and AirDoctor. Thrive Market has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. Not only does Thrive offer 25 to 50% off all of my favorite brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchased, they give a membership to a family in need. Get up to $20 in shopping credit when you sign up and any time you spend more than $49 you’ll get free carbon-neutral shipping. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com/Hyman. We need clean air not only to live but to create vibrant health and protect ourselves and loved ones from toxin exposure and disease. That’s why I’m teaming up with AirDoctor to offer you the AirDoctor Professional Air Purifier systems at a special price. Learn more at www.drhyman.com/filter. Here are more of the details from our interview:  Why those who are most food insecure have the highest risk of diabetes and obesity (8:08) How Tom when from being a chef to doing lobbying work in Congress (9:32) Making nutritious foods more accessible and affordable through SNAP and through the food supply system (18:15) Why SNAP doesn’t go far enough (24:06) Systemic racism in the food system (26:06) The populations who are on SNAP (27:02) Improving working conditions for food system workers by demonopolizing food production (30:57) The Independent Restaurant Coalition’s work to support the restaurant industry during the coronavirus pandemic (39:08) How Tom is approaching his restaurant operations at this time (46:03) Innovation in the food supply system (51:39) Check out Tom’s podcast Citizen Chef with Tom Colicchio at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/citizen-chef-with-tom-colicchio/id1513237410 Follow Tom on Facebook @TomColicchio, on Instagram @tomcolicchio, and on Twitter @tomcolicchio

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So much of what else this country, this nation, can be cured if we can get people to eat healthier. But the only way to get people to eat healthier is get them the dollars that they need to eat healthier. Hey guys, it's Dr. Mark. By now most of you know I love fat. And having plenty of healthy fats in my diet makes me feel focused and energized and pretty happy throughout the day. Good fats also help me avoid reaching for sugary, high-carb foods because of a food emergency. One of my all-time favorite ways to eat nourishing fats is macadamia nuts.

I keep them at my home, in my office, in my car. They're an amazing source of monounsaturated fats, sort of like the olive oil of nuts, that support heart health and the antioxidant vitamin E that can help with all sorts of things, including healthy aging. Since they're rich in fiber and protein too, they help me feel full and avoid cravings. And I've tried a lot of different brands out there, but I always come back to the raw organic macadamia nuts from Thrive Market. They have the best price and I know I'm avoiding the inflammatory oils and added sugars that other brands use. With Thrive Market, I can order my macadamia nuts and all my other favorite healthy products online and have them sent straight to my house. And everything

at Thrive is 25 to 50% less than you spend at other stores. So you can eat well without breaking your budget. I also love Thrive Market because they give back. For every membership purchase, they give a membership to a family in need. I believe in Thrive's mission so much that I'm proud to be one of their first investors because I wanted people to have access to low cost but healthy food. And right now, Thrive is offering

all Doctors Pharmacy listeners a great deal. You'll get up to $20 in shopping credit when you sign up that you can spend on all your favorite natural food, body, and household items. Anytime you spend more than $49, you'll get free carbon neutral shipping, which is awesome. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to chat about something pretty important, air. If you're listening to my podcast, it's likely that you

have a piqued interest in nutrition and health. You might be eating healthy and exercising and meditating, but one area that a lot of us tend to neglect is something we literally cannot live without. I'm talking about air, specifically clean air. Here are five reasons why I think you need to consider an air filter today. Studies show that our indoor air is up to five times, and sometimes in other places, up to 100 times more polluted with toxins than outdoor air. Do you know that many household items are covered in toxic chemicals? New carpet, furniture, paint, perfumes, cookware, mattresses, even many baby items are doused in the chemical flame retardants that we use, preservatives,

phthalates, chemicals that are slowly released and off-gassing into the air that remain trapped in your home. Indoor air pollution can contribute to short-term health effects, things like sneezing, wheezing, itchy throat, nose, skin, or eyes irritation, nasal congestion, runny nose. Could this be your air if these are only happening at home? Air pollution also contributes to chronic diseases. Long-term risks can include respiratory diseases, heart disease, asthma, cancer, and worsening of other conditions. Contaminated air can also contribute to sleep apnea and other sleep issues, and poor sleep is associated with irritability, anxiety, depression, brain fog, fatigue,

weight gain, hormone and blood sugar issues, and a whole slew of other conditions. And air filters can remove lots of these toxins and pollutants. However, not all air filters are created equal. The Air Doctor is the only air filter I trust and use, and it's affordable. It removes 99.99% of particles and the vast majority of toxic compounds in the air, including volatile organic chemicals and gases from your indoor air. It features an ultra HEPA filter, which is 100 times more effective than ordinary HEPA filters and is 100% sealed, which ensures all the air you breathe is pure and filtered. Now, I'm offering an exclusive special deal to my listeners. Right now, if you go

to drhyman.com forward slash filter, that's drhyman.com forward slash filter, you can access the Air Doctor Filter for $329. That's $300 off the normal price. So head over to drhyman.com forward slash filter to access this deal today and stay safe out there. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And if you care about what's happening today in the food industry, in the restaurant industry and why we should care, you should be listening to this podcast because it's with an incredible leader in space of food and restaurants and food policy, Tom Collecchio, who is the chef and owner of Crafted Hospitality, which has got a whole bunch of restaurants all over the country. My favorite that I've been to is Kraft, which was down the street from me in my apartment in New York City. And he is just a mover and a shaker in the food industry, as well as just being an incredible chef. He's got incredible restaurants all over the country. And he's opened this really cool restaurant in New York in 2018, which I'm sure is struggling

right now, called Small Batch in Garden City, New York, which is a casual dining restaurant that celebrates the pride of place through commitments to local ingredients and local purveyors and people, which is pretty awesome. So really decentralizing food. He's also been an incredible food activist. He also was an executive producer

for an incredible movie called The Place at the Table, which I saw in 2013 at Sundance Film Festival, which blew my mind. It was really about the causes of hunger in the United States and the often parallel and coexisting problem of hunger and obesity, because we don't typically think of people who are overweight as hungry, but it's really problems that go hand in hand. And that led him to go to Washington, D.C. The chef goes to Washington. He becomes a citizen chef activist and has been advising members of

