 Welcome, everybody. I'm happy that there are so many people wanting to fix our broken food system. I'm Marike van Schoonhoven, editorial manager of Food and Foldits. And I'm actually replacing Saskia, the founder of Food and Foldits. She woke up sick yesterday so I'm replacing her and I'm kind of improvised but I know what I'm talking about as well because I'm managing the thing. So maybe to start a little bit about Food and Foldits. What we do, Food and Foldits is a multimedia platform bringing science-based insights and journalistic stories about our food system. Food system challenges the origins of our food and the newest agriculture and food innovations. We do this via articles, podcasts, videos, our websites, our well-visited Instagram channel and events like this one. What else? We do this in English and Spanish and German so far and we have actually perhaps plans to also expand to the Dutch language so we keep you posted. And Food and Foldits is funded by EIT Food, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology on Food under the Horizon Europe program. So they are our biggest funders. So I hope with informing you with this event you will be inspired and get some key messages at home that you will then share with your friends and family and then that's be part of the story to transform our food system. Maybe first let me walk you through what's going to happen today. So we will first see the premiere of what we eat, our documentary series. It's a co-production between Food and Foldits and Will Media, an Italian media platform. And the first episode is this one, it's a six-series documentary series and after showing the documentary I will invite Sylvia Latzarez, the documentary maker and a Food and Foldits editor and Will journalist to the stage as well as Dan Saladino, prominent BBC food journalist and writer of the book, Eating to Extinction. The idea is that I ask them to the stage and from the beginning we will open the conversation so that you will also be part of the conversation from the beginning and that we will have an interactive series about our food system and about the documentary and about biodiversity in food, all in very important topics. After this conversation we move to the foyer. At five I think Dan, by then talking so much about food you will be thirsty and hungry so then we will talk a bit more in network over food and drinks and then you will have the opportunity to buy our Food and Foldits paper magazine and we plan to also have a signed copy for you of Eating to Extinction, the book of Dan Saladino, but we just found out that the books are not here but in Belgium so we have to improvise this as well so we will make sure that you get your signature, you can buy the book and then we will ship it to you, you can leave your address and we will fix this as well and then at six we finish and we say bye and we hope you learned a lot. So maybe a question for you now, who is buying their foods in a supermarket? I would say I think 80% or more. I think that is indeed almost exactly the number of the percentage that people buy food in supermarkets around 80% and in this first episode that you will now see you will see why this is actually quite surprising but maybe not to go too much detail into what you will see just see it and afterwards we can ask questions and discuss further so please enjoy. A lot to take in, I just said. It's 20 minutes setting the scene so I think we've seen that 100 years until now and how the supermarket played a big role in how we got to our current food system and also why this current food system is not working for the future and the other five episodes will go more into detail about the different challenges that we are now facing and what could be the possible solutions for this so I will introduce now our two stars of the day Sylvia Latsaris, she is a documentary maker she also has a director and a producer but she is definitely a big part of the documentary series so a little bio about you Sylvia Sylvia Latsaris is an Italian freelance science journalist after graduating from a Masters in Science Communication at Imperial College London in 2017 her work has been published in national and international media outlets including BBC World Service, Wired UK and Corriere della Serra she tackles ethics, power and science often through the lens of food and she is currently an editor for Food Unfolded like I said and an author at Will Media, the leading new media company in Italy and then our second guest is Dan Saladino a prominent food journalist and presenter of BBC's Radio Force the food program, his first book, Eating to Extinction the world's most endangered food and why we need to save them is an epic journey into the history, culture and future of food and involved 15 years of travel and story collecting since publication by Jonathan Cape in the UK and FSG in the United States Eating to Extinction has won multiple awards including winner of the prestigious Wainwright Prize for Conservation and Nature recipient of the Jane Grickson Trust Prize for Debut Food Book Special Commendation by Andri Simon Award awarded the Fortnum and Mason Book of the Year winner of the Guild of Food Writers Food Book Award and also the Guild's first Book Award and winner of the Corriere della Serra's Book of the Year Eating to Extinction was also shortlisted in the Stanford Travel Writing Awards and then the book has also been the subject of articles in loads of international media like the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Economist Financial Times and so on. A big welcome to you two. What is most convenient for you? Wow, in 20 minutes you managed to fit in so many schools more than I packed and served for 100 pages. That's also a note that I wanted to make. Sorry that we are open to feedback. So I think it was a great first episode but we're still in the process of producing and editing the other five so all the feedback is welcome here or afterwards in the network session. And we're going to try and have a relaxed, spontaneous conversation in which we're going to try and weave in some images so you can see pictures of foods but because it is a spontaneous conversation if we start talking about bananas but you see us unoranged then please bear with us. I will prompt the first question and I will leave the stage to you and I will be in the room to ask questions. If you want to ask your question in Dutch then it's also fine, I will translate. So my first question and I'll leave it to you. For you Sylvia is seeing this documentary and seeing all the work you put in there and all the research what is the most surprising thing that you discovered doing this research for the documentary series? Yeah. So I don't know, many interesting surprising things but I would say, I don't know, there's two things can I say two things that were most surprising? I mean the first one is actually how recent our supermarket system is I don't know, I was born in the 90s but I just assumed that had always kind of been there and then when I started to delve into that realizing that the food system was basically as old as my parents was strange but also I think another interesting thing was to realize that the supermarket arrived to Europe almost as a soft power exercise from the United States I mean this expo in Rome where the supermarket was displayed and people were running up and down the aisles and apparently, I mean we didn't put it in the documentary because there's no fact checking on that but the Pope gave his blessing from the Vatican or something like that, that was very surprising to me because we take it for granted but it was really not. Is the Pope doing his grocery shopping in the supermarket as well? There were some cardinals at that expo looking down the aisles of the supermarket but it's actually then maybe also quite promising that such a big shift is done so fast so that we maybe also can change our behaviors also as fast or maybe faster to go to a new food system or a new standard because it's always talking about people's behavior changes it's not going to happen, it's so difficult but actually if you see how quickly things changed then it's actually a promising thing I think we feel very much locked into this system but we really are not, we keep running it so we can also decide to change it hopefully together We did brilliantly in the film as well it's almost the sequence of events that just leads in a certain direction and I guess what we lose as a consequence is the complexity and the diversity but you can understand how one breakthrough or technological development leads to another and without asking the right questions you just end up down this linear track And also in the documentary we didn't touch on many other things that happened of course over the same century so we talked a