Future of Food - Let's Eat Better for Ourselves and the Planet

Scientists have established that large-scale farming is one of the causes of climate change. Do you think that some of the forces behind big ag would want to hide the truth about their damage to the environment?

As a matter of fact, that's just what they're doing.

In this episode, Georgina Gustin a Washington-based reporter for Inside Climate News who has covered food policy, farming, and the environment for more than a decade, discusses who is behind this spread of misinformation, where you can find trusted sources of information about food and the climate crisis, and how you can create change for the better.

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Making edible protein consumes resources. Not only is the world population growing — the United Nations predicts there will be nine billion people on Earth by 2050 — but rising income levels mean that more people can afford meat. When the demand for protein exceeds the plant's carrying capacity, there will be an environmental crash and people will go hungry. This reasoning is a driver of the "why eat crickets" argument. Our demands for protein cannot exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity. or we are done. You might say the pathway to survival involves choosing one of two human engineering projects.

Crickets provide protein efficiently, and they also might provide health benefits by providing probiotic fiber. There's a massive shift in health and nutrition science going on, a deepening understanding how the gut biome enhances overall human health. there's evidence that diseases like Parkinsons and Alzheimers start in the gut biome. Will that convince you to eat crickets? Cricket protein might help fight diabetes by regulating glucose. Jarrod Goldin, a co-founder of Entomo Farms, cites evidence of the health benefits of cricket protein. He also cites a story from South Korea that suggests that hospital patients who ate food fortified with cricket protein got better, faster.

Andrew Brentano, a co-founder of Tiny Farms, also interviewed in the podcast, talks about the market for cricket protein expanding from humans to dogs and cats.

In engineering, water and energy savings are the easy calculations. It's the human engineering that is hard. What will it take for you to eat a cricket even if it is unrecognizable as a bug and supplied as a powder?

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Tim is also a senior researcher fellow at Tufts University's Global Development and Environmental Institute and an advisor at the Small Planet Institute, where he previously directed its Land and Food Rights Program.

We’ve long wanted to do an episode at Future of Food about where to get good information about food and the climate crisis. We’ve wanted to identify which organizations might be giving us misleading information about food and climate. My interview with Tim is a first step toward understanding who controls what you know about the food you eat. Buy his book Eating Tomorrow.

While Kimbal Musk’s brother Elon is tunneling under LA to reinvent high-speed transportation, sending rockets into orbit to reboot commercial space travel for our time, and mass-marketing electric cars, Kimbal Musk is working with food. Over the last six years he’s started restaurants, designed vertical gardens, and developed an ambitious plan to put a thousand gardens into schools so that kids can discover their connection to food by growing it themselves. The idea is simple: A pre-fab, modular raised-bed garden that goes in a schoolyard, with seating for thirty students who attend outdoor classes about gardening, science, nutrition, and cooking. The white polyethylene garden structure is designed to last longer than the schoolyard it occupies. The project is called Big Green, and it includes the garden itself plus a fifteen-part lesson plan for teachers. There are learning gardens in Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, and Pittsburgh, with plans for more. “When we enter a city, we enter not to built one garden, but to build a hundred gardens at a time,” Tighe Hutchins, the program director of Big Green, said on the podcast. She works closely with school administrations and communities to make the gardens part of student life Kyle Kuusisto, a teacher at a Memphis school, tells us what it’s like to teach physical education classes, and then transition to gardening, science, yoga and food prep classes.

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How old is that potato? It's a question every restaurant has to answer. And when you shop for groceries, have you ever wondered if what you put in your cart is really fresh? These are supply chain questions that Creg Fielding can answer. He’s the founder and owner of Fusionware, a platform designed manage supply chains for food growers, packers, and shippers.