 When you work in the food sovereignty movement, you look at the world through the lens of power, not soil, carbon, not companion planting, not gardening or composting or anything like food waste. Like you look at it through power. Power as a force of oppression, as well as power as a force of liberation. Lauren Cardelli is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Lauren is the co-founder and executive director of a growing culture, AGC, which is a 501C3 nonprofit that confronts unjust power in the food systems. In creating AGC, Lauren works to shift the public's perception of agrarians from one of passive beneficiaries to one of active innovators. AGC is a farmer-centric organization that believes the key to sustainability lies in returning small-scale farmers back to the forefront of agriculture. As part of this growing movement, Lauren and his colleagues promote advocacy, farmer-led research, food sovereignty and allyship helping to create sustainable and self-driving futures. A growing culture confronts unjust power in our food systems. They are a movement, an organization that strives really to democratize food systems by connecting, amplifying and resourcing those on the front lines of the fight for food sovereignty. Welcome to the show. It's so good to have you here, Lauren. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. We met through a mutual friend and she says, you've got to have Lauren on the podcast. So Diane Hatz is a good friend of mine and you've been on her program, Change Food as well as Food Tank from Danielle Nienberg and you've done many, many things around food and I love your style, I love what you're doing and I'm glad that it worked out that we're here today. Can you give me a little bit of an update what you've been doing during this crazy time? Has any of this past experience that you had around food, food sovereignty, helping farmers, giving you resilience or seeing, wow, our food system truly is fucked up, broken. We need to get it fixed. And how have you weathered this crazy time? You know, I've been fortunate enough to feel that this time hasn't changed my perception and hasn't caused any pivots, new revelations or awakenings. When you work in the food sovereignty movement, you look at the world through the lens of power, not soil, carbon, not companion planting, not gardening or composting or anything like food waste. Like you look at it through power, power as a force of oppression as well as power as a force of liberation. You know, the work before COVID and the work during COVID and the work after COVID is going to be the same. It's confronting this unjust power, confronting the consolidation in our food system. And I've been fortunate enough that COVID hasn't changed anything for me. It hasn't, it's been a distraction from the work that I'm really rooted in. And so I've cut myself off by just hunkering down, you know, and working every day as hard as I can. Last year was an incredible year for us. I mean, you know, I felt like, I just realized like almost, I think two weeks ago, we hired two new staff this year. We hired two last year, you know, been growing our team since COVID because it took like a fucking pandemic and the unveiling of white supremacy for people to be like, oh, we get what you're talking about. We get what you've been talking about. We understand why we need to look at inequity in our food system. And so it was recently this last month when we brought in the last staff member, most recent staff member and I was able to have a team and working on this together at the moment, but I was able to actually start to breathe and realize that, you know, last year was like an extremely unhealthy year for me. It was one of manic and just epic proportions of obsessive and compulsive work behavior, which definitely had its own COVID influence on me. It distanced me from the people even the most closely, the people in my proximity, you know, because you get so blinded by this passion and this work that you, that it quarantined me from my own partner, you know, so that was brought on by a lot of, you know, our own issues, our own thoughts, but, you know, exactly part of the ecosystem that we operated, you know, last January, I was gonna shut down the organization. I've been doing this for 10 years. We've never been able to raise enough money to employ anybody, including myself. I've been invited, disinvited for more things than I've been invited to. You know, we've been in rooms in the beginning of conversations when they're defining terms like regenerative agriculture and people just want us to leave because we say the same damn thing every time, which is like, where's the equity? Where's the humanization? Where's the de-objectification? Why are we just talking about the car? You know, our message hasn't changed. We've always, the bold and audacious dream that we've always held was a food system that nurtures the one who grows our food rather than exploits it. And so it's been lonely. It's been lonely in a world where you even think that, you know, like you look around and you see green environmentalism, sustainability, and you see all these conferences, these panels, these articles, and each one of them was like a stab in the heart. Every time I went to an event, I left depressed and angry so much that you stopped going because it was so honest for me to see how deeply elitist and racist these environments were, how they were exclusionary, right? And one of my favorite quotes of all time is Chico Mendez, who's just nobody, if you don't know about Chico Mendez, go. You know, I'm not even gonna tell you because you need to read that yourself. You need to go and look it up. We'll put a link to where they can find that, yeah. You know, he says that environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening. And I want people to think about the power of those words. Why that is so important? Why do you use gardening? What is the difference between gardening and farming? Gardening is producing for the individual. Farming is producing for those you don't know. You know, we put out this article a few weeks ago called Welcome Movements Won't Save the World. You know, it's definitely a little bit provocative, but there's a line between this on this article that really resonates. That if you could read one line of this, that it would sum it up. And it is the difference between a food system that reproduces injustice and fights against it is the degree to which it is focused on the individual versus the collective. When you see the trends in the food movement and environmentalism, what we see is everything through a lens of individualism. My vegan diet, my microbiome, my compost pile, my fork, my local food, my garden. Vote with your dollar, just the least democratic thing ever. Vote with your fork, which is turning that dollar into a fork. Like this is the world we live in. And so like when I see this pandemic of individualism that has plagued environmentalism and sustainability, we start to see how every intervention is about consumer privilege, is about entrenching or leading them, is about enforcing those power dynamics. That's when you feel