lot about the supermarkets but there were many other technological and cultural innovation and political events that happened over that time span and Dan in your book you write a lot about the Green Revolution sorry, yeah you write a lot about the Green Revolution and maybe we want to introduce that too because without that of course a big piece is missing I think that's almost the hidden story taking place behind the scenes it's the inputs really that make the supermarket model possible which I think is a really important story to understand and I think if there's anything that films can do or books can do or conversations we need to know the story and I think the Green Revolution is one of them and it's a complex thing and there's still a live debate really about the merits and the problems, challenges created by it at least the more of us who are engaged and understand we can question and then figure out where do we go next do we want to say what the Green Revolution is? let's get to that in a moment because I think we need to build up to that in a moment then I'll follow the outline then so yeah I read Dan's book and I was also struck by a lot of the data that they found and a lot of the things that they saw in that book for example I have maybe like two or three terms for wheat like speices of wheat that I'm aware of but then reading Dan's book I realized there's like half a million speices of wheat and that was crazy for me because we don't actually have a lot of terms to describe the biodiversity of food that we have around us because we're always surrounded by the same few species now like four species and four crops are feeding most of the world, most of the calories in the world and so it's almost as if we don't even know what we're losing because we don't know what's out there so maybe you want to yeah it's almost as if we've lost our connection with the land and with I guess what I think is an important word as well agrobiodiversity so agricultural biological diversity or food diversity we've lost many of the nuances or the complexities of our palates as well and yeah along with that vocabulary as well and I think crop diversity is one of those things if we could just switch over to the PowerPoint I have some images to illustrate what we're talking about because I had in the size of the book I had the benefit of going back millions of years in a sense in our food history so two million years of bipedal humans and then our most successful lifestyle today hunter-gatherers and then 12,000 years ago those hunter-gatherers in the fertile crescent particularly became the first farmers because they were interacting with these wild grasses and through selection unconscious and conscious they eventually develop the early wheat as part of the Neolithic package the Neolithic package are the earliest domesticated foods so it includes wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils a few other more marginal things that's also the process of domestication in which we get cattle, goats as well and as those populations of farmers then spread out around the world so do the seeds and the crops that results in adaptation so as wheat spreads out from the fertile crescent it arrives in different environments there are different cultural preferences over time and so a huge amount of diversity is created and I think one of the questions I had in writing the book was well how much diversity is out there and one evidence of that is the Svalbard which is the backup for all of the seed banks around the world and when you look at the accessions of crops so what they've done is they've taken wheat from as many different places as possible and then they put them into the seed vault and so you end up with 213,000 that should be unique accessions of wheat whereas a farmer in Europe will be given a recommended list of around 10 pretty genetically uniform crops and so we get to the point where as you've mentioned huge amounts of biodiversity in our food system is being lost so although we have thousands of edible plants we end up with nine major crops feeding the world of which three wheat, rice and maize provide the world with more than half of its calories but it's that hidden story of the diversity within those crops is what we've lost because wheat is one of the most genetically plastic if you like flexible crops in terms of the nutrients it can have where it can grow, the appearance, the colour the flavours as well that's one thing, the association of wheat with flavour in many cultures is a powerful thing but for most of us it's been lost because wheat has become a commodity and apart from taste actually do we have what else are we losing with biodiversity so some people could say why should we care about this well the reason why we should care is also reflected in this so I think in that period that you've described in the rise of the supermarket behind the scenes we also saw huge amounts of consolidation in the food industry so the supermarket could only exist because the inputs into that system became cheap commodities and so you see the development of consolidation of power in the seed industry for example as you can see 50% of the world's cheeses depend on starter cultures and enzymes from one company based on the outskirts of Copenhagen near the airport it's an amazingly specialised industry but again huge amounts of consolidation of power and then the genetics of the livestock around the world has been shrunk so for example in the poultry industry there are three main genetic lines owned by two major corporations so we've lost that kind of diversity as well and replacing that with monocultures so most famously with the banana we have 1500 different varieties of types of bananas globally we've ended up with the Cavendish which is the globally traded banana again we've lost huge amounts of flavour and different farming systems that underpin these different types of bananas that are sometimes dessert bananas or cooking bananas sometimes used for brewing as well and so yeah in the disappearance of that we've ended up with a risky food system as well because as many of you might know the Cavendish because it's so genetically uniform it's not grown from seeds it's clonally propagated so you take the suckers from underground you plant them and you end up with a clone and so therefore if a disease hits one it can hit them all and so we're seeing in the different producing regions of the world which are growing this one globally traded banana farmers being devastated by this disease as their businesses are lost and a big question over the future of a fruit that is in most of our kitchens but as you've brilliant which is also recent the idea that you can create a system a monocultural system which means that these fruits are in local parts of the world but arrived in supermarkets it's one of the cheapest food you can buy is an illustration of again how how that system delivered to what many people was a serious breakthrough of affordability and abundance and just finally what we are also losing is the barriers between us as a species our food production systems and biodiversity and the wilderness because of Covid we still suspect that that was because of these barriers being broken between the wild and the urban and the domesticated but Covid was a relatively mild form of virus in terms of the death rate there was an outbreak of another type of virus in Malaysia at the turn of the century when it's pork industry so it's pig production spread into an area where there were there was forest, there were fruit bats feet became contaminated and a really deadly virus took hold there and wiped out the industry and killed over 100 people in a short space of time and it was confined but these are big risks we face by that loss of biodiversity and the arrival of this uniformity and homogenisation of the food system homogenisation is the result of the commodification of food so it went from being very local, a subsidence sort of food to becoming almost a commodity which is the same everywhere we have over specialisation of countries or companies do you think these two things are linked? Most definitely and I think obviously you need to go further back in terms of industrialisation you mentioned Henry Ford as well and that model being created in Britain for example we had the most rapid and early form of industrialisation so many people became disconnected with the land to feed the urban poor you then depend on bringing food into the cities in increasing amounts and then there was we had an empire as well so you could bring in huge volumes of food from around the world and that's the model that arrives and spreads around the world and so it's that disconnect I think that has unfolded that has changed our relationship with food completely but also nature and the