Pod Insights TED Radio Hour What we'll eat on a warmer planet About this episode From the farm, to the lab, to our tables, what we eat and how it's grown is changing. Agriculture contributes to global warming and is being transformed by it. This hour, a glimpse into the future of food.
Guests include chef and policy advisor Sam Kass, farmers Jim Whitaker and Jessica Whitaker Allen, biotechnologist Isha Datar and artist Sam Van Aken.
Original broadcast date: July 5, 2024.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:54 Manoush Zomorodi? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Hello, everybody. How we doing? So a while back, I went to a pretty unusual event. I'm really excited to be here. This was a dinner and TED Talk given by former White House chef Sam Kass. Let's start with those. Who presented us with a four-course meal. Let's start with the crab cakes. Crab cakes with crispy capers. Let's turn to fruit. Then came mini tarts. That beautiful little peach jam in the little monsieur cup you have. Seared Atlantic salmon with new potatoes and some focaccia on the side. Wine.
1:37 Manoush Zomorodi? All along, our wine glasses were topped off. Yes, wine. Wine is definitely a fruit, people. Until the end, when we were presented with chocolate cake and coffee. I mean, I'll say, it was very good. But Sam calls this meal "The Last Supper." Not like in the Bible. More because many of these dishes are under threat because of climate change. Now, this menu has been put together with ingredients that experts and models predict will not be around for
2:10 Speaker 06 For our kids and our grandkids. And you'll see that it's many of the foods that we hold dear.
2:18 Manoush Zomorodi? Sam first gave this dinner over a decade ago at the Paris Climate Accords, when he realized that food and agriculture were not on the agenda.
2:28 Speaker 06 When we say the words "climate change," what do the words "climate change" actually mean? The point here is not to depress you or to scare you. It's not. It's not. It's to try to make an emotional connection in a way that I think food, only food, can to understand really what's at stake when we're having these conversations. Now, the good news is, on our plates really does hold some of the biggest both problems, but also potentials to solve these challenges of anywhere that we have. And that's the part that gives me a ton of hope.
3:04 Manoush Zomorodi? There's a movement afoot to change the way we grow our food and eat. Because right now, global food production is a huge contributor to climate change. And the warming planet is making it harder for farmers to grow ingredients we take for granted. We've learned that eating local and organic foods are good for us and the environment, but it's just not enough. Agriculture needs to change drastically if we want to continue eating the foods we know and love and nourish the planet's billions of inhabitants. And so today on the show, figuring out the complicated future of food. A chef, a farmer, and a biotechnologist share how they're searching for solutions.
3:49 Manoush Zomorodi? So back to Sam Kass. He was cooking for the Obama family in the White House when he started working with them to get Americans to rethink how they eat and ended up getting into food policy as well.
4:04 Speaker 03 Most people didn't even have a basic connection at that point to their health and wellbeing and food. The idea that it was having such a big impact on so many people's health, we hadn't connected those dots. And it was a lot of work to do to just try to say, like, how do we shift the culture and put these issues and how we're feeding ourselves sort of front and center?
4:23 Manoush Zomorodi? You may remember some of their campaigns to make school lunches more nutritious.
4:28 Speaker 03 Wait a minute! Are you First Lady, Mrs. Michelle Obama?
4:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Michelle Obama on Sesame Street, motivating kids to move more and eat healthier.
4:39 Speaker 03 What are you doing here on Sesame Street? I'm about to have this nice, healthy breakfast. The idea was, one, can we start to shift the culture? Like, can we really elevate these issues on people's minds and start to shift our core values and that we care about the health of food and the impact that food is having on our society and our culture?
4:57 Manoush Zomorodi? But here we are now, a decade later, and you have moved on to another pressing food problem.
5:05 Speaker 03 Yep.
5:05 Manoush Zomorodi? Tell me about that transition.
5:06 Speaker 03 Well, I think the health of ourselves as humans and the health of the planet are inextricably linked. And climate change, which of course food and agriculture is a major driver of, is starting to decimate our capacity to feed ourselves. And the future is pretty scary when you start to see what the models look like in terms of our ability to grow the basic foods that we consume every day and some of the implications behind that. So for me, it's one big set of issues that we have to grapple with. But if we don't solve climate, all of the other things we care about in food are going to be just deeply impacted. And a lot of the progress that we've made are just going to be undermined by climate.
5:49 Manoush Zomorodi? Sam Kass picks up again from his Last Supper dinner in 2024.
5:54 Speaker 03 Our oceans are really on the front lines of climate change. In the Pacific Northwest, two years ago, they closed the snow crab fishery for the first time in its history. They did that because...
6:07 Speaker 06 That fishery had gone from 11.7 billion crabs in 2018 to 1.9 billion last year. That's over an 80% collapse of that population in just five years. Now, there was hope that, you know, nature is resilient and that population will rebound. But just about a month ago, officials announced that that fishery would be closed for the second straight year because the population just had not recovered. That absolutely decimates those fishermen who have depended on that fishing grounds for generations. Now, let's turn to fruit.