Congress and holding them accountable for being an integrity around food and food policy. He worked with Michelle Obama on the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act and is really a leading citizen chef at activist in the space. So I'm so excited to have Tom on our podcast. Welcome, Tom. Thank you, Mark. You make me feel so much more important right now. You are. You are. You know, I always look for the people out there who are not just doing what they do in their small world, but actually seeing the connections between everything they do. So you're in the space of food and providing some of the best and most amazing, delicious food in the country and have been given all sorts of awards. But you also realize that

it's not so simple as just serving up food in your restaurants, that we live in a food system and that it's broken and that people are hungry and suffering and sick. And that is really what you focused your work on. And I'm so excited about your new podcast. Everybody should be listening to this podcast called Citizen Chef. Only one episode is out as we're recording this, but it's going to be coming out more and more every week. And it really highlights some of the underbelly of the dark issues in our food system and also the possibilities for reimagined food systems. So Tom, you've been just such an icon for me, both because I love eating at your restaurants and love your food, but also because you are an example of what I think chefs should be. And I think chefs can be a leading voice for change in our food system. And you certainly are one of those.

So I'm so glad to have you on the podcast. Thanks. So to be clear, the reason why I was an executive producer on that movie was because my wife was the producer and director. Well, you got in there. But it helped you understand that there was bigger issues out there in America. Oh, absolutely. No, no. What was really amazing about the film, and when Lori, my wife Lori Silver,

when her and her partner, Chrissy Jacobson, started working on the film, very, very quickly we figured out that people weren't hungry in this country because of famine, because of war, because of drought. People were hungry in this country because they often didn't have the necessary funds to actually buy healthy food, and we didn't have a government

that felt that they had a responsibility to make sure everyone was well nourished in this country. It's true, it was striking to me and I learned about this just reading medical journals that those who are most food insecure have the highest risk of obesity and diabetes. So can you talk about why that might be the case? Yeah in a phrase in this country calories are cheap and nutrition is expensive and so if you have very little dollars to spend on food, you buy the cheapest food possible. Typically, those are the foods that are high in saturated fats, high in salt, high in sugar. They're dense in calories, but they don't actually offer much nutrition. And so that's why often you see in the same households people that are malnourished and obese at the same time.

Yeah, what's fascinating from a medical point of view is that in studies, they looked at what happens when people are allowed to eat as much processed food as they want versus real food. And they eat about 500 calories more when they have access to processed food and not real food. And the reason is that we are looking for nutrients in our food. We're biologically programmed to look for those nutrients. Just like a kid will eat dirt if they're iron deficient, we're going to keep looking for love in all the wrong places because we're never going to find the processed food. So people are actually eating a lot more to try to find the nutritional density, but they're not

getting it. And that leads to this obesity problem. So it's pretty striking when you look at these scientific studies, and we see this across America that, you know, people who are among the most food insecure are the most sick and overweight. Now, you've been an advocate for food and hunger issues for a long time and been lobbying on Capitol Hill to change our food system. How did you as a chef go from the kitchen to Congress? Well, so I go back to my childhood. My father was president of his union.

He was a corrections officer. My mother worked in a school cafeteria. And so that's kind of, if I go back to my childhood, that's kind of where I think it was rooted in some of the work that my dad did. I remember him campaigning for someone who was running for sheriff in Union County. I grew up in New Jersey. And so so I think that was ingrained in me. And they were, you know. Good voters, I mean, they're out there, you know, you know, they voted in every election. And so there was this idea of politics that was always discussed in my house, but then, I mean, obviously I had a platform from being a chef, but then also from, uh, being on TV. college campuses, showing it to various civics groups.

And so that gave me a platform to start, you know, talking about the issue a little deeper. But because we made the political argument in that film, that you can't solve hunger through food banking and through charity, that you actually need government response, a massive government response, and a much bigger response than we currently had. That put me squarely in Washington.

In fact, I testified while we were making the film. I actually testified in Congress in committee. They were debating the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act. And it was Congressman George Miller, it was his committee, he was a congressman from California, and I was scared to death. I always had a problem with public speaking. You wouldn't know, but I was really nervous. And I also had a speech that I had to read. I have a very, very difficult time reading speeches, or reading and speaking at the same time. I'd rather, you know, read the materials, and then sort of do it off the cuff. And I'm much better that way.

But I had to read this. I'm really nervous. Plus, I go into the chamber to meet Congressman Miller, and we chat a little bit. And so, you know, not knowing the process, you walk out and you're in the committee room, and it's like you see on TV. You're down below, up here, and I'm freaking out. And I'm testifying along with Secretary Vilsack and then another general, retired general from Mission Readiness, along with someone, I'm forgetting his name,

I'm blanking it out, from the Heritage Foundation. And so I read my piece, and that was fine, and they all kind of do their thing. And then it comes time for Q&A. And at one point, I got so angry at the guy from Heritage that I turned and started addressing him. And I got a reprimand from the bench. That's a conservative think tank.

Right, right. And I got a reprimand from the that's a conservative think tank right right and i got i got a reprimand from the bench saying no you you address us and and then but then i had a another uh democratic congressman who who kind of bailed me out and and like steered the conversation to where i was heading um so it was it was a really good lesson but it was also a lesson in civics and how the sausage is made and you, you know, I know how sausage is made. I know how we're both made now. You know, they say there's two things you don't want to see is laws and sausage. I've seen them both made, and I'll stick to cooking. But, no, but that – so the film came out and really gave me a platform.

And right after the film came out, I co-founded an organization called Food Policy Action. Yeah. Co-founded it with Ken Cook, who was at the time still running the Environmental Working Group. And he had this idea to model food policy action very similar to the way the League of Conservation Voters is set up. So we published a scorecard. So we graded Congress on how they voted around food issues.