planet I just want to mention this this is a non-food person, a physicist based in Boston but there's some brilliant things about our use of science because to arrive at that commodification of food requires those breakthroughs so early crop science emerges at the end of the 19th century into the beginning of the 20th century have a Bosch process so the arrival of fertilisers at the beginning of the 20th century and then the Green Revolution which we'll get on to in a moment produces genetically uniform crops that provide huge amounts of calories these are all amazing scientific breakthroughs in their own right but we were just so focused on production we didn't question the impact of the complex systems they were overriding and what was being lost as a consequence so actually yeah I saw that there was a question yeah hello testing hello I just had a question about because earlier you had on the screen there is you know 215,000 species of wheat so how did we get to you know 10 species that are on a list for farmers like how did we who chose to go who chose those specific species right like how do we go from a number like that to just a simple list of 10 yeah can I just change photos to answer that question because I think that's a really that is a really important and big question so Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov in the 90s or 100 years ago travelled across five continents collecting seeds and creates the first seed bank in Russia in St. Petersburg and he had grown up in an area in which there was famine in Russia there had been the Irish potato famine a few decades before that was a consequence of one of the reasons for that was that they were planting the same genetically identical potato in the called the lumper potato in the same soil and again a fungal disease overwhelms the crop a million people die many more millions leave Ireland the population has never fully recovered Nikolai Vavilov believed that diversity was the crucial thing that stood in the way of us and hunger and disaster in the future Norman Borlog who is one of the chief architects of the Green Revolution was working in Mexico in the 1940s wanted to improve the livelihoods of Mexican farmers and wanted to do that by improving wheat and making it able to take up the newly available synthetic fertilizers without falling over and also to have disease resistance so he takes a type of wheat or types of wheat from Mexico and the states and combines it with a type of wheat found in Japan very unusual because it was so short it was a dwarf wheat and then he breeds them together and then creates this really high yielding but very short wheat so if you drive past or walk through a wheat field this is why they just come above your knee really because they are very short varieties of wheat but it means they can put more of their energy into producing the grain and it's so successful at producing lots of grain and lots of calories it quickly spreads around the world and so all of that diversity that I mentioned in Spalbard quickly disappears because everyone wants to be growing that type of wheat thinking that all we really need are calories and energy and that really is the one that takes off that gives us the lack of genetic diversity what also happens around the same time is because of the chemical inputs demanded by these new crops which is the pesticides, fertilizer the companies that are producing those start to invest in seed companies as well so all of the major companies that own seeds today beginners chemical companies providing the inputs into this green revolution after the Second World War to produce more and more food and so you see a shrinking in the genetics of the global food system and also in the major business players who are providing the inputs but there are people who quite quickly realised this was a problem so this is a guy called Jack Harlan whose father Harry Harlan an amazing botanist knew Vavilov in the 1920s and it became Jack Harlan's obsession that the diversity that Vavilov was talking about in the 1920s and 30s was essential for again saving I mean this quote is really important that these resources by that seed diversity crop diversity stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine because he could see that if you have this uniformity if a crop fails it all fails and that's a dangerous situation to be in that quote was picked up by Carrie Fowler an American botanist in the 1990s who luckily for us convinces the Norwegian government to dig a tunnel down into the Arctic Circle with the Svalbard seed vault which is where 10,000 years of agriculture now sits in the form of seeds so that's the inheritance my inheritance from my ancestors who farmed for thousands of years the inheritance of all of your ancestors who farmed for thousands of years can be found deep under the ice but missing from most of the world's fields so that's kind of how we got there because it's that reductionist sense after the Second World War of we need food we need calories, we have starving populations here is a scientific breakthrough fossil fuels aren't really an issue at that point climate change isn't a major issue in the 50s and 60s and 70s although there were obviously some pioneering thinkers who did think it was mainstream political thinking it wasn't and so we plough on with this idea that we don't need diversity, we've cracked it we've solved the food problem and that's how we ended up where we are today Do you have any other questions? Yeah, there's a question actually over there Hi, thank you so much. My question is about this seed bank and well from the point of view of protection I could understand why it is the way it is and design the way it is and where well where it is I also don't understand but it's just off the it's within the Arctic Circle, off the north of the Norwegian coastline so it was thought to be the safest place away from potential conflict wars, climatic change the biggest risk were polar bears that's why it is where it is Thanks for the answer, I still don't understand why that place was chosen because I do wonder about the democracy of it I mean we're talking about monopolizing the food system and having people that are controlling certain things and it feels to me yes I do understand the protection of seeds but we're also responsible for what we eat and how we take care of it This is a backup so there are hundreds and hundreds of seed banks around the world in most countries and most countries are preserving their own resources this holds the duplicate so for example there was a seed bank in Syria and then the war hits and they are at risk of losing huge amounts of valuable crop diversity luckily they were backed up here so this doesn't have exclusive control over anything and in fact this is open access so if you wanted to become a crop reader and then start to use some of the genetics from an ancient type of wheat basically this is accessible to you there are many seeds that are now on the market because they are in so few hands and because they are mostly F1 hybrids where they will not breed true and you cannot save them and replant them so this is a public resource Just also wonder then from the global south perspective how is that also then accessible to somebody in South Africa for example it's not super easy to get there they usually set them in seeds you can send in the post so that's not a problem but there is a movement of seeds around the world between these different institutions and universities and researchers including many in Africa as well there are people in the Andes for example who are concerned about the loss of types of maize and to protect it for future generations they send it to Svalbard just for safekeeping but a mission to control but to protect and save and preserve for future use Okay Yeah, I mean it's almost like a backup server more than a museum, right? We're taking things from Greece and putting it in a museum in London, sorry This isn't the solution, we need diversity out there we need people to be growing these crops in Africa this is merely to this is the safety net because now they are in the being chilled below the ice they're viable but we need them to be in the soil so they can carry on that story of from the fertile crescent or from China with rice or from Mexico with maize we need them to be evolving and adapting to changing conditions And maybe we can also get into the Green Revolution talk about how actually a few companies got to manage the majority of the seeds around the world to even increase it Oh, there's more questions, sorry Yeah, let's go ahead The seeds that are preserved in vaults like these went out of fashion if that's the right word because they couldn't compete with the ones that were doing better so landraces of wheat that were more productive prospered