6:49 Speaker 06 That beautiful little peach jam in the little mozzarella cup you had. Last year, we lost 95% of the Georgia peach crop. 95%. And when you start to look at the models and how our environment is changing, in our lifetimes, I don't believe we'll be growing peaches in Georgia at all. And what's Georgia without a peach? But I'm gonna go to a fruit that is even more important, at least to me. And this is where these issues start to get pretty serious for me. That fruit is wine. The National Academy of Sciences predicts that by 2040, assuming we hit two degrees, or if and when we hit two degrees, the world's wine-growing regions will be cut in about
7:33 Speaker 06 half in terms of what can sustain wine. Just a few weeks ago, one of the largest cava producers in Spain announced that they were laying off 80% of their workforce, about 615 people, for a big operation, because they simply were not going to have grapes to harvest this year. There are producers in Champagne that are buying land in England because they do not believe they will be able to make champagne in Champagne in the foreseeable future. Now, you know things are really bad when the French are buying land in England to make champagne. It's like, sound, the alarm, we got a problem here.
8:14 Manoush Zomorodi? There are going to be some people listening who are like, well, boo hoo. You and your fancy friends can't have your champagne, your cava and your crab cakes. How do you explain the stakes to them? Why do you think this is an effective way to show people?
8:31 Speaker 06 Oh, I wish I could stop there. So let's keep going.
8:35 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay.
8:35 Speaker 06 Let's talk about, let's talk about wheat and rice.
8:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Staples.
8:39 Speaker 06 Staples. So the world, 60% of the world's calories comes from wheat, rice and corn. 60% from those three crops. Okay. Those three crops keep life on planet Earth going. So the warmer we get, the worse it's going to be for yields. The other part is, right now, about 15% of the world's wheat is grown in persistent drought conditions. By 2040, that number will be 60%. So you're going to see massive collapses, season over season, in different parts of the world of full crops that just fail. And remember, the population is going to continue to grow. So we, it's not just for the current 7 billion.
9:24 Speaker 06 You know, all the models show we'll get to be about 10 billion people by the, by mid-century. So we have to feed a lot more people in a much more challenging climate as the yields are declining. It is a pretty serious situation.
9:39 Manoush Zomorodi? So what can we do? Well, Sam says we need to tackle three areas to turn that situation around. First, let's talk about the consumer. He says we need to show companies that we want climate-friendly products. Only then will those companies truly invest in making products that are both sustainable and affordable.
10:01 Speaker 06 We, as consumers, have to start choosing foods that are produced in a more climate-friendly and environmental-friendly way. And... However, we can do that by supporting companies that are making any kind of claim. Even if it's not true, we have to start moving the market so that all companies know that if they want to grow and they want to hold on to their consumer base, they have to start taking the environment into account.
10:24 Manoush Zomorodi? What do you mean, even if it's not true?
10:26 Speaker 06 Meaning that right now, there's work to do to hold these companies accountable because there's plenty of companies who are saying these things and it's just nonsense. Like, it's not real.
10:34 Manoush Zomorodi? Greenwashing.
10:35 Speaker 06 It's greenwashing. There's some companies that are really trying to figure it out. So there's a bunch of nascent emerging brands that are doing a great job and trying to prove like it's possible. But the big companies right now, people aren't buying climate friendly. It's not a driver of sales. So right now for them, they look at their math, like, I need to invest how much money in changing my whole supply chain? And the CMO is like, I can't sell that. The mass market's not buying that.
10:58 Manoush Zomorodi? And presumably, it's at a premium as well.
11:00 Speaker 06 Right, there's a premium. There's a cost to this transition. And one thing we haven't figured out is who's going to pay for it. And consumers have to start sending a very strong signal to these big companies especially, that I'm going to choose products that are at least claiming to try to do a better job with the environment.
11:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Next, more foods need to be developed that don't increase global warming, but actually help reduce it.
11:25 Speaker 06 So with the right practices and some tools, food and agriculture can be sequestering megatons and gigatons of carbon, like really bend the global emissions curve. So you start doing practices like cover cropping and no tilling, so you're not turning up the soil and you're helping to build the ecological health around. That ecosystem, those microbes in the soil will start pulling down carbon through the plants and storing it in the soil. One company I'm very excited about has fungi microbes, like little fungi, that you coat seeds with, and they're pulling down like three tons of carbon per acre per year and storing that carbon more permanently in the soil. So shifting our practices with a different mindset and starting to incentivize and pay farmers to solve some of these big problems is the answer.
12:12 Speaker 06 The problem right now is like, we're asking farmers to make all these changes and take on all the risk in those changes. And with no real short-term economic benefit to them.
