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.

Listen to The Future of Food on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, at FutureX, or the Future of Food website. 

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. 

In an interview recorded in a studio before the pandemic, Kaitlin Mogentale tells host Ivy Joeva of the journey that led to create a food company  that transforms upcycled ingredients — the overlooked, nutritional byproducts of fruit and vegetable processing — into wholesome, better for people and better for the planet, pantry staples: Pulp chips. Waste Less, Thrive More, is the company motto, because Pulp Pantry believes that a thriving humanity depends on a thriving, healthy planet.  Learn more at http://pulppantry.com

How can we support our immune health despite toxicity in our environment, especially in the context of a global pandemic? How are our systems of food production contributing to the destruction of ecosystems worldwide, and giving rise to disease outbreaks like the one we’ve seen with Covid-19?

We had the privilege to "sit down" online with Zach Bush MD, to ask these questions, and get his insights on everything from the top anti-inflammatory foods, to how the air you breathe affects your microbiome.

Zach Bush MD is a renowned, multi-disciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care and internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to human health. www.zachbushmd.com
 

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned scholar and tireless crusader for economic, food, and gender justice. Dr. Shiva was trained as a physicist, and later shifted her focus to interdisciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy. In 1982, she founded an independent institute, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology which was dedicated to high quality and independent research to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times in close partnership with local communities and social movements. In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, and to promote organic farming and fair trade. In 2004, in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K., she started Bija Vidyapeeth (Earth University), an international college for sustainable living in the Doon Valley in Northern India. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental “hero” in 2003 and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia. Forbes magazine in November 2010 identified Dr. Vandana Shiva as one of the top Seven most Powerful Women on the Globe. Among her many awards are the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award, 1993), Order of the Golden Ark, the UN’s Global 500 Roll of Honour, and The MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity in 2016.

Navdanya promotes a new agricultural and economic paradigm, a culture of food for health where ecological responsibility and economic justice take precedence over today’s consumer and profit based extractive food production systems.  The promotion of biodiversity-based agroecology for economic security and the mitigation of climate change, together with seed and food sovereignty are central to Navdanya’s vision of an Earth Democracy.

LINKS AND RESOURCES 

Loretta Allison

https://www.lorettaallison.com/

Loretta Allison on Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/spadeandseeds/

Fig Earth Supply

https://www.figearthsupply.com/

Future of Food is part of the FutureX Podcast Network. Show transcripts, articles, and more at the Future of Food website.

On the Kiss the Ground website you’ll find a resource called Find Your Path. It will help you see a path forward to activism. Try it!

Resources Mentioned in this Epiode

Ryland Englehart on Instagram @lovebeingryland
@cafegratitude

Make Soil

Spy Community Garden

Kiss the Ground Purchasing Guide

Here is an intro to regenerative agriculture and ways to make your garden regenerative .

What if you had an opportunity for meaningful change each time you sit down to eat?

In the ten new episodes for Season 2 of Future of Food, Ivy Joeva interviews activists and innovators who show us that at every meal we have the opportunity to wake up to the impact our diet has on the environment, as well as understand how our environment affects our physical health and well being. Why? The same foods that support healing the planet are also the supportive of our health, vitality and fertility. And the foods that are most costly to the environment, and contribute most to climate change, are also most taxing on our health.

It's a cycle of food and life.

But there's so much disinformation out there about climate change it's hard to know what to believe. This podcast is here to help -- answering your questions about the climate crisis and food.

Find us wherever you get your podcasts and put the power to save the planet on your playlist.

Seaweed first made it on the menu as part of a macrobiotic diet, and was popularized by grocers like Erewhon. That was back in the 1960s, and since then, chefs have caught on, moving seaweed from a mere condiment to the center of the plate. Seaweed can be wild harvested, as they do at Maine Coast Sea Vegetables, farmed in the ocean, as they do at Sea Greens Farms and Greenwave, or farmecd in tanks on land, as they do at Monterey Bay Seaweeds. There are a lot or enviornmental and social positives about seaweed. It restores the ocean, and farming it can provide jobs.

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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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