So how do you feel about modifying these seeds that are dormant what is your opinion on genetic modification do you think we could get more out of these seeds if we use technology to improve certain aspects of them Yeah, I'd qualify that idea that they went out of fashion because they were less productive because there are many reasons why we lose crop diversity, so for example in India the Green Revolution arrives and it makes a huge impact but before that there had been the British colonisation which meant that they took wheat from Britain and then they created huge areas of wheat production and the Green Revolution expanded rice cultivation as well and we end up with a situation today where the record-breaking temperatures this summer in India we have high levels of nutrient efficiency even in people with access to lots of food in India because the kind of diet you touched on pelagra for example, but again because of the emphasis on rice and wheat because the food system had been distorted there is a public health consequence what did exist in India where rice and alongside wheat were millets so these tiny, tiny grains like sorghum and folio but India had some of the most diversity of millets and they're wonderful because they can grow in areas where there's not much water and they actually can supply many of the nutrients that are missing, particularly in the female population in India the Indian government has lobbied the United Nations for 2023 to become the year of millets to try and raise awareness in populations and also to encourage more research and so there's a big push now to bring back millets some of them might not be as high yielding as fields of wheat but actually we're in a far more complex situation now where it's not just about the production of calories which is causing huge problems around the world and not only that there is new technology which meant that millets were a kind of crop that women in villages would have to spend hours and hours grinding away to produce the flowers and other forms that they would use there's now machines that can do that as well so that's just an example of we don't just lose diversity because one crop produces more than another there are lots of historical reasons why a nation's diversity is changed in terms of the food it produces and there are now reasons which we can understand because of new science of why that diversity matters far beyond production of calories and I think millets is one example in India of that Thank you for your answer I don't want to monopolise There's a question up there too This is just a follow up from what you mentioned earlier about the dormant seeds and kind of they need to be in the ground for it to be you know, worth and existing Is there a concern that a lot of those seeds actually won't be able to survive in current conditions given the climate crisis and so there's a lot more urgency of replanting and seeing what's viable and encouraging that adaptation that should have been happening over the last thousands of years That is the case that I think and this is why I think a back up is also important because how well some of these hundreds of seed banks around the world are maintained is questionable and the one that ended up in Syria for example had previously been in Iraq and they'd moved it from Iraq to Syria thinking that that would be a safer place so again there are lots of reasons why we need to be worried about that resource but actually one of the reasons they exist is so that crop readers can be experimenting with them trialing them and I think we just do not know enough about the different traits in these seed banks there's a guy in India called Debaldeb who is going from village to village to find some of the last disappearing varieties of rice there. Some of them he has found can grow in highly saline soils others in flooded areas for long periods of time they can survive and still be viable some of them can absorb nanoparticles of silver and they're used in indigenous communities as almost like medicine as a treatment so again the huge amounts of different the diversity and the application of that we're just scratching the surface one example of that that I write about in the book is a story of some botanists who traveled to a village in Oaxaca in the late 1970s and come across a village where they were really surprised to see maize because the soil was so unfavorable but they arrive and they see this 16 foot tall type of maize with bizarre aerial roots coming out from the ground dripping a very weird alien looking kind of mucus glistening and dripping and they had no idea why this plant could survive there or what this mucus was doing it was only four years ago at UC Davis in the states they had the analytical tools to actually unpick the mucus and they realized it was full of thousands of different types of microbes that were being fed sugars by the plant and in turn were fixing nitrogen from the air to fertilize the plant so we have again there is so much we do not know that indigenous societies instinctively you all saved and replanted because they depended on them and because of the green revolution and the success of that calorie production the investment just hasn't happened in the research to unravel what's out there and in a sense I think that could also be a positive thing that there is a resource that's been created over thousands of years that we can now tap into because climate change and these unpredictable circumstances that we now face will depend on diversity to give us greater resilience at the moment the system is extremely fragile because it's so uniform another question thank you I'm really glad you talked about the banana because I heard it on a BBC food program and ever since that point when I eat a banana I always feel this sadness that I haven't tried the others and I'm a food designer and a lot of what people I work with people to talk about these things but a lot of what people ask me is what can I do and I guess this is not really about the seed bank this is more about the extinction and also trying new things and it's something that I feel with this banana so my question is really what consumers actually do to change this to can they start to find producers doing this stuff or is there different ways that you have ideas on possibly the most important question before I give my answer and I can find some images what's your thoughts on that we've thought a lot about this and we've spoken with a lot of people and of course there are many things that need to happen at the same time so as consumers of course we can only play our role and governments and industry will have to play their roles too there is a question about scalability of this solution that I'm about to mention but there's a lot of people now talking more about direct trades or like shortening supply chains not necessarily geographically but in terms of how close you have a relationship with producers and you can reward those producers who maybe will plant a variety of seeds that are seasonal and you'll receive boxes at home with whatever you don't even know you're going to find out what is there and learn how to cook with these new ingredients that maybe you've never even encountered this happened there was a spike with this during the pandemic but then again the big question around this is how scalable this solution is and yeah I don't know I would personally I try to I can only give a personal opinion I think in this situation but I tend to reward these sort of practices more than just always buying the same products and out of season all year round I think that's becoming increasingly possible because of technology so I as I mentioned I wanted to travel to the so called centres of origin where the world's most important crops originated and I travelled to Southern China and the origins of rice and again they had their parallel green revolution they were closed off at that point in terms of science so they had a parallel process of creating hybrid types of rice because of again more recent famines they had in China and I met one of the farmers who saved some of the traditional types of rice it was a so called red tipped glutinous or sticky rice that he used for all kinds of different dishes and also made wine using it and we were in the middle of nowhere and I'm thinking this guy in his 70s how on earth is he surviving and making any money from saving this rice he was growing the modern types of rice and having problems with being overwhelmed by weeds and other kinds of diseases plant diseases and he got out his phone and he showed me WeChat this app and he was selling his rice all over China to these consumers and I think we can people are building alternative food systems and this guy who's in southern Germany in the early 2000s was mourning the loss