lonely. That's when your mother's best friends who are foraging you articles from the Guardian and the New York Times, they think you're gonna love them and you read them and you just get sad. That's when you go to conference after conference and every panel is another white person talking about the thing that will save the world. Buy this product and we'll all be fine. We all plant the trees, we'd all be fine. We all compost and the world will be saved. The solution is under your feet. Give me a fucking break. That's not real. And so what this pandemic did is in some ways confront that duality between individualism and collectivism. So in the words of like back on Marvel, right? So I'm not optimistic because when you're optimistic you think everything's gonna go right and you don't do anything to change it. Not pessimistic because when you're pessimistic, you think everything's gonna go wrong and you don't do anything to change it but I'm hopeful because it's the only damn way to be. And so that's the hill that I'll die on. That's what you'll have to rip from my cold dead hands is my hope. That somehow through all of this, we come out at least an ounce more of collective spirit and we begin to fight for the ones we don't know. Wow, that's beautiful. Can you go into, I mean, there's definitely nothing new. It's indigenous wisdom, agrarian societies, one of the oldest economies in the world and the beginnings of many. How do we, you talk a lot about power. How do we get that power? How do we empower people? What are your messages? I don't know if you also know Sanjay Rawal from one of Diane Hatt's friends as well directed the film Gather. And there's a lot about Indian, indigenous Indians and kind of going back to their roots of gathering and food production, all the extreme racism and crap that occurred just with Americans in the United States and what they went through in many different tribes and nations, but I think we even need to go deeper. So I mean, you've definitely brought up this time and that, but I wanna go deeper in the power, but I also wanna go deeper in maybe the big history of this and what are we getting wrong? What's the shifts that need to be made? What are we just not grasping correctly? Well, first of all, Sanjay is a good friend of mine. Second of all, everybody's together. Sanjay is brilliant. And that whole team that put that film together is brilliant. And you're absolutely right. Collectivism was how we survived for 23 out of the 24 hours of humanity's existence. It's only recent that we've gone to this individualism. This is nothing new. Food is love. Food is love, love and love, but our food system is built upon the many acts of injustice that have plagued us since those first years of Brazil. When I talk about our food system, when I talk about agriculture as this failure, mistake, fraud, plague, whatever it is, because it is, I talk about grain farming. Our relationship to the natural world existed in many ways. We were cultivating. We were managing landscapes. That was collective. That was regenerative. I know people want to hear that word. Grain farming did something different. The birth of grain farming is the birth of sedentary society. It's the birth of taxation in the nation state. It's the birth of walls. It's the birth of the military. It's the birth of surplus distribution in politics. It's the birth of hegemonic thinking, class, caste, race, gender discrimination, malnutrition, poverty, the very first seeds sown at the Neolithic Revolution. We're not seeds of leader barley, but we're seeds, hegemonic, racism and patriarchy. Today you look around vast inequity, prison industrial conflicts, neoliberalism, nonprofit industrial conflicts, military industrial conflicts. You look at all these systems. We are reaping what we sowed. These are the fruits of those first seeds. So I'm not gonna sit here and romanticize the past. We've never had a food system. Yeah, we have never had a food system that didn't exploit. And what we now know, Mark, is that those very first walls were not designed to keep outsiders out, but peasants in. Because they were like, screw this, I'm going to the mountains to grow root crops where they can't tax me. But this nation state and nationalism and taxation and all that birthed out of that is at the heart of this individualism because it also birthed with the class private property. It also birthed with the class monogamy and the structures in place to pass down elitism and hegemonic structures. It's not indigenous to who we are at all, you know. And if, in the words of a dear friend of mine, Chris Newman from Silvernautville, at the end of one of his broadcasts for hunger justice on the dream team episode that he did, he said, if the world is to be saved, it's going to be through BIPOC people. Now, this is important because he says if the world will be saved because it's not looking like it is. The second thing is through BIPOC people. So we can interpret this as, oh yeah, people that are most oppressed and marginalized are able to be resilient and come up with the solution that we need. I don't think that's what he was saying. I think the reason he said that is because there's another way of knowing, another way of seeing, another way of relating that isn't the dominant white lens. And I think that if this world is to be saved, it's going to be adopting another way of relating to this world, one that isn't based on individualism, white supremacy and capitalism. It'll be moving towards a post-capitalist society of collectivism, whatever that looks like. Can you go a little bit more even deeper for some of these terms, even though they're very old, it's been around a long time. And I think we're probably a little bit more versed on them, even in the conferences that you and I have both attended all over, where you get this frustration of what people are talking about. Just a little bit more, I'll ask you to almost teach us or give us a little bit of education. What the power structure is, but what's the transition? What's the hope? What do we need to do? What are some actionable things that we can apply our ways to empower farmers to really bring back or not even bring back because it never existed, but change that paradigm, change the way they've been treated and fix the system somehow? You know, I think of our food system as an hourglass market, right? On one side, you have the peasant food web, the producers of this world's food, right? I say peasant because that's what I believe we should call them. That's what the community wants to be called. The largest membership organization in the world is La Via Compestima, peasant life. 200 million plus members. On the bottom is consumers, which I hate that word, tell me another one. So what happens is in the middle, it's an hourglass because it's being pledged. Yesterday's Pharaoh was today's monolith, corporate trends, national company, wheezing the life and dividing these two populations which together make up 99.99999% of the world. But it pits them against each other. If you want to prioritize the producers, you end up screwing over the consumers because it's not affordable. Your product goes