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Recorded at	October 22, 2020
Event	TED Salon Dell Technologies
Duration (min:sec)	12:01
Video Type	TED Salon Talk (partner)
Words per minute	171.73 medium
Readability (FK)	44.41 difficult
Speaker	Amanda Little


1	00:12	In the early months of the pandemic,
2	00:14	chef José Andrés circulated two photos
3	00:17	that have come to symbolize a modern American food crisis.
4	00:21	The first shows mountains of potatoes
5	00:23	that have been left to rot in a field in Idaho.
6	00:25	The restaurants and cafeterias and stadiums that had consumed them
7	00:29	were shuttered during the pandemic.
8	00:32	The second shows a devastating scene outside of the San Antonio food bank.
9	00:36	Thousands of carloads of people lined up,
10	00:39	waiting for food with not enough supply to go around.
11	00:42	"How is it possible these two photos exist at the same time,
12	00:46	in the most prosperous
13	00:48	and technologically advanced moment in our history," tweeted Andrés.
14	00:52	In the months after the photos were published,
15	00:55	the crisis got worse.
16	00:58	Billions of pounds of potatoes and other fresh produce
17	01:01	were chucked by American farmers.
18	01:03	At the same time,
19	01:05	food banks all over the country were reporting demand increases
20	01:08	and 40 percent were facing critical shortfalls.
21	01:11	Outside the US,
22	01:13	especially in the Middle East and throughout Southeastern Africa,
23	01:17	COVID-19 was paralyzing food systems that were already vulnerable.
24	01:21	Oxfam has predicted that by the end of 2020
25	01:25	12,000 people per day could die of hunger related to COVID.
26	01:30	That's more than the highest daily mortality rate
27	01:33	recorded so far.
28	01:35	But what's worse
29	01:36	and what's much more concerning to all of us
30	01:38	is that COVID is just one of many major disruptions
31	01:42	that have been predicted
32	01:43	in the years and decades ahead.
33	01:46	More chronic and complex than the pressures of COVID
34	01:50	are the pressures of climate change.
35	01:52	And those of you who live in California have seen this on your farms.
36	01:56	You've seen withering heat and drought and fires
37	02:00	disrupt avocado and almond and citrus and strawberry farms.
38	02:06	This summer, we saw the devastating impacts of storms
39	02:09	on corn and soy farms.
40	02:11	I've seen the various pressures of drought,
41	02:14	heat, flooding, superstorms,
42	02:17	invasive insects, bacterial blight,
43	02:19	shifting seasons and weather volatility
44	02:22	from Washington to Florida,
45	02:24	and from Guatemala to Australia.
46	02:27	The upshot is this.
47	02:29	Climate change is becoming something we can taste.
48	02:31	This is a kitchen-table issue in the literal sense.
49	02:35	The International Panel on Climate Change
50	02:37	has predicted that by mid-century
51	02:39	the world may reach a threshold of global warming
52	02:42	beyond which current agricultural practices
53	02:45	can no longer support large human civilizations.
54	02:49	The USDA scientist Jerry Hatfield put it to me this way:
55	02:53	the single biggest threat of climate change
56	02:55	is the collapse of food systems.
57	02:58	The reality we face,
58	03:00	one that was exposed by those mountains of potatoes
59	03:02	and the cars lined up during the pandemic,
60	03:05	is that our supply chains are antiquated.
61	03:09	Our food systems have not been designed
62	03:11	to adapt to major disruptions or preempt them.
63	03:16	Addressing this challenge as much as any other
64	03:19	is going to define our progress in the coming century.
65	03:23	But there's good news.
66	03:25	And the good news is that farmers and entrepreneurs and academics
67	03:29	are radically rethinking national and global food systems.
68	03:33	They are marrying principles of old-world agroecology
69	03:36	and state-of-the-art technologies
70	03:38	to create what I call a third way to our food future.
71	03:43	We're going to see radical changes
72	03:44	in what we grow and how we eat in the coming decades,
73	03:48	as these environmental and population
74	03:50	and public health pressures intensify.
75	03:53	I studied these changes for my book "The Fate of Food:
76	03:55	What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World."
77	03:58	I traveled for five years into the lands and the minds
78	04:01	and the machines that are shaping the future of food.
79	04:04	My travels took me through 15 countries and 18 states,
80	04:09	from apple orchards in Wisconsin to tiny cornfields in Kenya,
81	04:14	to massive Norwegian fish farms
82	04:16	and computerized foodscapes in Shanghai.
83	04:19	I investigated new ideas,
84	04:20	like robotics and CRISPR and vertical farms.
85	04:24	And old ideas, like edible insects and permaculture and ancient plants.
86	04:29	I began to see the emergence of this third way to food production.
87	04:33	A synthesis of the traditional and the radically new.
88	04:38	There's a growing controversy
89	04:40	about the best path to future food security in the US.
90	04:43	Food is ripe for reinvention, Bill Gates has proclaimed.
91	04:47	Huge flows of investment
92	04:49	are funding new methods of climate-smart and high-tech agriculture.
93	04:54	But many sustainable food advocates bristle at this idea of reinvention.
94	04:58	They want food deinvented.
95	05:00	They argue for a return to preindustrial
96	05:04	and pre-green revolution,
97	05:06	biodynamic and organic farming.
98	05:09	To which skeptics inevitably respond,
99	05:11	"Nice, but does it scale?
100	05:13	Sure, a return to traditional farming methods
101	05:16	could produce better food,
102	05:17	but can it produce enough food that's affordable?"
