 I am the project lead for SDSN Youth Solutions program, and I will be your host today. Before we start, I would like to introduce Chef Dan Barber, one of New York's most noted chefs, co-owner of restaurants Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and the author of the book, The Third Plate. He'll note on the future of food who will be doing the opening remarks for our session. Chef Dan, over to you. Okay. How's that? Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you fine. Okay. I'm sorry for that. Good evening and thank you for that introduction and thank you for having me tonight. I have to say I have a mixed feelings about being sitting here with you this moment. I'm very happy to introduce this segment. I'm also introducing a segment because I'm not with a restaurant, my restaurant anymore. I'd usually be standing in the kitchen and cooking dinner service. Right now, it's 6.30 at the height of dinner service. So it's been a sweet. Dan, we could see you for a second, although now we cannot. Can you click your video camera button one more time? Sorry. There you go. Thank you. Okay. So do I need to repeat myself or you were hearing that? Nope, we were hearing you. Go ahead. Okay. So I am thrilled to be at home with my kids and I just cooked some dinner for them, some spring vegetables, and I was thinking about the last time that I visited the Brooklyn Grange, which was I think a year ago and had an amazing experience in the heart of the city looking at well manicured soil, healthy soil, healthy and delicious vegetables and a crew of energetic and spirited young people who were devoted to the cause and the cause being that we want a future of delicious and nutritious food for ourselves and for our children. It's very simple. And we are the youth that I met at the Brooklyn Grange and I've met several times people who work as part of this project are part of the refugia. They are part of the future of a food system that refused to give in to the interests of big, powerful multinationals that do not have the interests of nutrition and deliciousness in mind. They have the interests of yield and of profits in mind. And that's a crude way to give encapsulation of our current situation, but it's as simple as that. It's very binary. It's your food choices are in the words of the great writer Michael Pollan, way to vote three times a day. And what the Brooklyn Grange does for you is it allows this experiment in the midst of New York City to blossom. Now, will it feed New York City? Are we imagining that rooftop gardening is the answer to the future of our food system? Because it's less transportation. It's grown right there. You can watch it grow and therefore that's the ticket to the future. No, I don't think anyone who works at Brooklyn Grange actually feels that way either. The promise of a garden in the middle of the city is the promise of connection. It's about a relationship that we all have to food and we all have to the planet earth which we're celebrating today. And that is a gift in the middle of an urban environment to experience that a real gift. And now in this moment, in this crazy pandemic moment, we all have a new, hopefully a new and renewed relationship with food. Because we're all at home and because we are now forced to cook in ways that we were never forced to cook and we are creating in ourselves and in our families that consciousness and that connection to food. And all of a sudden questions get to be asked, well, how was this grown and where did it come from? How did it get to me? Who was the farmer who was growing it? And on and on, questions like that are so healthy. And what is so important about urban gardens and urban agriculture is not that they are a practical solution to the problems. They are one good solution that whose power is about the gift of consciousness and relationship because the power that the big food chain holds over us is they make it harder to see and they thrive on that, it's a big story. And so we all now in this day and this day moving forward and as we circle out of this devastating time for the farm to table movement, we need to all dig in deeper to the relationship in a way that focuses our attention on the challenges for the future. I'll leave you with this point. If I had been talking to you all five weeks ago and I had said, the strongest food chain you could possibly engage in and support is the shortest chain. It's the farm table chain because it's the farmer shakes the hand of the person who's buying the food and cooking the food and putting on their plate. And therefore has a strong argument for the kind of food chain they want for the future because the industrial food chain is a long chain to anywhere that breaks, you have weakness. And you all would have applauded in your own way and said, yeah, that's right. That's why we need to dig into this. Well, here we are today. Now, six weeks after that imaginary conversation and what's happened? Well, farm table movement actually isn't looking as strong as it might have six weeks ago. And what COVID has done is reveal a weakness. And while I've opened this segment by trumpeting the potential of urban gardening and this increased consciousness and relationship with food, I also wanna leave you with a challenge. And the challenge is we have to move beyond the simplistic connection between a farm and a table. That's the biggest lesson for me in my takeaway as a farm table chef, as a chef who's sitting with a table in the middle of a farm actually is what I am. I've got a stake in the game. And what I have come to realize is that is that a pandemic like this quickly exposes the weakness, the Achilles heel of the farm table because you cannot shake the hand of the farmer that raise your food. You get a virus in other words. And that is a new paradigm of understanding. And what does it do for us? It challenges us not to accept that big clean agriculture is the future. No, the way forward is complicating the picture and using the farm to table model as the model to spring forward using a urban garden as a sense of a relationship that needs to be protected and how do we protect it? Well, in this COVID environment, one way to think about protecting it is to introduce more processors. It turns out the farm to table could use a few more middlemen because if we had middlemen, if we had middlemen and middle women, mulsters, distillers, fermenters, picklers, canners, cheese makers and all the way through the system, we do not need to think about food processing the way the American corporations think about food processing. We ought to think about it on a regional and on a distinctive level. And that is the greatest chain that we could enact, build on, support in the connection between a farm and a table. We ought to build out a real food economy and a real food economy is inefficient compared to the big chain, of course, inefficient. But it's resilient and it's multifaceted and in an environment of a pandemic and a breakdown, a devastation, you have the strength of a regional food economy to supply nutrition and again, deliciousness. And I want to end with deliciousness because that's the keystone part of this. If we don't value food for its flavor, then food as fuel becomes the next sentence out of your mouth. Food as fuel is a dangerous concept and we know that. And what we need to do is take the food that these farmers in our local regional food chain are growing and make them more valuable to the farmer through honoring the true cost of growing food in the right way. And then we need to honor it for our bodies. And that means processing it and making the nutrition and the flavor, deliciousness more bioavailable to us, more celebratory for us. And that is a delicious future that I feel even in this moment of weakness and of despair in many ways, I feel a sense of hope because we do have an opportunity to reset an answer to the food chain that dogs us nutritionally and environmentally and now's the moment to dig in harder than ever. So I leave you with that hope and that promise that for this moment to become not just the most exciting social movement which it has over the last 10 years but to circle into a food movement that actually has market share that's formidable. We need new processes to take the food and make it more valuable for the farmer and for ourselves. But it has to start with the farming. It has to start with the soil. It has to start with the connection in a relationship to a farm. And that's where I'm gonna give you the Brooklyn grain to learn more about that and to celebrate all their success. And I wish them well and I wish all of you well in this very strange and in many ways, distressing moment. But I think of a lot of hope when it comes to food and our future and I thank you all for being here tonight. Thank you, chef for your most valuable contribution today. We could not be happier for that and we couldn't agree more.