into whole foods and very few people can afford it. If you want to prioritize the consumers, you end up screwing over the producers. You don't pay them. And we live in a society where these populations are pitted against each other because they don't want to prioritize and think of each other now because of that divide. So even the privilege, the elite, when they go to whole foods, they ask more questions about how the animal was treated and about the human that was in that process. In the film gather, there's, or in the documentary gather, it's really if you want to control any kind of indigenous population or anyone, you just cut off the food supply. You take control over it. You don't allow access to buffaloes, to certain farming rights, to certain fishing rights. You cut that off. Or you turn that entire population into something that only migrant workers would do, which is another form of racism enslavement was a big issue with Brexit. And we're seeing it all over the world right now. That's why the big vote of the Brexit was basically they didn't want migrant workers taking their jobs. And then they were gone. And especially during the lockdown, none of those people from the United Kingdom jumped into those jobs and said, you'd be now we've got the jobs. And it basically screwed them because of that. But I'd like to get in that, but we're also dealing with that in India. In India now, there's a huge upheaval with around agriculture and farming and land rights and many other issues. So I want to even go, I want to go deeper. What, what, what's- Yeah. I mean, I think this is important because these are the issues. It's that like that clenching of that hourglass is the enforcing that the power has to pass through those on both ways, right? And so what happens now is these communities turning into each other. What we have to find ways of is taking that hourglass and stretching it and connecting those bottoms and top and uniting, right? That solidarity works, right? So to, to understand, you know, the Indian example is really difficult to understand. It's nuanced, it's diverse as everything India is. That is a magnificent, magnificent place of epic diversity. And so next week on the 12th, we're actually having a, March 12th, we're having a broadcast with about, I think it'll be over 15 speakers from India talking about the protest. But to understand this, the area that it's in, the epicenter is in the bread basket. It's in the grain basket of India, right? So this community is the early adopters and active participants of India's green revolution. These are industrial farmers. They're small scale, but these are farmers that were using industrial seed and petrochemicals, right? So that's something to understand that, like they've been squeezed from this system, from the get-go. And now they can't take it and aim more because you came for their security, which was the basic limit of their power was this bargaining right. Was this guaranteed? Because they've lost all the rest of their power in the adoption of industrial agriculture. They've lost it. And so the only thing that they could count on that said, I see you, I will care for you, I will protect you was the government's guarantee and that's gone. And that's why they're at the streets because they're reclaiming the power and it's uniting consumers and producers across the subcontinent of India, right? Like you're right, in Brexit, nobody wants those jobs. In the United States, nobody wants those jobs. Farmers, it's not easy. It shouldn't be romanticized. This is hard work. These are tours on the field. These are pursuers of erudition. These are one of my first farmer that I ever studied on, right? He said, farming is in rocket science but a rocket science is gonna do it. I love that quote because he's absolutely right. Yeah, because it's hard work. I mean, it's not only a science but it is a thing of art. I've seen migrant labor, which are, they are the farmers, they're the harvesters, the planners, they're really taking care of it. They're the ground workers, they are the farmer but we see them as only in addition to this system and that's not the case. It's beautiful what they do and how quickly they work and how efficiently they work. And this kind of also ties into something you just mentioned a minute ago and I don't know if you wanna get into that or address it but I'd like to have a little discussion about it. In 2008, all food systems were turned into commodity. So we had a big financial issue and everybody moved their investments into the food systems which turned the food, anything to do with the food systems into a commodity. And when you, basically when you cheapen food, you cheapen life. So now we've turned the food system into a commodity and people who aren't farmers, who aren't harvesters, who aren't the growers, the planners are now saying we need to get this just as cheap as possible. We need to produce it just as cheap as possible and I'll give you an example. I get products from Vietnam here in Germany all the time and there's no way in hell that a mango could cost one euro that's sent from Vietnam or Thailand or that a handful of cashews or a bag full of cashews could cost less than two euros that's coming from Vietnam or Thailand, right? That's not the total true cost, the natural capital, the total environmental cost, all those things are no longer be factored in and somewhere that payment, that finite resource has to be paid for. And so instead of using the term resource, why don't we talk about the relationship that the indigenous farmers usually had with our world, with our earth and that kind of, that's where I guess the original regenerative practices or gatherers or this thing occurred while there was always a cycle there. Yeah, I mean, there was the lack of commodification. There was a refusal to commodify. Owning seed was just unimaginable and that is a constant narrative throughout indigenous communities, you know? And we've corrupted the system, you know? We've adopted neoliberalist policies and these systems are absolutely under attack, you know? We had to go to Zambia in November of last year because our partners reached out, our grassroots partners as well as the largest civil society organization in Africa, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. They asked that we come there and help them campaign against the adoption of seed trees that made indigenous seed illegal. Now these are being pushed by Agra, the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, which anybody can look up who's behind that and that's the Rockefeller Foundation and Bill Gates Foundation. And they're pushing the adoption of these policies all over the world. They want to control the market because they know that their seed will only exist and thrive in a market where everyone is derivatives of themselves. These local seeds outproduce, outcompete these hybrid and industrial varieties all the time. I mean, like in India, we support a farmer, right? Going back to India that has like 17 varieties that grow in salt water, rice varieties, salt water. He has 12 varieties that can live under water for up to two weeks. That means