 our oceans are depleting, our lands are depleting, our air is depleting. If we don't take that call, especially in countries like Thailand where let's say 25 to 30 percent of the GDP is based on tourism, which is directly proportional to hospitality and food and beverage industry, we will be left behind and Mother Nature will shower its wrath upon us. Deepankar Kosla is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas. D.K., or Deepankar Kosla, affectionately known as D.K., is as passionate about reimagining authentic classical Indian cuisine, which he likes to call neo-Indian as he is for achieving food sustainability. Haoma is his dream come true project, a wonderful restaurant in Bangkok that began with an online course in aquaponics and just a year later had bloomed into a full-blown functioning urban farm in the heart of Bangkok. But it was a year of toiling the earth, coaxing fish to grow in new waters, and of experimenting through many trials and errors to optimize flavors all the while working to create a food system that can truly be called sustainable. D.K.'s commitment to the environment is contagious and so is his drive and passion to deliver excellent cuisine at Haoma, Bangkok. D.K., welcome to the show. It's so great to see you. How are you? It's a pleasure to be here today and to be speaking with you about things that we truly love and push forward. I'm pleased to be here doing great, not as good as we could be with the virus in our back doors, but we're happy to be surviving and with God's grace, we're doing very well. Thank you. Thank you for asking. I hope you're doing good as well. I'm doing most excellent. Thank you. It's so good to see you. Just for our listeners, we know each other. We first met, I believe it was in 2019, at the Sustainable Brands Chumpon, I believe it was. The Sustainable Oceans. Yeah, we did the Sustainable Seafood Manifesto together. We were actually at the same table and kind of had this workshop on the Seafood Manifesto. You've been doing this for quite some time. You've been a chef for a while and you're really thinking about new ways of food and sustainability has always been a focus and on your lips. We were surrounded at Sustainable Brands Chumpon with the Oceans theme and the Seafood Manifesto by numerous chefs. I mean, there was tables full of chefs and people there who really top of their class, but they were all concerned about a couple of things. Health of our food systems and sustainability, how we can get back to regenerative and organic practices, how we can include the environment and things. You've been in this space for a while and then bam, the entire world was hit with all sorts of craziness, not just the pandemic that we're still living through, Black Lives Matters, Asian racism, crazy inauguration in the gastronomy industry, horrific issues around businesses being able to stay open, survivability, a lot of issues with our food systems. I really truly want to know, one, how did you really weather? Did you weather the storm and all this experience that you had over the years trying to be resilient and sustainable and provide good food and do it in a way that's in alignment with circular economy principles in our earth? Did that prove to be a better model for you? How did you weather all the other craziness that's still coming and how are you doing? What were the learning lessons? I know some of them, some of the very good and positive things that you did for the community and are still doing, but I want to hear all about it because I'm sure there's a lot of good, bad and ugly learning lessons and some things that we want to hear about. Definitely, Mark. So as you know that I've been cooking for the last 14 years and sustainability is not a buzzword for me, it is the way of life. Every single day with multiple restaurants and multiple employees going into hundreds, there is decisions for me to make. There's right decisions, there's wrong decisions, but I always choose the sustainable one. And for me, giving back to the environment and working with nature, not against nature, is something that is a part of my life and that is what I have been raised with since I was a little child living in a small town in India called Allahabad, which was the first in India to ban use of plastic to having a small kitchen garden right in the backyard of our house where we would fetch our tomatoes and chili from once mum had already prepared dinner. So it's just the small lifestyle that I was raised in and I've scaled it to all of my businesses. As you know, once COVID hit and it came like a storm and it took all of us, blew all of our roofs away and we were lucky that we were already in the realms of working with sustainable farmers, working with a population in Thailand that was already pretty awake. And other than home, I also run a business called NutriChef which is regenerative nutritional diets for people who buy subscriptions and eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with us and that kept us going. However, Haoma was closed as a part of the lockdown so we turned it into a soup kitchen and we started No One Hungry which you know that we have been able to serve over 170,000 people. If you see the meals that we distribute, we distribute them in banana leaves, we did not compromise on our ethos and we took the produce that was rotting in the farms that the farmers could not get to the people in restaurants so that they could be cooked in fine dining or in fast foods. We turned it into meals that would then be delivered to people who had lost their jobs. Migrants especially from Myanmar, Cambodia, Nepal who had lost their jobs in the pandemic, we focused on them and we are doing that today. As we speak, we distributed 500 meals this afternoon to a Pakistani refugee community in Nongchok in Bangkok and we kept going through that. There's a lot of lessons we learned. First and foremost lesson was utmost resilience. No matter what happens, you do not let the burners in your kitchen go out. You cook. As cooks, that's what we can do right? So we cook to make sure that people are fed and cooking in the restaurants of our standard, the kind of level that we are at home and it counted in top restaurants in the world. It's not just only about how fancy the food looks in your plate and as you know, we work with United Nations Gain which is the global alliance of nutrition to be able to fortify rice and bring it out to people so that they could actually cook at home, cook for the homeless, cook for restaurants but uplifting the nutrition of what they are putting in their bodies because for me as a chef, it's not about how many Instagram likes my dishes get. It's about how your body, your mind and your soul is nourished by what I'm putting into your body. So that was one of the biggest lessons that we've learned. Resilience and the second biggest lesson that we've learned is that in the world that we are leading into, one stream of revenue is not going to be enough because you never know what strikes you, what lightning strikes your restaurant and it gets blown away. So you've always got to diversify and you've got to have the resilience and perseverance to pivot in the time of crisis and use the crisis as an opportunity to help yourself, your people and the society at large. So a lot we've learned from the pandemic as of