Yeah. Farming issues and fishing. And so that was clearly put me, you know, in D.C. And you didn't give people a good score. Maybe they want to talk to you. It worked out both ways. So if we if we didn't give someone, you know, there's some people got really bad scores and they just kind of blew us off. And then there were some people who got so-and-so scores and they would say,

well, had we known there was someone keeping track, we maybe would have voted differently. It was like, that's exactly why we're here. And so, and so I would go to Washington sometimes, you know, eight to 10, 12 times a year, and we would go and lobby. And so I was an unpaid, unregistered lobbyist, but working through this organization, I would always go with professional lobbyists and you would have meetings. And then at the end of the night, I would end up going to another congresswoman's house, I guess I can name her, Shelly Pingree. She's an organic farmer. Yeah, she's a 400 acre organic farmer in Maine. And so we would go to her house and a bunch of members would come out, usually like 40, 50 to 60 members. And they would always make a big deal when some of the

senders would show up. And so I would just give talks. And that just kind of blossomed from there. And the James Beard Foundation started moving directions and getting involved more in advocacy. And they started a boot camp to teach chefs how to advocate for things that they cared about. So we would bring those chefs to the Hill. So we would have 60 chefs on the Hill. And that made a pretty big impact. And so that really showed you the impact, the grassroots impact that you can have. But it takes a lot of work.

And I remember talking to George Miller when he was retiring. And we were at a press conference together. And I took him aside and Miller when he was retiring and we were at a press conference together. I took him aside and just congratulated him on his retirement. He was a congressman? Congressman from California, yeah. And he took me aside and said, listen, we keep coming back and we recognize this. They said a lot of celebrities that come up here for a photo op, they come here one day and we never see them again he said you keep coming back and he said that's that's being recognized and so you have a bet you have a more of a voice because you're not going away and so so that's how i

got involved that that was it and it was it was um and food policy action is a great a great organization i think in the last election they were able to unseat two congressmen who had bad voting records through a massive social media campaign that was really driven through citizen action. So people feel disempowered and they feel like they can't do anything and their voice doesn't matter. It actually does. And by collective action, you can actually unseat people who are bad actors. Right. When I was there, I'm no longer involved and I may be getting back involved. But when I was there, we actually went after one member of Congress from Florida, Stephen Sutherland, who almost single-handedly killed the farm bill.

And we went after him, and we don't have a ton of funding, but we went after him, did a few town halls, and I think he lost by about 3,000 votes. Gwen Graham beat him. Now, we picked a good candidate. Gwen Graham had a big name. Her father was a Senator and a governor from Florida. So she had a big political name, but it worked.

And now with the election where Democrats got, got hammered. So you're, you're, you're in Washington. You're talking to all these senators and congressmen and you're so clear about the linkages in our food system between healthcare, climate change, education, employment, the economy. Do you think that the congressman senators had an awareness of this? And why isn't this part of our national discourse in politics? Some do. The members of Congress that are on the Ad Committee do. You know, we had a great partner in Pat Roberts, a Republican senator from Kansas. His opposite is Demi Stabenow. They actually, on the last farm bill, did a great job of partnering

together. Yeah, there's people who do focus on it, but they don't necessarily understand the connection sometimes. that's what you have to do you have to make those connections and and I think also because of the the scorecard people you know you can't discard it people want a good record yeah they actually want a gold star if you're running for office just by nature you're competitive and you actually actually want to say, hey, I did the right thing. And listen, we're talking about nutrition. We're talking about people who are hungry.

You know, this shouldn't be controversial. But the thing that's challenging here is that there's the farm bill, which has the SNAP or food stamp program in it, which feeds about 46 million Americans, including one in four children in this country. Right now, it's much higher. Right before COVID, it was about 38 million, and that number is probably doubled at this

point. Yeah, I'm sure it's more. And the issue with SNAP is it's called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, except there's no provision for nutrition. There's no guidelines around the nutritious quality of the food and nutritional density. Yeah, except for the Double Bucks Program. The Double Bucks Program that is in the Farm Bill, you know it, but I'll just spell it out anyway. It's actually started by a good friend of mine, Michel Nishan, and his organization, Wholesome Wave.

Another chef. Right. If you're using chef right if you're using snap to to shop at farmers markets again this is how you make nutrition more affordable um if you are using snap in a farmer's market um you'll get double the amount of money you're spending so if you spend 40 you go and get another coupon for an additional 40 to spend in the farmer's market now what's great for this is it expands um your your dollars that you could spend on nutritious food because you're in a farmer's market you're buying fruits

and vegetables number two that money goes to farmers yeah that was the key here and this is how you actually work both sides of the aisle you work from the Christian side and take care of the sort of liberals who want to feed hungry people but then you actually are making sure you're giving money to rural communities and farming communities because otherwise that money is spent in a supermarket where it goes to a large company. So this is a way to take billions of dollars and move them into... So how many billions or how much money of the food stamp program goes towards double bucks? Do you have a sense of that? Actually a small amount of money and it's a public

private partnership. I believe that the first farm bill that was introduced, it was $100 million. And I think it's doubled now. So it's only about $200 million. Yeah. So that's $200 million out of $75 billion a year. Point well taken. Yeah. So one of the things you focus on, which is interesting, is not just erasing hunger through giving calories, but making sure people have nutritionally dense food. Can you talk about that? Well, again, if you want people to have nutritionally dense food, my experience is that people who have limited means, it's not that they want to buy junk food. They actually prefer to buy nutritious food. They just have to make their dollars stretch as much as possible. And so again,

how do you make nutritious food more accessible, more affordable? Accessible, meaning there are places in inner cities, but also places in rural areas where you have to travel pretty far to get to a supermarket to be able to buy a food and vegetable. And so there's the accessibility issue and there's the affordability issue. And so how do you make that work together? Do you do it through subsidizing fruits and vegetables? Maybe not. But can you do it through actually research and development so those farmers can actually get studies and data and information

on how to grow more fruits and vegetables on the same acreage. So if you're producing more, the price will come down, but you're also selling more. The other thing that I think is critically important is nutrition. And you know this, if you start at an early age, teaching kids about nutrition, it'll last a lifetime. And so making sure that nutritious food, making sure that there's a system, and this wasn't the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, making sure that there is money so farmers can get food directly into school systems, so fruits and vegetables can get into the school system. But here's something that's missing. Most schools are actually open when, especially here in the Northeast where I am, when farmers are producing most of their food, school's out of session.

