 If we miss the food systems opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if we just let our industrial food system continue on the course it is on, which is deepening the emissions related to it and if we can dig into what some of those are and why, but if we do nothing about food, if we don't shift and transform how we grow food, what we're growing and where we're growing it, even if we got everything right in every other sector, even if we got everything right and every one of us has solar panels on our home and we stop fracking and we stop drilling for new oil, even if we got everything else right, we would still blow our carbon emissions. And LePay is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Anna is a national best-selling author and internationally recognized expert on food systems and a funder supporting food systems transformation. A James Beard leadership award winner. Anna is the co-author or author of three books about food, farming and sustainability and the contributing author to 14 other books around the world. The author of the award-winning diet for a hot planet, which I have right here, editor to her mother's 50th anniversary edition book, Diet for a Small Planet, which comes out September 21st. I don't have the new edition because it hasn't come out yet. I have the 20th year anniversary right here. I did do a podcast with Frankie or Frances Moore LePay as well on her book already and that will come out as the book releases as well. And she's the co-founder of three national organizations, including Small Planet Institute, Real Food Media, and is all over the place doing funding. She has led grant making of the Small Planet Fund for two decades and created the Food Sovereignty Fund. So you're the director or direct the Food Sovereignty Fund of the Panta Rea Foundation. And I could go on and on and on and we will in the podcast. Anna, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. It's so wonderful that you're here and you could take the time. You are so busy. You are all over the place with food and food rights and food insecurity and travesties that are going on there and writing wonderful solutions through food that really can help us solve some of our global grand challenges, not only food insecurities, food injustices, but how can we fix our farming? How can we fix processed food? How can we fix industrial food? And you're really all over in your bio. I only touched on a few things. We could probably talk for hours on it, but you also have podcasts and book reviews where everything from Mark Bittman where it's on real food media. It's basically the real food reads and also podcasts as well that I love. And I've seen you on many TEDx talks. We have a mutual friend, Diane Hatz, and you've spoken at her TEDx conferences in Manhattan. So I'm not only a big fan, but I'm glad to have such a plethora of wisdom and be talking to the person who was there all along with your mother on this diet for a small planet, kind of getting his hands on learning and experience. And that's where I want to start. Was it just through your mother that you kind of got into this, or did it evolve naturally as you watched her? Or how did that experience happen for you to get into this and come to the awakening of how food touches every aspect of our life and how important it is? Well, it's a great question, a nice one to start with also. I mean, the way I think of that question is really twofold. One is how much, certainly my mother, but also my father, he passed away many years ago, but he was an incredible force in my life. He was an epidemiologist and toxicologist and worked a lot to expose how chemical companies impact our everyday lives, particularly for workers like farm workers who are exposed to agricultural pesticides in the fields. So growing up with my mother, who you mentioned, Frances Moorlapay, she wrote her first book, Diet for a Small Planet, two years before I was born actually, but has had a lifelong passion for connecting the dots for people between food and democracy and our own power. And being raised by her, being raised also by my father, who also really had devoted his life to, you know, without being cheesy, you know, trying to make the world a better place. So I think from an early age, I was really infused with a curiosity about how my life might unfold where I could also feel like I was contributing, you know, doing my part to try to make the world a better place. And so definitely their values infused me from my earliest memories. But the second way I would answer that question and how I really got into food as my personal life path really came from an experience that my mother and I had together. When I was 26 years old, I was a graduate student at Columbia University, there you go. And I was studying economic and political development. I didn't think I would focus on food per se, although certainly was passionate about the issues that my mother had written about. And my mother and I were talking about her first book, Diet for a Small Planet. And really this idea I had, my brother and I had for her to go back to the original ideas that were the seeds that were planted in that book, which is that we have to understand the root causes of hunger if we're ever going to fix it. And those root causes are about building real democracy. And so we had the idea for my mother to revisit those original ideas and to write a book that would take people on a journey to see the places and meet the people that were really bringing democracy to life and getting to those root causes. And it was I would say really for me that journey, this incredible experience of meeting the leaders we did and seeing the communities that were really addressing these root causes that set me on my life path. And that book I held up while you were talking, I didn't want to interrupt you, but as Hope said, it's basically discussing that journey, which you co-authored with your mother about your journey and your experiences. It's a it's a thick biblical read, beautiful page turner from end to end, just like Diet for a Small Planet, to back up just one little bit. So for those who don't really know who your mom is, we've tickled it, she wrote 50 years ago now the Diet for a Small Planet. I first came in contact with her book and maybe this is dating both of us, but it's through my grandmother. My grandmother had had the very first copy in her kitchen. It was tattered and torn. The pages were turned. She wrote in anywhere she could. She put her notes in it. And that's where I found it. That's where I I saw it in the original copy we still have. It's actually in my dad's house and in America. I'm in Hamburg, Germany. And so it's just been around for a long time, but the light didn't go on. That awareness of what was right in front of me and that big connection to food and the climate, it just wasn't there. It's like it's a transformation. It's something where you say, okay, I've got to go on this journey. I've got to decide or make kind of almost make the decision that that's the path that my life is going to take. And that's kind of for the listeners what I want to break down today because as I mentioned in your bio, we could talk about numerous books. We could talk about numerous interviews you've had with other experts around the world and experiences in your journey. But I want to take our listeners on this journey of kind of how maybe we could help them to turn on the lighter to see the big connection of how food touches everything in our life and how in many ways it's kind of becoming a huge issue of what our future is going to look like and how well we're doing to meet some of our climate issues and environmental issues that we're seeing around the world. And so that's the path and the journey that we want to set out on. I want to start with a question and I genuinely want to know how it has been. We've been through almost two years of absolute craziness. The inauguration craziness, the pandemic variants of the pandemic now, lockdown, Black Lives Matters, Asian racism, hurricanes, extreme weather conditions, and I could go on and on. There's tons of other craziness. I want to know how have you weathered and specifically on all the learning, all the speaking, all the things that you've been doing for many years before this started. Did any of that help you with a more resilient model to weather this crazy time, to weather the storm, and have any learning lessons or any things, aha moments, or things where I say, boy, some really big issues bubble to the surface of problems with our systems, but also some great aha moments that this is a better model, a way to live to get us through these hard times. That's a big question. I think that, but a good, really good one. And I think, you know, to be really honest, I think like probably everybody, you know, this has been the hardest period in my family's life, my life. And