 To start I would like to show you an image a picture of vegetation that I like very much It's not edible vegetation. It's vegetation from the American prairie. It's grasses and you'll see that these proud plants Have a lot above the surface, but even more below the surface It's like four or five meters below the surface the root systems And if you don't think that the roots are longer than the top look at it upside down and you can see that actually The roots are the most important part of this But what I particularly like about this picture is that you can see also Something else apart from these wild grasses. You can see civilized grass The kind of grass that makes it funny to be in a city where we enjoy when there's a park or there's some other Lawn in in in our suburb or we go to a sports stadium where they play soccer on on the lawn The civilized grass the kind of grass we use in in civilization is a very very small Kind of grass will almost without roots and almost without stretching up into the sky It's called Kentucky bluegrass the most common thing in American sports arenas and stuff The Kentucky bluegrass that you have up there Is very shallow very superficial doesn't go down into the earth for very much water and minerals Not very much up to the Sun for for energy and it's the the question that I want to post here is Why is it that we live in such a superficial? Civilization why is it that the plants that we plant on purpose and sink our nice in parks? Stretching so little into the universe and into the planet we live on as compared to wild food Why is that what has happened if you compare to a natural ecosystem like a forest you can see there are There are vegetables here and vegetable growth on all scales You see trees that stretch far up into the sky and also The same deep into the earth you see at all levels of heightened depth You see someone trying to grab the resources there and next time you take a walk in the park Or in a forest think about the fact that there's as much below ground as above ground And when you walk at a grass lawn think that no one is using most of the area below the Level where your feet are standing. So this is how? Natural vegetation vegetation looks like if you take a field like a wheat field You have a lot of plants in our monoculture all of them equal height and equal depth So you don't really use the resources that are there and you actually also spoil the soil in which these plants are growing And so the question is when nature is so diverse. Why is civilization so monotonous? Why do we choose to plant this way? What is the strategy we are having? Why are we doing this and basically we're doing this because? 10,000 years ago there was a climate change for natural reasons astronomical reasons the end of the last ice age the Water level in the oceans rose very much like 100 meters a lot of the most fertile areas where people were hunting Disappeared like the darker land between Denmark and England which is now for fishermen but that at that time was the most fertile hunting ground in Europe like the Persian Gulf Which was the the paradise of the of that time named the paradise But now of course is is covered in water So there was a big change and people had to do something and hunter gatherer people who were living at that time like 5 million human beings on the planet started taking on reluctantly the technology of farming Which they had known for a long time, but didn't really like so they became far farmers They settled down and they started a huge change in what they were eating. We know historically that the hunter gatherers Before this transition 10,000 years ago We're eating a manifold of different fish animals and plants And we know also today that hunter gatherer cultures that are still around even the why even though the white man tries to wipe them out These hunter gatherers eat an enormous variation of plants animals insects, whatever Hundreds of different plants during a year hundreds of different weird kinds of animals during a year and this has been Collapsed into a very very few fish animals and plants that we eat because we wanted to Tame them to cultivate them to control them to take them into our sphere of control So that we knew what we were doing and so that we knew what we had to rely on So we tame the wild and domesticated the wild so that it became part of our household Dumus means house so domestication is about taking the wild stuff the wild beast the wild plants into our Sphere of influence into our household to domesticate them and cultivate them and make them tame and lame and Therefore having something to eat take any stone age hunter gatherer and he'll be eating hundreds and hundreds of different plants But we rely on rice weed corn and potatoes. We can only eat it because we can eat it It's not edible to our stomachs in its raw form So it's a weird thing that after 10,000 years of technology development and civilization and and Wonderful chefs and whatever we came up with this situation with six percent of what we eat come from only four crops We're dependent on these we're hooked on these crops. We're junkies on these crops my claim and I'm being pertinent here I'm not a gastronomer But I like food and my claim is all of gastronomy up till this date up till the birth of The wave and the movement that Noma is part of All gastronomy has been about making something rich out of something very very poor like a supermarket Everything you buy in the