Right. And most schools, most cafeterias no longer process food. They only take food in and reheat it. That's right. So we need to actually create a system, a regional distribution where food can come from a farm and get processed. When I say processed, I mean minimally processed,

meaning taking peas and blanching them, taking broccoli and blanching or carrots and having fresh foods, fresh fruits and vegetables now that can be frozen and ready for school years. Nothing wrong with frozen. Nutrients are there, but now you're actually taking the food from the farm. You have that processing source, and then it goes into the school system. This is crucially important because if you get kids to eat nutrition, again, early on, it'll stay with them for life. Plus, studies have shown that kids then introduce those foods to their parents. Parents, yeah. It's true.

It's really important. So also teaching about nutrition in school. We don't do that. We don't teach nutrition. In fact, when we went to medical school, how many classes on nutrition did you have? You know, they were mostly about scurvy and rickets and malnutrition. How many things that you see in your practice that can be cured if someone actually had a better diet? Most things. I mean, chronic disease is predominantly caused by what we eat, and it's

mostly cured by what we eat. So here's something that Congress, both sides of the aisle care about, how you lower healthcare costs. That's your answer. Yeah. Except they don't, they don't connect the dots, Tom, between. God forbid we're the nanny state and we tell people, you know, how to eat more nutritious. And so, but this is how you do it. So we spent $200 billion a year on healthcare costs and everybody wants to know how to make that, make that come, you. And everybody wants to know how does that come down? Obviously, pharmaceuticals come down, sure.

But how do you make people healthy so they don't need that intervention? Actually, the budget for Medicare is $1.3 trillion. It's a lot. And then you count all the other healthcare programs in the government. It's about 60% of our total healthcare costs. But now we have to make sure that people can afford healthy food. And so snap doesn't go far enough. No, just kind of gets you by effect. Most families run out of snap, you know,

three weeks into the month. Um, also most, uh, families who are on snap have at least one member of the family working full time and they're still on snap. Um, also, you've got to also bust the myths around Snap. People believe that people are just abusing their system. Most people, most families are only on Snap for about eight months. Also, a single-bodied adult with no dependents, otherwise known as A-bots in the lingo, they can only receive Snap three months out of any three years.

Also, most people don't know, if you're a college student, you cannot receive SNAP unless you work 20 hours a week. This is crazy. And college campuses, there's food pantries opening up on most college campuses now because these kids go to school. Maybe they're the first in their family to go to college. They barely have enough money to get the kid to college. They don't have enough money to pay for a meal plan.

And the kids are hungry. And when you're hungry, you can't learn. That's a staggering amount of hunger on campuses. You talk about that. I mean, I think most people don't realize that college kids who you think of as, you know,

fairly middle-class well off actually are hungry. Right. And what happened? COVID they closed all college campuses. So what happened? Housing, the kids got thrown out of school. So they didn't have housing anymore and they couldn't eat anymore. Yeah. Right. And what happened COVID? They closed all college campuses. So what happened? Housing, the kids got thrown out of school. So they didn't have housing anymore and they couldn't eat anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we, so much of what else this country, this nation

can be cured if we can get people to eat healthier. But the only way to get people to eat healthier is get them the dollars that they need to eat healthier. So one of the issues that isn't really talked about a lot is who are the hungry and it's really often the poor obviously but many of those and the 50 million food insecure are mostly black, Latino, Native American and they're really... Yes and they're disproportionately affected by coronavirus. And with this whole issue of systemic racism, how does systemic racism play a role in both the issues around food insecurity and hunger as well as the farm and food workers?

Because I think there's two subjects I wanted to get into. I think it's pretty easy. Systemic racism has disproportionately affected black communities where they don't have wealth. And they don't have wealth built up over generations because they weren't allowed to own property. They were promised 40 acres and a mule. They never got that. And then when they moved up north, they moved into places like Chicago where they were breadlined when they couldn't get a mortgage. And so how do you build up wealth and families?

It's through property. It's through property, it's through home ownership. And so also that and, you know, the constant sort of push on wages. And so, of course, it's pretty easy to understand how it affects the black community disproportionately. And so, again, and the health outcomes, again, you asked one question who's who's on snap yeah really children people with disabilities bets those are the categories yeah about uh um whether they're black white latino they're actually more whites on snap but as a percentage there are there are more people of color but that's who's really going hungry. And so you have elderly who have to make decisions whether to actually take their medicine or their

food or their medicine needs to be taken on a full stomach and then their stomachs aren't full so the medicine's not working or it's getting sicker. You have people with disabilities who can't work. People with disabilities who end up getting locked up because we don't have a mental health care system to take care of them, so we lock them up. Children who are living in homes that are food insecure, they are affected, are then the parents who are feeding their children in those homes, they're not eating themselves. And so this is a, and so we're really sort of looking at COVID right now,

and this is what I'm hoping on the hunger side that comes out of COVID. Right now, states like Maryland, I know there's been a 70 – almost 75% increase in applications for SNAP. If you extrapolate that throughout the country, you know, we're looking at probably 50, 60 million people on SNAP, right? These are people who are lining up for food pantries and cars. You see these lines that are two, three hours long. These are people who never, three months ago, in a million years,

