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Truth: Food is awesome.

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We all love to eat.

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It's one of the best things 
we do every single day.

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Food actually can be the solution
to so many problems,

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from my own personal mood
to geopolitical strife.

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But the reality is — food can also
be the cause of a lot of problems,

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and as an entrepreneur,
I love to solve problems.

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The first one I went out 
to tackle was hunger,

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because it's a pretty 
intractable problem.

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A billion people hungry in a world
where we actually have enough food

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to feed everyone more than
a 2,000 calories a day that they need,

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today on the planet.

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The problem is obviously that

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food is not necessarily getting
to the people where they are.

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Even in America, there are 
49 million hungry people.

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One thing I found ironic when travelling
to the world's hungry regions,

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is that even in the most 
desperate desolate places

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where hunger is ravaging populations,

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you can generally find soda,

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and you can generally find
packaged processed foods,

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and sometimes even French fries,

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which has led to another intractable 
problem in our food system,

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which is a massive 
global obesity epidemic.

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Now, there are places in the world

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where people are transitioning
from hunger to obesity

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in just one generation,

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and having all of the health problems

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that we in our own 
Western diet countries have.

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Things like, diabetes, 
and heart disease, and cancer,

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at the same rates that we do,
in just one generation

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after being hungry for years.

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And it looks like this problem
is going to balloon

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to about 2 billion people,
even in just 2015.

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So we have on our planet,
just caused by food

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two major malnutrition crisis,

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and I argue that they're 
essentially the same problem.

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In both hunger and obesity,

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it's very difficult to access
nutritious foods,

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no matter where you are.

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And they're killing us.

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These two problems alone
are responsible

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for millions and millions 
of deaths every year.

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And they're totally preventable, right?

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Because it's all because of food.

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So, I'm trying to understand

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why food can be the cause 
of so much death and destruction.

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Or, where does food come from?

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It comes from agriculture.

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And we've been made to believe

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that there's essentially
two forms of agriculture.

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One, which we mostly get 
in the United States,

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represented by me on a gray bin,

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where there's massive highly
consolidated farms.

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And another, which you can see it
represented by these women,

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which is mostly women farmers on 
very under-financed plots of land

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that they don't necessarily own.

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80% of the farmers in Africa are women,

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most of them have 
no rights to their lands,

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and have no resources.

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So, we now see that maybe 
hunger and obesity,

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both connected to farms,

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could be connected to this fact

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that there's a bifurcated agricultural 
system around the planet.

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Where did this come from?

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It actually came around the same time
I came onto the planet, 1980.

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And, something kind of weird 
happened in 1980

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that led to that graph of obesity
that we all see today.

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It pretty much starts with 1980.

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Well, what changed?

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Something changed that 
fundamentally shifted dinner.

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I argue that in the 70's oil crisis,

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making oil and all the inputs
to agriculture wildly more expensive,

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a lot of changes came out of that.

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One of the biggest changes
was a massive loss

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of small and medium size 
farmers in America.

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We lost a million farmers
right around 1980.

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But other interesting things
happened in 1980.

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Genetically modified crops 
became patentable

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according to a Supreme Court 
decision in 1980.

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High fructose corn syrup first came
onto the market in a big way in 1980.

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We started to divest 
in agriculture internationally.

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So since 1980, we've shifted away
from agricultural development

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and towards food aid 
by measure of about 75 percent.

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And we also stopped investing in 
agricultural systems in our own country,

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like, publicly financed 
research for seeds.

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Today, most of that 
is done by corporations,

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and you can obviously tell what kind 
of results they're gonna get.

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Also since 1980, the data is very clear,

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both hunger and obesity are up.

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Hunger has increased by 80 million people.

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This is in a time when we know 
exactly how to grow food,

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and how to certainly feed the planet.

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And this other problem 
has obviously appeared.

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Well, what we grow 
is clearly part of the problem.

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Corn is in everything.

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From our soda to our beef,
to our cars, and to our food aid.

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And what we eat is an absolute 
outcome of what we grow.

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Because we have such preponderance

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of corn, soy and wheat
in our agricultural system.

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And we subsidize it.

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Fruits and vegetables have become 
much more expensive relatively.

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Also, we're growing these inputs
that go directly into fast food.

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And, if we can see that data alone,

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you can tell obviously 
that our global food system

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has changed quite dramatically.

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The other weird part of the food system
that no one likes to talk about

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is that both hunger and obesity 
are connected to some strange middle man.

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We solve hunger by canned food drives,

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and that same canned food 
is what has caused

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a lot of our health and obesity 
problems around the world.

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We all know that the solution to both

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is fresh fruits and vegetables,

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healthy food, and easy access 
to them by everyone.

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I argue that in the next 30 years

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we can actually erase all those 
bad problems with the food system

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and change the food system for the better.

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We have a 30-year-call-to-action 
to reverse problems that started in 1980,

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and recreate a better food system
of the future.

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I think it's time to change dinner.

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And my argument is not 
just that these problems

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are intractable, and big, and global.

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It's that there are things
that we can do something about

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right at our own dinner table.

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If we change dinner, we can change health.

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187 billion dollars is our 
per year investment

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in just obesity related diseases
in our health system.

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We can change the environment.

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We've seen that our food system,
our soil can be a carbon eater,

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instead of a carbon output.

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We see that our water has been 
degraded by our agricultural system.

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All things that can be changed
right from our dinner table

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if we choose better,
more agro-ecological farming.

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We can change farms.
That whole middle section between

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the really small farmer who is under-funded,
and the really big farmer

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that is a corporate conglomerate.

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That whole section is waiting for change.

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Here in San Diego,
you have living in a county

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with the most farms
of any county in America.

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That's something you can do to change 
dinner right in your own home.

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We can change trade
by buying fair trade products.

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We have huge opportunity to affect 
change around the world

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and make sure people are paid well
enough to feed their kids.

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We can change meat. We're not supposed 
to be eating corn-fed meat.

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it's worst for the environment,
it's worst for our health.

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If we buy better quality meat, we're helping
to change the food system for the better.

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We can change local economies
and forget about other investment plans

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that are brought by Washington
or Sacramento.

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We can change local economies right here,

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by keeping our money in our 
food system right at home.

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We can change family health:
like we've seen in some of those videos,

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eating together not only brings
home the family story,

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but it actually makes kids have 
better grades, do better in school,

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do fewer drugs later in life,
it's a huge social impact.

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We can change security.

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"A hungry man is an angry man,"
says an old African proverb,

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and if we make sure that we're investing
in agricultural aid around the world,

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we're helping to improve hunger.

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We can change innovation.

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There are systems,
like those farms in a box,

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that we can actually improve upon
local regional agricultural systems

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right in our own backyard.

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And we can change value.
What's the new value meal?

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Is it something that we make at home,

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or is it something 
that we go out and buy?

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My call to action is change dinner 
and change the world.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)