Future of Food - Let's Eat Better for Ourselves and the Planet

While Kimbal Musk’s brother Elon is tunneling under LA to reinvent high-speed transportation, sending rockets into orbit to reboot commercial space travel for our time, and mass-marketing electric cars, Kimbal Musk is working with food. Over the last six years he’s started restaurants, designed vertical gardens, and developed an ambitious plan to put a thousand gardens into schools so that kids can discover their connection to food by growing it themselves. The idea is simple: A pre-fab, modular raised-bed garden that goes in a schoolyard, with seating for thirty students who attend outdoor classes about gardening, science, nutrition, and cooking. The white polyethylene garden structure is designed to last longer than the schoolyard it occupies. The project is called Big Green, and it includes the garden itself plus a fifteen-part lesson plan for teachers. There are learning gardens in Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, and Pittsburgh, with plans for more. “When we enter a city, we enter not to built one garden, but to build a hundred gardens at a time,” Tighe Hutchins, the program director of Big Green, said on the podcast. She works closely with school administrations and communities to make the gardens part of student life Kyle Kuusisto, a teacher at a Memphis school, tells us what it’s like to teach physical education classes, and then transition to gardening, science, yoga and food prep classes.

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As an instructor in sustainable food and agricultural systems at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Valerie Dantoin is helping create career paths for students who want to become farmers, or become closer to the land.

If you close your eyes and you just imagine what you would think of as an organic farm, you probably get this image of a nice cow out on green grass. That happens on our farm. It doesn’t always happen on every organic farm and it certainly doesn’t happen anymore on farms that we call conventional farms.

-- Valerie Dantoin

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What is going on? Why all  that wasted food? One in six people in Los Angeles copes with food insecurity, the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. Why is the food they need tossed away?

There are a lot of reasons. In this podcast episode, you'll meet two people are working on solutions.

Luis Yepiz is the wholesale food recovery manager for an organization called Food Forward. Food Forward started by collecting unharvested fruit from backyard orchards and distributing it to community centers. The organization has since expanded to large-scale programs to recover food at farmers markets and wholesale markets. This is food that might be blemished or hard to sell and that might be thrown away. That’s where Luis steps in. Each year, the program he runs at the Los Angeles Wholesale Market collects food valued at $13 - 15 million and distributes the produce to neighborhood residents who don’t have ready access to fresh food.

At the time of our interivew, Eva Goulbourne was the director of business and multi-stakeholder programs for ReFED, a nonprofit committed to reducing U.S. food waste. She was working on a roadmap toward behavior change — change needed from you and me, from restaurants, and food distributors.

A large social engineering project is needed, a way to convince us to buy food more responsibly, use the food we have and don't throw away food that is perfectly good. Restaurants and distributors need a similar reframing of their supply chain.

Eva comes at this problem from the policy side, Luis from the activist side. They tell their stories in the podcast, and you'll find out what simple things you can do every day to save food.

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Vertical Harvest is a farm that has transformed the growing season in Jackson – which is usually just four months long. They took a plot of land downtown — and went vertical. The site is only a tenth of an acre, but the goals are large. It has become a model project others seek to emulate, not only because it supplies food year-round, but also because it is employing people with special abilities.

I believe that architects have the power to shape communities. Architecture can be more than just a box, or more than just four walls. We can ask, “What do we want it to do? What do we want this building to achieve?”

--  Nona Yehia

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What does a food activist do? To answer the question, you need to look no further than Anna Lappé. She is the founder and director of Real Food Media, a collaborative initiative that catalyzes creative storytelling and media about food, farming, and sustainability. “We work with partners across the country to really elevate the solutions that we find out there that are really transforming the food system toward greater sustainability and equity, and then we help people understand what are the real impacts that we have to worry about it, about our current foods just don't why we need such transformation” she says.

In this episode, she discusses why the food choices that are good for your body are also good for the planet, why consumer demand for meat is constructed, and why cooking a good meal at home is a good idea.

I’m not so sure that food activism in the digital age is that much different than food activism at any other time. You know, I think we know how to make transformative change. And one of the best ways to do that is through organizing and through working in one’s own community and scaling that up. So that doesn’t really change that much in the digital age. I would say one of the ways in which activism is influenced by the digital age is unfortunately how this new era has really unleashed a phenomenon of evermore fake news of the proliferation of misinformation, and of the challenges of getting our story out. -- Anna Lappe´

Some of the food activists we are interviewing on this podcast are looking to tech and apps for solutions to hunger and food insecurity. Anna is looking to education and policy changes - but in ways that may surprise you. Extended show notes at http://futurefood.fm. Follow our journey on Instagram.

Planting heirloom seeds — the kind of seeds you order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds  —  seems like a quaint pastime. You picture baby food jars lined on a sunny kitchen windowsill, each one filled with a different kind of seed, or neighbors trading seeds over the backyard fence.  The world of heirloom seeds is all that, and a lot more.  Seeds carry culture and history. Civilizations live or starve depending on whether they have access to seeds. If the world were to end, rebooting it would begin with planting seeds.

Heirloom seeds do something really weird.  Plant them and they grow. Harvest the seeds and plant them again. They grow all over again.  If you are an urbanist who gets most of their food out of plastic packages, the idea of self-replicating food is something out of science fiction.

Here’s something else out of science fiction. Just before the year 2000, there was something called the Y2K Scare. People believed that their personal computers would freeze up and go black.  The banking system would collapse as well as the power grid. Planes would crash. Balanced unsteadily upon a binary code of ones and zeroes, the world would stop when all the computers failed. It looked like the end for people, so people started saving seeds in case they needed to grow their own food.