12:23 Manoush Zomorodi? Finally, as more climate-friendly farming practices and products become available, our culture around what we eat on a daily basis has to change too, he says.
12:34 Speaker 06 This is the one place in our daily lives that we can collectively have a really big impact. And how we eat gives us a shot every single day to try to do a better job. And it doesn't have to be some big overhaul. Little by little, it can have a big impact. Not to be stressed about it, not to get all worked up about it. And if you have a steak every once in a while, I have a steak every once in a while. It's a treat.
12:52 Manoush Zomorodi? It's a treat.
12:53 Speaker 06 It's a treat. I love a ribeye. Like, I'm not going to lie, I'm not going to pretend like anybody who tells you a ribeye didn't taste good, I think it's insane. Like, I just don't think they know what they're talking about. But like, that's OK. We just can't eat giant portions and we can't eat it all the time.
13:06 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, we wrap up the Last Supper with some dessert and coffee. And chef-turned-food policy wonk Sam Cass predicts what happens next for food and climate. On the show today, the future of food. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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15:13 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the complicated future of food. We were just talking to former Obama White House chef Sam Kass, who is now a food policy guy and hosts dinners that he calls the Last Supper. On the menu, dishes that are in jeopardy because of our changing climate.
15:37 Speaker 06 This is not some far out future challenge.
15:41 Manoush Zomorodi? In 2024, I attended one of his Last Suppers, where he also delivered his TED Talk.
15:47 Speaker 06 Now, I wish I could tell you, you know, you're still going to have your dessert, and everything is fine.
15:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Alongside coffee and chocolate cake for dessert.
15:56 Speaker 06 And in some ways, chocolate is faring the worst. So probably you've never probably had a bite of chocolate that wasn't grown within about 10 degrees of the equator by smallholder farmers. And there is not a single model that shows that if and when we hit 2 degrees, any of that region will be suitable for chocolate production. It will be too dry and too hot.
16:19 Speaker 06 And again, this year, chocolate prices are up by 50% because those production ecosystems have been hammered by drought and extreme weather. Raise your hand if you've had a cup of coffee today, or a cup of tea. Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I know. Much of coffee is grown, it's sort of in the valleys around mountainous areas, shade grown coffee. And as it started to warm on the bottom of those mountains, it's just become simply too hot. About seventy-five of the hundred and twenty-four wild varieties of coffee are on the verge of extinction right now. And that's really a problem because much of the genetic material that we will need
17:03 Speaker 06 to try to produce hybrid varieties that could thrive in much more volatile climate are going to be lost.
17:11 Manoush Zomorodi? You said earlier that, back when you were in the Obama White House, that there was sort of a sense that people were ready for a change when it came to how they thought about their food, the cultural implications, the way that they understood how it related to their neighborhood, to their community. Are we ready for this next sort of way of thinking about food? Are we, do we still have a lot of work to do before these changes happen?
17:35 Speaker 06 There's mixed signals. When we were in the Obama administration, the big ag groups, first of all, did not engage with us. And if you said the word "climate change", it was like you were spitting in their face. It was like the greatest offense. There's no discussion. Now, you have the biggest, most conservative ag groups sitting down and forming formal coalitions with some of the most well-known environmental groups to figure out how to galvanize agriculture to start solving these problems. And I would have bet every dollar I would ever make that that would never happen. On the other hand, you know, you still don't see the mass consumer rallying on this.
18:16 Speaker 06 You see parts of politics starting, wanting to still go backwards on these things, which is like... You know, there's reasons to feel good and there's reasons to feel concerned. I think we have no choice but to figure out how to galvanize more people. And I'm a father of two, two boys, Si and Rafa. They're six and five. And our ability to hand to the next generation the quality of life, the richness and deliciousness of life that we were given, is truly at stake. And that's why these issues matter. And that's why working to make some better food choices matter. That's why voting matters. That's why advocacy in your church or your business that you either run or work at, in
18:59 Speaker 06 your schools, wherever you are, putting these issues forward matter. Asking the questions matter.
19:07 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Sam Kass. He's the author of The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis. On the show today, the future of food. So that question of how to incentivize farmers to change how they grow staple crops so that they're better for the environment and make money? Well, there's a family farm getting closer to an answer here in the US. I met up for coffee with Jim Whitaker and his daughter Jessica Whitaker Allen to hear their somewhat radical approach to growing rice.
19:48 Speaker 05 So rice is the single largest calorie consumed around the world every day. It feeds more people than any other crop. When we harvest it, it goes straight to the meal. We take the husk off and it's ready to eat.
20:03 Manoush Zomorodi? Rice is calorie dense, a good source of protein, it stores well, which is why about half of the world eats it every day. The Whitaker family has been growing rice for six generations.
20:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, we've been in Arkansas for over 130 or 40 years. And sometimes I wonder, why did they stop here? Did their wagon break or what happened? But there's not many of us left. We're just only a few, me and my brother.
20:33 Manoush Zomorodi? And I mean, I didn't even know that there was- Rice farming in Arkansas in the United States.
20:38 Speaker 05 So Arkansas is the largest rice growing state in the country. We have six rice growing states. It's the largest one. About half of our rice is exported and about half of it is eaten inside the U.S.
20:50 Manoush Zomorodi? So if I go to the grocery store and buy like Uncle Ben's or something like that, it could be from you?
20:56 Speaker 05 If, well, if you bought Uncle Ben's ready to eat rice, there's a strong chance one in every three of those come off our farm.
21:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, wow, okay.
21:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
21:13 Manoush Zomorodi? So let's go back to how you got to be such a big supplier of rice in this country. You tell a story about how you were 22 and you were like, okay, grown up. I'm going to start my own farm, but not that easy.
21:28 Speaker 05 No, it's not. I mean, I remember it like it was yesterday. We drove to the bank and didn't have two nickels to rub together and we got a FHA beginning farmer loan and took off. So my brother and I rented a farm.
21:43 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Jim Whitaker on the TED stage.
21:46 Speaker 05 Farming is a very capital intensive business. My dad couldn't help us. He didn't have the finances. He could not help us get started. And let me tell you something about renting a farm when you're 22 years old. No one rents you a farm unless no one else wants to rent it.
22:07 Speaker 05 It was a big piece of land. It was cash rent. I mean, the states were set. We were doomed to fail. And we weren't focused on environmental sustainability back then. We were focused on economic sustainability. How do we make higher yield? How do we use less fertilizer? How do we get to the next year and feed our family?
22:28 Manoush Zomorodi? In my mind, I mean, when you say rice farming, I mean, sorry, it's such a cliche, but I'm picturing, you know, rice fields in Vietnam, or, you know, where there's water everywhere, and people picking the rice, and is that what it looks like?
22:43 Speaker 05 Okay, so, so, rice around the world is grown in a flooded environment. This is for weed control purposes. When they plant the rice in the water, grasses don't grow well in the water. So that's why people use water all these thousands of years to grow rice, is for weed control. Now, you know, I was in Bangkok a few months ago, and a farmer was on his back porch. I'm like, "Well, how do you know if that's right?" And he said, "Well, that's the way we've always done it." I say I'm a fifth-generation farmer, he's probably a hundredth-generation farmer. I mean, they've probably been farming rice there for 2,000 years in that same field. It's just the way he's always done it.
23:26 Manoush Zomorodi? For thousands of years, rice has been grown in tiers of flooded fields. You've probably seen the photos. They look like massive green staircases. But about 20 years ago, Jim and his family started wondering, what would happen if they didn't grow rice this way? They started experimenting with different methods, like getting rid of those tiers.
23:51 Speaker 05 So, one of the first things we did on our rice fields, we adopted a technique that's a little different. We leveled our fields completely flat. This is called zero grade. Rice all over the world is grown in a flooded environment, and most people use the natural contour of the earth to cascade the water down, and let the water flow downhill. We call it continuous flood. They continuously put water on their fields. And we leveled ours flat with a perimeter road. And what that perimeter road lets us do is capture rainfall. So we're actually, pump less water, we're actually able to use less water, we have
24:34 Speaker 05 less runoff, less erosion, less nutrients leaving our field. Nothing leaves our field unless we want it to. So, it happens that economic and environmental sustainability go hand-in-hand, along with social sustainability. As we use less fertilizer, use less water, our yields start going up.
24:56 Manoush Zomorodi? By flattening the rice fields, the Whitakers gave rain and fertilizer more time to soak into the soil. And that road they built around the fields, it collected excess water that they could reuse. So, using less resources was good for the environment and the Whitakers' finances. Jessica Whitaker Allen, Jim's daughter, remembers helping out with those early experiments as a teenager.
25:21 Speaker 00 I guess I was around 16, 17-years-old. And we had a project one year to see and monitor our water use on our farm. And I would actually go monitor and record that data weekly after rain events, just to make sure, you know, we've got this. And that's really when we started tracking this. We saw that our water use was down, and so we really started recording all this stuff by hand in just an Excel spreadsheet. We didn't know what we were doing.
25:49 Manoush Zomorodi? But you knew you were on to something.
25:51 Speaker 00 Yes. So, we started recording everything. Let's add more data points to that. Let's add our fertilizer. Let's add our fuel usage. And so, we didn't know what was important or how it would be important.
26:05 Manoush Zomorodi? That's when Jim and Jessica began to question the other fundamental tenet of growing rice: keeping the fields flooded. They decided to cycle the fields between flooding and letting them go dry. So, okay, that's what's counterintuitive, right? Is because people think that rice needs to be in water all the time.
