TCSE: Ted Corpus Search Engine

Recorded at	April 10, 2022
Event	TED2022
Duration (min:sec)	12:21
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	134.81 very slow
Readability (FK)	70.8 very easy
Speaker	Alexis Nikole Nelson


1	00:04	If a vegan falls in the forest ... (Laughter)
2	00:09	And no one's there to hear them say, "I'm vegan!"
3	00:15	(Laughter)
4	00:18	Are they even really vegan?
5	00:20	(Laughter) (Laughter and applause)
6	00:29	I like to preface conversations about my dietary habits with jokes because brains love the ha-has and because sometimes you say the word "vegan" and people get a little afraid.
7	00:48	Their mind immediately conjures this nonexistent super vegan who's an amalgam of every annoying thing they've ever heard a vegan say.
8	01:00	(Laughter)
9	01:02	And at that point, they're checked out.
10	01:06	Now if you've managed to somehow avoid the zeitgeist for the last 15 or 20 years, one, tell me how.
11	01:14	(Laughter) Two, I will tell you what vegan means, because I'm sure you're dying to know.
12	01:24	So vegan is both a diet completely free of animal products and a person who follows that diet, often used interchangeably with "plant-based."
13	01:36	But plant-based means "vegan" but not vegan.
14	01:41	(Laughter)
15	01:43	Like, not necessarily done to decrease animal suffering per se, but maybe to help one's health.
16	01:51	But that is not the argument we came to have today.
17	01:56	No siree, Bob.
18	01:57	(Laughter)
19	01:59	I see some sweet-spot minds looking to tussle.
20	02:02	Not at my TED Talk.
21	02:04	(Laughter)
22	02:09	Now I am an outdoor educator, I am a wild food forager, I am a reluctant social media star.
23	02:19	(Laughter)
24	02:21	And yes, I am a vegan.
25	02:24	Audience: Whoo!
26	02:26	Thank you.
27	02:27	That's not the reaction I usually get.
28	02:29	(Laughter)
29	02:31	At the age of five, upon realizing that the cows in the fields and the cows on my dad's grill were the same cows ... (Laughter)
30	02:41	I asked my parents if I could go vegetarian.
31	02:45	To which they said, "Sure, but let's wait until you're done growing first."
32	02:51	So sure that I would change my mind over the next five to nine years.
33	02:58	Well.
34	03:00	Shortly after my 12th birthday, I took the plunge, and I gave up meat completely.
35	03:06	It took another 12 years for me to give up eggs and dairy.
36	03:09	And now between the veganism and the foraging, I have one of the more eclectic pantries in the world.
37	03:20	(Video) Meet the Indigo Milk Cap.
38	03:23	Let's make a fancy dessert out of seaweed.
39	03:26	Here is a mimosa tree.
40	03:27	Please be a puffball! Please be a puffball!
41	03:30	(Laughter)
42	03:31	It was a puffball.
43	03:34	Now, foraging is the art/science of identifying, collecting and eating wild food.
44	03:43	So if anyone's ever convinced you to try dandelions or wood sorrel, congratulations, you're a forager too.
45	03:53	When my mom told me that there was a bunch of free food hanging out in lawns and sidewalks ... (Laughter) my mind was blown.
46	04:05	All these free fruits, veggies and fungi that didn't require your water, didn’t require your time and often were healthier than their counterparts in the grocery store.
47	04:18	Cute little fun fact just between us, we did this thing over the last 100 years where we bred foods to travel easier, be bigger, taste milder.
48	04:28	And that often breeds out the nutrition.
49	04:34	Let's take, for example, Purslane or Verdolagas, if you are in a Spanish-speaking part of the Americas.
50	04:42	It is a weed that grows out of sidewalk cracks in the summertime.
51	04:49	It is chock-full of Omega-3s, and it ain’t a fish.
52	04:53	Iron, get out of here, Popeye.
53	04:56	(Laughter)
54	04:57	And vitamin C, your immune system will thank you.
55	05:01	Sometimes I will just stand in my neighborhood, looking at the ground like.
56	05:07	(Laughter)
57	05:11	And I'm baffled that no one else seems to care.
58	05:17	Now I am a forager and a vegan for much the same reason.
59	05:23	My love of this planet and its inhabitants.
60	05:27	But let me tell you, between those two identifiers, it's pretty hard to get people to try my food.
61	05:35	(Laughter)
62	05:38	You tell someone something's vegan and you're already met with skepticism.
63	05:43	Tell them it’s vegan and you pulled half of it out of the ground ...
64	05:47	(Laughter)
65	05:49	It's a tough sell.
66	05:52	So today I'm going to give all of you my tips, my tricks on getting people to expand their palette and try wild vegan foods consensually.
67	06:03	(Laughter)
68	06:05	This is not the Lying Liar show.
69	06:09	It is the Slightly Annoying but Ultimately Lovable Tall Vegan show.
70	06:12	(Laughter)