thought that they would be lined up for a food pantry. They had jobs. They actually, you know, they went to school. They got a good job. They're lined up. Okay. So I'm hoping that the language around people who are on SNAP, it's always, they're not deserving. Bad decisions. Nobody wants to be on SNAP. Well, hold on. They made bad decisions in life. It's their own fault. Pull yourself

up by the bootstraps. um why did you have so many children right you hear this yeah it's your fault and that's that's what the government shouldn't take care of you because it's your fault but now we're seeing people no fault of their own are hungry and so what we're hoping what i'm hoping is that we have a deeper empathy for people who are struggling you know people who are born into poverty, they don't have to be asked to be born into poverty. They're born into poverty. And so how do we, how do we, I think there's going to be a deeper, you know, empathetic sort of feeling around who's struggling in this country and how we can fix that. Because people, again, who never thought they'd be in this situation are going to have to reach out to the government for help. And so hopefully there's a better understanding about who's healthy, who's hungry, why they're hungry, and why we should feed them. Now, we already touched on the health benefits for why people should be fed. But then take it a step further.

When you're healthy, you have better educational outcomes, right? Better health outcomes, obviously. You get a job job you have a job more productive and more productive therefore you're paying taxes therefore it's actually good for the country and so if this country wants to get back on its feet and even when we're at close to full employment you want to make sure that people are healthy enough to thrive so they can actually contribute to the country and so this is an argument that now is a very different argument. It's not an argument about my liberal knee-jerk reaction

to make sure people are taken care of. This is now a different conversation about what's good for America. So now you make an argument for why feeding people and making sure that they're properly nourished is actually good for our country. So you wrap this in the American flag right now. Now we're having a different conversation. Absolutely. I mean, it's good for the economy to have people healthy and working in every way. And speaking of, you know, working, the biggest employer in the country is the food system. And when you look at food and

farm workers and restaurant workers all across the food chain, it's 20 million people. And a lot of those people now are out of work and restaurants are struggling. But even before they're out of work, they're often marginalized workers, they're often paid low wages, they're often migrant workers, they often have no benefits. You know, Kerry Kennedy has been on the podcast talking about the state of farm workers in New York who never got a day off Christmas or anything and had to work crazy shifts and had no benefits and no rights. And I think these are the things that people don't understand when they're buying their food at the grocery store. What happened all along this food supply chain that led to some of the workers that are producing the food being really adversely affected. So we really don't have the kind of fair labor laws for most of the farm and even food workers, and we're paying the price for that.

Yeah, well, in fact, in the Fair Labor Standards Act, farm workers were left out of it. They didn't have the protections that other industries were afforded. It wasn't until Chavez started organizing people that they got some rights. But, but yeah, so what we're seeing now, and this is what's interesting. You read stories about these food processors that are just getting ravaged because of COVID where some plants where there's 3,600 workers over a thousand that have COVID where this could have affected 90% of the meat production in the country.

Well, that's because you have two reasons. Number one, you have low paid workers that, that, you know, are being forced to go to work. They should stay home, like the rest of us, but they're being forced to come to work. They're getting sick. And they end up going to work because they have no savings. So they end up going to work and they end up getting sick. And so our food system is built on, and our food system originally was built on slavery. Let's be honest here. And so it hasn't changed that much.

It's using low-paid workers to produce food. But now all of a sudden, they are in a position where they're essential. okay well why weren't they essential all along and why don't one thing you paid more along really this is this this can be taken care of pretty quickly oh how would you do that over the last 40 50 years these big food producers but out the little guy they are all very centrally located. It's very, it's very,

they become monopolies. When you have four, you have, you know, four companies that process the majority of the meat in this country, they become monopolistic and we can break them up and they should be breaking up because our food system should be spread out. It's too centralized right now.

So if we spread it out, this is actually one of the things that we talk about on our podcast, one of the issues we deal with. We spread it out. We actually put it into communities. And so when you have a processor that is in the community, they're not a big agribusiness that is actually Brazilian or are in Smithfield's case owned by the Chinese. Smithfield sounds like an American company, but it's owned by the Chinese, who's most

of the pork in this country. When you have processors now that are part of the community, wages will go up. Listen, last week, the Justice Department actually is going after these processors for racketeering, for essentially price fixing. They price fix wages.

They're pushing wages down because if you're working in food processing, it's only a game in town. So you're going to take a job for $10 an hour, $12 an hour. You're working crazy hours. You don't get breaks. I mean, here's stories of these people working in food processing plants that wear diapers because they can't take a bathroom break.

Yeah, they have to process 150 chickens a minute. Crazy numbers. And so we have to break this up a little bit and sort of spread it out. And, you know, this is all, you know you know again but there's obstacles to that right how many the the policies that are in washington have to change in those policies we don't have to change policies we already have policies in place to actually break up monopolies that's called the sherman antitrust act but it's exactly been a little bit rolled back by Reagan. So it's allowed all this consolidation of the food industry and seed companies and everything. Right. But if you look back in the 20s when we broke up the monopolies,

the reason we were able to do it was because it was couched in terms of this is anti-democratic, because now you have companies that are too powerful and they have an outsized vote, they have an outsized reach when it comes to Washington. They can create laws. So, you know, there's 800 meat processors in this country, 800. Fifty of them produce 90% of the food, 90% of the meat. Okay? There's also 20 licenses that the USDA gives out.

The big guys make sure that you cannot get those licenses. Now, if you're a small farmer, maybe you can get a license where you can kill maybe, you know, a couple thousand birds a week. You can only sell them whole from your farm. You can't put them actually into a distribution model. Or maybe you can actually kill animals and sell them directly, you know, to the public, but you can't sell them to restaurants. So there's, again, there's 25 different licenses, and the big guys make sure that you cannot process portioned meat out and sell it to supermarkets. That's crazy. So basically, the government is keeping the status quo and preventing these companies from being able to liberalize and actually allow small producers to...