for all the reasons that you just enumerated, we, you know, we've been very fortunate in my own family. We've been healthy. Our kids are in able to go back to school now. But, you know, raising kids in this context of not just COVID, as you said, but the context of everything else you described, being here in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, bracing ourselves for another year of wildfires. You know, it's been exceedingly hard. In addition, my husband has always worked in the labor movement. In the last decade, he's been working for a labor union that represents grocery retail workers, meatpacking workers, and food delivery workers who have been, as probably every listener can imagine, some of the workers who have been the most hardest hit by this pandemic and have had to really stretch the farthest to continue to help put food on our table. And so he's been working, you know, 24-7 to really have to unfortunately pressure those companies to do the right thing, to extend hazard pay or hero pay, to make sure they're protecting worker well-being in the context of all of this. So it's been very hard and definitely have had just some very, you know, deep moments of anxiety and also real what one might think of as climate grief, particularly the moments last fall when the wildfire smoke was the worst we've ever seen here. And even more particularly on the day last fall when the sun never came out. And the sky was so dark that the streetlight stayed on, you know, the ash fell from the sky and my two California kids thought it was snow falling from the sky. And to be a parent in that moment, to be a human in that moment, the incredible grief that I experienced was so profound. And I think the one lesson that really came up for me then, and I keep returning to, is a lesson that actually comes from that time of writing Hope's Edge with my mother of that experience of meeting these incredible leaders from India to Bangladesh, Poland, Kenya, France, Brazil all around the world. And these leaders that we met were up against some of the biggest obstacles one could ever imagine. If we met with land reform leaders in Brazil who had seen members of their movement murdered in their efforts to organize for land reform, we met farmer organizers in India who were helping to transition Indian farmers to organic practices in communities where the rates of suicide were astronomical because of the indebtedness from buying pesticide inputs because of the incredible impact of the environmental damage of chemical agriculture had in those communities that there was this incredible epidemic of suicide. And so I say all this to say that in that context, what I kept coming back to is that these leaders that we met were some of the most joyful, one might even say hopeful people I had ever seen in my life. And person after person we kept inquiring, you know, what, how is this possible? You know, you are facing these incredible barriers and real trauma. And what we kept hearing and, you know, translated in different languages with slightly different words was a message that stayed with me this full time. The message that was really resonant for me was that their sense of hope and that joyfulness for them came from a choice they made to be taking action, that in the act of joining the landless workers movement in Brazil, in the act of working with Vandana Shiva's Navdanya network in India and training farmers on how to free themselves from pesticides, that that was their source of joy. And that hope then turned in my mind from what I had seen as kind of a cheesy, fluffy, airy fairy emotion, you know, you're sort of head in the clouds because you're hopeful and you're not really looking at how bad things are. Instead hope for me and my mother became this sort of wellspring of energy that you could tap and the way you would tap it, the way you would generate that hope in your own body is through taking action, trying to be part of making change in the world. And so when I have found myself in these very deep dark moments of COVID and these deep dark moments of climate grief, I have come back to that and come back to that sense of even in these darkest times, we can dig deep enough to choose that hope and choose that joy. And choosing joy, I think, is a very radical act when we are in this moment where there is so much suffering and there is so much reason to feel deep anxiety and grief. And that, you know, in hope's edge, that's the overarching theme that we can read throughout is that there is a lot of hope. But it's always on the edge, you know, there is a lot of hope. And why are these people so hopeful and very miserable, hard conditions or the struggles that they face, they still have these optimism that is unbelievable. And I love how you tie that together. That really brings me perfectly to the next big question. And it's really, you kind of caveat it. So there's a lot of people in hope's edge and even your other books, your mother's other books that are all around the world, you know, this global food system. And so I want to frame this question in a couple of different ways. Do you feel like you're a global citizen and how would you feel about a world with the removal of borders and nations and divisions, human beings, one from another? And the reason I kind of ask it in that way is this time of lockdown, economic crisis in these two years of craziness that we've experienced, food was a global citizen. We've seen that the pandemic was a global citizen. And we've seen that really it affected everyone around the world. But we as humans were locked down and separated in this rise of nationalism, one against each other came up. And the UN for the last two years, it was supposed to really go into effect last year. But this year, they've kind of come out with this UN food system summit that they're trying to get the global voice on global food systems. I want to know what your take is on this question, kind of under that guys and set up how you see it and how you see it with your past books and journeys and how you speak about food in general. Yeah, great. Well, first, I want to just put one little amendment you were talking about what I was saying about hope and that sense of optimism. I'd like to amend that to say, my mother and I like to call ourselves not optimists or not pessimists, but possibleists. Because, you know, I think if you really dig into what does optimism really mean, it means that you have a kind of surety that things are going to work out. Pessimism is the flip side, you know, the hubris that you really think nothing is going to work out. And I think that we have been humbled enough by witnessing again and again, incredible movements that we never thought would gain traction, incredible efforts that we never thought would spread to see those movements grow to see those efforts spread to give ourselves that sense of possibility and that you never know what's possible. So I would just like to put a little flag in that. So I'd like to think of ourselves as possibleists, not necessarily optimists. But to your this question, which I think is really interesting and multifaceted, I'll start with where you where you got to with the question about this moment in time of the United Nations Food Systems Summit and what we might learn from some of the debate around that summit about what global governance might look like in this moment. So to back up, I think that zooming out, we know that the crises we face cross borders, greenhouse gas emissions that we emit here in the U.S. affect the world. And unfortunately, the people who have had the least impact on climate who have emitted the least greenhouse gas emissions are now being affected the most. And so the onus of responsibility is really should be disproportionately on the shoulders of countries like the United States that have had such a big impact. So we know we need to function as a planet to be able to really meet those climate targets. Similarly with food, we know that we need to work collectively in order to again address those root causes of hunger and to finally end hunger on a world that produces plenty of calories for everyone. Right. So there is this deep question about what would effective global governance look like. And what we have seen over the past several decades is really powerful organizing by everyday people organized through civil society everywhere in the world to try to gain a voice in the highest levels of global governance like at the United Nations. And they have done so through a number of governance mechanisms that have said, look, we everyday people, we social movements representing the public interest should have the seats at the table to be deciding what happens to everyday people around the world. And we need to have very clear conflict of interests barriers so that those seats at the table aren't filled with the private interests of either the fossil