of something that went extinct in his community so I mentioned in the Neolithic package that left the fertile crescent thousands of years ago slowly moves into Europe and one of the most important and most humble of those ingredients was lentils and in this rocky part of southern Germany the lentil was one of the most important food sources but also it was essential for crop rotation because it did fertilize the soil so they could grow other types of grains as well but in the 1960s Canada took a decision to become the biggest global supplier of lentils Germany was industrializing lots of people were leaving the land going to the cities why would you need to grow lentils for the extinction of a type of lentil that was adapted to the alps the Swabian alps contacted every seed bank he could make contact with no luck, it seemed like nobody had traveled through in the 1920s or 30s to save the seed and keep it safe somewhere but with a group of farmers from this remote part of Swabia travels to Russia to go to Vavilov's seed bank in St. Petersburg and luckily even though they didn't think they had it they had it but it had been filed under the wrong name and this is one of my favorite photos in my research is him being reunited with his seed and it's a powerful photo because he is he's found or rediscovered not just a way of farming a farming system but a way of life for him and he returns to Germany partly because it tastes so delicious and there's a market for it a couple of hundred farmers join him in growing this food and then his story inspires a group of farmers in Sweden to go back through different historical records about what people were eating and again these humble soups and stews affordable, nutritious again, fertilizes the soil and all of a sudden there's this movement across Europe of these small scale producers going back through the history books including three guys in England who create a company called Hodmedod's and they realize that the father being was being grown in Bronze Age Britain and so they've returned that and again great packaging marketing all those other things these simple humble foods with a story as well and I think that's so important and this alternative food system is growing yeah so we were talking a lot about crops and also on land farming but the food system is also like consisting of the ocean so I was wondering what you think like within the aquatic food system which areas issues need or deserve more attention or maybe also you came across some like approaches yet that you found promising so like just some insights on that maybe let me just whiz back through again sorry about this but I want to get to there so the green revolution was the 20th century version of trying to create uniformity and productivity with livestock it happened centuries before so in the 18th century there was an English farmer who attempted to take out the random process of breeding on farms and actually start to redesign farm animals and was hugely successful so he became one of the wealthiest farmers in Europe because he was coming up with sheep that produced more wool cattle that could grow faster and more muscle for meat so on and so on and into the 20th century we then end up with the chicken of tomorrow in the US where lots of the small birds then suddenly became big because there was a concerted effort by supermarkets and by political institutions and with the help of the government to literally redesign the bird in the decade to the point where it has all the problems we associate with fast growing poultry where it can't really stand on its legs with fishing again huge amounts of industrial technology comes on stream at the end of the 19th century into the early 20th so the amount of fish that could be caught by one boat then we could never replicate now because that abundance has been automated by this almost military exercise we waged with using sonar and the arrival of nylon in the 1930s for example completely changed the way we fish the question one of the questions I look at in the book as well as the loss of huge amounts of biodiversity because of pollution and overfishing etc is can aquaculture be part of the solution and a lot of people in the 1960s and 70s go into fish farming thinking this is conservation I want to take the pressure off the wild species and as with Bakewell in the 18th century Norwegian fish scientists took a number of different salmon from around seven different rivers and then they create it's a modern day domestication story so they create the farmed fish which will which can tolerate swimming around in small pens and being fed we are effectively processed food as well but in parallel with that we see the near disappearance of many of Europe's river systems of the wild Atlantic salmon and we're starting to understand what the impact or the connection is between the rise of the farmed salmon and the decline of the the rise of the farmed salmon and the decline of the wild because of, for example, escapees from the farmed system weakening the gene pool of the wild and also the impact of lice build up in the pens so therefore it's still a really important question that more than 50% of the world's fish consumption now is dependent on aquaculture which depends on huge amounts of protein from the sea to feed that system and actually if I can add something on this so I recently did some research into the state of the Mediterranean sea and apparently the Mediterranean is one of the most depleted seas around the world and now 70% I think 75% of the fish stocks are actually either maxima exploited or over exploited which means that we risk actually losing these species over the next few years and I was speaking with some researchers who were saying the proportion is not linear we don't need to necessarily stop fishing altogether but if we already reduced by 20% the amount of industrial fishing we do in these oceans we would give time to the populations to repopulate and have even more but also going back to diversity and lack of diversity we're very much used to always eating the same species and we expect to find always the same sorts of fish in a supermarket for example but some fishermen and researchers were telling me if we just as consumers we're fine with this week or this month there's these either type of fish which we don't know but actually it's going to impact our oceans much less because there's a huge population of this fish and then we let the other ones do well and repopulate in the meantime because as the film demonstrated so well this idea of abundance and consistency and uniformity which again nature doesn't produce that but yeah so I think marine conservation areas, protected areas are really essential and also eating lower down the food chains smaller fish and sardine as opposed to big meaty cod and also there are forms of aquaculture so mollusks so bivalves mussels for example the filter the water and also highly nutritious very low impact about this topic that you just talk about I was thinking is in it like part of the solution to like giving up our privilege about food like all these abundances that we have you know and why do we even eat bananas you know like I wonder if in other parts of the world like in Vietnam for example they're obsessed with blueberries you know and they do everything for having them at the lowest price from the other part of the world you know and it's you know with like obsession for example that we have right now I'm just making some example I don't know like if we don't have something should we try to obtain it at any cost yeah that's a big question of the of the episode and we didn't want to give necessarily the answer to this because it always feels a little strange to tell people you should just have less and we're now used to having so much more but I personally I think consumer awareness about these issues will already change us a little bit hopefully after this conversation already we will look at bananas differently or blueberries differently but there's a big question right now and it's often framed as the sort of wizards versus prophets kind of a challenge not challenge but different perspectives on the food system, the climate any environmental climate challenge Charles Mann framed the argument saying that there's people who are wizards who say you know innovation we will find technology and innovation and we will solve these issues and we will be able to give more to people not tell people that they should restrict their diets and actually we will have to increase our food production by 70% in less than 30 years so we will be able to do it with a new green revolution with new technology new innovation and then there's the prophets who frame the argument from the other perspective they say well actually we're just doomed to eating to extinction