now. That's so beautiful and it's really a model, a better model for reaching the future, a better model for resilience because you have that sustainability but that's stability and tough times to be flexible to pivot on a dime to go from being a wonderful, very sustainable restaurant to serving meals to people in need. And what we're seeing all over the world is that businesses and organizations are really starting those ones who have the right business models for sustainability and environmental social governance to provide planetary services, social services towards the health of their communities and environment and to give back. And as they give back, not only does it build more resilience but it also builds new sources of revenue streams, new sources of security, new sources of sustainable supply chains and things. I want to back up a little bit because I know that you've been working on a lot of meals and helping. At Sustainable Brands, we were brought together by Dr. P Newey who is a wonderful friend of both of ours and did a lot of things and she also wrote a contribution in my book, Menu B and I'm hoping to talk to you about getting your contribution as well with all the wonderful things you're doing around the world and representing those much needed people in the communities that you serve. But I want to go a little bit deeper into Homa and I want you to explain to me what does sustainability mean to you and how is your restaurant sustainable? And I know it kind of started with the aquaculture course but it is metamorphic into a wonderful regenerative restaurant. Yes, so Mark as you know and I still remember at Sustainable Brands Ocean Manifesto we were having a cup of coffee and we were having a chat about this, about where being sustainable and zero waste is not a checkered box for Homa. It's not something that you tick off and you keep moving forward. It's something that we strive for like that's the basis of employment in my restaurant. Like if you want to join me as a sous chef, I don't take a cooking trial. I give you a questionnaire or 20 questions of how you can make this world better and cooking is a skill that you always have. Empathy is something that has developed in you over the years and I think empathy sustainability. Okay, let me first throw some more light about sustainability. So sustainability for me is not just about getting vegetables that don't have chemicals in them. The idea of sustainability is a lot bigger. Sustainable environment, sustainable employment, sustainable society. That is the realms that we work on together. The No One Hungry program was the initiative of the sustainable society. If I did not go out there today and feed all of the migrants that had lost their jobs, when I opened my restaurant again, where is the kitchen porter? Where is the dishwasher? Where are the line cooks who are going to be doing our butchery? So to be and not just for me, but at large, the entire industry is based on them. The Mexicans of the US FNB industry is the Burmese of the Thai FNB industry. We had to go out and they are most of them not supported by the social security system of Thailand. So when the plug was pulled, they were the first ones to go dead. So we then reached out to them as a part of our sustainable society. Then we're talking about sustainable environment where we said, okay, enough of this greenwashing where you say, okay, this produce is organic, USDA certified, so on and so forth. However, the guests are never able to really know where the produce came from. Because in your one hour, two hour dinner at a restaurant, you do not have time to inspect all the produce. So we said, why don't we bring the farm on the premises of the restaurant? So we started then growing 2000 fish in rainwater. In a city that gets 155 mm rain in a month, we have enough rainwater to work with. So we started working with the rainwater. We started growing produce in the restaurant. And then the question came, okay, we only have 120 square meters of space left for the farm. I was like, okay, let's go vertical then. So I made six stacks and that gave me 600 square meters of space. It's about how hard do you want it? How badly do you want it? How badly, how much do you love Mother Earth to be able to care about her? And that is what the ethos with which we went in there. An idea that seemed so alien, so weird to the people who were constructing our restaurant, to the people who wanted to market our restaurant, our PR agencies in the first go was like, this is prime real estate. Mark, I am located 750 meters from what is known as the city center of Bangkok. You know what real estate is like in the metropolitan Asia. So I could have easily gone ahead and put 40 or 50 more seats if I used the right marketing, did the right photography on my Instagram and Facebook. I would have filled those seats up anyway, but it's a commitment. You know, the commitment to be able to wake up every single morning and say, no, if I don't get this produce today, I'm going to change the menu. I'm not joined to compromise and run to the supermarket and buy some Australian carrots because my Chiang Mai farmer cannot provide me the carrots today. You go ahead and you start from scratch and you start really doing your menus. That is the level of sustainable commitment that we have. And then came the question of how can we take the sustainability and bring it to the masses. That's when we went ahead and started working with Gain, which is the global alliance for nutrition at the United Nations. We started working with the biggest conglomerate of Thailand CP. As you know, I'm now serving foods in 7-eleven, which are fortified with that rice, fortified meals with folic acid so that they can uplift the vitamin B12 complex deficiencies in mothers in Thailand so that they can have better children. And that's the level that we took. We took a global giant that was shamed for its plastic use to come to the level where it is now being known for selling fortified nutritional meals. That is our commitment to sustainability at HAOMA. I absolutely love it. You also have a very strong waste-free commitment and also have some tools on hand to purify your own water through different options there. So you're really trying to do restaurant to fork. You're doing a lot of it in-house and you're taking back control of the production and you're sourcing as much as possible in-house, which I love. As a chef, unless you get that, okay, I say I'm cooking clean and healthy food, how can I cook clean and healthy food with unclean and unhealthy vegetables? I need to know where my produce is coming from and it has to be ethical. And in this in this world that we are living where agriculture is not equals to yield. I don't believe in that. I believe agriculture equals to nourishment. We are now living in a world where agriculture and farming is done for yield and yield only with those big boys coming in and commercialization and industrialization of farming. Seed banks have been taken away from the farmer. Fertilizer use has been taken away from the farmer and land as it was seen has been cut into so many small parcels that they don't really control nothing. So that is why I have gone back and started controlling that. And with the help of Food Made Good, which is globally known as one of the largest sustainability audit