fuel companies or in the case of food, the pesticide companies or the meat industry so that it is actually a fair playing field and that the voices of everyday people are heard equally. And what critics of the United Nations food system summit have said is that by shifting this conversation to New York City, by shifting how that table has been set and who gets to sit at the chairs around that table, that actually it's setting us backward from some progress that had been made to really have civil society voice really strong and heard. So I really have appreciated the very clear calls from academics and scientists and civil society leaders from all around the world to raise these fundamental questions about is this United Nations food system summit actually taking some of the reins for this global governance framework and putting it into private interests hands. And so I think it's a really important conversation to be had and I was really pleased to see this fairly united strong global voice speaking up about it. I love that and that's what I see as well. I see also where actual UN delegates some countries in Africa that are pulling back and say we're not going to participate, we're not happy that there is not a balanced representation of public and civil society at the UN food system summit but why does Bayer and Monsanto or other chemical companies or tobacco companies have a seat at the table when they're part of the cause of the problem and they've got the monies, the lobbyists to be there and to control that already. We've heard their voice, we've seen what they do with their voice. Let's get those who can globally reform our system and not keep it one that tries to use every last drop of those fertilizers of those seeds of those fossil fuels in that system until it's too late to make a true switcher system. And I'm glad the way you framed it as well. I'm not going to let you off the hook though because I still want to hear a little bit more about this, not necessarily globalization but this global citizenry, this voice on how a lot of us and maybe I'll give you one other example of that so that maybe you have some things that you can discuss with that. Before the pandemic, we had the whole Brexit craziness and that kind of came into fruition but then with the pandemic and the lockdown, the borders were closed so all those migrant workers between 200,000 and clear up to 600,000 a year that go to the United Kingdom to work in the food system, agriculture, gastronomy, food and beverage industries there, they weren't allowed to go in anymore because of the pandemic and lockdown and so we saw all sorts of craziness around food in that system but then there's another caveat that most of that food that the United Kingdom produces is not always produced in the United Kingdom, it's produced in about five times that same land mass around the world somewhere and so food is a global citizen, it's affecting us all over the world but we're not making that connection of how it ties and sustain each other and we're locking us down as individuals but not saying but for food that's okay, food can be a global citizen, we're going to extort and extract resources and food and manipulate workers and those things around the world so that UK can survive and it's not just the UK, I can give him any countries that are doing the same thing and so I kind of still would like to hear maybe, it doesn't even need to be political but it needs to be something I'd like to know your stance and what your thoughts on that is maybe a way of solution or not a solution. Yeah well this goes back to what I was saying before about the need to organize globally on these global issues because if we don't we know what happens so let's look at tobacco for instance and the organizing against the tobacco industry really early on advocates realized that the extent to which they were successful say in the United States the tobacco companies would say fine fine you want to completely stop smoking you want to have no market for tobacco in the United States there are so many other markets that we can exploit fine I mean they did not actually say fine they fought for the markets here and they've continued to sell their products here and shift into things like e-cigarettes so maybe not fine but they they understood that there is a world to be exploited of markets around the world and one could say similar similar things for anything we're trying to address when it comes to environmental issues and public health you know plastics for instance the plastics industry the extent to which any one country can pass an effective single-use plastics ban the industry will move into another country so people have long understood the need to organize collectively and the third example so tobacco plastics the third example I would give is organizing around pesticides so pesticides which is a broad term that refers to everything from the agricultural chemicals to kill weeds to the chemicals to kill insects or rodents or fungus so pesticides is this really broad category we have seen an astronomical increase in pesticide use over the past several decades it has been devastating to people to ecosystems there was a study that came out last year that for the first time in 30 years actually estimated how many people how many farmers and farm workers are impacted by pesticides every year they found staggeringly 44 percent of all farmers and farm workers in the world have at least one incident of an acute pesticide poisoning experience every year so we're talking about an incredible impact on people there was another study two years ago that for the first time really tried to pull together all the data we have about insect population loss and found that about a third to 40 percent of all insects on the planet are threatened with extinction over the next several decades and the single largest driver of that insect population decline is pesticides used in agriculture and monocultures you know large large swaths of land to grow one kind of crop so we know that we cannot play whack-a-mole with this industry and just you know ban one pesticide in one country and and because what we've seen happen is those companies then just exporting to other places so to your question about then how do we see ourselves in this context it is 100 percent that we have to see ourselves as part of a global community and have to think about how we organize then across uh across nations so that we don't essentially have you know sort of think about protecting our own place and in the case of pesticides literally exporting the most toxic pesticides elsewhere to the extent that we succeed say in banning a pesticide here in the US so I really come to this work from that global perspective now the sticky question then becomes strategy and how do you actually operationalize that and you know there's we could get into that but I do think that uh it's always been a reality that our planet is you know is an island you know we are in this together as cheesy as as that might sound we've always known that we have to organize in that fashion and um and yet you know it there's it's not easier said than done but bringing that kind of mentality to our work I think is really important and so I'm I'm going to try to I'm I'm totally in alignment with you I want to kind of see if I can summarize it in just it's not cheesy at all I think you're saying we're all crew members of this spaceship earth we're all on this island together and so of course duh we are global citizens um we're not divided amongst ourselves because and you kind of tickled on it before that um we're all breathing the same air we're all drinking the same water and eventually there is no place to hide from these pesticides and these chemicals and things that get into our food and into our atmosphere and into uh that to not just hide from climate change and global warming but to hide from the effects of those feedback loops on those things that we're putting into our our spaceship earth that that's getting it's occurring faster and faster and so in some of your books and some of your writings you talk about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and she talked a lot about pesticides and chemicals um Maria Rodale Organic Manifesto does as well you and I have both interviewed on the Monsanto papers um and I had that's why I was looking I was looking for her book here from Island Press and basically I think we stand in the same place as far as how we feel about these chemicals but you also write articles for for civil eats and there was an article that you did that was beautiful that really talked about this and it was it was actually March uh the exact date was March 21st 2021 science came out with this basic global food systems mission so our global food systems are having these emissions and also effects through pesticides and chemicals and and and causes of our food