and we're just forcing the boundaries of nature a little bit too much and the boundaries of what we can do we're being a bit too arrogant thinking that we will always find the solution because eventually every solution creates a new problem and new problems that we will create will be too big so the problem is that with both of these perspectives we struggle to solve the issue and we probably need to find a sort of an in-between point of view where we do think about reducing a little bit what we're doing and change our consumption especially in countries like Europe where we have maybe too much abundance but then also at the same time we find the new technologies to increase the amount of food that is made available to a growing population and to the 800 million people who don't have even enough food I don't know what you would say The reason why I wanted to show this image because I spent some time in Tanzania with some of the last of the hunter-gatherers in Africa and the argument here isn't we need to go back and become hunter-gatherers again and actually the hads are thoroughly modern human beings who are choosing to live the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers while the outside world encroaches on that so they're under huge amount of pressure but they're still determined to live in that way. What's fascinating is throughout the seasons we have access to 800 different plant and animal species huge amounts of diversity and some days they'll gorge on their favourite food, honey which will be directed to them because of this conversation they've been having or their ancestors have been having with a bird a honey-guide bird, scientific name indicator indicator we think the bird started to lead the hunters to the honey around 100,000 a million years ago as soon as humans were able to control fire and smoke and safely get access to the honey that the bird had led them to the bird in exchange wants the wax and the larvae this is a disappearing conversation but I think the most powerful thing for me in answer to your question is yeah, I mean this idea I mean this idea that supermarkets are giving what we ask for nobody's ever asked me from a supermarket but I think this idea of the the same consistent uniform fruits and vegetables and all of the other foods that fill those supermarket chains I think we just need to just remind ourselves about millions of years of human evolution based around diversity and what we've survived on and depended on and we need to break out of this cycle of this expectation of abundance which you touched on as well and it's a fabricated it's an invented abundance as well but also importantly a superficial diversity based on this the uniform genetic inputs of those three major crops that can be ultra-processed into all kinds of different things so I think the more we understand about the importance of diversity in human evolution we were talking about the gut microbiome earlier today fascinating and really important because the more diverse our gut microbes are the impact on our physical and mental health we now are realising it's significant and the more diversity we eat the more diverse our gut microbiomes I went to visit the house Spence and Plumber that has a epidemiologist Professor Tim Spector who is studying the gut microbiome and realised that the hadsa have gut microbes that have gone extinct in western populations what they do we don't fully understand but the hadsa they die of many other things like falling from trees and accidents and all these other things but they don't die from food related illnesses so there's a really powerful simple message about where we came from in terms of our relationship with the planet with nature, with diversity and how that has been completely overridden in the blink of an eye as you're saying a tiny tiny moment in human history and also on top of abundance it's perfection I was just to answer also the question from earlier the other day I was in a supermarket and they gave me for free they wanted to give me for free a few apples that were slightly bruised and we just throw away so much it's the avocado and the bananas but even just the daily foods that we eat and that are from around us we end up impacting so much on the climate and the resources we use just because we're so spoiled I saw that many Can I just answer that question that you touched on earlier that are these new scientific breakthroughs going to be the solution to everything in terms of who controls the protein production and distribution globally it's the Tysons and the ADMs and the Cargills and Conagra and JBS in South America if you look at who's actually investing in the new protein technologies so the alternative the meat substitutes for example you also find Cargill one of the biggest investors in some of the new alternative proteins really that if the existing model of conventional intensive livestock production is under pressure they are one of the key investors and beneficiaries of the new technologies Thank you so much for your documentary and also for the presentation so far I have this question because if you have all different kinds of foods people tend to be a little bit afraid of tasting new things like what they've learned to eat they attempt to eat and what they've not learned to eat they can be anxious about eating that so perhaps we have to learn to eat again but then pretty much different kind of flavors but how can we learn people to accept all those different flavors because that's very scary for a lot of people yeah I think there's definitely I would say different tiers of this one thing I think is to convince people to eat insects which are very far removed I guess from what we eat but I don't know recently again I've found black chickpeas they're not so far away from a chickpea but there are different varieties of different species of a thing that I'm used to eating so I wonder how much of that will actually be very hard I don't know what you think then but I get your point and I think we should definitely educate to eat again develop a different relationship with foods is necessary yeah and I think in the UK I've been really impressed by visiting schools where they're practicing what they call taste ed it's called taste education where getting beyond what food lessons have become in schools which is 5 a day traffic light systems good calories, bad calories that kind of thing which for kids is A it's boring and B that's scary I think just to be told that taste ed actually you bring the food into vegetables into the classroom and then kids can actually see, touch they use all senses to explore the food which they might not get to see at home or anywhere in the school food system in the canteen for example and it's been running for a few years in different parts of Scandinavia and it's relatively new in the UK but it's already shifting certainly with the parents whose kids are coming home and saying can we try this or can we eat this or can we cook with that but yeah it's a complete re-education because of how powerful this shift has been as a species the fact that we use this science and technology to create this in some ways amazing system but it meant that we have this disconnect and it's a dangerous thing because we all die without good nutrition without food so I think taste education and also I think just the storytelling the reason why I came to write the book was because I fell in love with this project created by Slow Food in the 1990s because they realised all of these traditions and flavours and systems were disappearing and so they created an online catalogue which you can all look at and there's a drop down menu so wherever you are in the world you can see what's disappearing or endangered where you live but more than 5,000 foods from 150 odd countries each one with an amazing story of how it shaped cultures and identities and allowed people to survive and thrive in different parts of the world so again I think people should taste education listen to the stories fall in love with the stories then try the food and then maybe that will reduce some of your anxiety but we shouldn't I think we shouldn't be afraid of food and that's obviously there's a real health issue but again if you think again it's about human evolution and what we how we got here today it isn't because of the last 100 years you've got to think about the last 2 million years we are so adaptable that's the crucial thing and our pallets are so changeable and adaptable and we can be reeducated and reacquainted sourness and bitterness so bitterness in foods is an indicator of chemical compounds that are beneficial to us because they are part of the plant defence mechanism within the 20th century with the new fruit breeding techniques we removed the bitterness we made the fruit bigger and sweeter