companies, we've been able to see a tunnel that we were walking in was pretty dark and then they gave us a torch in our hands. They gave us an entire guideline of how we should be able to do what we are achieving to do and custom made that for us. And that is why we are doing what we're doing in Mark. My commitment is that in a couple of years, as we speak today, I am already jotting all of this down. I want to be able to present this to people. Okay, you want to go ahead and open a restaurant? Please go ahead and do that. But make sure that what is going to happen to your grey water? What is going to happen to your waste? So this now has to be a commitment that comes in at the governance level saying if you want to open a restaurant, all these things need to be taken care of. You open a hotel, all these things need to be taken care of because our environment, as you know, is depleting. You've been speaking about that for n number of years. Our oceans are depleting, our lands are depleting, our air is depleting. If we don't take that call, especially in countries like Thailand where let's say 25 to 30 percent of the GDP is based on tourism, which is directly proportional to hospitality and food and beverage industry, we will be left behind and Mother Nature will shower its wrath upon us and we'd be left with probably nothing. So it's a selfish commitment for me to say I'm going to work towards nature and nature is going to provide to me because as a chef, if 20 years from now there is no produce left in the ocean, what the hell am I going to cook on my seafood Wednesdays? So it's something that I need to start thinking about today and I'm ready. My commitment now is that I'm going to package this entire model that I've created in the last four years at HAOMA as a prototype of the restaurant of the future and give it out to you. You can give it to anybody who's looking to build a restaurant in the future. I really don't want to go and pay 10 this or trade mark this. I'm not that guy. This is something that can help the industry at large globally and I'm glad that I have been empowered to be able to do that and I'm happy, very, very happy to share each and every element of it. I'm so glad and I know you're that way. You're basically saying please go out and make the world a better place. Here's a better model and it doesn't need to be patented or trademarked to make the world a better place. I actually think those type of processes not necessarily make the world a better place when you patent and trademark something. It actually limits those who can take it up and use it. The more people that are doing that, the better it is for you, the better it is for your customers, but also the better our entire industry of gastronomy, of food, regenerative agriculture, regenerative farming goes and how we can advance forward into the future of food where we really need to be. We need to globally reform our food systems and how it works so that we stop destroying it because it's the greatest cause of human suffering, health problems and human suffering, malnutrition, overweight, obesity, health issues, but also environmental problems which are just making things worse. Absolutely. Mark, I always mention this and if you look at any of the talks or podcasts that I've done recently, I always try to raise this voice that we are currently the world if you look at the amount of agriculture and produce that we are producing is 1.3 times of what total consumption of the world is going to be. However, we have in this world almost 25 to 28% of our population going hungry. The distribution of the produce food is just not right and that is why I'm coming back to saying first, the idea of patents and trademarks. When I was opening my restaurant, I was 27 years old. If I wanted to do a sustainable restaurant and I wanted the blueprints of it, if I went ahead to buy a patented idea, I would have to shell hundreds and thousands of dollars on that stuff. It then becomes so commercial that I go like, okay, screw it. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to just do whatever I think is right. Similarly with farming, similarly with produce, similarly with like today, if I want to do zero waste, I have to go ahead and buy a software from a company that costs me hundreds and thousands of dollars a year. So how would a small business be able to incorporate that? And it's about the small businesses made. There is 15 five-star hotels and there is 50,000 standalone restaurants. So the grass root level as we call it, the grass root level is the smaller players and we need to be able to impart this knowledge and bring this technology and bring these ideas and these set of guidelines to them to that level, not just keep it fancy and make it a part of your corporate social responsibility by greenwashing everything else and nobody else can see it, just sweeping it under the carpet and getting done with it. So that's why we go ahead and work the way we work, Mark. I absolutely love it and I'm so glad that you brought that out because it is very complex and we talk about systems a lot. So when we talk about food systems, the reason we do that, it's not just about food waste, it's not just about growing food, it's not just about farming, it's not just about how we cook and process that food. It's about all of those food systems working together in order to make a restaurant work, in order to make a farm work. There are so many components and facets of this complex system that we need to understand, but that's okay because that's how our world works. Our world works. I lost your image there. Okay, there you're back. That's just how our world works is in these complex systems and we really need to make sure that we understand everything in our world is systems and that we can understand systems. The minute we start breaking them down into silos or into a linear view is when we get into the problem. The solution comes when we make sure we're addressing all of that to solve the problem and that's what I see you're doing in Paloma and your restaurant and in the other projects you do. You have, and I think we'll tease that now, you have something pretty exciting that you've also started and begun working on. It's a circular economy regenerative farm to help support the restaurant and your other projects as well. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Sure. So leading up to everything that I mentioned just now, what the idea is that as I was telling you, the seeds are controlled, the fertilizers are controlled, the produce is controlled, the land is controlled. There is so much centralization that has happened by big companies. I don't want to go ahead and do some name gaming. However, we all know who these are and they are controlling this and then henceforth controlling the entire food system as we're talking about. So I am going ahead and I'm disrupting that in Thailand. We've already started and we are making the first decentralized blockchain driven farm where you can actually come to my restaurant, you can scan your omelet and you know where the egg came from and you'll be able to see the entire life cycle of that. The entire farm is not a VC or a venture capitalist driven. It's not a bank driven. It's about hundreds and thousands of us coming together, putting a small crowdfund together to be able to eat healthy and feed our children healthy. And we're starting that. We just started with 3000 layer hens. So we'd be doing around 3000 eggs a day. We are following that up with another 2000 broiler chickens, which is going to be every 45 days around 3000 kilos of meat. This is all pasture raised and this is all grass fed. And then we are going ahead and we are getting around 12 cows. This is not going to be for meat. This is only going to be for dairy and dairy products because most high quality dairy and dairy products are all imported from Australia or on France. And this is what is causing large amounts of carbon footprint. So we are going ahead and disrupting that. And then we are creating around in one acre land around 17 greenhouses and we will be growing produce for CSA, which is community service agreements. You can join us and we will be serving you top quality produce that nature offers today. Not you wanting to eat a black carrot in January when it does not grow. So we'd be going ahead and doing mass education for people to be able to understand that, that what it does it really take. And to avoid any kinds of confusion, we will be sending people along with this produce with your milk, your eggs, your butter, your cream, your vegetables, your cauliflower, tomatoes, your carrots. We'll be sending you recipes of me telling you how to cook that produce. So we are then creating an entire food system and people who want to join can join in with as less than, as less as $250. I want to make top quality food accessible to everybody. And that is what we are going to do. And every single week, we are going to have a farmer's market where people can come who are a part of the CSA and pick up whatever produce they want to pick up and feed their children and their husbands and their mothers and their daughters with top quality, great food that should be accessible to all, not wrapped in a plastic, laying in a section called organic in a supermarket that you don't dare walk to because it's three times more expensive than what you would get otherwise. So I am going ahead and I'm disrupting that mark. And that's a regenerative organic farming practices about 30 kilometers outside of Bangkok. Because we were doing with farms in Chiang Mai and that's almost 700 kilometers away. So we will be reducing our carbon footprint by 670 kilometers every three days. That's around 1500 kilometers a week. That's 6000 kilometers a month and 78,000 kilometers of driven diesel trucks for a year. And it's also much better farming practices, which is something that we learned at Sustainable Brands, Chimpon is really in a big push. We're trying to get more regenerative farming and a lot more organic farming practices within city limits, but also in Thailand period because those practices haven't been much used. And so now with your standards of quality, you're very concerned to make sure it's truly regenerative, truly organic. Absolutely Mark. And that's why we are putting it on a blockchain so that it's completely truly exposed. You can actually at any stage of time see the soil composition, the water that's going in, the fertilizer that's being put. What are the vitamins, nutrients, minerals that are being given to the chickens? What are they really being fed on? What the cow is really eating? At any stage of time, I am happy to expose this because when you are true to yourself and you're true to Mother Earth, there is nothing to hide. And we will expose this right there so that people can have that faith and take the leap. And we will be the first ones bringing precision farming techniques to Thailand, which is much required. The world has already learned those things, Japan and Europe and different parts of Israel are already so much more forward on this stuff. We want to be able to teach the farmer here that how can he maximize his output from a single piece of land without taking away from the land? And that's what we are looking to do. So I know when I was there in Champan, it was also a very bad time as far as the air pollution goes. And people had already been wearing face masks for about three months within the city limits of Bangkok proper. And we were a little bit outside, so we were lucky that we didn't have to wear the mask and it wasn't quite as bad, although it was also felt there. That has since with the pandemic and other things has also gotten a little bit worse because of the pandemic, we're wearing more masks as well. And Thai people have that natural social distancing in any way because of their hospitality and the numbers are getting low. But there's something that, you know, maybe I want to tickle upon a little bit. The COVID, the pandemic has a strong tie to food and agriculture and health. It has a strong tie to air pollution and how it's spread. It has a strong tie towards not just healthy eating, but how we grow our food, what kind of chemicals and pesticides. If we're burning our crops in between harvests and what that does to the air, but also to the biome of our earth and to many other things. And so because of that, I kind of want to see what your thoughts or feelings are, how as a restaurant or as a food producer, as a chef, are you starting to think about not only healthy, nutritious ways to help people strengthen their immune system, but also of ways to purify our air, purify the way you produce and make products so that we're actually leaving the earth or those areas where our restaurants, our homes, our things are better than we found it. So that we're kind of being an example to others to clean up that air, to clean up the way we live. Absolutely Mark. And I think that we had a small chat about this when we were in Champong that while the city was running at 165, 170 parts per million of pollution, Houma and the vicinity where we have done planted over 18,000 plants since we got there, it was running at around 130, 120, which was an acceptable range. So that is something that we have like our landlord when he comes to the place and he looks at it, he's just in awe. He's like, what have you done to this place? And planting trees is something that we have been doing at Houma as I was telling you the last time as well, every single diner that comes to the restaurant at the end of the meal, whatever food he has eaten, we take the food waste and compost it and give you a seed and that waste to take back home. That's your takeaway. And then you can plant that seed and your food waste and then plant a tree. And imagine we get around 700 to 900 diners a month, that's 10,000 trees planted by people just coming to eat at Houma. And that is something that we want to be able to do with now coming to the offset from a restaurant is smaller, but the offset for air pollution coming from farming, especially because of the GMO rise that has been grown in countries like Thailand is massive. And man, my farm where I'm building my farm, when I drive to it, I see the fields burning every single day. However, the practice of burning fields in India, in Australia, in different parts of the world goes back 5000 years. That's how mineralization happened. But that was done once a year. The crop was planted twice. You planted the crop, you burnt, you planted the crop again. However, with your GMOs, and I am experiencing this every single day, right next to my land where I'm making my regenerative