system that are going to put us well over the 1.5 possibly two degrees of climate change just that one aspect alone and um and even though the question was about global citizenry I think we're leading into this we're all on this spaceship earth what's happening how big of an effect is our food systems having on our planet on human suffering and our global grand challenges and so I would I would kind of like you to go a little bit more into that and and um why you've chosen that because is that the biggest drawdown lever that we need to fix in order to to get us into a place of of less climate warming or we've got a is that something you've picked out or it's just something because of this paper you want to make sure we know about it to to move forward on it yeah well let me back up to say my journey my food and climate journey really started about 13 14 years ago in uh my tiny walk-up brooklyn apartment I happened to to run across a really long very wonky policy paper from the united nations that for the first time tried to assess what were the greenhouse gas emissions so what was the climate impact essentially from the livestock industry globally and these researchers for the first time pulled all the data from all the different ways in which livestock affects climate from both the methane emissions that come from ruminants like cattle when they belch when they digest their food to the emissions associated with growing all the feed that we need to feed livestock so livestock production globally uses about 80 of all agricultural land so you're talking about a huge land user the fact that so much of the deforestation that we are also concerned about is actually being driven by demands for livestock feed or cattle grazing put that all together and what the researchers found was at the time livestock related emissions were actually greater than all the emissions associated with transportation so trains and planes and uh automobiles and I remember reading this and shipping right I mean name all your all of the transportation varieties you know uh it all of that combined was less than livestock emissions at the time and that's just livestock we're not talking even full the full food system and I remember reading this report and being shocked because I thought I was somewhat climate savvy but all of the focus at the time rightfully so I should say right I mean it's not like we shouldn't also be talking about transportation and our energy sector of course and uh but I was I felt like there was a missing part of the conversation and what this March 2021 piece was saying is that we now have very clear evidence that we have to do everything we can across every sector to limit ourselves to hopefully 1.5 degrees celsius but probably even you know probably we're looking at closer than two even if we get everything right and the point that I was making when I wrote the book that emerged from that original journey diet for a hot planet and the point that I was making in this piece just this year is that if we miss the food systems opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we just let our industrial food system continue on the course it is on which is deepening the emissions related to it and if we can dig into what some of those are and why but if we do nothing about food if we don't shift and transform how we grow food what we're growing and where we're growing it even if we got everything right in every other sector even if we got everything right and every one of us has solar panels on our home and and we stop uh uh fracking and we we stop drilling for new oil even if we got everything else right we would still blow our carbon emissions and so what uh I definitely do not like to play the game of you know is your strategy more important than mine absolutely not we need to be pulling every climate lever we can and the message that I and colleagues are are hoping to elevate is that food systems offers food systems change offers a really powerful lever to reduce our climate impacts partly or maybe even especially because the things that we can do to make our food systems less of an impact on climate they also are the very shifts that we need to make and can make to make farming more resilient to the weather shocks that come with climate change to produce healthier food that's better for our bodies and better for you know better for public health to do things like you know reducing the pesticide load that's having this huge impact on on insects that you know Rachel Carson warned us about so many years ago so food systems levers are this important tool again not only to help what climate scientists would say you know mitigate climate change but also to really help us create the kind of resilient societies we are going to need because climate change is here we're the weather shocks are here and we have to be retooling our communities and our food systems to prepare for that too. Okay you've you've set me up here with your answer to go in a couple directions so in your book you talk about restoration agriculture for Mark Shepard you actually go out and visit him and it's a perfect way not only to farm but a perfect example of how we should be doing and what we should be looking towards my kind of question I want to throw out there so I talk about food I've been talking about it not as long as you but pretty pretty long time and I also speak a lot about the reports and and whether it's the eat lancer report whether it's the report from the UN that you you talk about in 2015 the United Nations food and agriculture organization came out and said we have 70 harvest left and today's date September 10th we have 45 harvest left with traditional industrial agriculture before our soils before we're done with on that type of farming we need to heal our biome heal our soils and the way we do not only agriculture not only seafood but on how we process food the aromas flavors pesticides preservatives chemicals that we use and high pressure processing or or food processing procedures is just out of this world and so I want to go back to I love Paul Hawking I love the drawdown book and it talks about you know what are the top 100 ways we can draw down global warming well for everybody who who likes these reports and think that's the way to to flip the switch and just the light goes on and then you can never look back and get some action the oil coal and gas industry the tobacco industry the automotive industry the telco industry they're on the list of people doing bad and doing harm to our planet to human suffering but they're probably about seven eight or nine or ten on the list the big ones on the list is the the thing that runs our batteries the human homo sapien battery breathing food water that's our energy source that's the basic energy source and from one to seven food and empowering women and girls and and and the farmers around the world that's really the biggest drawdown factor to save our planet to kind of get us to that ideal resilient future of or a better future of 1.5 or less degrees of warming and what I've seen over all the books that I've read and all the people is these statistics and data are great but do we need that Anna to to give that data to people for them to make that shift or can we go back to what what you mentioned and what I both mentioned as well wouldn't it be easier if we make that connection that we're all star stuff that we're all crew members on this spaceship earth and that we're all part of this big organism this this consciousness that's emerging that sees the planet as one organism and an organism fighting against itself is doomed and we're basically fighting against other homo sapiens about all these systems and we're ruining our world instead of saying hey if my gut biome is doing well if my soil biome of my planet is doing well our future is going to be well and instead if we use other things that's kind of going to turn out bad and so the real question is do we need those reports do we need the science articles do do we need that to make the shift is that also the key or is that just in in climate communication is that just telling us how bad it's going to get well I think it's both and and I and I say that not as a way to escape giving you a straight answer but because I truly do believe it's both and and what I mean by that is that you know we know from decades of neuroscience about how our human brains are wired to respond to story and how powerful the stories that we hold in our mind are so George Lakeoff at UC Berkeley neuroscientist likes to talk about this in terms of frames or frames of reference and that our our human ability to manage so much information hinges on this very human capacity and drive to create frames of reference in our minds and these are kind of the scaffolding on which all data or new new information comes in and George Lakeoff will talk about how our frames are so powerful that