they're not breathing during a huge fall. He has 64 varieties that are drought tolerant that don't need a drop of water after transport. I mean, you know, the international rice researcher who gets $100 million a year, a thousand scientists since 1960, they don't have any of that. You know, but these varieties are developed without ownership. This is the peasant food web. The revolution might not be televised, but it will be open source, right? And that's how that knowledge is growing and treated. But it also makes, when you have knowledge like that that's unclaimed, it's threatened by the industrial machine, by the intellectual property rights, by the pattern. So what we're working with the farmer out there to enter all these into the comments, to report on them, to protect them so that these companies can take these varieties. So far he's published in over 45 peer-reviewed journals, Science, Nature, the two most high up academic journals for this kind of subject matter, published in Scientific American, editorial boards have backed his research to prove that not a single one of these hybrid or industrial seeds outperform his varieties, you know? But then what's the challenge? How does he get funding? He doesn't, right? How does he get support? How do we commodify this? Because we can't commodify it, nobody's supporting this process because they're not recognizing the inherent value within his system and these seeds. Listen, Mark, he found a variety of seeds, he's studying them and he's testing his one variety and he sees it spiking in silver. He's like, how can rice be spiking in silver? He goes back and tests it again, spikes again. Goes through his notes. This indigenous community giving the rice and they called it poor man's rights. Because when they were sick and got problems, they would eat this rice because the silver is what? That bacteria, it pulls silver from the ground, stores in the house. So he published this academic paper on it, right? You wanna see the problem with whiteness and in our society right now, is that three different companies wrote to him asking for to buy the rights of that rice. Not a single person wrote to him wanting to support his work. Razi, absolutely insane. I want you to tell us a little bit more about a growing culture, how it started, words going, you told us you've hired some new people but the bigger vision, the bigger mission, how is it truly a movement? And I know you're working from Vietnam to Africa and different places around the world you're doing on and offline stuff. Tell us a little bit more about that. Tell us where we need to go to get smart about it and kind of give us the, not the simple version but kind of a enlighten us, things that most of us wouldn't know. The growing culture is a very different and interesting organization I'd have to say. And I'm definitely biased but we work in a different way. We don't have a solution, Mark. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that we have a solution for anything. We're comfortable in not knowing. You know, we don't champion a one-size-fits-all which almost every nonprofit does, right? Like we've seen that. We're not saying that urban gardens are gonna save the world or building gyms or after-school programs or food aid or composting or whatever. We don't, that's not our thing. So we have no solution but I can point you to about 10,000 people that do and none of them look like me. And we champion those folks. We are a collective of activists with different skill sets that you read out in the beginning from media to grant writing, to communications, to graphic design, to videography, to software and I mean, everything. And what we do is we are in service to the grassroots communities. These last 10 years, it's 11 now. We have built the deepest trust, appreciation and networks across the world with peasant and indigenous communities. This is built on mutual respect. And with that, we are in service to the community. If they need support with anything, they come to us and ask. We don't design an implemented program. One community can say, we need support raising capital for this rice program. We want to do media campaigns and we need your help creating media and graphic design campaigns. We need your help creating an event and hosting this broadcast. We need your help organizing this twice a year coordination between media representatives and the peasant food web so that they can report on the stories, the killings, the red tagging, the displacements, the land grabbing that we're dealing with that nobody's reporting on and because this injustice happens in the dark help us shine a light. Whatever they ask, we do. If it's not in our network, we work hard to find it. We bring in legal counsel. So like we want the black farmer legal fund so that farmers in the United States, black farmers have access to free legal support. Whatever it is, we work in service to these communities because the three most powerful words in the language is I see you and that's what we do. And the more staff we bring on, the more skills and talent that we can put in service to grassroots and indigenous and peasant communities because they know what to do. They don't need to be told. They don't need to be educated. They don't need to be empowered. They need people to see them and to fight in the trenches with them and we will do everything we can to do that. Brighton, there's this Australian saying this Aboriginal saying that's like, if you came here to help me, I don't want your help. But if you came here because your liberation is tied to mine, let's get to work. Love it. We get to work. That's what we do. And so we will be growing over the next years to have more resources to deploy in grants and untethered unrestricted support of food sovereignty movements. We will have staffing to work with them in any way they can. Policy directors, to media, to PR professionals, we're going to develop out an outfit and an agency that does nothing but in service to these communities. That says, how can I assist you in acts of shared liberation and mutual respect and co-dreaming? That's the organization we are. And that's why it doesn't translate to many functions because they say, well, what is the tangible outcome? What does this look like? I don't know. Some of the groups we work with are anarchists. Some of them are Marxists. Some of them are capitalists. We fight for all of them the same because the difference is diversity over uniformity. The industrialized system is the system of uniformity. We believe in the diversity of opinion, the diversity of reflection, and that's what sovereignty is. It's the ability to manifest a dream. And we fight for that ability and that agency and that humanization, not a practice because when you celebrate agency and you unlock the bondage and you start to realize that we are not part of the food chain, we are food chains, then you see that practice is infinite. Innovation is a verb. You start to see these things before you say, and it's not about that. We're not trying to push some practice that embeds in a system of injustice. We're trying to stop the objectification and ignite a new system