Y2K didn’t happen. But the seed habit caught on for some. A new generation of backyard gardeners realized that growing your own food was good. Y2K was when Jere Gette’s business really took off.  You can get to know his business from the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Catalogue.  The same one that I ordered my seeds from to plant in my tiny garden. He printed his first catalog when he was seventeen. When I discovered the catalog in LA he had already been at it a while. Now, more than two decades later, he offers about 2000 varieties of vegetables and herbs, the largest selection in the U.S.

Jere joins the podcast to tell us why seeds matter, why GMO seeds are damaging  the integrity of our food supply, and why beet seeds are his favorite. 

The problem is as we lose more and more of these traditional varieties, it reduces the gene pool for breeders to work with. And that's why it's so important for home gardeners and farmers, everybody, to conserve these old varieties because even if you're developing modern hybrids, you still have to start with some base stock. You still have to have the genes of these old insect-resistant varieties or these old heat-tolerant varieties to develop the modern varieties.  - Jere Gettle

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Krystine McInnes was a developer passionate about sustainable building methods. She liked the idea of edible landscaping. She started to think about the best delivery systems for these ideas. An urban farm started looking like a good way to combine them in a package that had a low energy impact and which benefited the world.

What if starting a micro-farm in an urban location were easier?  A lot easier? 

One day while thinking about this, Krystine went by a farm that was for sale just to have a look around. She instantly realized that it was the right place to be. She has pointed her future at farming.

The journey has been incredibly hard. She discovered that there was no “farmer instruction manual.” Knowledge was passed down from generation to generation, and since she does not come from a farming family, she had to hunt for information on her own. Resources and data were hard to discover. Most small organic farmers, she learned, lost money in the first year. If they survived into their second year, it was because they had navigated a learning curve steep as a hockey stick.

With Grown Here Farms she has resolved to create a business model and an example for other micro-farms. She is building a digital dashboard for farmers to track prices, reporting, and worker wages. She has a vision for a replicable business model that can lead to the success of the small farmer.

In our conversation, we get into how a successful organic farm must turn away from being a mere commodity and toward a beloved brand. We discuss Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and what it means for the small farmer and you.

Key Takeaways

• The number of small farms is shrinking while the farmer population is aging. Who will grow our food?
• We know amazingly little about the farm-to-table supply chain, and large food producers and distributors would like to keep us in the dark.
• Your fresh fruit and vegetables travel an average of 1500 miles to get to you.

Tinia Pina, the Founder and CEO of Re-Nuble, talks with us about how to all that waste in a way that won't kill the planet. How much waste are we talking about? 12,000 tons of food waste is produced annually in New York City. That much food waste would take 800 fully loaded garbage trucks to remove. And the city of New York is spending $180 million a year to get rid of it.

The numbers sound crazy when you first hear them.  New York City is spending $180 million annually to deal with food waste.  For a while, it was being loaded on barges and shipped off to China. Today, capacity is still an issue as NYC food waste is shipped off to neighboring states. There are commercial storage facilities to help out, but there's still a lot of food waste with nowhere to go. Tinia Pina thought there had to be a better way. Her startup Renuble has joined the list of innovators who are recycling food waste into organic compost, as a soil amendment.

When you think of food waste, you might think of the scraps you scrape from your plate or the food that restaurants throw away but there is also food waste created when food is processed, even before it makes it onto your plate. Wholesale food distributors buy directly from farms and re-package food to sell to schools or restaurants, they often throw out the stuff that's less than perfect. Food waste is 75% liquid. A company called Industrial Organic can go to your processing facility, draw out the liquid, digest and sterilize the food waste, leaving you with organic fertilizer. In another approach, Misfit Juicery, based in DC, is sourcing food waste all the way from New York City and turning it into a cold pressed drink. In LA, Pulp Pantry is using the post-juice pulp from your favorite juice bar and turning it into fiber-rich granola.

Soil is lost at a rate of 10 to 40 times as fast as it can replenish itself. Conventional farming is stripping soil of carbon and nutrients and 70% of the earth's topsoil is vanishing, because of erosion. To feed the world that soil has to be replaced, that's where fertilizer comes in. Jonathan Bloom wrote in American Wasteland that about 40% of the food we produce ends up being thrown away. The annual cost of that, he says, is $100 billion.

Key Takeaways

• Buy groceries according to your needs. Supermarkets buy produce based on projections. If you find that you're buying more than what you actually need and wasting about 20% of it, then that waste also is translated upstream to the supermarkets.
• Plants like good dirt.  Crops need organic fertilizer to thrive, instead of the chemical "junk food" they often receive with industrial farming. Turning food waste into nutrient-rich organic fertilizer helps solve the waste problem and also helps the plants that feed us.

Listen to my conversation with Tinia Pina about how she is changing what happens to food waste and building a better story for food and the supply chain that feeds us all.

Click the podcast player in the header to hear the whole episode, or in the interactive transcript below, click on any play button to hear that part of the conversation.

Jonathan Bloom wrote in American Wasteland that about 40% of the food we produce ends up being thrown away. The annual cost of that, he says, is $100 billion.

What can you do about it? Tinia has some suggestions for you in the podcast.

I feel like this is my purpose and in addition to the experiences that I've had, it has supported my dedication to it. So I'm a huge environmentalist and just, kind of, as hard as agriculture can be, I really feel like this has kind of been just something that I'm here for and that's why I kind of remain dedicated to it. - Tinia Pina