farm, there is another 10 hectares of land where they were growing rice. They harvested the rice today. The next morning they came, they cut it. They cut everything that was left behind. The next morning they came, they burnt it. The next morning they came and they plowed it again. And two days later, they were already sowing. And with the crops of, you know, am I allowed to name what is destroying this country? Of course, yes, please. With the Monsanto crop and the Kageal fertilizer, you can get up to five rice harvests in a year. And Mark, if you're a poor farmer who's living in a village and I came to you and I said, hey Mark, you know what? Give me your seed, take the seed. Instead of twice, you can grow rice six times this year. That means three times more money you will make this year. Are you willing to do that? You will say yes. And you will take that bait in that moment. And that is what has happened. The big firms have joined hand the likes of the Monsantos. And they have completely centralized farming here. Kageal is the only player in fertilizer. Monsanto is the only player in the seeds. And I'm seeing this with my own eyes because I'm into that business right now. I'm full-time farming business because my restaurant's been shut in a lockdown on and off for the last 18 months. So I am seeing that with my own eyes. And when me and my business partner were sitting down, we were trying to explain that if we can, with our farm, make it a provided destined model saying, oh, you have an acre of land, you can do poultry, you can do dairy, and you can do farming together. And you would make just as much money that you would make by doing GMO, then we can take this model and give it to every farmer in our area or every farmer in the country. So that is also something that we are developing now, just like the way we develop the prototype of the restaurant of the future with Alma. That's so beautiful. I'm glad to hear. I absolutely don't have a problem at all. Matter of fact, I had Carrie Gillum as a guest on my show. And she was a big proponent against Monsanto. She wrote the book called The Monsanto Papers about the travesties of Monsanto. I've also had Maria Rodale of Rodale Institute and Rodale Farms. And she also wrote a book called The Organic Manifesto, says horrific things about buyer Monsanto. All true because they are horrific things. Of course, if you're a poor farmer in Thailand and you're given the choice of struggling and doing one harvest a year or five or six harvests, that's a hard choice to make of the sustenance of your family. But those are the type of food systems we want to get people away from. We want people to have resilience and strength to push back and say, to diversify, to create regenerative farms with agroforestry and permaculture processes, to have biodiverse multiple harvest perennials and crops that they can harvest numerous crops and have that resilience and that stability that they need to get through hard times like this. And not at the cost of our air, not at the cost of human health because it's not worth it. And Mark, you know, before we went ahead and we started the farm, the first thing we did was, as soon as we acquired the land two months ago, the first thing we did was we started planting fruit trees over there. And we started planting perennials and shrubs over there. And we built an insect hotel and a bee hotel so that flora and fauna in our area could start thriving. So, you know, we started from a bottom up approach. And these fruit trees in the future will give fruits that will further give fruit trees, so on and so forth. And our entire area will benefit from it. Because it is absolutely demoralizing to see that when I drive from the airport to my farm, which is only 10 kilometers away from there, I only see rice and only rice and nothing else. And I see that cycle going on and on and on in the last three or four months that I've been there, without the farmer realizing that his yield is pretty much the same. It would be from two harvest if grown right, if not using genetically modified produce. And they would be pretty much making the same money because now there is so much produce that there is crop rationing and they barely get any money for the crops that they grow anymore. So they are still, they are being further pushed down this hunger game society that the likes of Monsanto and the buyers have created without really benefiting the farmer, because it does not benefit the farmer, it benefits the giants. So that is something that I am very closely going to be working with. I'm very happy to shoot some pictures and videos to you as well after our call today for you to be able to look at that because I know you love that kind of stuff. So you can take a look at that as well and we can always have the dialogue going. I really appreciate that. I've got a bunch of questions for you, even more, you know, we're just getting the ball rolling now. Now we know who you are, now we know what you do, but I want to get a little bit more insight. So you're living in Bangkok, you're living in Thailand, you're from India. Yes. How did that happen and how does it tie to your feelings of global citizenry or this world that might function better without nations and borders, divisions of humanity, one from another. If you look at this whole lockdown and the pandemic, the COVID, food was a global citizen, the pandemic was a global citizen, air, water was all a global citizen, but humanity wasn't. Our borders were closed, a lot of nationalism and so I want to get your feelings on being a global citizen, but also how did it evolve? How did you go from India to Thailand and how do you feel about this type of a world? I was the all of 24 years old then running the best Indian restaurant in Mumbai and when you tell a 24 year old that he has an opportunity to move to Bangkok, that's pretty much period. That's the end of it. All you can see is a brilliant party life, but as a chef that does not really happen. You're still working 16, 18 hours a day and I moved down over here. I think it was God's will to be able to let me give him, give me a grand opportunity to be at the executive chef of the Fraser Hotel and that's how I came here and I stayed because you've been here multiple times. Mark, you know this land has its own charm. It has its own beauty. Two hours drive to a beautiful beach or a four hour drive to some mountains in Chiang Mai. So it had its own charm and it had the charm that my hometown of Allahabad where the closest airport to Zara Nasi is only a two and a half hour flight away. So it was like I could go home for the weekend. It would take you longer to fly from New York to San Francisco than to go from Thailand to my hometown in India. So that's why I stayed and Thailand is very accepting of who you are because of the Buddhist culture that they have over here and that is something that I really enjoyed. When I came to Thailand they were serving water in a plastic bottle wrapped in a plastic cap with a plastic straw that was inside a plastic and you would get in a plastic bag and five years later with all of the noise that we are creating the movement and the awakening that is happening is disappeared, Mark. You cannot get a plastic bag at a 7-11 anymore. You must carry your reusable bags now. You know, so the country is very accepting