if the facts that we are getting don't fit our frames we are more likely to discard the fra the facts than to change our frame and so what I hear you asking is how do we change people's frames and is it through fact or not and what I would say is you know facts are essential this data and the science and I'll come to this as the both and part is essential to making the changes we need to make but you cannot forget that we humans are driven by story and that we also need to lead with story and that what my mother and I have found in our work is that there is incredible power in story to help people shift their frame and one of the keys to that one of the ways in which story can do that is when we traveled to write hopes edge movement leader after movement leader talked to us and shared their own stories about how their consciousness shifted to come to the place that they did which was often you know it's really radical movement leaders and that often they talked about these moments of cognitive dissonance you know for instance we heard from the leader who had been you know a farmer their whole life but who'd become a organic farming leader but he talked about how for most of his adult life he had been using pesticides and using synthetic fertilizer and kind of following this kind of chemical dependent agriculture that he had been taught in the United States is the way you do it it's the most efficient it's the best it's you know the you know it's going to get you the most money and it wasn't until he had this moment of cognitive dissonance where he himself woke up in a hospital bed sick and poisoned he realized from the pesticides that he was using that he had this kind of shift of thinking of opened up his mind to maybe what I was doing was actually not life-serving and not good for my farm not good for me not good for my you know bottom line and he started exploring this different path and ended up actually developing a really successful organic farm that is you know more productive better for his own health you know better for his bottom line and what we share in our book Hope's Edge and what we talk about all along is that how can we help people have these moments of cognitive dissonance where their frame can shift without having every farmer have to be lying in the hospital bed before they have that shift and one of the ways that we think you can do that is through telling stories is through telling the story of people who have made those transitions for instance telling the story of people who have explored you know different paths and have come to you know really shift their frame so stories are important but I will say reports are so essential the science the data we cannot build for a food system of the future without actually grounding that in the data and so you know I would say you know often in the funding world especially when I talk to philanthropists they say well Anna you know where's the evidence that you can actually grow enough food to feed everybody without using toxic pesticides and synthetic fertilizer and thanks to the hard work of researchers around the world I can say here is a study let me show you this study from the European Union where actually dozens of scientists modeled if you shifted every single European Union country to ecological farming practices over the next 10 years here's what the science found about what the yields would look like guess what they're actually you know yes they might go down a little bit but since you're growing food that feeds people directly and that doesn't go into things like biofuels or feedstock for industrial livestock actually more people get to eat healthy food in this model and hey here's the data that shows that you're going to reduce pesticides so much you will have an incredible bounce back of insect populations and bird populations and all kinds of positive ecosystem benefits and here's the data that shows if you make this shift over the next 10 years the farmers in these European Union countries are going to do better economically so the data is vital the data is on our side but you cannot just have data you also have to have stories and when you use one might be different than when you might use another but they work in concert together and they are vital you can't have one without the other I appreciate you explaining that for us and kind of why that works I want I want to play the devil's advocate and flip the switch a little bit for us to use chemicals and pesticides to use industrial agriculture there weren't any reports or studies that allowed the blatant craziness in the industry for seeds and chemicals for them to be able to do that but now we're held at a higher standard of reports and papers to prove that there is a better way and a healthier way for our planet that doesn't ruin our soil and that is it's craziness and in a lot of ways because the the books and reports are out there we've talked about Rachel Carson and I've talked about the organic manifesto we've talked about you know numerous new ones but some that are 50 years old obviously your diet for a small planet and many others that we're just not the reports are out there saying hey that this is going to go wrong eventually you know it's a small planet we can only do this so long and then it's going to come back and bite us and hurt us and we're seeing that at the extreme cost of human suffering around the world it's those developing countries that see it first but honestly just in the past less than a month Germany Belgium London have experienced extreme droughts because of poor soil because of poor infrastructure because of ways that they've treated their environment their biome and tried to farming that have made their cities insecure for flooding and all sorts of other issues um part of part of the issues that we're facing with the pandemic and future pandemics has to do with the health of our biome of our soils of our air pollution and the type of industry the way we produce things there's this there's this wonderful book I don't know if you've read pharmacology Daphne Miller um not super new but fairly new but the interesting thing is as it led to an epiphany for me which which I want to bring up I always say it's not about the brands of the future plant-based foods alternate proteins or the brand type okay this new silent drink or something that will stop human suffering and fix our environmental or our global grand challenges it's about the way we produce anything that will solve human suffering and our global grand challenges and what I mean by that is if we use renewable methods without chemicals fertilizers pesticides aromas flavors sugarings without fossil fuels without those things it's it's almost virtually impossible to have a product that's going to be bad for human health or our environment but if we use those things and high high processing and all those things it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to have cancer or some kind of issue down the road health or environmental issue down the road that's going to come back to there's a reckoning there's there's something there and the epiphany that I had is if you take two identical products no matter what they are and you hold them in front of each other once high pressure or high processing and with chemicals and fertilizers and the other one is organic or regenerative organic or biodynamic or however you want to say you look at the ingredient list on the label or the packaging they could look identical it's like a generic drug that you you know aspirin or whatever it could look identical but when you open them up and you smell them and and you look at the contents yeah the contents could be the same but the way they're produced is totally different and one can maybe help you and the and the other one could probably kill you or make you sick or do nothing it there's no efficacy in it because it's dead you know it was used with dry dry products or high high processing and so I always say it's about how we produce anything that will truly solve human suffering and our global ground challenges so I want to know how you feel about that and kind of if I'm being too mean of playing the devil's advocate on why aren't why aren't the chemical companies or the tobacco companies or those held at that same standard that we're now we're actually setting the bar high because we're the ones setting that standard I think in some respects to get us into a better place. Well this is a great question and it and it gets to I mean don't get me wrong it makes me completely frustrated that we have to keep repeating the same science over and over you guess what we knew that millions of farmers and farm workers were getting sick from pesticide exposure every year but yes we needed to pull that data together to be able to say it's 44 percent of all farmers and farm workers having at least one moment of acute pesticide poisoning which