rooted on that agency and creative potential of the ones who grow food. It's really in line with just how the world works anyway because there is no apple that tastes the same over years and decades and centuries. They can have some certain qualities, but sometimes it might be sweeter or it might be more sour or tart and with any type of food and there's that indigenous local way that nature works everywhere. And I think that's a nice thing that I'm hearing out from you is you're working with those cultures that are very indigenous to wherever they are and whatever their belief and that culture is that you wanna help them to keep that biodiversity, keep doing what they're doing and has really truly bottom up. I don't know if you've ever heard this or it's a damn Lauren, you're just, you're too strong, you're too tough, you're kicking our ass with how you're pounding on that. You're scaring me with your activism and the fervor and the way you speak about this. And why don't you come at us a little bit softer? How can we get everybody on board and you're scaring us type of it. Do you ever run into that where they're like, my God, those guys, he's gonna kick my ass if I don't get on board and figure out how we can help or do it. I mean, you're one hell of an advocate, but I'm wondering, do you ever get that? Do you ever deal with that at all? All the time, all the time. I don't, I don't, you know. And I mean, yeah. It's just, I get it all the time. I mean, people always, you know, after the lecture, the talks, presentations, they get these letters and comments that so inspired but overwhelmed, you know, I feel disempowered or lost in what I can do. I feel stuck and paralyzed in this knowledge now. Now everything I thought I was doing right is wrong. I get that. What help do you have for people or how? I think it's fine. I think we have to embrace not knowing. I think we have to embrace imperfection. I think we have to embrace it, but I think what I really want people to come out with is ability to ask more questions, to go deeper, to start looking at something like local food movements, right? So like when we wrote that article, it was like, why are you coming after local food, right? It seems so perfect. But once you start to understand that like the wealth of the industrial North has been pulled from all of the resources of the global South. And so the graphic we use was dug up Africa and South America piled on top of United States and Europe. And we had that statement, local food movements on the table, because it's like, okay. So after all that colonization, after all that extraction, now the privileged people and those sources of resources want to say, I'm gonna do local. So now I'm gonna silo all this wealth that has been taken in script by generation. And I'm gonna think that this is saving the world, right? Like the problem is not that local food is bad. Local food is great and we should always do that if we can, but when we think that that's the solution, like that's the end all, that's the danger, Mark. Like that's the danger is because we're ignoring, we're acting in a ratio, right? When in the first conversation I said, you said, this is nothing new, of course. Collectivism is nothing new, right? Like, so the problem is the denying of the historic or trauma of colonization, the denying of indigenous and BIPOC knowledge and contribution. And so when we create this silo in these communities, what we're doing is adding to that erasure. We're denying the past. There's no solution that doesn't gonna address some kind of reparative justice. We need that. And I don't have that. So I'm not judging anybody. What I want them to do is to ask questions and think deeply. I don't wanna see signs on Kiss the Ground's website that say healthy soil solves everything because like, come on, come on. Like, that's not, and I want people to see that and say, wait, this isn't right. Like, you know, and so there's amazing activism that's happening local, but that like, it's taking some of this knowledge and this reparative justice. It's addressing equity in the local movements, building in SNAP and inclusive environments into your local farmer's markets. We need to figure out ways to do this. We can't be complacent with the status quo of white ideas, like, and that are just rooted in these spaces. You go to a local restaurant, everybody's gonna look like us, Mark. Yeah. And everyone thinks they're saving the world by being there. Yeah, yeah. Well, one reason why I have this different lens or this view of global citizenry or this bigger view of the world is because, you know, I'm from America. My mother was German and grandmother Austrian, but I have a family, not only in Europe, but in Asia, I traveled to Asia and I've seen, it just grew up seeing different races and different cultures and different ways of producing food. Come from six generations of Germany's oldest farmers, you know, and organic farmers for the last three and a half generations at least. And really, it's this craziness that we're separating one, one another from distant cousins. We're all on the same spaceship Earth. We all crawled out of the same primordial soup. There's nobody dropped off here from Venus, Mars, or Germany and the U.S. We're all Homo sapiens and origins are the same, but it's just unfathomable the way we're going with this. When I, I mean, a gather was a shaking documentary for me because I like, how have we assimilated and basically torn apart these tribes to almost nothing? I mean, when I watch that, the obesity, the diabetes when they're talking about their drug and jail problems and social problems, but just how they've dismantled them into this whole other system. And I'm like, how are they ever going to build back? They're almost down to nothing, you know? And I feel so bad because that's the roots of humanity. That's our roots of our historical ancestry, you know? We're the same species and we're destroying each other just this, it's just, it's just shaking. Yeah, I don't know, for me, it's hard to say, oh, well, I guess I get fucking pissed off. And I wanted to tell you, that's why I come off like this because we're, we're, we can see the elephant in the savannah and not the elephant in the room, Mark, which is our privilege. You know, you want to know what tools needed to fix the food system, it's a mirror. Like we need to start to understand that you said the cost, you have never paid the true cost because everything you have ever eaten has been subsidized by the exploitation of others. And so like, I'm sorry, but that's gonna make you irate and angry and upset and passionate. And if it isn't, check your fucking pulse, my friend. Like, because this is the truth, what we did to the indigenous communities. And I was on a call with, with the wizzie from well, quote, a buffalo ranch, right? Yesterday. And he said, he said, you know, people always like, why don't we have this? Why don't we have this? It's like, think about how much we'd have if we didn't have to buy back our lands first. Like, like, like this is unbelievable. Like we need to account for some kind of reparative justice. We can't just look for things to make