WEBVTT

00:00:19.664 --> 00:00:22.243
Truth: Food is awesome.

00:00:22.243 --> 00:00:23.850
We all love to eat.

00:00:23.850 --> 00:00:26.355
It's one of the best things 
we do every single day.

00:00:26.355 --> 00:00:28.978
Food actually can be the solution
to so many problems,

00:00:28.978 --> 00:00:33.255
from my own personal mood
to geopolitical strife.

00:00:33.255 --> 00:00:38.020
But the reality is — food can also
be the cause of a lot of problems,

00:00:38.020 --> 00:00:40.852
and as an entrepreneur,
I love to solve problems.

00:00:40.852 --> 00:00:43.463
The first one I went out 
to tackle was hunger,

00:00:43.463 --> 00:00:45.633
because it's a pretty 
intractable problem.

00:00:45.633 --> 00:00:49.352
A billion people hungry in a world
where we actually have enough food

00:00:49.352 --> 00:00:52.930
to feed everyone more than
a 2,000 calories a day that they need,

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:52.930 --> 00:00:54.695
today on the planet.

00:00:54.695 --> 00:00:56.204
The problem is obviously that

00:00:56.204 --> 00:00:59.558
food is not necessarily getting
to the people where they are.

00:00:59.558 --> 00:01:03.150
Even in America, there are 
49 million hungry people.

00:01:03.150 --> 00:01:06.542
One thing I found ironic when travelling
to the world's hungry regions,

00:01:06.542 --> 00:01:08.993
is that even in the most 
desperate desolate places

00:01:08.993 --> 00:01:11.004
where hunger is ravaging populations,

00:01:11.004 --> 00:01:12.963
you can generally find soda,

00:01:12.963 --> 00:01:16.180
and you can generally find
packaged processed foods,

00:01:16.180 --> 00:01:17.665
and sometimes even French fries,

00:01:17.665 --> 00:01:20.751
which has led to another intractable 
problem in our food system,

00:01:20.751 --> 00:01:23.278
which is a massive 
global obesity epidemic.

00:01:23.278 --> 00:01:24.884
Now, there are places in the world

00:01:24.884 --> 00:01:27.423
where people are transitioning
from hunger to obesity

00:01:27.423 --> 00:01:29.110
in just one generation,

00:01:29.110 --> 00:01:30.819
and having all of the health problems

00:01:30.819 --> 00:01:33.364
that we in our own 
Western diet countries have.

00:01:33.364 --> 00:01:36.255
Things like, diabetes, 
and heart disease, and cancer,

00:01:36.265 --> 00:01:38.819
at the same rates that we do,
in just one generation

00:01:38.819 --> 00:01:40.813
after being hungry for years.

00:01:40.813 --> 00:01:43.322
And it looks like this problem
is going to balloon

00:01:43.322 --> 00:01:46.803
to about 2 billion people,
even in just 2015.

00:01:46.803 --> 00:01:50.235
So we have on our planet,
just caused by food

00:01:50.235 --> 00:01:51.948
two major malnutrition crisis,

00:01:51.948 --> 00:01:54.531
and I argue that they're 
essentially the same problem.

00:01:54.531 --> 00:01:56.043
In both hunger and obesity,

00:01:56.043 --> 00:01:58.333
it's very difficult to access
nutritious foods,

00:01:58.333 --> 00:02:00.236
no matter where you are.

00:02:00.236 --> 00:02:01.857
And they're killing us.

00:02:01.857 --> 00:02:04.649
These two problems alone
are responsible

00:02:04.649 --> 00:02:07.581
for millions and millions 
of deaths every year.

00:02:07.581 --> 00:02:09.446
And they're totally preventable, right?

00:02:09.446 --> 00:02:11.421
Because it's all because of food.

00:02:11.421 --> 00:02:12.750
So, I'm trying to understand

00:02:12.750 --> 00:02:15.513
why food can be the cause 
of so much death and destruction.

00:02:15.513 --> 00:02:17.026
Or, where does food come from?

00:02:17.026 --> 00:02:18.565
It comes from agriculture.

00:02:18.565 --> 00:02:19.929
And we've been made to believe

00:02:19.929 --> 00:02:22.248
that there's essentially
two forms of agriculture.

00:02:22.248 --> 00:02:24.440
One, which we mostly get 
in the United States,

00:02:24.440 --> 00:02:26.293
represented by me on a gray bin,

00:02:26.293 --> 00:02:29.299
where there's massive highly
consolidated farms.

00:02:29.299 --> 00:02:32.709
And another, which you can see it
represented by these women,

00:02:32.709 --> 00:02:36.748
which is mostly women farmers on 
very under-financed plots of land

00:02:36.748 --> 00:02:39.157
that they don't necessarily own.