26:24 Speaker 05 It's gotta be summers all the time, and it doesn't. And they think, if I let it dry up, I'm gonna hurt it some kind of way. So, the varieties we are using are hybrids, and they're very resilient.
26:36 Manoush Zomorodi? So, they can take it when the field gets dried out?
26:39 Speaker 05 They can take it.
26:41 Manoush Zomorodi? Not only did the rice do surprisingly well, this new method had other advantages for the climate because...
26:48 Speaker 05 Soil is full of microbes.
26:50 Manoush Zomorodi? Microbes that multiply if crops are underwater.
26:54 Speaker 05 And what they're doing in the soil on a basic level is they're down there chewing away, eating up the biomass that's left over from the crop before. So, they're digesters. And out of that comes methane.
27:08 Speaker 05 The same way it happens in cattle operations or whatever.
27:13 Manoush Zomorodi? Methane is a notorious greenhouse gas and rice farming accounts for 8 to 11% of global methane emissions.
27:23 Speaker 05 So when we dry the soil, that anaerobic microbial that's living in that soup, that mushy soil, either dies or goes dormant. So we break his life cycle.
27:35 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh.
27:36 Speaker 05 And then it stops him in methane, but it doesn't hurt the rice. It actually helps the rice when you use less water.
27:42 Manoush Zomorodi? That reduces the emissions, the methane, by how much?
27:47 Speaker 05 Well, last year, our documented emission reduction was 79%.
27:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, wow.
27:52 Speaker 05 We say that we're going to reduce it 50% on our package, but our documented last year was 79% reduction.
28:00 Manoush Zomorodi? So you're reducing the emissions, but you're still growing just as much rice?
28:06 Speaker 05 Just as much rice. So Jessica went to college, got a ad business degree, a sustainability minor, went on to get her MBA, emphasis on finance. Now she's back helping me with protocols and data collection. So we established what is called the Smart Rice Protocol, and we have one of the first ever third-party verified sustainable rice packages that hit the market a few months ago, and we're trying to get in retail locations, and I think that's going to be the future.
28:43 Manoush Zomorodi? But it's been tough getting retailers to sell climate-friendly rice. So the Whitakers are now partnering with over 30 other sustainable rice growers to try and create a market for climate-friendly rice. Recently, Jim also started advising an organization that is working to get more farms to invest in agriculture that earns a climate smart certification.
29:06 Speaker 05 Almost like an organic certification. There are only a few in the world that are doing this, so it doesn't mean anything yet. We hope it means a lot in a few years.
29:19 Speaker 00 I mean, take a walk through your supermarket. Everything's greenwash. You can put whatever you want to on a package. And there's no rules, there's no standards. So we're trying to make that standard.
29:32 Manoush Zomorodi? So there is opportunity here.
29:33 Speaker 05 There's opportunity. I'm not doing it for nothing.
29:36 Manoush Zomorodi? Is it going to cost the consumer more?
29:38 Speaker 05 I think it will until we can get to scale. And I think it should cost the consumer a little bit more because they're partnering along this journey to clean up the climate. So we need to expand the price of rice just a little bit. And I'm working with a lot of companies that have that mindset to get more money to the farmer and help them do the stuff we're talking about doing.
30:10 Speaker 06 Our town has 4,000 residents and one stoplight. The nearest airport, Starbucks, shopping mall, Whole Foods is two hours away in any direction. Without places like this and farmers like us, you'd be hungry, naked, and sober.
30:34 Speaker 06 We are going to work with farmers in southeast Arkansas to educate them about the benefits of growing sustainable rice. We're going to work with veterans, immigrants, limited resource, and socially disadvantaged farmers. Farmers that aren't so different from my family just a few generations ago. We will then implement pay-for-practices such as alternate wetting and drying, cover crop, no-till, and low-till. We will then help them learn about and document their greenhouse gas benefits, monitor, measure, report, and verify them.
31:12 Speaker 05 Then market and sell that rice at a premium to help them realize the benefits of producing sustainable rice, the economic advantage. Let me tell you why that's important. There are 400 million acres of rice grown globally. It is the largest emitter of methane gas. It is the largest user of irrigation water. And our methods, if used, can reduce greenhouse gas by 50%, reduce water use by 50%, increase yields to feed a hungry world.
31:46 Manoush Zomorodi? So let's say there's a farmer watching this and thinking like, I don't know much about these practices. Or you meet someone and they're like, how do I even begin to do this? What right now is the way that they learn to put some of these more sustainable practices to work?
32:02 Speaker 05 So you've just got to get plugged in. And sometimes challenge the, this is the way my dad always did it mentality.
32:13 Manoush Zomorodi? What would your dad say to that?