and to compensate for the lack of defence mechanism in the fruit we spray them with chemicals and bitterness is good for us and we're very adaptable I think so over the course of one generation many things can change so we should be optimistic I hope you don't get mad after my comment bring it on I think you don't understand both did you try to sell each of you a product where you dream about did you try to sell a product where you dream and write about sorry I didn't understand the question the question is maybe I'll get in a different way I think you write wonderful books and very good documentaries but you have to sell the product did you try to sell a product where you dream about where you write about I didn't I've spoken to some of the most leading scientists and experts in their fields around the world to try and distill what we are learning about food and farming systems and put it into a book it's not a dream also I think that our credibility is what makes us sell so I think I don't know if this is my topic is it's all correct what you read and what you tell us but how do you sell this new product with more biodiversity etc etc I'm a farmer I'm already 40 years in the big business and we developed a concept with more biodiversity if you look at the Dutch market 3 persons decide what 12 million people eat every day Albert Heim Jumbo and Superini it accounts for every category 3 people decide what we eat we try to sell a new concept and the door is closed we are struggling 20 years so I think that it's all ok what you write but we have to put a lot more energy and how do we sell the business I completely agree and I also believe that farmers have been some of the biggest victims in the creation of this system and with 3, 4, 5 million euros animal welfare opposite opposite groups are able to tell their story we are in common not able to tell our story so how are we going to tell our story and that we find customers for the right product every farmer is willing to produce that product but he is in a system that he can't move forward, backwards so this is a call for today how are we going to change the system and we need a movement with telling the story and decides to buy those products I think definitely sorry for not understanding the question but we have been talking a lot about what can consumers do I was reading that over the past few decades we have actually become much more consumers and much less citizens and we think that with our individual choices we can change the system and of course we can partially but then also we need to push our governments to make the right decisions to create the right playing field for farmers, for industry to go into the right direction and I think a lot of more political work needs also from the bottom up to change the system unfortunately I don't believe in political systems who are changing the food game I think the consumer has to decide so I think the reason why the slow food story is interesting is because they have this concept of the co-producer so consumers who aren't passive but actually engaged and I also mentioned the fact that technology can actually bring us closer to you as a farmer and a food producer but admittedly I think consumer behaviour needs to change the more of us who know this story and the fact that this is a problem the better I think but also we do need subsidies to change you are going to be locked into a system because there is a concerted effort for allocation of subsidies to follow greater diversity in systems and also the fact that cop is coming up food was neglected in the previous cop but a lot of people have woken up to the fact because of what we are seeing in Ukraine the weaponisation of food we talked about how dependent we are in terms of energy and we ended up talking about the need to diversify food systems as well so the fact that this is such a high priority issue right now I think it is an opportunity for politicians to engage and change the system significantly but it is not going to happen overnight it is going to take a while for that to happen but I do think we all as consumers have a responsibility to understand how this system works and the fact that the farmers are being squeezed in the middle particularly by the retailers but also there are companies such as Unilever who are investing huge amounts of money in diversifying their supply chains and that will hopefully impact on their relationship with the production side of things as well but I can understand why you feel frustrated and angry and locked into the system that is the story I am trying to tell I think there were some questions up there and then one down here yes my question is a little bit about the previous question I think if you look at the title of this event it is about resigning the broken food system but I think the system itself is incredibly efficient you get exactly what you want if you want something else in this system you set up your own company you make it, you try to sell it and exactly what the previous speaker will tell it will 90% of all the business will be out of business within one or two years it doesn't work because this market is too efficient and people want that most of them are in a capitalist system and this is what you get so the solution as an economist I study economy as well and things should be with the government and the government actually is the people we get the government we choose and as long as the government doesn't have a long-term vision of how we have to live together in the whole world not in Holland, no in the whole world if we don't have a vision about that and we don't have long-term plans nothing will change and all these damages like you said the economy is 9 trillion but the damage is 12, so 3 billion damages each year so if we don't price in these damages into the current system nothing will change but that's exactly what I think change is going to happen so the government has to price it in they can set the rules they can set the government system public health budgets are increasing all the time in terms of diabetes obesity we are not stuck in this situation forever because it will not be able to continue as it is but the people have to change first everything people is the government we tend to say something needs to happen first so that something else can happen later but I actually think many things need to happen at the same time and they are I think there's more consumer awareness we are talking about these things and there's thankfully interest in an event like this governments need to change at the same time but we need there's no consumer and then government or government and then consumer there's two paths going in parallel at the same time that's at least the way I see it well if you think also about the trillions of dollars that float around the world from investors as well they are increasingly engaged in investing outside of the existing model because they see risk in the system they see the risk of government regulations because of the consequence of public health they see the risk of disease outbreaks in livestock populations they see the risk of crop failures because of the genetic uniformity as well follow the money the money is going into interesting places in different parts of the world not necessarily just that but in terms of building an alternative food system because they are factoring risk into the existing system there was a question here and then and then there thanks I was thinking we said like 80% of the people buy their food in supermarkets and the supermarkets are not really changing really fast I think and I don't know if they can change fast enough to help this system so isn't it then maybe a solution that we make new food change so we buy our food somewhere else now it's more efficient to go to the supermarket because you can buy there everything so a lot of people go there because it doesn't take a lot of time with all these technology we have there must be solutions to make corporations of farmers and people with good products to make platforms I don't know how but yeah sometimes I think should we wait for the supermarkets or should we just I don't know make a new system a new chain and we'll also maybe trigger the supermarkets that was my question how you think about it I think a big shift is already happening and has been exacerbated by the pandemic I think numbers are changing so many more people now go on online supermarkets than they used to and there's being a shift towards online technologies rather than going in person at the supermarket of course many many people still go but there is a trend that has started and has been exacerbated by the pandemic and so I think that as we move online there are many tools that can be used to interact way differently with the people who produce or bring