71	06:15	So today we are going to be making a snack that happens to be vegan, happens to be great for the planet, happens to use one of my favorite ingredients.
72	06:25	We are making sweet and salty kelp chips, a Korean snack known as Dasima Twigak.
73	06:32	Oh, thank you.
74	06:34	A "woo" for the pronunciation, I was worried about it.
75	06:37	(Laughter)
76	06:40	Now I know all of y'all's kids are obsessed with those nori seaweed snacks, so why not kick it up a notch --
77	06:47	Sorry -- (Laughter) With a locally foraged ingredient: bull kelp.
78	06:58	I foraged this right here in Vancouver.
79	07:01	(Applause and cheers)
80	07:06	Now I'm going to go and start chipifying this seaweed.
81	07:11	Very official kitchen shears.
82	07:14	And while I'm doing that, I'm going to give you my first tip.
83	07:21	When introducing a dish to skeptical mouths, it is best to use a dish that is not pretending to be something else.
84	07:31	(Applause)
85	07:32	You know.
86	07:34	That way, they have no prior associations, no memories to be comparing it to of their mother's version of it.
87	07:43	(Laughter)
88	07:45	Maybe they have no opinions about it at all.
89	07:48	I'm going to spritz these with a little sunflower oil.
90	07:52	Ooh. Smokey.
91	07:57	Now, seaweed and sea vegetables in general are a very exciting food space.
92	08:06	They don't require fresh water.
93	08:10	They don't require fertilizer.
94	08:11	They don't even require land.
95	08:14	They're just hanging out in the salty seas, creating ecosystems, creating oxygen for all of us to breathe, and creating these amino acid-rich snacks.
96	08:24	In this day and age, seaweed is truly future-minded food.
97	08:28	They're an option I wish more people would reach for, as runoff, water access, labor issues and monoculturing plague a lot of modern agriculture here in North America.
98	08:41	Yeah.
99	08:43	(Applause)
100	08:45	Also they taste real good.
101	08:49	Those amino acids do a lot more than adding umami to your dishes.
102	08:54	Bull help on average packs 15.3 percent protein by weight.
103	09:00	That is for everyone who asks where vegans get their protein from.
104	09:06	We're fine.
105	09:07	(Laughter)
106	09:11	Now as I said before, this dish is nothing new.
107	09:15	It's a popular bar snack in parts of Korea, and we actually have a lot of accidentally vegan recipes historically.
108	09:25	And the reason for that is because up until recently, we did not eat this much meat.
109	09:30	Which is going to lead to my second tip.
110	09:34	It's a little spicy, a little touchy.
111	09:36	Hopefully the promise of a food reveal will get you all through it.
112	09:42	And it is this.
113	09:44	Explain to your friends that the way that we are eating is not sustainable.
114	09:50	Yeah.
115	09:51	(Applause)
116	09:53	It's not.
117	09:54	(Applause)
118	09:55	As we are constantly reaching for more land and more fresh water, we have set a precedent that our planet can not keep up with.
119	10:07	Tell them you are not trying to change their entire life.
120	10:10	You just want them to be a bit more thoughtful with some of their choices, to go for those kelp chips instead of maybe pork rinds from the convenience store.
121	10:20	I find that introducing people to wild foods in their area is an excellent way to foster their connection to their food.
122	10:29	And it's a way that fosters that connection over shame.
123	10:33	And it shares a snack instead of an infographic or a shocking piece of media.
124	10:42	Now moment of truth time.
125	10:44	Let's see how these guys are doing in here.
126	10:48	Oh, yes, this will do nicely.
127	10:53	Now I'm going to be real real with all of you because I would never not be real real with you.
128	11:00	Some people ...
129	11:02	OK, get out of there, babies.
130	11:07	(Laughter)
131	11:10	Some people are going to be salty.
132	11:14	And that's a funny thing for me to say, because this is salt.
133	11:17	(Laughter)
134	11:20	And that's just the way it goes, we don't get to choose the pace at which people change, if they choose to change at all.
135	11:30	But, some people -- this is sugar -- will be sweet.
136	11:38	They will appreciate you for meeting them where they are.
137	11:43	For sharing a snack and a smile, and maybe you extending that bit of compassion to them will make them make some big changes moving forward in their life.
138	11:56	And who knows, maybe next time they'll be gutsy enough to try acorn cheese or something.
139	12:03	So share that snack.
140	12:06	And make that memory.
141	12:08	Thank you all so much for coming to my talk.
142	12:13	Ooh.
143	12:15	That was a nice crunch.
144	12:16	Happy snacking.
145	12:18	Don't die.
146	12:19	(Cheers and applause)

Alexis Nikole Nelson: A flavorful field guide to foraging