and moving towards a better tomorrow. As the pandemic as you said, the air, the water is a global citizen and humanity is a global citizen too, Mark. I would like to add that. However, the capitalists are not global citizens. They want us to be for their profits, for the profits of those little few. We have to be branded through these little books with different colors and emblems of our country that we must carry in our pockets to go anywhere and be anywhere is the only thing that I see that stops us from being one. And I would like to see a world which is free, free for word, free for speech, free for travel, free for ideas and free for us to be able to really take something that, okay, I saw Mark doing something amazing in Hamburg, Germany and I want to go ahead and bring it today to Thailand. I should not be waiting for six months in the custom department to be able to do something that is better for the country, that is better for the people and humanity at large. So I completely agree with you that the borders are only and only created for the profits of a few. We are one. The pandemic has affected everybody just one. And if we work towards a better tomorrow, global warming, for example, it's not like Thailand is warming, but Malaysia is not. Or Malaysia is warming in India is not. It's a global phenomena and everything other than our passports has a global identity. And so should we as well. I absolutely agree with you. And I like the way that you phrase it. And it's very unique to your personality and how you are. And I love to see that view. One thing that's really interesting is global citizenry or this world without nations or divisions or borders of humanity, one from another. And especially during this time of the pandemic, this increased nationalism that we've seen rise up in certain countries where they're very fearful of others has been very negative. I'm originally from the United States, but I've lived in Hamburg, Germany now for almost 12 years. And it's really interesting because Germany was very generous and wonderful for Syrian refugees, climate refugees and conflict refugees taking in lots of lots of them. Europe took in quite a few, but Germany, I believe, was one took in quite quite a few. But even in that respect, there was a lot of debate and controversy about, do we take them? Do we stop our borders and things like that? But now something's happened. Germany experienced humongous issues around flooding just recently in the last few weeks. Hundreds of lives have been lost and billions of damage, billions of dollars in damage insurance because of severe flooding. That flooding and those problems come from poor infrastructure, poor agriculture, using fossil fuels and agriculture, having air pollution, but also ruining the hummus and the grounds, our soils to be able to absorb water and also to having poor infrastructure to not, instead of buildings or roads, have some form of a system in place to handle those type of severe floodings, which is poor infrastructure. And now some people might say, well, what does that have to do with refugees and what does that have to do with climate change and what does that have to, well, it has a lot to do because those occurred May 2017 was the last time before a few weeks ago that Germany had flooding and there was a couple hundred of people that died, close to 300 people died and also hundreds of millions of flooding damage. And they knew back then what it was and they didn't prepare the infrastructure, they didn't prepare the way they do agriculture, they just continued and now it happened again. And so now instead of talking about Syrian refugees or climate refugees or disaster or conflict refugees, those Germans that were bitching and moaning and those people in Europe and in Belgium that just experienced those floodings are now climate refugees themselves because I can guarantee those floodings and those hospitals and those cars and that damage and those farms doesn't get built back tomorrow. It's going to take a few years and those people have been displaced and they become refugees themselves in their own damn country. Absolutely. So now they should pull their head from their ass. I'm sorry for my language and wake up to climate change. This last week we had the IPCC report come out, the AR6 that says, again, not telling us anything different in history. We are in the hottest month in the history of mankind. Yeah, we need to do something. We need to take action. Let's quit debating. Let's quit pointing fingers. Let's quit complaining about refugees. Let's start some action and change our infrastructure. Let's change our gastronomy. Let's change the way we do the food. Let's do it regeneratively. Let's do it within a symbiotic planet. Let's do it within the biosphere of our planet and in cooperation. And so as you say in your restaurant, it's this Neo-Indian, which I love. It's a kind of this nice twist on cuisine that I love a lot. But it's also a twist on how our world works. And it's much different than your wonderful cuisine. But there's a term, Neo-liberalism and Neo-darlinism. And it basically means that natural selection, survival of the fittest, only the strong survive severe competition. That's bullshit. That's not how our world works. Our world works in symbiotic relationship, one with another with nature and our biome. When we cooperate with each other, when we cooperate with nature, when we prepare our infrastructure, our restaurants, our food systems with nature together as partners in collaboration, in cooperation, we can live resiliently much longer. And that's how our world works. And we're finally waking up to that fact. And I'm just so sad that many people have had to suffer through death and hard times to come to that realization. But I think the message, we're done talking about the negative. We're done talking, period. Let's start acting and doing things. And so I'm sorry, I'm kind of preaching a little bit, but I wanted to get that out. Because I know you have strong feelings the same. I completely agree with you, every single word that you said, you know, the word Neo in front of Indian came from exactly the same idea that you spoke about that we are not, it's not a doggy dog world that we live in. This, the mother provides for everybody. There is enough for everybody in there. So we don't have to kill our neighbors to be able to eat a healthy diet. We don't have to, we don't have to go and step on somebody and push somebody down the ladder to be able to be successful because there is somebody who's everybody, something for everybody, I mean. And I largely believe that at Haoma, we and at all of my other businesses, I very largely believe that the time to have a dialogue and discussion was yesterday. Today we need to wake up and we need to take some stern actions because we are fucking up our planet much quicker than the planet thought we would do it to her. So we better, we better, we better be ready for the backlash because I have never heard of the kind of fires that are there in Greece at the moment. Last year, 70% of the land in Australia got burned. There's massive, the hottest temperatures, 49 degrees centigrade recorded in California this year. Like what else does this mankind need to wake up? Do they need their homes, their own homes to be burned before they wake up? Or are they