supermarket basically is based on corn on maize And but it's packeted in many different ways and colors So you you get a variation out of something that's that's very monotonous monotonous And it's the same thing with gastronomy you try to make the very monotonous stuff Interesting by preparing it in many different ways. This is a waste of Gastronomers, this is a waste of chefs. This is a waste of your skills your heart and your brains We want to go somewhere else Also, because the problem with the starch in these grains is that starches is a very weird Stuff to get into your body. It gives you a very fast increase in blood sugar levels Which means that you will be hungry very soon Why would any restaurant in the world offer people bread when they arrive before they actually order on the menu because bread will make you Satisfied but for a very short time so People get all kind of diseases from this very starchy diet like circulatory diseases hard and and and and circulation diabetes Overweight or obesity and all this stuff comes from this agricultural food that we are eating But this is our problem and that is not the biggest problem the real problem the real SOS here Save our souls is dealing with our soils Because the soil cannot bear this way of growing food The soil is a fantastic Complex ecosystem sort of the skin of the earth the most complex ecosystem on on the earth Which is sort of the borderline between heaven and earth where the sunlight from from the star above us Will make plants grow and and they will go into the soil when when they die And and there they will meet the minerals coming from the rocks from the earth below With withering there will be released minerals that that come up There's also water will come up from from the groundwater passing and you will have the soil as a meeting between heaven and earth And this goes on all the time. There's a reproduction of soil all the time But it only has a slow pace and we are using the soil at a much quicker pace because we are weight raping the soil essentially by by By plowing it and it leads to waste and loss of soils through dust balls through scarcity of nutrients in the soil by Compactification of the soil and so on because of the way we treat it now look at this map It's a map of where on earth Agriculture started 10,000 years ago. There were nine different centers where it started That's the the red areas and if you look at them You will notice that the red areas are in parts of the planet where today you would actually You would actually more think of a desert like you have the fertile crescent in the Middle East You have Sahil which is now a desert in Africa You have the Andes and Amazonia areas you have parts of Mexico you have parts of New Guinea Which are now and not very fertile anymore. You'll see in the lighter shade You'll see where the planet is fertile agricultural now and you ask yourself the simple question Why is this the areas became deserts because of agriculture the cradle of human civilization is now a desert because they used up the soil and This is the pace of human history that we use up the soil and there's basically a 500 to 1500 year lifetime of civilizations and then they go and the history books doesn't tell us why but David Montgomery Tells us why because they used up the soil. So how about us? We've been around for more than 1000 years. Yes, but we have been rented the fertilizer We put nutrients back into the soil at a ever more desperate pace to make this happen in Tokyo 500 years ago almost they were banning the the present agriculture practice do not return the atoms from the soil the matter from the soil Because of this monoculture tradition that we have and this is a big problem We need to learn how to recycle the soil how to put the atoms back again And we have many different historically techniques for this we can rotate the crops We can use night soil which is a nicer word for the shit and piss you produce during night We can use animal fertilizer, which is a nice word for the shit and piss produced by animals or you can use the chemical fertilizer Which is what we what we tend to use up nowadays But cannot use for a very long time because of the rain because the chemical fertilizer is all based on on the use of fossil energy when we produce NPK fertilizer, we really need to Use all this fossil we use it for the hydrogen we need to the atoms part of the fertilizer Process necessitates that we use hydrogen from natural gas And we most of all need the energy from the oil the coal or the natural gas and the climate Producing the rain showers forbids us to go on doing this. We cannot Proceed there's no future for the present Regime of agriculture. It's the end of fossil fuels and therefore also the end of chemical fertilizers and With the end of the fertilizers is also the end of the regime of the annuals of the pessimistic plans So we have to do something entirely new and we have to discuss what this entirely new is we have to save our soils and Producer planet that will keep feeding us for the coming generations The key concept to doing this is the concept of flow and let me now Turn away from vegetation and show you my pet animal Which which are small shrimps and the funniest thing about these pet animals are the fact that They do not require any maintenance at all. You don't have to feed them They will swim happily around in this little bowl of glass on your table for years and years and years I think the record is like