ourselves feel good. You know how many people think buying a Tesla is enough? A funny looking white bulb is enough. Shopping from your local, no. Those are serving you, not somebody else. We need to start that. And that's why Bernie Sanders' most powerful ad last year was that fight for someone you don't know. Remember that? It's a beautiful ad. Like, that makes you feel something. That makes you feel something. That's unbutton. I am because we are. How do we tap into that, Mark? And do you see that in the, in the, in the liberal community? Like, do you see that in the spiritual community? Do you see that in the sustainability community? I'm told, I'm so in that respect, I absolutely neo Darwinism, neoliberalism, it's bullshit. It doesn't exist. And Carl Sagan's first wife, Lynn Margolis, you know, she was fabulous around the symbiotic earth and micro Riza and kind of how just our world works in a symbiotic way. And I just absolutely not. There's, it's not natural selection survival of the fittest only the strong survive. It's through collaboration and cooperation. That's the true way we work. And we've gotten off track on this other system. And I really don't even want to go down that track with you on the show. I want to kind of, you know, give the chilling awake, but where can we start to make those shifts in those movements? And so my question back to you is I'm, I believe that our social frameworks are our civilization frameworks are failing us all over the world. I can, we can see unrest, disease and that they're really failing us. But I truly believe in this, going back again to Lynn Margolis, this kind of a symbiotic earth. How do we create an ecological economic model or a model that works for everyone? What does a world that works for everyone look like? A model that we can say everywhere works for us because we're all homo sapiens, we're all distant cousins. What does that work look like? And how do we get there? And I have some ideas. I like to be crazy and kind of out there, but it takes that biodiversity that you're talking about. We need to go to those pastorials and those peasants and those indigenous wisdoms and get everybody's voice at the table and everybody's anger at the table to come together for a solution. And so there's two questions in there. One, and you might think this is also the wrong, the wrong place is the United Nations coming out this year with the Food Systems Summit. So it's 197 countries all over the world. It's a secretary general to bring everybody at the table to talk about food and how can we fix and repair the food systems and have it be one that works for everybody. I'm taking part of it. I encourage others to have their seat and voice their concerns or whatever to play a role and especially indigenous communities. So they're the ones who need it the most at that seat at the table. So that it doesn't go rye again, so to say. And then the second one is the question for you is the burning question. It's WTF and it's not the swear word that everybody's thinking about it. It's what's the future? What's our plan? What's our model? And what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? And those are kind of I wanna get your thoughts and I wanna get your answer to that. Where we're going and how we're gonna get there. It looks like freedom of expression man within the farmscape, but then it looks like it's we don't, for me it's so powerful because I root in sovereignty. You won't see me talking about regenerative agriculture or agriculture or organic or biodynamic or bio intensive. You don't see that with me. Like, because like I don't fight for principles. I fight for people's right to shape their food system. Right, which is the diversity of reflection, right? Like, you know, I've been in Egypt working with farmers and this farmer says, please, I want, can you come to my farm? I wanna show you my farm. And he get on the back of his motorcycle and we go through and you're going through all the tributaries and the canals and you see pollution, dead animals, trash. And then you're going through the fields and there's just people spraying and the same irrigation pathways are going through. And by the time we get to him, we passed all of that. And he looks at me and he goes, I wanna be organic. How do I make this farm organic? What are you gonna say? Does that person have the right? Does that person have the liberty and the choice to be organic? There's nothing they can do. Nothing, no possibility. Yeah, that's when they have to almost build up a wall around their own thing, create their own walls and borders and division and they still can achieve it. Yeah, because the irrigation that feeds their water is already contaminated. So there's no wall that can do it because the resource is collective. And so when you have people banning the right for indigenous seeds, preventing them on the market, when you have a condition where nine out of 10 farmers in the Philippines don't own the land they till because they're caught in feudal land policies that were put in place during US occupation. When you have West Africa producing 80% of the world's cacao, but getting less than 2% of $100 billion revenue, no wonder it's all child-savvy. Okay, I need to stop it because you've just touched upon something. Let's take that same model that, okay, it's there's no way because their same resource is already in this other crazy system that it's already contaminated. It's already got the chemicals in it. It's already got the seeds in it. Let's step a little bit further. Yeah. The overview effect, the earth view. You and I read the same air that Gandhi did that the Plato, Socrates and whoever Aristotle breathed the same, Julius Caesar, whoever you wanna say, we breathe that same air. We've drank the same water. It's all recycled on our planet one way or the other. So even further than that, that goes back to the question I asked you. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you? What's the future? And the reason is, is if we don't do a global operating system a global upgrade of our civilization framework in that respect, we say it doesn't fucking matter because the Amazon burning in Brazil is gonna affect me in Germany. The soil and water contamination that's happening in the US is gonna affect me and Mexico and Brazil. You know, whatever, there is no place on this earth to hide from the detrimental shit that others do. It all will come back to bite us in the ass eventually. So how do we get a better operating system where we're more in this alignment, a symbiotic alignment with one another, empowering one another or even giving those peasants the thing to have a voice to change that system instead of to have the feeling of enslavement or being stuck on that hamster wheel of endless doom, you know, how do we get there? What, I wanna hear your answers. We form cooperatives, we form collectives, we unite in solidarity, we return power into these grassroots communities and we take it back peacefully or violently but we have to take that power back, right? You know, that's the reality, right? And if I told you that the future of this food system looks like a food system