Truth: Food is awesome.
We all love to eat.
It's one of the best things we do every single day.
Food actually can be the solution to so many problems,
from my own personal mood to geopolitical strife.
But the reality is — food can also be the cause of a lot of problems,
and as an entrepreneur, I love to solve problems.
The first one I went out to tackle was hunger,
because it's a pretty intractable problem.
A billion people hungry in a world where we actually have enough food
to feed everyone more than a 2,000 calories a day that they need,
today on the planet.
The problem is obviously that
food is not necessarily getting to the people where they are.
Even in America, there are 49 million hungry people.
One thing I found ironic when travelling to the world's hungry regions,
is that even in the most desperate desolate places
where hunger is ravaging populations,
you can generally find soda,
and you can generally find packaged processed foods,
and sometimes even French fries,
which has led to another intractable problem in our food system,
which is a massive global obesity epidemic.
Now, there are places in the world
where people are transitioning from hunger to obesity
in just one generation,
and having all of the health problems
that we in our own Western diet countries have.
Things like, diabetes, and heart disease, and cancer,
at the same rates that we do, in just one generation
after being hungry for years.
And it looks like this problem is going to balloon
to about 2 billion people, even in just 2015.
So we have on our planet, just caused by food
two major malnutrition crisis,
and I argue that they're essentially the same problem.
In both hunger and obesity,
it's very difficult to access nutritious foods,
no matter where you are.
And they're killing us.
These two problems alone are responsible
for millions and millions of deaths every year.
And they're totally preventable, right?
Because it's all because of food.
So, I'm trying to understand
why food can be the cause of so much death and destruction.
Or, where does food come from?
It comes from agriculture.
And we've been made to believe
that there's essentially two forms of agriculture.
One, which we mostly get in the United States,
represented by me on a gray bin,
where there's massive highly consolidated farms.
And another, which you can see it represented by these women,
which is mostly women farmers on very under-financed plots of land
that they don't necessarily own.
80% of the farmers in Africa are women,
most of them have no rights to their lands,
and have no resources.
So, we now see that maybe hunger and obesity,
both connected to farms,
could be connected to this fact
that there's a bifurcated agricultural system around the planet.
Where did this come from?
It actually came around the same time I came onto the planet, 1980.
And, something kind of weird happened in 1980
that led to that graph of obesity that we all see today.
It pretty much starts with 1980.
Well, what changed?
Something changed that fundamentally shifted dinner.
I argue that in the 70's oil crisis,
making oil and all the inputs to agriculture wildly more expensive,
a lot of changes came out of that.
One of the biggest changes was a massive loss
of small and medium size farmers in America.
We lost a million farmers right around 1980.
But other interesting things happened in 1980.
Genetically modified crops became patentable
according to a Supreme Court decision in 1980.
High fructose corn syrup first came onto the market in a big way in 1980.
We started to divest in agriculture internationally.
So since 1980, we've shifted away from agricultural development
and towards food aid by measure of about 75 percent.
And we also stopped investing in agricultural systems in our own country,
like, publicly financed research for seeds.
Today, most of that is done by corporations,
and you can obviously tell what kind of results they're gonna get.
Also since 1980, the data is very clear,
both hunger and obesity are up.
Hunger has increased by 80 million people.
This is in a time when we know exactly how to grow food,
and how to certainly feed the planet.
And this other problem has obviously appeared.
Well, what we grow is clearly part of the problem.
Corn is in everything.
From our soda to our beef, to our cars, and to our food aid.
And what we eat is an absolute outcome of what we grow.
Because we have such preponderance
of corn, soy and wheat in our agricultural system.
And we subsidize it.
Fruits and vegetables have become much more expensive relatively.
Also, we're growing these inputs that go directly into fast food.
And, if we can see that data alone,
you can tell obviously that our global food system
has changed quite dramatically.
The other weird part of the food system that no one likes to talk about
is that both hunger and obesity are connected to some strange middle man.
We solve hunger by canned food drives,
and that same canned food is what has caused
a lot of our health and obesity problems around the world.
We all know that the solution to both
is fresh fruits and vegetables,
healthy food, and easy access to them by everyone.
I argue that in the next 30 years
we can actually erase all those bad problems with the food system
and change the food system for the better.
We have a 30-year-call-to-action to reverse problems that started in 1980,
and recreate a better food system of the future.
I think it's time to change dinner.
And my argument is not just that these problems
are intractable, and big, and global.
It's that there are things that we can do something about
right at our own dinner table.
If we change dinner, we can change health.
187 billion dollars is our per year investment
in just obesity related diseases in our health system.
We can change the environment.
We've seen that our food system, our soil can be a carbon eater,
instead of a carbon output.
We see that our water has been degraded by our agricultural system.
All things that can be changed right from our dinner table
if we choose better, more agro-ecological farming.
We can change farms. That whole middle section between
the really small farmer who is under-funded, and the really big farmer
that is a corporate conglomerate.
That whole section is waiting for change.
Here in San Diego, you have living in a county
with the most farms of any county in America.
That's something you can do to change dinner right in your own home.
We can change trade by buying fair trade products.
We have huge opportunity to affect change around the world
and make sure people are paid well enough to feed their kids.
We can change meat. We're not supposed to be eating corn-fed meat.
it's worst for the environment, it's worst for our health.
If we buy better quality meat, we're helping to change the food system for the better.
We can change local economies and forget about other investment plans
that are brought by Washington or Sacramento.
We can change local economies right here,
by keeping our money in our food system right at home.
We can change family health: like we've seen in some of those videos,
eating together not only brings home the family story,
but it actually makes kids have better grades, do better in school,
do fewer drugs later in life, it's a huge social impact.
We can change security.
"A hungry man is an angry man," says an old African proverb,
and if we make sure that we're investing in agricultural aid around the world,
we're helping to improve hunger.
We can change innovation.
There are systems, like those farms in a box,
that we can actually improve upon local regional agricultural systems
right in our own backyard.
And we can change value. What's the new value meal?
Is it something that we make at home,
or is it something that we go out and buy?
My call to action is change dinner and change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)