something like 10 years Never being fed and this this could be a mystery But it is not because there are two other species in there. There's some algae and some bacteria And and they they live together in a very simple way You have your shrimps swimming happily around over here They produce waste that the bacteria will break down into nutrients for the algae The algae will take in daylight and that's the source of energy in the system and use that for photosynthesis Producing food and oxygen the shrimps will inhale the oxygen eat the food Combust the stuff. They have already got the energy to swim around and being funny They will exhale co2 that the algae will use to build up the new sugar in in the food So this is a closed systems. You don't need to put anything into the glass bowl You don't need to take anything out. All you need is a little light flowing on it And they will swim around happily a year after year after year. It's a fantastic list little system And and it's very funny to look at and think about the basic law of this system Of course is that waste equals food the waste of one organism is the food of another organism If an organism makes some kind of waste that nobody else is interested in eating It will pile up inside the glass ball You have trouble if you want to eat something that nobody else produces has waste you will run out of food very quickly Now this is a somewhat bigger glass ball, but it has the same basic Physical laws. No matter goes into it a little stardust from time to time when shooting stars Nobody leaves it a few astronauts going with their tubes of Food and a back to shit into the moon and back after three days But basically no one leaves this system basically atoms are just Recycled all the time like jumping from the shrimp to the algae to the bacteria here You have the same basic system and and your actors are basically the same you have the plants You have the animals and you have the bacteria the plants is the generalized algae That's the vegetation part You have the animals that's creatures like us swing around or shouting around in the rain And you have the bacteria who do the the job of recycling the nutrients All you need is light and then the system runs But we insist on doing something else even though there's lots of light the big tube There is the amount of solar energy falling on this on the surface of the planet That's a lot and the little red one on your right is the global consumption of energy Everything including the Americans with their conditioning Everything is in that little one and and the engineers and the politicians and the businessmen tell us we are not able to get that little red Square from the big yellow square and I say you are mis-talented idiots Come on do your job. It's not very difficult to do The climate tells us we have to do so the climate specifically tells us that the problem comes from the greenhouse effect You know co2 the carbon and and and oxygen Combination and we also have learned that the co2 or carbon problem really comes from agriculture agriculture Is the most important source of greenhouse gases historically more important than the use of fossil fuels? So so agriculture and the change land use is a real reason for the climate problem But today The fossil fuels are on top of that the thing that keeps alive a sick agricultural system Through the energy input from these fossil fuels. So we have to get back to the flow thinking We have to get back to what I will provocatively call the thinking in terms of reincarnations And I'm not turning into a Buddhist here at the end of my lecture. I'm talking not about anything Outsides or transcendent. I'm talking about you. You are reincarnations We are all flows of matter flows of energy and if you think about how much you eat and drink It's it's like one kilograms of food per day like three four liters of water depending on the climate per day Add that up and you find out that into your mouth goes every year one and a half ton of matter 1,500 kilograms of matter goes into you every year and from the laws I just show you we know we can we can deduct that 1,500 kilograms of matter goes out of you again through the openings that you have in your body including the Your sweat so there's a lot of matter going through you What does this mean you can you can label the atoms or the molecules in your body with isotopes where you active isotopes? And you can measure how long time does water stay in your body? It turns out to be like 8 to 13 days is the half time of the lifetime of water in your body Depending a little on the climate so in a month all the water has been replaced water is like 68% of you So most of you is not the same as as a month ago Now if you take then you say bones that would take longer time not really calcium in your bones three months and it's replaced It means that if you meet here in a year from now And I think any would like us to meet here in a year from now when we meet here in a year from now Most of us will not be there. It turns out that 90% of the atoms in your body is replaced in one year This is a shocking number in the sense that it tells you that what is continuous in you and Make sure we remember your childhood is not the atoms because they've been replaced in that constant flow It's something else that remembers your childhood because we are not things We are something very different if we compare things and flows and this is important to do You can say a diamond is a thing it's