32:16 Speaker 05 My dad wouldn't even recognize the farm today if he was still alive. It's changed that much. I mean, when he retired and when my brother and I went back to the family farm, he could ride around every day and tell us what was wrong with everything and then be happy and go home. But you could tell he was thrilled to have us there. And we immediately did the makeover to his farm. And he's like up in arms, you know, what are y'all doing? You're ruining that field. I don't think it should be done that away.
32:51 Speaker 05 And we just kept going. And in that fall, he said, that's the prettiest rice I've ever seen. So he just, he didn't understand that sometimes you have to, you know, it's going to look uglier before it looks better.
33:11 Manoush Zomorodi? That was rice farmer Jim Whitaker and his daughter Jessica Whitaker Allen. You can see their full talk at ted.com. When we come back, the future of meat. On the show today, the future of food. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
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35:15 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. On the show today, the complicated future of food. So as we've heard, staple crops like rice are big emitters of greenhouse gases. But even more so, meat production. Growing and grazing animals takes a lot of resources. So what if it didn't have to? Yeah, there is so much we could potentially...
35:44 Speaker 06 She unlocked by creating a world where we can farm cells for food.
35:48 Manoush Zomorodi? This is Isha Datar. She first started thinking about this 15 years ago in college.
35:55 Speaker 06 So I started as an undergrad student at the University of Alberta.
35:59 Manoush Zomorodi? Isha was a cell biology major who really cared about the environment, but who also loved to eat meat.
36:08 Speaker 06 Yes, I really got into steak tartare. This is like 2008. I mean, I thought that was a bit precocious for someone in undergrad.
36:18 Manoush Zomorodi? And one day, she saw a poster promoting a meat science class. She signed up.
36:25 Speaker 06 Meat 404, I think it was called.
36:28 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm sorry, I have to ask, what is a meat science class?
36:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, so in this class, we learned all about what meat is, how muscle transforms into meat, the meat industry. And I just remember feeling like, oh, my God, we all have to become vegetarian tomorrow or vegan.
36:45 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
36:46 Speaker 06 And that lasted for a couple of weeks, that idea. And then a few classes later, we were just packing up our bags and our professor just mentions, very casually, he's like, oh, maybe one day we'll grow food from cells.
37:00 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, so you just kind of toss that one out there?
37:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, and I just, that was my real epiphany, which was, oh, my gosh, yes, absolutely, that is going to happen.
37:09 Manoush Zomorodi? That was all Isha needed to hear. She was hooked on the idea of cultivated meat and ended up writing her final paper on exactly how to grow meat from cells in a lab to eat. Because the concept of growing protein cells, it had been around, but applying it to food was pretty new.
37:30 Speaker 06 And so I wrote this paper really pulling from.
37:35 Speaker 06 Medical journals that were looking at, you know, growing skin tissue for burn victims, like growing cell culture, but for medical purposes. And I wrote about the idea of applying that to food.
37:47 Manoush Zomorodi? The paper was published in a peer reviewed journal in 2010, and a lot has happened since. Isha has become a leader in the field of cellular agriculture. She's watched as billions of dollars have poured into cultivated meat startups. Lab grown meat is on the rise. And the science has accelerated. In 2013, a professor unveiled the first lab grown hamburger.
38:11 Manoush Zomorodi? It cost over $300,000 to make. In 2016, there was the first lab grown meatball.
38:18 Speaker 03 This is the first time a meatball has ever been cooked with beef cells.
38:21 Manoush Zomorodi? And then the first cell based rib eye steak, the first lab grown salmon, and the first cultivated chicken nuggets.
38:28 Speaker 06 It tastes like chicken.
38:30 Speaker 03 Because it is chicken.
38:31 Manoush Zomorodi? And in 2021, Isha told an excited TED audience that cultivated meat could be coming to a dinner plate near you.
38:39 Speaker 06 To me, this chicken nuggets, this hamburger, this sausage, all made from cells instead of animals, aren't just fast food products. They're our ticket to a new food system. Here's how it works. Rather than raise a whole chicken with beaks, feathers, sentience, we grow the meat directly from muscle cells. We take a small biopsy from a living animal and then extract the cells of interest. Muscle cells in particular love to attach onto surfaces. It helps them grow and elongate into those long muscle fibers that we're so familiar with. So we might provide a scaffolding material for those cells to adhere onto. And then, of course, we have to feed the cells something. So we put them in a liquid medium
39:23 Speaker 06 that provides all the nutrients that these cells need to grow and divide. Lastly, the cells on the scaffold in the medium all grow within a bioreactor, which is kind of like a large stainless steel tank, looks a lot like brewing equipment, and can be just as big as well. And the bioreactor really just provides that constant, stable environment that those cells need to flourish in. And after those cells get a chance to mature into muscle fibers, we might harvest the cells and the tissues, and then turn them into a nugget. Now, this wouldn't just be better for chickens and cows and pigs and the people who have to farm them and slaughter them. This could be better for the whole world. I mean, if this all works, it's our once in a lifetime opportunity to get a second
40:08 Speaker 06 chance at agriculture, to do things better and to learn from our mistakes.