00:02:39.157 --> 00:02:41.162
80% of the farmers in Africa are women,

00:02:41.162 --> 00:02:43.246
most of them have 
no rights to their lands,

00:02:43.246 --> 00:02:45.330
and have no resources.

00:02:45.330 --> 00:02:48.424
So, we now see that maybe 
hunger and obesity,

00:02:48.424 --> 00:02:50.120
both connected to farms,

00:02:50.120 --> 00:02:51.584
could be connected to this fact

00:02:51.584 --> 00:02:54.722
that there's a bifurcated agricultural 
system around the planet.

00:02:54.722 --> 00:02:56.623
Where did this come from?

00:02:56.623 --> 00:03:00.338
It actually came around the same time
I came onto the planet, 1980.

00:03:00.338 --> 00:03:02.757
And, something kind of weird 
happened in 1980

00:03:02.757 --> 00:03:06.259
that led to that graph of obesity
that we all see today.

00:03:06.259 --> 00:03:08.870
It pretty much starts with 1980.

00:03:08.870 --> 00:03:11.250
Well, what changed?

00:03:11.250 --> 00:03:14.212
Something changed that 
fundamentally shifted dinner.

00:03:14.212 --> 00:03:16.882
I argue that in the 70's oil crisis,

00:03:16.882 --> 00:03:21.121
making oil and all the inputs
to agriculture wildly more expensive,

00:03:21.121 --> 00:03:23.275
a lot of changes came out of that.

00:03:23.275 --> 00:03:25.455
One of the biggest changes
was a massive loss

00:03:25.455 --> 00:03:27.633
of small and medium size 
farmers in America.

00:03:27.633 --> 00:03:30.713
We lost a million farmers
right around 1980.

00:03:30.713 --> 00:03:33.007
But other interesting things
happened in 1980.

00:03:33.007 --> 00:03:35.243
Genetically modified crops 
became patentable

00:03:35.243 --> 00:03:38.514
according to a Supreme Court 
decision in 1980.

00:03:38.514 --> 00:03:42.716
High fructose corn syrup first came
onto the market in a big way in 1980.

00:03:42.716 --> 00:03:45.629
We started to divest 
in agriculture internationally.

00:03:45.629 --> 00:03:49.992
So since 1980, we've shifted away
from agricultural development

00:03:49.992 --> 00:03:53.403
and towards food aid 
by measure of about 75 percent.

00:03:53.403 --> 00:03:57.173
And we also stopped investing in 
agricultural systems in our own country,

00:03:57.173 --> 00:03:59.314
like, publicly financed 
research for seeds.

00:03:59.314 --> 00:04:01.432
Today, most of that 
is done by corporations,

00:04:01.432 --> 00:04:04.743
and you can obviously tell what kind 
of results they're gonna get.

00:04:04.743 --> 00:04:07.748
Also since 1980, the data is very clear,

00:04:07.748 --> 00:04:09.508
both hunger and obesity are up.

00:04:09.518 --> 00:04:11.819
Hunger has increased by 80 million people.

00:04:11.819 --> 00:04:14.553
This is in a time when we know 
exactly how to grow food,

00:04:14.553 --> 00:04:16.741
and how to certainly feed the planet.

00:04:16.741 --> 00:04:20.665
And this other problem 
has obviously appeared.

00:04:21.340 --> 00:04:24.756
Well, what we grow 
is clearly part of the problem.

00:04:24.756 --> 00:04:26.251
Corn is in everything.

00:04:26.251 --> 00:04:30.261
From our soda to our beef,
to our cars, and to our food aid.

00:04:30.261 --> 00:04:34.135
And what we eat is an absolute 
outcome of what we grow.

00:04:34.135 --> 00:04:35.698
Because we have such preponderance

00:04:35.698 --> 00:04:38.547
of corn, soy and wheat
in our agricultural system.

00:04:38.547 --> 00:04:39.975
And we subsidize it.

00:04:39.975 --> 00:04:44.175
Fruits and vegetables have become 
much more expensive relatively.

00:04:44.175 --> 00:04:48.470
Also, we're growing these inputs
that go directly into fast food.

00:04:48.470 --> 00:04:50.279
And, if we can see that data alone,

00:04:50.279 --> 00:04:52.798
you can tell obviously 
that our global food system

00:04:52.798 --> 00:04:54.859
has changed quite dramatically.

00:04:54.859 --> 00:04:58.285
The other weird part of the food system
that no one likes to talk about

00:04:58.285 --> 00:05:03.909
is that both hunger and obesity 
are connected to some strange middle man.

00:05:03.909 --> 00:05:05.665
We solve hunger by canned food drives,

00:05:05.665 --> 00:05:07.666
and that same canned food 
is what has caused

00:05:07.666 --> 00:05:10.414
a lot of our health and obesity 
problems around the world.