the same thing because the atoms are sitting there forever a Flame is a flame and burns because the atoms the air that heats up and lights is is replaced all the time It's a dynamic character of a flame a rock sits there at least in human time scales forever a river Is only a river because the water is replaced all the time if the water stops flowing in a river It becomes a lake and evaporates and it's no longer anything interesting We want to find food for the nine billion people that will be on this planet in a few decades We have to find a strategy that allows us to do this and the strategy We should take an interest in is the strategy of the wild of the wilderness Why not eat was already there and instead of trying to control the surface of the planet the wild stuff Is it edible? Well people used to eat a lot of wild stuff, but is it edible that the big question is is there wild food? Is the perennial plants that we could depend on could we replant the earth could we start using what's already there? For its own reason Instead of trying to control all the time We have to ask simple questions like how much wild food is in the world I've asked a lot of people working in different areas like Botany or animals or at no Botany and so on how much wild food is in the world I did so for a book last year and the question was nobody knows it's it's very very simple Nobody has any idea how much wild food there is on this planet All we know is that if we didn't cultivate the planet if we didn't try to have agriculture the bio productivity will go up 10% But most of it Wouldn't be edible. It would be like trees, but then how do you know trees are not edible? We have biochemists and stuff today that we didn't have earlier 10,000 years. We made a goal We made the simple choice to eradicate what was going by itself by plowing and instead introduce a very few plans Was that a wise decision? Were they well informed when they did that decision? Well, of course, they were stone ages They didn't have the Aborators of chemistry the skills of the gastronomers of the chefs that we have today Who says that you cannot eat was there all by itself? In the hunter-gatherer society you had many many kinds of plants and animals you ate They were based on solar power and life We know from it's an anthropological studies was healthy in agriculture. You have a very few plants All driven by a solar and a lot of human power hard work in industrial agriculture the modern agriculture It's all basically corn. It's all basically one plant almost and it's it's driven by fossil means and The health state of the people who eat it is not very good So we have somehow to go back to what I could call a high-tech stone age Rediscover the wild and make the wild edible through modern methods. We need a lot of stuff here We need to another approach to nature because the wild in terms of language come from the word will To be wild means to have its own will as opposed to the tame the cultivated which has our will which we control The wild is what wants to be there on its own What's there when there's no human project project in between the human projects and the human fields? You could say that the wild grows in the no man's land where there's no human agricultural project as my final tribute To you and to gastronomy and to Noma. What is it really this all this stuff is about? What is this tent with this rain falling? What is this group of people doing? Why are we here today? We're here today because we are gastronauts We're not astronauts who's been to the moon eating out of a tube and shitting in a bag We're gastronauts and we have a fantastic mission. This tent is a spaceship that just landed on this planet This is the planet where we are natives where we started off 10,000 years ago We've been on this long long civilization travel into the galaxy and now we are coming back with one burning question Is the world outside this tent friendly? Is the earth edible? Is there something we can rely on or do we have to take these tubes of free strides food with us out? Into the space outside the tent is this planet friendly to us Can we trust the planet? Can we go out there and go with the flow? Do we need to have a meal box with us or is there plenty out there? That is the real question and we need your skills when you need your curiosity your Brilliance in preparing your stuff to answer this question We need you to go out there and research the planet. Look at the planet again Respect the planet means the same look at the planet again and restore the state of the planet and the state of human Health through finding all the good stuff out there and as you know to restore when that's a word that developed into another word of a place where you restore people a place where you work a Rich a restaurant is a place to restore the planet to restore people and you have a mission Which is not to feed the the rich guys with some new variation on potato You have a mission, which is rediscover this planet and that's why you landed on this Spaceship looking like a tent and of course this is not the Noah's Ark where he went when when the rain come and the floods came in And just ran away with a few animals No, no, no, this is the nomas arc where you come back to the planet with a lot of skilled astronomers To go out and say we are the natives of this planet. We belong here the planet meets our shit And we come back now to feed on the wild and we are proud to do so and I thank you for being