is really a signal that they could be developing you know a long-term illness you know 10 20 30 years down the line developing a cancer related to pesticide use right so no it makes me very frustrated that we have to keep doing this science and research but of course we do and one of the reasons here in the United States we do is because of our policy policy frameworks that actually determine things like pesticide residues that are you know what what level of pesticide residue is that's safe for human consumption all of that is based on industry self-reported data and it's based on a kind of cost-benefit analysis it's based on absolutely the onus of that research the onus of proof on the shoulders of those of us who are trying to show that this this causes harm compare that to a very different approach taken for instance largely taken in the European Union of something called the precautionary principle so the precautionary principle flips that on its head and says you know you the producer of some novel pesticide it's on your shoulders to prove that this does not cause harm not on ours to show that it might so it's a really different policy framework that we're operating in here that does absolutely put the burden on us to prove harm and I'll give you an example of what does this mean and how does it impact our everyday lives in a really harmful way I think a really powerful example is the long debate around an insecticide called chlorpyrifus and so this is an insect insecticide that's been historically used in homes and you know kill cockroaches and other bugs but also used widely in agriculture so researchers over many years showed that there is incredible evidence that even very low levels of exposure to chlorpyrifus harm children's brains we know that it is a fact the science shows it but because of our policy frameworks it took incredible amount of advocacy to I think it was the 1996 to finally ban chlorpyrifus but only for home use because the agribusiness lobby was so powerful and the chemical lobby was so powerful that they pushed for and allowed for the government to still have chlorpyrifus used on agricultural land so flash forward to just before Trump was inaugurated the EPA looked at the data again and again the data was really clear there is no safe level of this insecticide for children we should not be spraying it by people who may be pregnant maybe coming pregnant we should not be spraying it near schools near nurseries near homes we should not be using this chemical and the EPA's own data showed that they were poised to ban it and what happened we saw the the inauguration of the Trump administration we saw a quarter of a million dollar gift to the republican national convention from the pesticide company that produces chlorpyrifus in this country we saw that same company give more you know campaign contributions to Republicans and we saw the Trump administration's EPA back away from its own data to keep chlorpyrifus on the market so in those intervening years we saw communities around the country organized saying okay if the federal government isn't going to ban this we will we saw organizers in hawaii were at the forefront of this work and they were the first to pass a statewide ban of chlorpyrifus and flash forward to just recently we thankfully saw the EPA finally agree to and commit to banning chlorpyrifus for use on agricultural land so I tell this story as one to show in our particular regulatory framework here in the u.s. it is enormously hard to make smart everyday policy choices that are protective to people and planet so you know we really need to be firing you know in all directions to be sure that we're developing strategies that build the kind of political power that we need to protect our government from private interests to ensure that we're seeing some policy again move in the direction we need to do not just for climate but also for our health I think you've answered it that that was perfect and I promised we would go deep and that we would be on a journey so it's definitely something that that we're going to do but I want to I want to shift which is we hear this statistic quite a bit and it's fluctuated as fluctuated during the past two years that out of everything the agriculture seafood food and beverage industries in the world produces that you know we've heard 30% is wasted one third is wasted we've heard even during these past almost two years we've heard 40% is wasted but we really don't understand that that percentage or that number totally so yes it's it doesn't make it to a person's plate it's not consumed it's thrown away and sometimes that that waste or that problem is thrown back on to the consumer in many respects but what what we're really missing is that it's not just what no matter what number we take whether it's one third or it's or it's 40% it's not just the resource waste it's not just the emissions that went into produce that the time the harvesting the land the water the resources that we use the packaging the transport and those emissions it's not just that waste but the top three ways that we dispose of our waste in this world the number one way is we bury it in a landfill the number two way was we burn it and the number three way is we throw it in our waterways our oceans and the number one way is really coming back to bite us the hardest because when we bury that with dirt in packaging or not in packaging and this is what we saw during the this brexit and the pandemic that they didn't have harvesters to pick the food so they were just tilling it back into the ground covering it with dirt which could have some benefit but it has a problem when you bury food with dirt in packaging or not at ferments it aggregates and it creates methane and methane is a greenhouse gas and it's 84 times more effective at reducing heat than CO2 and in the short term it's a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 and so now we've got this exponential it's not just that 40 percent or that one third it's this exponential being to deal with and that's what you you said just earlier in our conversation that in this article through civil eats how agriculture actually and the chemicals and the methane and the ruminants are such a big impact but we didn't even talk about food waste in that that's just the ruminant study right so now I want to talk about that and what your thoughts your feelings and and again is the solution do we have a solution and is the solution how we produce yeah well well to back up for listeners who really want to get the big picture we'll start there and I want to and then I'll go immediately into food waste because it's such a huge opportunity right it's like we don't need to do that and we know how to we know that there's some really you know some of it might be kind of thorny and tricky to figure out but some of the ways we can reduce food waste are pretty obvious and we can talk about that in a second but again for your listeners to just understand big picture the latest data that we have estimates that the whole food system so we're talking about you know all the everywhere around the world all kinds of food not just meat and dairy but everything we eat and everything it takes to produce that food is responsible for about 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions of our climate impact and when we think about greenhouse gas emissions when we say that term we think about climate impact we're really talking about three gases we're talking about carbon dioxide we're talking about nitrous oxide we're talking about methane which you just mentioned food and agriculture are huge contributors in particular to methane and nitrous oxide and both of which have a much higher heat trapping capacity than carbon dioxide and you know are really important to be focused on as well okay so that's big picture let's drill into food waste you mentioned different figures of how much food we're wasting you know the estimates vary partly because they vary by place by country by region even by city but anything on the order of magnitude of I've seen globally 40 percent of food wasted you know we're talking about a significant amount of food we waste which is crazy and it's particularly crazy when you hear people say we need to use more synthetic fertilizer and use more pesticides because we need to grow more food to feed people even if we didn't change anything about our production models one could argue if you just reduced food waste cut out all food waste imagine how much more food people would have to eat themselves right yeah it's less than one quarter of that percentage we're talking about could feed everyone who's not being fed or malnutrition and cover it so why is this food waste happening and how do we address it and the answers to that are are really uh manifold there are many reasons why we're wasting food you and I as individual consumers I've seen