That young farmer who wants to stay on his family's property, but he can't make it because the government's not letting him. I'm out on the north end of Long Island on the North Fork. It's a farming community. It started out as potatoes and broccoli and cauliflower and hops. And now it's mostly grapes and you still see a lot of farmland. I have friends of mine who are raising animals. They have to ship them off the Long Island to Connecticut to slaughter them and then bring them back to sell them on their own farm. That's crazy. It is crazy. You know, we're talking about some of the

disparities in farmers and, you know, some of the challenges of sort of racial injustices on the farm. And I was recently listening to a podcast called 1619 about the way in which Black farmers have been prejudiced against through USDA policy that allowed local banks and local white communities, which were in control of the loans, the crop loans for the farmers, to limit their loans, to delay the loans, to cause all kinds of trouble for the farmers that made them go out of business because the white farmers didn't want them. And it's the source of the biggest class action civil rights lawsuit in history. And I think it's sort of systemic,

and I think it makes it hard for us to have a fair food system. Right. Well, now you're squarely now making the argument for reparations. Yeah. Land was taken, and that's the root of the reparations. Yeah, I think Lincoln offered the freed slaves 40 acres and a mule, and Johnson, who followed him, was a slave owner and a southerner who repealed that, and that land today would be worth $4.6 trillion, which is staggering.

But I think giving small amounts to each individual African American in the country probably isn't the right solution. It's probably revitalizing communities and empowering communities in ways to rebuild themselves, led by themselves. Yeah, I don't know what the solution is, but HR 40, which is the bill that's been introduced in the House, I don't know how many times, John Connors, I believe, is the sponsor of that bill, is just to study this. It's actually not to say, well, here's what we're going to do. It's like, let's study this issue. And Congress says, no, we're not going to study it.

And so, yeah, I don't know how to figure out how to compensate people. That's way above my pay grade, but we should study it. Yeah, it's a huge issue. So let's talk about restaurants because that's your business. And I think right now the restaurant industry is under a staggering blow

from COVID-19. It contributes $1 trillion to the economy each year and is 4% of the GDP, but it's been hit harder than any other industry. And you've developed this incredible group called the Independent Restaurant Coalition to lobby Congress to get relief for the restaurant industry. So tell us what is happening. I mean, you know, for me, just thinking about it

as a lay person, nobody's eating at restaurants. A few people are doing takeout. How do they staff the restaurants to even make up money doing that? I mean, how is this unfolding, and where are you going here? You don't make money. And just to be clear, I'm one of the founding members only because someone called me first or second. Actually, so the Independent Restaurant Coalition, I think it was March 14th, 15th, I got a phone call from a friend of mine who's not in the restaurant business. He's an agent who represents chefs. And he said, you know, you have a foundation maybe we can help out and i said hold on to your money um because this is way too big

and then right after that call i got a phone call from a friend of mine um scott favor who is one of the lobbyists that i worked with when i was in food policy yeah environmental working group yeah i'm on the board of the environmental working group so okay so scott called me up and you know to tell me about something else and um i kind of in passing said yeah and he asked me what i was working on i said well we got to do something for restaurants and i said i think we need a lobbyist he said okay let's do it and so i called my friend back i said i think i know how you could spend your money and then he had talked to a few other people and we managed to get some money within two days we hired a comms team uh we hired lobbyists, not SCOP, but we hired lobbyists

and we were on our way. And then it kind of branched out and we found a group down south that were about 100 restaurants strong that were working on something and found another group in Chicago and then San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. And then we found chefs from all over.

Right now, we have about 60,000 people on our list. Actively, every morning on a Zoom call, there's probably 100 or so restauranteur chefs. And we're set up solely to lobby. And so we were the ones who really were focusing on PPP and the fixes to PPP. And we just got that. It just passed the boat chambers and it extended the period where we can spend the PPP money from eight weeks to 24 weeks. It changed the split from payroll to rent our other expenses from 75 to 25 to 60, 40.

And also if the portion that wasn't forgiven, the portion that is a loan was extended, the payback period was extended from two years to five years. There were a few other things in there too so we lobbied hard for that and got it um we were invited to the white house some one of those kind of you know um you know uh press little little hits i guess um but we had we didn't make a difference and now right now

we are we are asking uh for 120 billion billion specific to the restaurant industry. And before anybody chokes on that number, we employ 11 million people. I'm talking about independent restaurants. And so we define that as restaurants that are not publicly traded and restaurants that have fewer than 20 locations. And so that money will go to hire our stats back. We'll give us the necessary pay our vendors and give us the necessary runway to actually get open because as you pointed out when we open up we're opening to a very depressed

market number one take out half our seats also we were forced to close and we have to take out half our seats there's additional money that we're gonna have to spend making sure the restaurant is constantly sanitized and making sure people are wearing masks and the whole bit. And so we're looking at maybe 30% of our business, maybe. We can't make money doing that, so we're going to lose money. And so the question now, if Congress is going to put a stimulus bill out there, the restaurant industry is uniquely positioned to take that stimulus dollars and have it all go out

because typically 90 cents to 95 cents every dollar we take in goes out the door in terms of wages or suppliers or rent and so if you want to actually take money and flow it through a business so it goes to a lot of people until they spend money and that's what actually keeps the economy going um we think that the restaurant industry is where they should look. And in the scheme of the money that's going to be needed to actually keep the economy afloat until we get a vaccine, we're talking trillions of dollars. So $1.2 billion is actually a pretty low number. You said $1.2 billion? I'm sorry.

$125 billion, yeah. But the challenge is that even if you do that and get the money in, the restaurants aren't going to keep losing money because at 30% occupancy, it's still losing proposition. Right. So that $120 billion number, that actually comes from about 75% of income replacement for about five months, I think, is. And so my table of thumb was wrong.

But what that does is if that money is flowing through, right, then we stay in business because we're not losing money anymore because our payroll is paid for, our suppliers are paid for. We're actually taking that money that's coming through, and that's what's floating our business. So if all we're paying in expenditures are some hard costs, meaning rent and our food costs, then we can make it. And then you think it'll open up within a year or two? I mean, because it seems like a long trajectory to restaurant opening. Vaccine. The economy will stay depressed until there's a vaccine. There are some places that will do really well. Food stores will do really well.