40:14 Manoush Zomorodi? At this point, some of you might be wondering, when can I buy this meat? Well, it might be a while, because in the last few years, cultivated meat has gotten a reality check. Startups have come and gone. The FDA and USDA gave their approval in 2023, but several states have banned it, bans that were upheld in court. And in the rest of the country, you won't find cultivated meat in grocery stores either. You'll have to go to Singapore. In 2024, it became the first country to sell cultivated chicken. But those products still mostly contain plant-based fillers, which is why they're affordable. Isha's learning that lab-grown animal products have a long road ahead.
41:00 Speaker 06 So around the world, there are a lot of companies that are doing little tastings here and there of their cultivated meat product. The product on the market in Singapore is made of 3% cells, 97% plant stuff. And that's actually exciting. Like, that's actually a really great step forward. It just feels like disappointment because it's been pitted against this expectation that was set way too high. And that expectation is cool as a future-forward, like, holy grail expectation of where we could be one day. But that's also the hardest thing you could possibly do.
41:40 Manoush Zomorodi? And is that because it's so hard to actually cultivate animal protein? Like, what's the big challenge here?
41:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, it is incredibly hard to cultivate animal protein into these kind of 3D cuts, like a chicken breast or a steak. In 2017, I was able to taste a steak chip, like, very thin, crispy. The reason why it was a chip is because cells grow really well in two dimensions, like, in these very thin layers. Getting them to grow in three dimensions... Is a lot harder.
42:13 Manoush Zomorodi? There was a point where just even getting the opportunity to take a taste of this was nearly impossible. And if you did get a taste, that bite morsel would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?
42:25 Speaker 06 It's still, it's pretty much is still the same.
42:27 Manoush Zomorodi? Huh. So I was at a TED event recently where I had a lettuce wrap with cultivated chicken in it. It was definitely not 100% because I think that would have been too expensive.
42:39 Speaker 06 So there's some skepticism there as well as like, is this product actually going to be viable in the market in the long term? You know, it's a big question.
42:48 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah. I mean, no offense, Aisha, but like, that is far less sexier than
42:54 Speaker 06 Oh, my gosh, no.
42:55 Manoush Zomorodi? The simple headline, lab meat is going to save us from climate change. Here's a big juicy hamburger.
43:01 Speaker 06 I know. If you have ideas for what our like, should be, let me know.
43:07 Speaker 06 But this is the invisible work that really moves biotech along. It's, it's not going to be one company that brings it to market in a way that changes the world. It's not going to be 10 companies. It's not going to be one university. It's going to be an entire new scientific discipline because there's a long technical path ahead of us.
43:27 Manoush Zomorodi? I guess I'm surprised because like, when you gave your TED Talk in 2021, you seemed super optimistic, excited, really talking about the potential behind cultivated meat.
43:39 Speaker 06 Yes. I actually, I am still, I am optimistic about it. I think it's an incredibly exciting idea. I don't necessarily know if meat is the thing that's going to change the world. I'm very fixated on this idea of growing food from cells more broadly. Meat is one such kind of product, but it's, it's this, again, this kind of holy grail product. There's a lot of interesting things that we might discover in Farming cells for food that aren't meat, but make a huge difference in the near term.
44:15 Speaker 06 By farming cells, we could actually proactively envision agriculture for a climate changed world. We could theoretically grow anything that might come from plants or animals from cells instead. Vanilla doesn't have to be rainforest farmed. Egg whites don't have to come with a yolk. Foie gras can be completely cruelty free. And leather and silk don't have to come off the back of an animal or the home of a silkworm. In fact, we already consume cellular agriculture products in our everyday lives just in super small quantities. Several vitamins, flavors, and enzymes are already made in cell cultures. In fact, rennet, which is the set of enzymes used to turn milk into curds and whey for cheesemaking,
45:01 Speaker 06 used to come from the stomach lining of the fourth stomach of calves, baby cows. And in 1990, a cell cultured version hit the market, a version of the key enzyme, chymosin. And today, only 30-ish years later, 90% of rennet used for cheesemaking came from a bioreactor instead of a calf.
45:24 Speaker 06 We're used to transforming food with biotechnology. It's arguably like the oldest technology we have is when we started fermenting foods. And we started making beer and kimchi and pickles and yogurts and cheeses and all that kind of stuff. Like, that was us transforming foods with cell cultures. We could have never looked at a glass of milk and said we wanted it to be stinky with like veins of mold going through it and hard and it melts.
45:55 Manoush Zomorodi? You mean like cheese is basically what you just described in the most disgusting way possible?
45:59 Speaker 06 Yeah. Would someone have envisioned cheese from scratch? Had they never had cheese before? And so similarly, if we looked at milk and couldn't have envisioned cheese, today we're looking at meat and we're just trying to make meat again. But maybe we can make the cheese of meat.