estimates of you know we waste about $600 or more per person of food every year of just the you know the the stuff in the back of your refrigerator and you know I don't think we're going to solve global is that Dana Gunder's book yeah awesome waste free kitchen so we could all we could all read that I don't think we are going to solve none of us should should imagine that we are going to you know solve the world's problems by just you know putting solar on our on our roofs and getting an induction stove and making sure we don't have any moldy leftovers in our fridge but at the same time guess what let's also while we're you know fighting these big fights make sure we don't have any moldy leftovers in our refrigerator it saves you money and you know it helps to make sure that you're you know getting your nutritious food that you spent your hard money on so yes individually we can do things like that Dana Gunder's book actually has really great tips and I it's changed my own practice around my food and my refrigerator so yes individually we can do that but of course it's bigger and it needs systems that's just a very small yeah that's really small part really small part I would say one of the it varies also by region so the data shows that in developing countries a lot of waste happens at the because there isn't proper storage maybe not as much refrigeration so there's actually you know kind of built environment things we can do in places that might not have infrastructure to to provide you know storage facilities and so on so I think a really overlooked opportunity to reduce food waste in the United States is actually to invest in workers and training for workers in food retail environments so a lot of what you see happening from the food retail sector is you know jumping on campaigns against food waste but it's really focused in two directions outward it's focused on how we consumers can waste less food in our kitchens and how they can get great tax write-offs and benefits from donating product to food banks what you don't hear from these retailers about is how actually investing and training their workforce investing in their own worker well-being putting more workers to work in their stores can be a really really effective way to reduce food waste so you know I don't hear enough of the story that actually food waste is partly a labor story and and that's I think a really powerful intervention the second really powerful intervention is a lot of food waste again driven in part by food retailers happens because farmers are not able to sell their product to a retailer if it's not the perfect head of broccoli or the perfect sized carrot and so a lot of what you see happen is product actually being plowed back into the field because a farmer has lost a market for it because it's not perfect doesn't quite you know size up so again we can look at how we can take a page from other countries that have really promoted kind of you know the funky fruit and vegetable movement to say all the carrots don't need to be the same size in the grocery store and and and really make sure that farmers are able to get their product to market the final thing I will say around the food waste piece is that that again I think this is where yes we as individuals connect but there are just these huge institutional shifts that can be made so on college campuses for instance there's an incredible epidemic of food waste and some pretty simple interventions have been shown to make a huge difference so something as simple as not giving college students trays to put their meals on has been found to reduce you know I was a college student once too and we would get a tray you'd fill it with all the incredible things of all the food in the cafeteria you wouldn't eat it all so small kind of behavior change interventions like that but at a systems level at an institutional level can also make a really big difference I think there's a bunch of things that you uncovered and one of them is really that are these industries agriculture seafood food and beverages cafeteria food services in some respects are not up to speed with the best most effective ways to one reduce food waste but also give us the proper the the proper amounts of food and that we need and and to put those things in place that would really minimize not just food waste but also a lot of the food issues that we're having and when I look at the food processing industry it's really not about how can we deliver the most healthy vital product possible it's more or less how can we produce that at the cheapest possible price with the machinery that's probably outdated with poor labor standards and and and that as possible so that we can get the biggest profit margin in there so that we can be viable and so and what you said in your answer if I if I can almost hear the the industry lobbyists in the background saying well we wouldn't make any money or well we're already selling it as cheap as possible there's no margins and whatever else and the cost is being reaped in the human suffering in the health problems and the insurance and health industries that we're seeing those and the the biggest cost is being seen in our environmental impact not just with pandemics but with really a huge soil degradation issues in our waterways and things that we're seeing around the world and that comes to a total different thing and I would like you to speak on this if you don't mind or your thoughts or opinions we don't talk about the true cost of food we don't talk about the total environmental cost of food I can go to the grocery store here in Hamburg Germany and buy I kid you not buy a mango from Vietnam or Thailand for one euro it traveled from Thailand or Vietnam to Germany thousands of kilometers how can that be one euro where's the water the time the harvest the transport that's not there and I that's just one example there's many foods like that and it's like that all over the world we're not charging the true cost of food and someone somewhere and it's usually the environment and suffering and developing countries has to pay that cost and so and that ties also into food waste as well and so I guess the question is around that are you seeing that not only in in 2021 we had a book come out the true cost accounting book which I'm fabulous a lot of the people you and I have interviewed on our podcasts and books we've read written in that book as well but I want to know what are you seeing besides that information coming about that those industries are saying hey it's time for you to pay the historical carbon emissions of producing coca-cola or unilever of producing your products want you to pay the historical greenhouse gas emissions but I want you to pay the true cost of food that's caused suffering of humans and our environment well it's funny you mentioned that true cost accounting book because as you were asking this question I was going to say you should read this book it's really powerful it's fabulous it's fabulous and I think that it's part of this broader again global effort to create a true cost accounting framework to bring that into dominant policymaking because what what we have to remind ourselves I remember about 20 years ago when I was studying economics and graduate school are in economics system and school of thought was is is built on this really outdated and really dangerous model of economic thinking that talks about everything that you just described the impacts of production on on water quality on human health on climate on you name it as externalities things that do not show up on any business's balance sheet they don't have to pay them it who pays it you and I do all of us do right and so we really do need a shift in something as fundamental as how we have organized the economics of our societies so that that true cost accounting is being done and one way is to you know the first step is to even make it all visible you know what is the true cost so you mentioned this great book I saw the Rockefeller Foundation just commissioned a study to look at what is the true cost of food in the United States and it's you know on an order of magnitude of trillions of dollars and to me this gets that actually a really critical strategy that I think can be really effective for how we are going to deal with these grand global problems as you described them and it is to both yes have kind of new frameworks for understanding but also it is to look at how who have benefited from these systems how has power and wealth concentrated and how can we rest some of that power and wealth concentration back so my colleague called Carl Burkhart at One Earth just wrote a paper about you know how to how to take on this thorny question of the climate crisis and he talked about the need to follow the money and show us the money and one of the things he showed me the money right and he reminds us that of course not only during the pandemic