where every farmer practiced regenerative techniques and built soil carbon, like that would translate to you. If I said our future is where everybody eats local food, that will translate. But when we talk about equity, it's hard for us to see the tangibility in it because we're so caught up in the injustice. Like, but like that's what I'm saying, which is just as clear as a world where everybody buys local or just everybody like, you know, builds soil carbon. Like it's that like the farmers can dictate their price, their practice, their design, that the communities can celebrate their cultural food and not be under threat and be attacked every day of their lives. It's breaking out the corporate control of our food system so that people have freedom of expression within their food web and food culture. It's so important. It's so important. And that's what we have to fight for. I know it's complex and I know it, but the brilliance is in the complexity. The brilliance is in the diversity because for Joe Jandai in Thailand, he's worked with thousands and thousands of farmers to create a social enterprise where every farmer now has to grow fish, fruit trees, rice, vegetables, meat. They feed their community and their homes. Then the company buys the surplus at a better than market rate and they're able to sell that to communities across Thailand at half the price of organic produce, right? Because they're vertically integrating and farmer controlling the food system. That's a food sovereignty policy. That could work in Thailand. It doesn't work in the US because in the US, people don't own land. So Chris Newman of Savanakwa is trying something different using a mosaic of public and private lands, vertical integration, right? And he's trying to find housing models and all this stuff. In Thailand, you don't have to do that, right? So everywhere is nuance and different and we have to have examples that embrace the complexity and nuance of place. So I can't give this thing, but what those have in common is their democratization models. They're returning power into the grassroots. That looks like Masipag in the Philippines, right? Taking control of farmer knowledge and creating whole systems of innovation and academic work, which is all led and designed by the farmers. Advancing agri-ecology and seed breeding and to create genetics that are way better than industrial and academic places, right? Models of farming that are incredible, right? It's lobby accomplicino, organizing peasants around the world to create a massive campaign and political force that the FAO has to bring them in, right? These are all democratization at Bel Horizonte's food policy in Brazil, right? Which brought in rubber tappers and peasants and artisans and created a food policy which guaranteed the right of food for all. It's Cuba and a nap. At the height of the embargo, we're able to survive and amplify academic, I mean, organic food because they use the model based on the liberation theology of accomplicino or accomplicino where peasants identified the problems collectively brainstormed, went home on a 10th of their land to try different innovations. Once that innovation worked, those peasants became the teachers and the community came together and that knowledge spread open source. It's the practical farmers of Iowa who were fed up with the extensionism in the United States who farmers came together and bought and hired extension agents to actually work with the farmers and serve the farmers not the thought academic institution. These are models of power. This is what we have to do. Not one of them works but all of them work in the mosaic of sovereignty. Complex or complexity science systems thinking and you really answered the question with the question almost. It is a world that works for everyone, for everyone. There's no separation or individualization. There's no segregation. There is no racism that that only works for some but not for others. There's no enslavement. It is the form of sovereignty for everyone. It's just like a self-sovereign identification. It's like a basic right. It's not universal basic income. It's a universal type of ecological right. Something that works for everyone with the diversity of cultures, with the diversity of race. We're not gonna solve the world. We're not gonna solve the world's problems today for sure. But I think we're on the right track. I think we are. But I'd love to ask you some questions as somebody who knows this world, right? Somebody who's immersed in it, right? When you see the trends in the food and when you see Regenerative Act, does it address any of this complexity? Yeah. So the answer, it's a mixed answer. I would say no and all because it's, none of these things are the silver bullet, the major bullet. They're a facet of that complexity. They're a facet of the system. So regenerative organics, regenerative agroecology or agroforestry, that is one facet in the food system. It's not the save all. And that's where we make a mistake quite a bit. We say, okay, we need to go plant-based or we need to become vegan. And then we get in this extremism that doubt one facet, which probably addresses quite a bit or is pretty positive, is gonna fix the entire system. We're complex human beings. We're operating every single day, 11 major systems of our body and not one of those systems controls the other 10. They're all working in harmony together at the same time, almost gooey or autonomously. The same way is the way that our world works. You can't just take one facet and say that controls us, solves the problem of that. That's phyload linear thinking. We're talking about complexity, science. We're talking about systems thinking. We need to have all those facets, all those systems functioning and running at the same time. That's a complete system and something that works for everyone everywhere. And so that's kind of my answer to that. I think that, yeah, that's nice, but don't get the blinders on and hyper-focus that that's the only way and the true way and the save all because then you're gonna be in a lot of trouble. I know a lot of vegans, they're bad at pale. Their skin looks like hell, they're not living a good life and that's not saving the world. Matter of fact, it's probably doing different or even those people that say, it's only this one thing, that's all we need to do is renewable energy transition. I was just, no, it's not. Our world's much more complex and that quick pitch, the elevator pitch, the short version, the TED talk or the elevator pitch, those don't solve global grand challenges and human suffering. There's complexity, science, thinking and systems addressing all facets of our global grand challenges at the same time. That will come a step closer whereas addressing this exponential growing world, good, bad and ugly that we're living on but also a long-term solutions or better models of civilization frameworks that will nudge us in a much better direction to solve these problems eventually. That's truly what I would believe as a step in the right direction. And I see it like Fritz Hof Capra who does the Capra courses. I see it as the system's view of life. We need to embrace