 All right First of all, thank you mad. Thank you Renee. Thank you David Thank you for to you Copenhagen for allowing a street cook like me to be here I go by poppy on the streets and I'm from Los Angeles You guys might know it See here You guys might know it, right? It's a magical magical place where I come from But I also come From this Los Angeles There are over five million people that are starving or close to hung or hungry and close to starving and they have the fear of going hungry In this in an area that I represent South Central Los Angeles 44% of the children that's 65,000 children live in poverty They make less their families make less than twenty two thousand dollars a year, and I think that's the equivalent in euros another 17% 25,000 children Live in extreme poverty, and that's less than 11,000 dollars a year in the same in euros In the same area, there are 41% of The eighth graders and 39% of the 11th graders that scored below basic in English and language arts Out of 56 middle middle schools and high schools in the area It gets worse 50 53% of the 8th graders and 81% of the 11th graders score Below basic in math and At Thomas Jefferson High School where I worked They fell 38% below in the English and 78 73% were below in math, and it gets even worse They do studies and There's I'll just read it to you here Low academic performance between K through 12 high truancy rates Low high school graduation rates low percentage of teachers with full credentials. They just throw motherfuckers in there. You know I'm saying An inactive voting population um Risk factors that represent You know high poverty unemployment single-parent family homes low literacy rates and You know up to 90% of the residents have either witnessed or been directly involved with felony violence level violence So to me these facts are staggering, you know, and they're even more crippling because These are these are my friends, you know saying and You know like so I'm gonna get into it man We have we have a hunger crisis in Los Angeles a straight-up hunger crisis, and it's not as straightforward as it may seem You know like with so many paved roads Farms farmers markets our weather, you know, we got tree till you know, we smoke tree till the end of the day You know like we got restaurants. I mean it seems ludicrous like we should be just happy as clams, right? But many in many parts of our city This is how we supply our neighborhoods liquor store liquor store Liquor store There are no chef-driven restaurants Not one Okay, there are very few supermarkets or little to no organics The markets that do exist our second-hand rebate centers that serve expired produce expired foods. We have food banks Discarded stuff stuff you would never buy, you know I'm saying The restaurants that do exist our fast food chains. They got the guts to go in, you know Night and I said Chinese food junk food alcohol You know and like, you know you bring this up you hear so many times all the rhetoric you hear all the All the jokes about about the ghetto and shit like that, you know like, you know So, you know you start to think like so what right? Like I mean everyone in life has a choice, you know We all have the ability to make that choice and like we all have something bad going on in our life Why do we got to worry about this, you know what makes this any different than our own problems? I mean like all these residents can just drive over to the next town, right? You know just get in the car and drive over and shop at Whole Foods or whatever it is But to me it's not that simple because it's psychological. It's an invisible wall You know whether youngsters or adults make their decisions, you know and lead themselves into vices or addictions or whatever it is out there That's not what I'm trying to really talk about What I'm talking about is it's the fundamental belief that we all believe that we have these choices these equal choices But it's it's that belief that we have these equal choices that's that is and the accessibility To to have a great meal that is the fallacy You can't render the choice the same when the options aren't presented You know if you see if all you see growing up is junk food fast food process food You know the meats that they eat there are old dairy cows that they you know that all the Processing plants ship out to so that meat you can buy meat and hamburgers for 99 cents, you know say You know these things in no vegetables no fruits these things inform your decisions as you're growing up As a child they become your nutrition You know in our neighborhoods With the highest crime rate and the highest dropout rate and the least jobs are getting the worst food and our friend Daniel Patterson, I remember he alluded to this as well in the San Francisco Chronicle and I applaud him when he said that But to me this doesn't make sense, you know, I mean like This doesn't make sense so why do I say all of these things that At a food conference with the best chefs in the world, you know with all y'all Because I really believe that chefs can do anything, you know, and that's with capital letters and an exclamation point on the end Because you know, we're not the richest people on the planet, you know But when a chef talks people listen when the chef does People follow, you know, I mean, can you imagine like a place where a chef? He called like a pre-shift and he said everyone get together and we're gonna do this and then like everyone was like on their phone Like no, I'll get to a later chef Hell no, right? Hell no I'm feeling better You know a chef can command attention in any circumstance You know with these problems that exist everyone in politics tries to fix everything from a macro level top-down For me, I don't have time for that, you know Like the people in these communities my brothers and sisters they're starving out there on the streets children Generation after generation are getting no support at all Schools are being shut down. You could apply this to any city any inner city in America Schools are being shut down programs being cut. We're feeding them chemicals that are corrosive You know, fuck you world, you know, like that's like how I feel about it. So this is where we stepped in as chefs You know, what if every high just think of this? What if every high caliber chef all of us in here told our investors as we were building restaurants? That's you know, and we leveraged it for every restaurant We would build every fancy restaurant we build we would it would be a requirement to build a restaurant in the hood as well What if we just started serving food in hood and chef started getting into street food and opening carts and getting food Out there and making