our food to us one example I mean I can give just a couple of examples from the UK I lived in the UK and I used to use river ferns foods so it's a cooperative of organic farmers all over the UK and then they also have some ties with some organic farmers in Europe and they send weekly boxes you don't have this enormous choice as in a supermarket but they sell seasonal fruits and vegetables plus other essentials and I found that was really good it really changed my relationship with food because in a way I was just receiving something that I had to think about putting together so usually I went the other way around I would go to the supermarket have a recipe get a lot of ingredients that then maybe I wouldn't even use anymore and I had a lot more waste at home but I've changed a lot my relationship with food by just receiving these boxes directly from farmers or at least the intermediaries are much fewer I don't know if this is something that is scalable I don't know if this is something that is the right direction to go into but there's definitely more and more of these initiatives that are popping up a couple of generations ago we might be thinking the small grocery store origins of Tesco was that scalable and obviously who knows what the new models are with the application of new technology in the UK as you mentioned there are box schemes there are dayboats coming out with catch that are being used as the fish equivalent so huge amounts of innovation new ideas in my epilogue in the book I argue these systems will coexist but we need more diversity and we can't afford for all of these resources to just go extinct they will coexist with a commodity system if you are in the commodity system then you are going to be obviously exposed to the global market forces for that but I think with the application of new technology with the new science of what means a healthy diet and good nutrition that means that there will be a huge market and business opportunity for greater diversity in the food system there was a question here there was a question here for a while I'll pass the mic and then sorry thank you both for the time I wanted to go back to the seat bank as I find it quite interesting that there is such a huge diversity store whether it's in Norway or in different seat banks but at the same time it's this quite sterile environment it's very hard for a human being to relate to a place where they try to stop free time literally so how do you think we as consumers can relate more or increasingly to these seat banks is there such a big diversity there and I think in history wise it wasn't there again this is only a backup so for example in the UK there is what we call the heritage seed library which was set up in the 1970s which was again that period when the green revolution is kicking in supermarkets are coming on stream there are new regulations across Europe about seeds and being able to sell seeds and as a response a journalist wrote a letter in a newspaper and said we're losing huge amounts of diversity in our vegetables and fruits and set up a means of seed exchange the heritage seed library is based in Coventry and you can withdraw you can ask for the seeds and then you can grow them in your allotment or in your garden and that's a community of thousands of thousands of people in the UK who were sharing seeds and lots of seed swapping events that take place as well and the main reason they do this is flavour they are tasting things in some of these older varieties that is substantially different to what you get in a supermarket so I think that the vault is important as a backup resource and it's called the doomsday vault for a reason if things do go badly wrong around the world in terms of the viability of the seeds that are being stored in those seed banks future crop breeders even the ones who are breeding crops for commodity they need those genetic resources but at the same time I bet somewhere not that far from where you live there will be a community of seed savers but yeah I'll just give you one example of the application of the seed vault that actually will impact directly on us maybe in the next decade or so in Cambridge there is NIAB it's the National Institute of Agricultural Botany it was set up after the First World War to try and give farmers the best performing crops possible and the scientists who are now working there today are taking seeds of goat grasses from seed banks in Svalbard and also some in the States and also in Turkey as well goat grasses were one of the ancestors of wheat so in the fertile crescent 100,000 years ago there was by chance completely random chance event of a goat grass crossing with a wild ancestor of wheat giving us the evolutionary process and the selection of humans that give us the bread wheat today what these scientists are now doing in the 21st century is going back through the goat grasses that didn't get involved in that event 100,000 years ago and breeding them back in to see what kind of diversity we could have in future wheat I mean it's mind blowing they are going back 100,000 years of wheat history but they are using the seed banks to do that because of concerns over drought, pests climate change lack of water, all of these things to see if there are other genetic traits that were lost in that process that we embarked on so yeah, I think intensely fascinating the whole seed banks but also the application of them today yeah yes we are all with the green switch sorry keep jumping around as well but I wanted to go back to what you were saying about the fact that so many things need to happen at once to have effective transformation because it's something that we haven't really spoken about here but vast food deserts and the fact that good food costs more money like bad food is cheap and I know we are talking about the fact like all this power but a lot of consumers don't have a lot of power which is why I kind of agree with someone who said over there you know governments do need to do something because a lot of these food companies are getting away with I remember writing a story back in the summer holidays in the UK about the fact that all this food that was on our the equivalent of free school meals on summer holidays was terrible for children but they were poor so that's the food you're going to get so I do just think that there needs to be a bit of nuance there perhaps about the fact that not all consumers have this power to make these decisions and that something like a vegetable box is kind of a luxury for a lot of people especially now it's a parent we think it seems that we have all of this power because there is all of these abundance but actually of all of that abundance there's a minority of that abundance that is good food for us actually and absolutely actually 6th episode of the doki series will be all about food deserts and all the things you talked about can we not confuse this as a food problem with that's an economic problem as well people not being paid enough people in poor housing there's a food problem definitely but also there are wider economic problems that are about social justice and actually I think the more research I do into the food system the more I realise that this food system is a part of a much bigger system and so the problems of the food system are not just inherent to the food system it's almost like a symptom of other problems that are going on around and again about the same idea that more things need to happen at the same time but some of them will have to do directly with the food system and some of them will have to do with our socio-economic systems and political systems as well but yeah hopefully we'll change it stay optimistic stay optimistic thank you all for your time so far for all the questions I really like that it was really an actual conversation because you never know but we are in the Netherlands and you show that you are good talkers and have opinions so that's good so let's continue the conversation in the foyer you have all drink tokens there will be magazines and not books but we file but we will definitely sell them talking for food unfolded please follow us reach out to us for a collaboration reach out to us with your stories so that we can cover them and that we can together change this food system I think we tried in a cinema room but we need to continue this discussion and take actions anything to add from your sites no thanks thanks for coming along listening to asking some brilliant questions as well again it's only scratching the surface here but I think it is about knowing the story is the starting point really because there's no way in which we can change anything if we're not informed whether you agree or disagree I think we need to know this history of how we got here and the consequences if we don't engage it thank you