The Amazons in the world are going to just crush it. Zoom is doing okay. So there are pockets that will do really well during this time. But restaurant industry is not going to come back. Listen, also keep in mind one of my restaurants, River Park. So we're on a near NYU.

60% of our business is private functions. We have a conference center. Yeah. This isn't coming back anytime soon. Right. So, so we have, and that's not coming back until there's a vaccine.

And so listen to the other day, he thinks possibly by fall, there could be a vaccine. Um, There could be, but you know, there's a lot of questions about it. It's not like a typical vaccine for measles or polio. It's, it, these, these vaccines are hard to do for respiratory viruses are not a hundred percent effective. And yeah, there's, there's a lot of questions. I mean, I hope it's going to be a miracle and maybe they will be, but I just worry about it. I worry about the restaurant industry because people are afraid to go out. People are concerned

about, you know, how to stay safe when they go out. And I mean, it's a thing I miss a lot because I used to eat in restaurants a lot, but people are struggling. How are you, you know, as a restaurant owner, how are you navigating this as an individual? My restaurants are all closed. I thought it was important. I weighed trying to open up and do

community service or something. I thought, and this is me personally, and I'm not casting aspersions to anyone who made a different choice, but my decision was keep my staff home, keep them with their families, keep them safe. I have a few friends of mine that are ER doctors who both had COVID, came out the other side, they're back to work, and they would tell me horror stories. And so my feeling was keep people safe. My employees are coming in on public transportation, and so I didn't want to make them come to work. Plus, knowing that the federal unemployment bump up actually put a good

amount of dollars into people's pockets, especially since people weren't going out. So I got a good sense from my staff that they were doing okay. Out of all the employees that we let off, I think it was close to 420, think 470 somewhere in there only about 20 um couldn't receive unemployment and we helped them out so so that was that was why i made that decision but um as things are starting to to get a little better in new york um one of my restaurants uh craft we may open up next week as a meal um kit restaurant meaning we'll do all the prep. You still may have to some of it at home. So for instance,

like we, we cut all the vegetables and we'll marinate them in olive oil and herbs and, and we'll, you know, plastic wrap them and we'll have a whole chicken that's already been brined and tied and ready to go. And we'll give you some directions and even do a video of taking those vegetables,

put them in a roasting pan, put it in the oven for 50 minutes. So it's like Blue Apron, but for families. Yeah, I love that. And other restaurants are doing it. It's not my idea. And also turn our private dining room that we just renovated, we can't use,

into a butcher shop and a gourmet store. Because people who live around the restaurant, maybe they don't want to go to a big supermarket and they want to support restaurants. And so we'll sell olive oils and vinegars and mustards and we'll sell beans and flour you can't buy anywhere. So we'll sell flour because you can buy 50-pound bags and break it up. And so we'll sell flour and beans and stuff like that.

And we'll have six to seven will do pastas and sauces. So you can buy pasta that we make fresh pasta and we'll give you pesto sauce or we'll give you a bolognese. And so we'll bring together a menu of things that you can assemble at home very quickly. Um, and that's how we're going to go forward with that restaurant. Um, uh, I have another one. Will that be profitable or it'll just be a way to, no idea. Yeah. No idea. Cause you can't do the same

volumes you did no no luckily for me i have a landlord that's working with us um we've been there 19 years and so they want to keep us there and so they're working with us um and uh you know because of ppp um i pay i'm paying my my staff for ppp so that's an expense I'm not using them paying. Whatever rent I'm paying is PPP as well. And so I may have a shot at making it. I don't know. Yeah. We'll see. But those are the – right now, those are the food businesses that are busy,

supermarkets and a lot of gourmet stores. In Brooklyn, Olmstead, it's a great restaurant. I mean, Greg, the chef there, he moved very quickly to this model and has been doing pretty well from what I understand. And this is actually a way for America to get cooking again, which I think we all need to do, right? It is. It is. People are.

Day one, I closed the restaurants. In the morning, I woke up and I was on Twitter. It's something along the lines of, I know many of you out there don't cook regularly. If you have any questions, like that. And then I went about my business all day long. And like 11 o'clock in the morning. 4,000 questions. Not only that, it created a community.

I used the hashtag cooking through a crisis. And it started this community of people who were helping each other. So I didn't have to. And it was like someone had a question about X, Y, and Z and someone else would say, well, try this, this, and this. And it just created this great community. Actually, People Magazine figured it out.

It was pretty funny. So my restaurants, you know, what I miss most, I miss seeing my team. I see them occasionally on Zoom meetings, but not the bartenders, not the waitstaff, not the baristas, not the porters. I'm seeing my management team. But restaurants are like families. And the funny thing is I have seven restaurants. Two are in Las Vegas, so I don't own them.

But the restaurants that I own, the four in New York, they're all individual families. We do get together occasionally for maybe a holiday party or something, but for the most part they become their own little families and people are missing each other. We did a Zoom meeting for the staff last week and the chat was all, just miss you, miss you,

miss seeing you. So that's who you miss. You miss that connection and I think that's the goal. It's like people, you know, they're not interacting. Luckily for me out here, I have a few families that i know have been safe and we're starting to to interact again um outside um not inside and our kids are playing but we have to trust each other you know i i most likely if i go to new york and open a restaurant i'm gonna have to sort of step back for two weeks or so um so that's the kind of system that we've worked out for friends

that start to get together. And so far we've been okay. Yeah, I mean, it's a new world. I think the other question I have for you finally is, you know, a lot of restaurants are not as big or successful as yours, and they might have survival issues long term. And I think that in addition to the restaurants, a lot of the suppliers of the restaurants are struggling. Independent farmers. How are these restaurants and farmers innovating to stay afloat? And what's

going to happen going forward? I mean, it seems like there's going to be a lot of people are just going to go out of business. Right. So let's tease this out a little bit. There's two supply, food supply chains in this country. One are farmers that sell into supermarkets. The other are farmers that sell predominantly to restaurants or to farmers markets. And so when you read stories of milk being thrown out, right, that's because you have a milk producer who has a deal with a processor, but that process processor, that processor processes milk for institutional places like colleges or hotels where they're putting it in five-gallon containers, and it's not labeled the same way milk would be labeled for the consumer.