it a part of the culture You know, I really believe essentially we as chefs are maternal There has to and I really believe that there has to be some value Place back in that some value placed back into the spiritual currency of that and not just financial currency You know, we feed people our nature is to care and take care of people I mean getting off the plane here in Copenhagen. It was like walking into an open arms, you know That's just our nature to make sure you're all right. Are you okay? Are you fed? Is there anything you need? And you know, it's strange for me because I walk with my feet planted in many different worlds, you know, I'm here with you I have a very fortunate life, you know, I'm a student of the craft. I study the sciences and search for knowledge You know the four forging the indigenous cuisines Sustainability heirloom seeds the research affirmation bacterial cultures microbes all the stuff we're talking about, you know I'm a student of it too, man, you know, but You know But I'm also in the hood man, you know where people are starving So we revel in these beautiful things that make up the super duper food world now, you know, like there's this whole You know, like we're all connected. We have this wonderful view of the food world But what if there's a whole population of citizens your friends and neighbors right under your noses I couldn't even eat a horse carrot or even access vegetables, you know, it's real And I and that continues to make me think about like what language are we speaking as chefs? You know, we have the internet of course right now 2013 when this real hyper awareness, you know I believe the Mayans talked about this about this this this state of being where we were connected so closely and the information was passed so So instantaneously that they predicted that this would happen and we're at that place right now, you know The food world has never been more active, but really the question is has it really changed Aren't we still just feeding kind of the same people? The privileged there's nothing wrong with the fact that you can afford it, but aren't we just feeding the people that can't afford it You know, the audience has gotten younger it's gotten smarter, but But still it's this circular kind of motion bubble You know, we're feeding a small populace And we think we're feeding the world It's like chasing our own tail, you know listening to our own rhetoric The age old paradigm of haves and have nots, you know And I'm sick and tired of it straight up and So for me it's about shifting paradigms You know, we share Instagram and Facebook pictures and we blabber on Yelp and we're talking about food all the time more than ever But at the same time we're sharing these pictures and taking these pictures. We're feeding our children crap, you know Our prison systems in America have the worst fucking food you can imagine and we're supposed to be rehabilitating These people human beings, you know You know, and we think we're sharing food we think that food is everywhere But the cycle continues then two generations from now kids that aren't even born yet You know, y'all gonna hook up and make some babies. You know, I mean like those babies, you know Not even born yet. We're gonna have the same divisions if we don't do something about it You know, so this conference is about guts And I'm really trying to ask like do we have the guts? Us collectively to break this cycle And I know you're wondering why am I the one talking about this? Well five years ago. This happened to me Five years ago me and my crew started going out on the streets. We started feeding people same place Nighttime into the next day. You know, I mean like just feeding people I mean Kogi was getting so like it was reaching so many people like even creatures from out of space were coming down You know like we went out there and we started feeding people I had no idea it was gonna be a revolution man I had no idea We were just trying to make some ends make some money get paid have some fun, you know Oh But the moment I stepped behind that wheel it was like I knew my whole life was gonna change I felt like I had locked into a portal and I could see things that any didn't exist in its present time I saw these people these people it was weird like I could see these people on the street but they weren't there yet, you know, I they existed in almost like a hologram and And That's why I picked these corners, you know, they were random corners random streets But they were like calling to me, I guess kind of like a graph artist can see a wall, you know That could hear the hunger I could feel the hunger and I won't get too weird You know, I'm gonna talk about shape-shifters and shit like that, but But I can tell you that I felt a hunger and it pressed itself upon us You know any time of the day in the nighttime in the morning time in the daytime and we fed it, you know Street after street day after day, and then we added technology to food from the beginning We paired it with Twitter and provided content and connectivity. We gave a food of voice You know, I mean like it was the most important thing in this social media space. We were the first company to use Twitter Newsweek as things started to blow up news we called us the first viral America's first viral restaurant We went street to street and through that I started to develop a style I started to get information from the people standing in line of how to do it I had no idea how to do it my crew had no idea, you know, but through that we started to get this information And how to break this wall in the cycle it was take, you know And what it came out to was it was taking all my training as a chef and Jonathan goal who was just on to quote him He said using the tricks of fine dining to elevate street food the direct opposite of the semi exoticized cooking He'd been doing at a giant century city fusion restaurant So By getting that information I changed the way I cook I started to cook like this And this and this like that You know, and I um, I started to realize that we weren't speaking a language that was youthful enough to reach the people Or for them to even care about food you know, and so in order to Get the food to them so that they would wait in line like that. I had to break rules I had to Go against a lot of things that we believe in as chefs and that's mixing technique with Processed food mixing emulsions with canned meats Mixing junk food with intense purees of organic vegetables And like in mixing those things together making it young like streetwear, you know That's taboo for us, you know, we would never open a can of canned green beans, you know serve that on a dish in our