did the wealthiest billionaires see their assets grow something on the order of magnitude of like 27 or 30% but there has been an incredible concentration of wealth over the past several decades so that today he reported that .03% of the world's population so the wealthiest .03% of the world now controls 100 trillion dollars in assets and if we were to generate a wealth tax of just 1.5% on those assets which you know 1.5% doesn't sound like that much and I think that you know once you get passed having a billion dollars I'm not really sure you know why you need more than more than that or you know do you even need a billion but 1.5% tax on that those wealthiest .03% would generate enough economic power to completely fund the transformation we would need to make an energy sector and across the board to fundamentally address the climate crisis so I think we need to be thinking about strategies that are that bold and that look at how do we tax the wealthy how do we actually start shifting power and resources back to the public so that we can actually direct direct those dollars towards the kind of solutions that we need to put in place I don't know if I want to even go down that political way I know your mother has written a book about democracy and she's very active in that respect as well and you need to get into that as well. Well if I can just jump in because yeah because I think that what are some of those big bold strategies we have been hearing about climate you know there are things like a carbon tax has been floated and you know has been tested in certain places it's been largely very unpopular certainly here in the United States we've obviously seen models of carbon markets you know where companies are able to buy carbon credits to keep polluting from you know and seeing how actually that doesn't necessarily move us as quickly as we need to in carbon emissions reductions what we see at least here in the United States around polling around the idea of taxing the wealthy just a little bit we're not talking about taking away all the yachts and all the mansions but we're seeing a very very high favorability around modest wealth taxes across the political spectrum and again because wealth has become so concentrated even modest taxation on tiny fractions of the population would have a huge benefit to all of us so I actually think this is like a very part of what part of its power comes from the fact that it is a kind of a nonpartisan idea and you know highly popular compared to some of the other tax and regulatory policies to deal with this question I'm kind of the reason I said not because I'm fearful of getting into the politics or talking about it I'm more of a ecological economist kind of from the the school of Herman Daly or our Buck Minister Fuller or even Tim Jackson is one of the best new age ecological economists of our times that I agree the carbon tax is not very popular but but I would like to not set the bar low and say okay here's a new taxonomy here's a new tax and this is the minimum requirement you must do that because businesses and lobbyists and and they're so damn clever they're going to find a way around it they're going to find a tax haven they're going to find this they're going to find some loophole they're they're going to make the products even cheaper so that they can pay the taxes so some some manipulation is going to be there what I would like to see is instead of a tax I would like them to pay the true cost or the total environmental cost from the get go I would like them to pay since they've been in business where their historical carbon emissions are impact on our environment and human health and not just to pay restitution but to get up to speed and if they're a business that can't function with that that the true cost of what it costs to to conduct business then they shouldn't be in business because they don't have the right model it's not an ecological economic model and it's a model of extraction and capitalism that always comes back to hurt the poor to hurt those in developing countries first and then to hurt to separate us as humanity demarginalize and and really put humanity in this bad place one against of each other and I don't want I don't want to get too much into it because it's really this neoliberalism this neo Darwinism where where it's natural selection survival of the fittest severe competition that we're fighting against each other always trying trying to be the best and everything that you've talked about everything that I talk about our world doesn't work that way our world works like a symbiotic earth like Lynn Margolis and in collaboration in cooperation with each other our soils the microorganisms the way our earth functions isn't in that harmony that collaboration cooperation man and even women are not at top of this world as this big ego we're part of this integral biome this system and until we figure that out whether we're businesses or just individuals we're we're going to continue to get it wrong and so when I go in that direction politics or economics that's kind of more the leaning and we could talk days or hours about that and that's kind of why I stray away from that but you know I've also thought about us we need to have bigger taxes we need to figure out ways to do it differently yeah and I think I really resonate with what you just shared and I think the point isn't that there is going to be one strategy that's going to get us there but what is that constellation of action and strategy and and it and like I said it's constellation of strategies like I said is also pulling lots of levers at once so it's not saying oh if we could just get food right you know we fixed it no no no we also have to look at the energy sector we also have to look at these other sectors but we cannot ignore food and just like we cannot ignore the crisis of wealth concentration at the same time we also can't ignore the fact that that there isn't a single corporation today in the U.S. that is paying the true cost of what their product production really costs us right so it's it's it's again it's both and it's really looking at that full picture so thanks for adding that yeah yeah no problem I see there's there are certain models so for instance Paul Hawkin coming out with a new book this month called Regeneration and there's these other models that that are moving more in that way that give me hope for this more ecological economics better models for for the future and it's the systems fuel life and food and the food industries is one facet of that big system of our earth it's a big vital one because it's the main power source of humanity um but the largest user of land right largest you know and the user of fresh water in this country largest polluter I mean we're it's how we orient ourselves around food is essential one in five deaths globally now the Lancet reports comes from diet related illnesses so getting food right is essential it's big it's huge it's it it's so vital so thank you for having me on to to talk about all of this not at all I have four last questions and I'll make them quick the hardest one is the first one I have and it's really the burning question WTF what's the futures or even better put I want to know your perspective what what does a world that works for everyone look like for you well it looks like the sun coming out every day not you know wildfires smoke blotting it out you know it it looks like actually having a balance between the humans on the planet and all of the other beings who who call this planet home with us and certainly in terms of food it looks like a complete upheaval of of where we are today which is you know 60 of our calories in this country come from ultra processed foods it would look like actually having 100 of our calories coming from real food that is not been ultra processed that actually in eating it provides us nutrition and health and energy and joy and since you've got a run I'll give you one last question it's really for my listeners if there was one message your message that you could depart my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change your life your message what would it be well if I had just one I would say that finding joy in this moment of such intense grief and crisis is a radical act if I had two I would add an addendum to say tapping into food thinking about what your own relationship is to it making sure it is nourishing you and bringing you that joy is critical and also we are all food citizens too so flexing our muscle flexing our political power to make sure the systems change is also vital thank you so much Anna I really appreciate having you on on the show thank you for letting us inside of your ideas it's been a sure pleasure we could talk for hours there's so much to cover it's a big topic but it's so important that we get it right yeah thank you so much really enjoyed the conversation thanks bye bye