going to really listen to you and me and all the other likes of us who really want to shake them up and say, hey, start making healthy, wise, planet-driven decisions. And trust me, it's not hard. You've seen, you and me are doing it. We've been doing it and we've been telling people and we've been changing people's opinions about this for a long time. People at large, all of the viewers here today, I'd like to say this to you, that if you think that your house is not going to get washed in the next flood, then you are mistaken. Make sure that there is no flood. You will not be protected when the environment comes down on you. So make sure that the decisions that you're taking every single day, when you walk into that supermarket, what bags you're carrying, what decisions you're making every single day, make sure that it is towards a better tomorrow, which is for all of us, not just you. And thinking that somebody else would save the planet is the biggest mistake. You have to save the planet for yourself, your children, your family. So please wake up. Yeah, we're all crew members on this spaceship earth. There are no passengers. There's only a small period of time when we're a baby or when we're very elderly before we pass away, where we're too frail or too incapable to do anything. But even there, we play a role as a crew member on this earth to teach other crew members how to treat each other and cooperation with love and respect, but also how to teach us how we need to be good crew members on this spaceship earth because we can put our hand on the steering wheel to guide us to the future that we want. And that leads nicely into my next two questions. How, how do you feel? I know you're part of the chef's manifesto and food for good food for all. And you're part of the SDG to no hunger and advocacy around that with Paul Noonham, who's an Australia, but also has been involved in the UN Food Systems Summit. But I really want to know about your feelings about the sustainable development goals and what your thoughts and feelings are on there. And also, do you feel like they're a roadmap, a goal? Are they good targets to get us to a better future, to keep us at 1.5 degrees and warming and just how maybe you put them into your life or into your restaurant or what your thoughts or feelings are? How just the lay person in Mumbai or the lay person in Thailand, just the general citizen, do they even know what the SDGs are? And how can, how would that awareness or just thinking differently might help them in a shift? And I kind of want to know your thoughts and feelings on that. Absolutely. So we've been working very closely with Paul for a while, and Chef Manifesto has finally been able to actually give guidelines to a lot more younger chefs. I'd like to believe that we got onto this wagon a little bit earlier, but the wagon has still not left the station. The wagon is right there. And with the likes of gentlemen like Paul, who are actually showing the light through this tunnel to a lot more people. We are busy in our daily lives, but he has committed his own life to be able to give them the guidelines towards how we can get this together by bringing people like myself and other chefs together who examples of how we can achieve this at the same time, be successful, be world-renowned, be profitable, but still be working towards a better tomorrow. And SDGs, Mark, I'd like to believe that they are great for, with no disrespect, they are great for the educated classes. They are great for people who are awake like you and me, but a layman, he has, he probably has no idea of what is happening into the environment. He has, oh, it's just, there was a flash flood. Ah, there must have been a cloud burst over. Okay, wait for the government to take some action. So to be able to instill this into their program, into their windows of their brain, we have to go to the grassroot level and children in young, young, young ages have to be compulsively go through this strict regime of knowing, okay, you cannot, they have to be told what decisions to make Mark. I don't think children need to learn about what battles Napoleon won in the 1400s. They should, which we were being taught in school as a 13 year old, but rather never taught of how we could protect or benefit our environment and our mother earth. So I think the goals that are set, the SDGs are great for the educated classes like you and me, but at the grassroot level, we need to go down deeper and we need to be able to educate the budding citizens of our world. So it's a kind of a eco literacy and environmental literacy that needs to occur and I agree with you. Yeah, I'm totally with you and I think that there's another way. I mean, I don't, I talk about the SDGs a lot as well, but I think what we also talk about daily things that people do interaction with food and the environment that also without saying it directly touches on all of the SDGs, but in a different way that some, some people can understand how they can live life differently. And I think that's really, really important way to do it. You coming from Mumbai, very hot place, Thailand's a very hot place. The California is extremely hot now. Certain areas of the world are extremely hot now. And I've, and I've been in conversations with some people from these areas, they're not getting that it's climate change, that it's our environment getting hotter. It's just like, oh, that's, that's weird that it's so hot. It's a record again. Somehow they're missing that link of connection. And then they go right back to their daily lives. Yeah, it's hot, the forests are burning. It's hotter than ever. People are dying up. Okay, I got to go back to work and it's business as usual. Those two things to, for me, don't correlate. How can you not see that correlation and that relationship? Mark, you know, the urgency that they have shown with the COVID pandemic, the lockdowns, they, I am telling you today and mark my word that this will be on video. The speed at which they're going, suddenly there is going to be a wake up call and the government is going to shove this down their throat. There's going to be, there's going to be climate change lockdowns. People will not be allowed to get out of their homes because the cities near them are burning. And this is going to happen in the near future. It's going to happen tomorrow. I know one of the greatest three-star Michelin restaurants in America, Medwood, got burnt and gone in California in the last fire. The entire village got wiped out. Who would have thought? People, they were spending $500 a dinner over there, lining up, booking three, six months out in advance. It's gone. It's disappeared. It hasn't come back to existence. You know, so I think people, we live in a world where we understand the pain, where the pain is infected upon us. You know, we don't want to learn by somebody else's example. We don't want to learn by what happened in Australia last year. We are still, we are not, our media does not want to emphasize upon the fact that Greece is burning at the moment or Turkey is burning at the moment. You know, or it does not want to emphasize on the fact that more than 600,000 people are trying to relieve Kabul tonight because the Taliban is taking over. You know, so we live in a world which is fucking weird, but at the same time, I'm not giving hope on