00:05:10.414 --> 00:05:12.263
We all know that the solution to both

00:05:12.263 --> 00:05:14.080
is fresh fruits and vegetables,

00:05:14.080 --> 00:05:17.655
healthy food, and easy access 
to them by everyone.

00:05:17.655 --> 00:05:19.481
I argue that in the next 30 years

00:05:19.481 --> 00:05:23.375
we can actually erase all those 
bad problems with the food system

00:05:23.375 --> 00:05:25.674
and change the food system for the better.

00:05:25.674 --> 00:05:29.823
We have a 30-year-call-to-action 
to reverse problems that started in 1980,

00:05:29.823 --> 00:05:33.316
and recreate a better food system
of the future.

00:05:33.316 --> 00:05:35.792
I think it's time to change dinner.

00:05:35.792 --> 00:05:37.989
And my argument is not 
just that these problems

00:05:37.989 --> 00:05:39.970
are intractable, and big, and global.

00:05:39.970 --> 00:05:42.626
It's that there are things
that we can do something about

00:05:42.626 --> 00:05:44.434
right at our own dinner table.

00:05:44.434 --> 00:05:47.220
If we change dinner, we can change health.

00:05:47.220 --> 00:05:53.230
187 billion dollars is our 
per year investment

00:05:53.230 --> 00:05:56.025
in just obesity related diseases
in our health system.

00:05:56.025 --> 00:05:57.648
We can change the environment.

00:05:57.648 --> 00:06:02.688
We've seen that our food system,
our soil can be a carbon eater,

00:06:02.688 --> 00:06:04.289
instead of a carbon output.

00:06:04.289 --> 00:06:07.398
We see that our water has been 
degraded by our agricultural system.

00:06:07.398 --> 00:06:10.157
All things that can be changed
right from our dinner table

00:06:10.157 --> 00:06:12.523
if we choose better,
more agro-ecological farming.

00:06:12.523 --> 00:06:14.998
We can change farms.
That whole middle section between

00:06:14.998 --> 00:06:18.170
the really small farmer who is under-funded,
and the really big farmer

00:06:18.170 --> 00:06:19.658
that is a corporate conglomerate.

00:06:19.658 --> 00:06:21.522
That whole section is waiting for change.

00:06:21.522 --> 00:06:23.806
Here in San Diego,
you have living in a county

00:06:23.806 --> 00:06:26.507
with the most farms
of any county in America.

00:06:26.507 --> 00:06:30.481
That's something you can do to change 
dinner right in your own home.

00:06:30.481 --> 00:06:33.457
We can change trade
by buying fair trade products.

00:06:33.457 --> 00:06:36.255
We have huge opportunity to affect 
change around the world

00:06:36.255 --> 00:06:39.006
and make sure people are paid well
enough to feed their kids.

00:06:39.006 --> 00:06:42.051
We can change meat. We're not supposed 
to be eating corn-fed meat.

00:06:42.051 --> 00:06:44.225
it's worst for the environment,
it's worst for our health.

00:06:44.225 --> 00:06:48.208
If we buy better quality meat, we're helping
to change the food system for the better.

00:06:48.208 --> 00:06:51.634
We can change local economies
and forget about other investment plans

00:06:51.634 --> 00:06:53.727
that are brought by Washington
or Sacramento.

00:06:53.727 --> 00:06:55.763
We can change local economies right here,

00:06:55.763 --> 00:06:58.282
by keeping our money in our 
food system right at home.

00:06:58.282 --> 00:07:01.060
We can change family health:
like we've seen in some of those videos,

00:07:01.060 --> 00:07:03.463
eating together not only brings
home the family story,

00:07:03.463 --> 00:07:06.792
but it actually makes kids have 
better grades, do better in school,

00:07:06.792 --> 00:07:11.223
do fewer drugs later in life,
it's a huge social impact.

00:07:11.223 --> 00:07:12.719
We can change security.

00:07:12.719 --> 00:07:15.456
"A hungry man is an angry man,"
says an old African proverb,

00:07:15.456 --> 00:07:19.177
and if we make sure that we're investing
in agricultural aid around the world,

00:07:19.177 --> 00:07:20.711
we're helping to improve hunger.

00:07:20.711 --> 00:07:22.143
We can change innovation.

00:07:22.143 --> 00:07:24.613
There are systems,
like those farms in a box,

00:07:24.613 --> 00:07:28.319
that we can actually improve upon
local regional agricultural systems

00:07:28.319 --> 00:07:30.024
right in our own backyard.

00:07:30.024 --> 00:07:32.371
And we can change value.
What's the new value meal?

00:07:32.377 --> 00:07:34.124
Is it something that we make at home,

00:07:34.124 --> 00:07:36.804
or is it something 
that we go out and buy?

00:07:36.804 --> 00:07:39.516
My call to action is change dinner 
and change the world.

00:07:39.516 --> 00:07:40.678
Thank you.

00:07:40.678 --> 00:07:42.000
(Applause)