restaurant But see like for me the information was I had to do that because It's like when you get out of surgery, right? You can't just go straight into a meal You have to kind of ease your way back into it Well, you had communities and people that had this hunger that they couldn't just dip into the food that we were cooking a chef So I had to create some sort of a bridge and then it changed the city Then it changed the county and it changed the nation And it started to affect Other people other cities started creating their own street food people, you know before this before Kogi happened people weren't eating off Taco trucks in masses. It just wasn't happening in America. It was a subculture for Latinos and how They eat in Mexico and Honduras Guatemala, you know as Salvador, you know, it was for construction workers mechanics You know like the rest of society were calling trucks roach coaches They were saying oh, that shit is dirty How could you eat off that? You know moms were grabbing their little kid, you know, please that's scary That's scary and now those same moms are hiring that truck for their kid's birthday party It's crazy. It's really crazy You know so There's more it in mushroom, you know, I mean like it's Got crazy. I got crazy now in mushroom. It's having the time of my life I was feeding more people than I could possibly ever imagine It was like hero status, you know, I mean like pretty pretty great and then this happened to me I had an emotional meltdown I Wrote a blog it was the 20 year anniversary of the LA riots I just I just wrote a blog, you know, I was questioning a lot of things, you know, I Went AWOL man like I started calling out everybody on this blog I put up the back signal to you Jamie Oliver It's pretty stupid. Yeah, I was just being stupid like You know, but it was just a blog post I was just writing in the middle of the night and just put it out there You know and then in the blog I wrote that I might stop eating meat I might leave cooking for a while just to get some more perspective. It was almost like Just convincing myself. I was gonna turn in my membership. You know, I mean like But then it went viral It went viral, you know, like it's crazy, you know and But it all led me to making choices and to thinking about hunger more, you know And I knew I had to break a pattern I felt that if I either left cooking or I stopped a certain way that I ate that every time if I didn't eat Me that every time that I made a choice to eat a meal that at least there would be a split second where I would be thinking about hunger And I could see things in a different way You know, so you see like after all that happened with Kogi and feeding almost every street on every block in every county I found myself in South Central Los Angeles with a bunch of kids and I realized, you know After all that we had done for four years three four years the food wasn't even getting not even close to them, you know They couldn't get to it and you know, we made food as accessible as we possibly could and we weren't even close and that's when I knew I had to break this pattern and So after my meltdown I put pieces back together everything. I went full commando mode into this and What it is is it's we started at Jefferson High School and we started Just doing fruit Fruit cups fruit in in the community having the kids build the cafe It's a one of the lowest performing high schools. We we built a store a small little student store We we taught them economics 101 marketing. They helped us with the flavor profiles And then we went out there and we to the rest of their friends We made the proposition to their friends to buy these drinks and these fruit cups that were made of coconut milk agave Fruit and lime juice for $1 seems like a good deal, right? But the challenge that we had was that everything that was being eaten at that time for school lunches Were plastic sealed bagged hamburgers chocolate milk and candy. So it's it's a really tough challenge to go up against that But then one by one the kids started responding, you know, we put the flavors in there We made the cafe from the ground up. They designed it went out there and we were big man in South Central and then It turned into this That's that's at the school Created a car and it turned into this and then we created a cafe in the neighborhood And now it's a living breathing cafe in South Central serving fresh fruits and smoothies next to liquor stores and fast food You know Bear in mind, I mean, I know it's not a restaurant with Marcona almonds and see your chin and The things that we're able to access, but it's a start, you know for me it was a start You know In America we lied to our kids that carrots help their eyesight just in order for them to eat it. It's not true We lied to ourselves That food is accessible to everyone. It's not true. You guys telling you the truth I mean but I have this idea that Food desert we call food deserts in Los Angeles or throughout the nation that they don't have to exist. I mean if I have this five-year plan now like Street food came along in five years if we if we focus our energies in five years like street food what wasn't can be and what was can be gone and You know, I imagine at mad eight five years from now Collectively if we're able to pull our strength together and our ideas and our wisdom that The word food deserts just like roach coaches will become a distant memory You know, I've traveled throughout Asia a Lot of Asia and I imagine it's the same here in Europe No matter the income how poor you how poor the country may be or what your income is You feed your children delicious nutritious food that's forged from the land in Thailand They in school lunches. They serve curries and stews filled with vegetables fruits and spices in the ghettos of America we feed our children corrosive chemical waste and I don't know chefs. I don't know how you feel about that, but I've made my decisions But I'm just one dude man one dude one city one street at a time This is the premier food symposium of the world. I mean to quote you guys in quote Intended to invoke a sense of courage and urgency. It's the number one word Enabling this year's symposium to become a venue where we can reflect on the stories and ideas that no one usually dares or gets an opportunity to tell So I stand here with the guts to ask you, please. Let's do something Let's do something and feed those that we're not reaching collectively we can just imagine where we can go with it You know, I mean so like I'm just gonna I'm gonna play a song man Like if you if you love the ghettos and you want to see y'all can come down and dance, you know I got some music I got some music right here