it. I still want to drive to a better tomorrow because I have hope and I have faith that we can do this. I do too. And I've had a few meals with you and I know your level of standard of eating and it is important to me because what better way than through connection of one human being to another and good food that is sustainable and healthy and makes you feel good in a restaurant, in an environment, in a farm where the air quality is better because there's trees and there's healthy soil that's capturing the carbon. The food that is not highly processed with sugars, aromas and flavors and chemicals, but it's good to eat. There's no better thing in the world to do and it's something that each of us do each and every single day and it's something that we can all contribute to human suffering, to the health of our food, but also to our environmental destruction because it's not just the fossil fuel industry, the automotive, the chemical industry, the number one creators of greenhouse gas emissions and our global warming, they're on the list. Don't get me wrong, but the number one factor creating the biggest impact on human suffering and global warming in our environment is agriculture, seafood, food and beverage. We do it every day. It's food and the packaging, the waste on and on, etc. And it's also the biggest silver bullet to draw down and fix the problem and it's a beautiful thing. It's such a nice thing to do when we connect ourselves. I have the hardest question for you that I'm going to give for you today and it's the burning question, WTF. And no, it's not the swear word, although we've probably been saying it several times these past two years. It's actually, what's the futures? What do we have to look forward to? What is your vision? I want to know your vision of what's the futures? Where should we go? Why should we go there? And what's the roadmap? I think, Mark, the only possible way from my, and I'm no guru, I'm no political pundit, but I can tell you this that from my vision, from where I see as a 32-year-old is that the only way to survive what is coming ahead of us in the midst of this disease, in the midst of this global warming, in the midst of the depletion of our environment, we need to be able to form communities. We need to be able to live as a community. And we need to be able to bring like-minded people together who have empathy. With empathy, I don't only mean, oh, you pet a stray dog or you help an old lady cross the road. Empathy for nature. Empathy for your neighbor. Your empathy for the environment. We need to come together and we need to say, okay, we are going to build food systems of our own. And we are not going to rely on the commercial systems. And I personally believe that that is going to be the future. Community service agreements, CSA is the future of where people come together. And the irony is that the future is the past because that's exactly how it happened back in the day, right, Pak? You would step out and there would be a small trailer truck and the back of the truck would be loaded with vegetables and your aunt and your mom would step out of the house and buy whatever he brought today to the cell on the back of his trailer truck, right? And that was community. And it was the same guy coming in every day, whatever was in the farms and he was sourcing, he was selling. That is what we need to go. We don't, we suddenly don't need to have the need to eat value be frying from Japan in Germany. Neither do we need to eat caviar flown from France to Bangkok. We need to wake up today when we travel and go to these places a couple of times a year, we can definitely do that. But having massive shipping containers fly that produce to be able to consume on a daily basis from supermarkets is not the need. We do not need to consume things that are not in that region and that is not local war. I think community that is local war driven is the answer to most of the problems is how I feel about it. I love it. I have three more questions left and then we're done. They're really for my guests, for my listeners, I guess, not my guests. If there was one message you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, what would it be your message? And it's okay if it's a couple of messages. But what's a sustainable takeaway for them that really would have the power to change their life? I believe you've already answered it in some respects by saying, grow your own food, take control of your energy source back. But please, I want to hear it from you. I just to all the listeners today, the only thing that I want to say and I think what your takeaway should be is that please do not wait for somebody else to save the environment. Please wake up today and go out there and to be able to adapt and make the right decisions, adapt to the right food systems. And you all deep down inside know that there are people like me and Mark out there who have laid the guidelines on our websites on our channels. Just pay heed to us and you'll be able to know what decisions to make. The road to sustainable living is not very hard. It's very, very simple and very rewarding. And you can get on this today as soon as you end this podcast. Great. What should young chefs or innovators, entrepreneurs in your field be thinking about if they are looking for ways to make a real impact on their community and on their life? Mark, I think all the young chefs and all the food entrepreneurs that are listening to me today, what I want to tell you is that please, please look beyond acknowledgement. The first two years that I was doing this, nobody knew who I was. Don't look for instant gratification. Focus on what you think is right and make sure that it is ethical. And once you do work towards a better environment, a better food system, a better food industry, you will be hurt and age and everyone will be hurt. You need to know that it's not about how good your food looks on the plate or how delicious it takes. It is about nurturing the diners. Nurture your diners. Make sure that after they've eaten your food, they will wake up better, healthier tomorrow. And the last question is what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start? Man, if I would have known this about sustainability or this, would it change your life? Is there anything like that? Yeah. If I had known and people wouldn't have made sustainability and live in sustainability and running a sustainable restaurant sound like rocket science, it would have been easier for me to adopt this much earlier. Most of the people, I've got to tell you and please go ahead and look up Haoma and see the sustainability page on our website. You'd see the amount of sustainability we do. All of that that you will see on our website and all of those beautiful systems that we've made, DIY have costed us less than $20,000. So it is not expensive to go sustainable. It is rewarding to go sustainable. And I wish I knew this way in advance. Yeah, you would have started sooner. DK, thank you so much for letting us inside of your ideas. It has been a sheer pleasure. It's always wonderful to talk to you. It's good to see you again and I can't wait to see you again and give you a hug and also eat at your restaurant in Bangkok very soon. Please have a wonderful day. May we meet again soon. Mark, thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you.