46:20 Speaker 06 That is such an exciting vision for me. Is unlocking the power of cell culture to just increase food culture instead of replicating a culture we already have.
46:32 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay, last question. Do you still love steak tartare?
46:35 Speaker 06 I do still love steak tartare.
46:39 Speaker 06 I've gone through long bouts of not eating meat, vegan, vegetarian, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, no, I'm still that conscious and conflicted carnivore that I was when I got into this.
46:54 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Isha Datar, Executive Director of the nonprofit New Harvest. You can see her full talk at ted.com.
47:07 Manoush Zomorodi? We started today's show by talking about how we can preserve many of the foods we love, from crab cakes to the Georgia peach. We want to end the show with an artistic twist on the future of agriculture, specifically stone fruit. Artist Sam Van Aken works at the intersection of botany, conservation, and creative expression. Here he is on the TED stage in 2019, talking about his project, The Tree of Forty Fruit.
47:37 Speaker 03 100 years ago, there were 2,000 varieties of peaches, nearly 2,000 different varieties of plums, and almost 800 named varieties of apples growing in the United States. Today, only a fraction of those remain, and what is left is threatened by industrialization of agriculture, disease, and climate change. The Tree of Forty Fruit is a single tree that grows 40 different varieties of stone fruit. So that's peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, and cherries, all growing on one tree. It's designed to be a normal-looking tree throughout the majority of the year, until spring, when it blossoms in pink and white,
48:19 Speaker 03 and then in summer bears a multitude of different fruit. I began the project for purely artistic reasons. I wanted to change the reality of the everyday, and to be honest, create this startling moment when people would see this tree. Blossom in all of these different colors and bear all of these different fruit. I create the Tree of Forty Fruit through the process of grafting. I'll collect cuttings in winter, store them, and then graft them on to the ends of branches in spring. In fact, almost all fruit trees are grafted because the seed of a fruit tree is a genetic variant of the parent. So that when we find a variety that we really like, the way that we propagate it is by taking a cutting off of one tree and putting it on to another.
49:02 Speaker 03 This is definitely not a sport of immediate gratification. It takes a year to know if a graft has succeeded. It takes two to three years to know if it produces fruit, and it takes up to eight years to create just one of the trees. Each of the varieties grafted to the Tree of Forty Fruit has a slightly different form and a slightly different color. As the project continues, it's been conservation by way of the art world. As I've been asked to create these in different locations, what I'll do is I'll research varieties that originated or were historically grown in that area. I'll source them locally and graft them to the tree so that it becomes an agricultural history of the area where they're located.
49:46 Speaker 03 These are plums from just one Tree of Forty Fruit in one week in August. Several years into the project, I was told that I had one of the largest collection of these fruit in the eastern United States, which, as an artist, is absolutely terrifying. But in many ways, I didn't know what I had. I discovered that the majority of the varieties I had were heirloom varieties. Several of the varieties dated back thousands and thousands of years. And finding out how rare they were, I became obsessed with trying to preserve them. So I set out to create an orchard to make these fruit available to the public. So Governor's Island is a former naval base that was given to the city of New York
50:29 Speaker 03 in 2000, and it opened up all of this land just a five-minute ferry ride from New York. And they invited me to create a project that we're calling The Open Orchard, that'll bring back fruit varieties that haven't been grown in New York for over a century. Currently in progress, The Open Orchard will be 50 multi-grafted trees that possess 200 heirloom and antique fruit varieties. So these are varieties that originated or were historically grown in the region. Varieties like the early strawberry apple, which originated on 13th Street and 3rd Avenue. Since a fruit tree can't be preserved by seed, The Open Orchard will act like a living gene bank or an archive of these fruit. Like the Tree
51:13 Speaker 03 of Forty Fruit, it'll be experiential. It'll also be symbolic. Most importantly, it's going to invite people to participate in conservation and to learn more about their food. Growing up on a farm, I thought I understood agriculture, and I didn't want anything to do with it. So I became an artist. But I have to admit that it's something within my own DNA. And I don't think that I'm the only one. 100 years ago, we were all much more closely tied to the culture, the cultivation, and the story of our food, and we've been separated from that. The Open Orchard creates the opportunity not just to reconnect to
51:56 Speaker 03 this unknown past, but a way for us to consider what the future of our food could be. Thank you.
52:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Sam Van Aken is an artist and an associate professor at the School of Art at Syracuse University. And you can still visit The Open Orchard project on Governor's Island in New York. Thank you so much for listening to our show about the future of food. This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, Hersha Nahada, and Chloe Weiner. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Giran and Katie Monteleone. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Neil Teavault, Robert Rodriguez, Gilli Moon, and David Greenberg. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei.
52:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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