the chaos theory, complexity, science and start thinking and systems because we deal with them. Everything in our world is that way. And so to just break it down to one little facet as the save all, whether it's regenerative or the future of food, new cell, ag, those are all fabulous. They're tremendous but they're only one small facet in the big system. And so if we can down on the peasant level on all levels give people the tools or the knowledge of the bigger system that they're working on and let's do them all at the same time. And I think we'll do more than just pickle the surface so the problem will actually start to make bigger dance or bigger movements steps in the right direction. And that's, I mean, I don't know if that totally answers your question. That's a little bit better. I think it's great when you answer the question you're embracing the complexity but I wonder on top of that, how do we account for a history? How do we account when we're talking about systems thinking like this is what I'm asking you like I jive with everything that you're saying, my friend. I do. But then like where I'm missing is we're not starting from an equitable place. Today isn't the first day. And so where is that involved? And that's why when we have frameworks for solutions if they are ignoring the historical trauma of colonization of enslavement, right? Like if they're ignoring that they're enforcing and empowering the forces that benefited from it, right? And so like when we have any solution out there whether it's plant cell, regenerative, whatever it is if equity isn't built in if those communities that have been historically oppressed aren't seen, recognized, aren't seen in those systems then we're failing. We're not helping anybody. And that's what I'm asking for. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And I love it. I love what you guys are doing. And I think you're definitely on the right path. And I want to support you however I can but I also feel that there's a lot of wisdom and learning to be had for people who I mean, I'm sure it's more than half of my list of the people that were in the groups that we used to move around in. They haven't even thought of that. I mean, when I ask people what's the future or what does the world that works for everyone look like? I have no clue. They're so worried about their basic needs or their daily lives. They can't even think about that. And this is one crazy thing that I talk about all the time. And it's kind of the starting point where most of these discussions we're both white and we're both in developed countries and we're doing pretty good. But I deal a lot with places that aren't. And so I call it this weird society where Western educated industrialized rich and democratic and most of our economic wisdom, most of our wisdom or discussions usually comes out of a weird society like that. We don't even, even in the UN is now starting to do it more and more and address that indigenous wisdom and deaths that developed wisdom or that we really need to get into to get out of this Western thinking these weird societies of models that we think it's just a cookie cutter stamp that we can put on the rest of the world. Well, it doesn't work that way. And what I've heard from you, what I really love let's get into that growing culture and that understanding of each individual indigenous culture and area and their foods and the peasantry and how they deal with it to get them in a better system or to support their movement to one that works for us all because I, especially in Thailand and Vietnam and I was, my God, they're the kitchens of the world. And if you go and eat with them, if you go farm with them in India, you'll never go hungry. You'll eat like a king. It'll be wonderful that there's, they're not just looking out for themselves. Once they have themselves taken care of and even when they don't have themselves taken care of they always want to be hospitable and give and serve and show new things. That's what those cultures about. It's not in any different. So they've, even when they've been oppressed they're still that way, which is a mindblower in and of itself. Yeah. I have three last questions for you. Cool. And then we're done. And they're really for my listeners. If there was one message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, what would it be? Your message. I love this line that Cesar Chavez said. And he said it when the New York Times sent a reporter to follow him at these rallies that he was organizing. His reporter was there for a few days at the third day or something. He says, how do you explain that here in respect that these farm workers have for you? Blown away, but how much these farm workers love? And he laughed and smiled at her and said, the feeling is mutual. I want people to tap into that and use that lens when they look at the proof system. We've lost that conference and panel article. It's void. It's not inclusive. There's no peasants, there's no farmers, there's no producers. Let's champion that. Let's fight for them. I love it. What should young innovators in your field or activism be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make a real impact? They should be looking at power structures. We started this off and I don't think there's anything more important. Does your innovation, intervention, whatever it is, does it address power? Who is it empowering and who is it disempowering? Think about that. Does this soil machine, right? Who is it putting the information to? Who is it telling what to do? Does it treat these communities as beneficiaries or active innovators, right? What is the frame? Ask yourself these simple, simple questions. And then you can send that article to my mom who reported to me, right? But I don't want to look at them unless they address power. Fabulous. And the last one is, what have you experienced or learned and some of it you brought out also in our discussion but what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far, especially your journey around agriculture and dealing with peasants so far that you would have loved to know from the start? That I know nothing and I'm not the hero of my story. I love it. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful. I'm so glad you took the time to speak to me and we could talk for hours. We could get even more passionate and go into more depth and substance. I think we need to have a follow up call very soon and I'd like to also get an update on how some of the different movements and things that you're working on are going. Thank you so much for your time and you have a wonderful day. And if this is your opportunity to say your last words before we say goodbye. Yeah, my last word is fight for people that you don't know. You know, join us, follow us. Like let's do this together. Collaboration is the world's most renewable resource. Love it. And I'll put your links and socials in the description and people can reach out to you and see how they can help in the movement. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it, Lauren. It's been a sure pleasure. Take care. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.