That business dried up, and so that farmer doesn't have an outlet anymore, so that's why they're dumping the milk. That processor can't change very quickly and start putting milk in quarts and half gallons with proper labeling. So that's why you're seeing milk being thrown out. Same thing with pig farmers that are killing their animals. You know, my animal's 200 pounds. It needs to get processed. That processor closes down because of COVID.

It's crazy. There's all these hungry people not getting food. And there's all these farms that are having to throw out their food. I mean, it's kind of a, that too, if the government just, and this is Jose Andres is, you know, he's putting out there in feed act, which is starting to get some steam. If they just started taking dollars and putting them into restaurants, we could have kept that supply chain intact and just kept producing food for communities. That would have been a very easy way, not break that link. You have to plan for that. You know, We could have very easily turned on a dime, but you have to

plan for that. Our government didn't have a plan for that. Hopefully, the next one we will. Some of the farmers have done a pretty good job of getting their CSAs together. More people are getting CSA boxes. Dan Barber, the chef at Stone Barns, is using his farmers to put together CSA boxes for his Barber, the chef up at Stone Barns, is using his farmers to put together CSA boxes for his clients. That's a way of keeping that supply chain intact. That's some of what I'm going to do when I reopen Kraft. And some farmers haven't been able to make that pivot, and so they're in trouble. So the James Beard Foundation did a survey of chefs and restaurateurs, and only 20% of the chefs and restaurateurs they surveyed say they will open up.

Only 20%. 20% of the restaurants? Definitely open up. That means 80% are going to go out of business? 80% don't know. They just don't know. They're unsure of the future. Most chefs, most restaurateurs, they don't have the wherewithal to get through this.

I only have really five restaurants and you know, we're, you know, without PPP, we're out of cash. And so we'll figure out a way to get open, but it's, it's it's going to be tough. And these are marginal businesses at best. They're not high profit margin businesses. So you've just not at all. Not at all. And over, over the last 10 years, it's become even more difficult. Rents are going up. Um, you know, especially in big cities. Um, I had to close a restaurant because my rent doubled, you know,

I might at least run out and the rent was doubled. I had to close, um, crap, crap bar. But, um, yeah, so, so listen, we're, we're in trouble with the problem. And again, this is why we're arguing why the restaurant industry is is the place where you want the stimulus dollars because it's not only the restaurants it's the farmers it's the fishermen it's the winemakers the cheesemakers the person who delivers my linen um even musicians who may play a sunday brunch you know all of those people are part of our our you know our our ecosystem. Yeah, our ecosystem. And so, you know, you extrapolate that out. It's close to 20 million people. And so you don't want to see that go away.

You don't want to see a farmer have to lose their land because they can't produce food. And so this is why we're making the argument for why restaurants should be safe. And you do think that will actually get passed? Do you have a sense what's happening in Washington around that? Because it seems like a great idea. Well, who knows?

You know, when the jobs report came out last week and we added two and a half million jobs, but we lost 16 before that. So maybe more than that before that. So I'm not sure why we're sort of rallying around that. But all of a sudden, it's like, you know, the deficit's getting too high. We can't put any more money out there. The Federal Reserve came out today and said, we're going to see a long sort of many, many months, many years of employment being at, you know, 10%. So I think they're going to have to stimulate the economy, especially since this

is an election year. So that's what we're going for. We also just put out a pretty in-depth financial study where we are making the argument that the $120 billion that are spent will actually return $250 billion worth of economic activity. So we think we're making a really good argument, and hopefully will will come through right now. Senator, I'm sorry, Congressman Blumenauer, who's a congressman from Portland area in Oregon. He wrote a bill. It's going through committee right now. He has a partner on the on the Senate side in Senator Wicker, who was a Republican from Alabama. He was working with Kyrsten Sinema and Cory Booker. We have both sides of the aisle working on this.

Hopefully, we can get buy-in from a few more people. I hope so because we all love restaurants and that industry goes under. It's going to be hard to pull it back. All the 20 million food and farm workers are involved in some way or another. I think this is a moment for us to stop and think about how do we want

our food system to be? Do we want it to be so centralized? Do we want to decentralize it? Do we want to make it more equitable? How do we, how do we create a more just and fair food system? And this is sort of highlighting some of the cracks in our food system that need to get fixed. And we were at the center of it, unfortunately, but it's, it's a, it's. And without restaurants, we're going to see more, more of a centralized food system because restaurants are where those,

those independent farmers are actually selling their food into. So this is another reason why. That's right. Well, you're, you're one of my heroes, Tom. And, uh, I can't wait till I get to go back and eat at craft. I'm going to go get the takeout stuff for sure. Yeah. Come, come, come and see us i think by next week we'll have it we'll have it up and running and uh but thanks thanks for having me on the podcast of course great seeing you i'll see you in person soon yes everybody who uh this is my

cat i just got a puppy we're all excited our dog after 11 years passed away in november and i had it November. It took a lot of sort of breaking down my wife to get another puppy, but we got a puppy two weeks ago, so we're pretty psyched around it. Well, I encourage everybody to check out Tom's work. He's written a number of great books, Think Like a Chef, Craft of Cooking, Witchcraft, Craft a Sandwich, and definitely check out his podcast. It's top of my list, Citizen Chef, which is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you love this conversation, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment, share with your friends and family, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts,

and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks.

It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up that's dr hyman.com forward slash pics p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and i'll share with you my favorite stuff that i use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger

longer now back to this week's episode hi everyone i hope you enjoyed this week's episode. services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.