103	05:20	The rift between the reinvention camp and the deinvention camp
104	05:23	has existed for decades.
105	05:25	But now it's a raging battle.
106	05:29	One side covets the past,
107	05:30	the other side covets the future
108	05:32	and as someone observing this from the outside,
109	05:35	I began to wonder, why must it be so binary?
110	05:38	Can't there be a synthesis of the two approaches?
111	05:41	Our challenge is to borrow from the wisdom of the ages,
112	05:45	and from our most advanced science,
113	05:48	to forge this third way.
114	05:51	One that allows us to improve and scale our harvests,
115	05:54	while restoring rather than degrading
116	05:56	the underlying web of life.
117	05:59	I belong to neither camp.
118	06:02	I'm a failed vegan and a lapsed vegetarian,
119	06:04	and a terrible backyard farmer.
120	06:06	If I'm honest,
121	06:08	I will keep trying at this, but I may fail.
122	06:11	But I'm hell-bent on hope,
123	06:13	and if my travels have taught me anything,
124	06:15	it's that there's good reason for hope.
125	06:18	Plenty of solutions are merging
126	06:19	that can help build sustainable, resilient food systems.
127	06:22	Even if we can't rely on a critical mass
128	06:24	of backyard-farming vegetarians to do this on their own,
129	06:28	from the ground up.
130	06:30	Let's start with artificial intelligence and robotics.
131	06:33	Jorge Heraud is a Peruvian-born engineer
132	06:36	who now lives in Silicon Valley,
133	06:38	and his company developed a robotic weeder named See and Spray,
134	06:42	and I went to Arkansas to see the maiden voyage of See and Spray.
135	06:47	And I was half expecting a battalion of C3PO-style robots
136	06:51	to march into the fields with pincer hands to pluck the weeds.
137	06:55	And instead, I found this.
138	06:56	A tractor with a big, white hoop skirt off the back of it.
139	07:00	And inside that hoop skirt are 24 cameras
140	07:02	that use computer vision to see the ground beneath
141	07:06	and to distinguish between the plants and the weeds.
142	07:09	And to deploy with sniper-like precision
143	07:11	these tiny jets of concentrated fertilizer,
144	07:14	or herbicide,
145	07:16	that incinerate the baby weeds.
146	07:18	I learned how robotics can end the practice
147	07:21	of broadcast spraying chemicals across millions of acres of land
148	07:25	and how we can reduce the use of herbicides
149	07:28	by up to 90 percent.
150	07:30	But the bigger picture is even more exciting.
151	07:33	Intelligent machines can treat plants individually,
152	07:36	applying not just herbicides
153	07:37	but fungicides and insecticides
154	07:39	and fertilizers on a plant-by-plant, rather than field-by-field basis.
155	07:45	So that eventually,
156	07:46	this kind of hyperspecific farming
157	07:49	can allow for more diversity and intercropping on fields.
158	07:53	And big farms can begin to mimic natural systems
159	07:57	and improve soil health.
160	07:59	Heraud is the embodiment of third-way thinking, right?
161	08:03	Robots, he told me,
162	08:05	don't have to remove us from nature,
163	08:07	they can bring us closer to it, they can restore it.
164	08:10	Increasing crop diversity will be crucial
165	08:13	to building resilient food systems.
166	08:16	And so will decentralizing agriculture
167	08:19	so that when farmers in one region are disrupted,
168	08:21	the others around, they can keep growing.
169	08:23	The rise of vertical farms,
170	08:25	like this farm, built inside a former steel mill in Newark, New Jersey,
171	08:31	can play a key role in decentralizing agriculture.
172	08:35	Aeroponic farms use a tiny fraction
173	08:37	of the water that is used in in-ground farms.
174	08:41	And they can grow food much faster, about 40 percent faster.
175	08:45	And when located in and near cities,
176	08:47	where the food is consumed,
177	08:48	they eliminate a huge amount of trucking and food waste.
178	08:52	It struck me at first as creepy
179	08:54	in kind of a "Silent Running" way
180	08:56	that we'd be growing our future fruits and vegetables
181	08:59	inside, without soil or sun.
182	09:03	And after weeks of spending time in these plant factories,
183	09:06	I began to see it as oddly, almost perfectly natural
184	09:10	to deliver the plants only and exactly what they need,
185	09:13	with zero herbicides and radical efficiency.
186	09:16	Here again, we see innovators borrowing from,
187	09:19	and perhaps even elevating the wisdom of natural ecosystems.
188	09:24	Developments in plant-based and alternative meats
189	09:27	are also profoundly hopeful.
190	09:29	And they follow a similar trend
191	09:31	toward local, resilient, low-carbon protein production.
192	09:36	Consumers are excited about this,
193	09:38	and during the pandemic,
194	09:39	we've seen a 250 percent increase
195	09:41	in demand for alternative meats.
196	09:44	A study by the Journal of Clinical Nutrition
197	09:46	found that the participants who were eating the plant-based proteins
198	09:52	saw a drop in their cholesterol levels,
199	09:55	in their weight
200	09:56	and eventually, a drop in their risk of heart disease.
201	10:00	The potential environmental benefits of plant-based meats are astounding.
202	10:04	And there's even potential in lab-grown or cell-based meats.
203	10:08	Uma Valeti fed me my first plate of lab-grown duck breast,
204	10:13	harvested fresh from a bioreactor.
205	10:16	It had been grown from a small sampling of cells
206	10:18	taken from muscle tissue and fat and connective tissues,
207	10:23	which is exactly what we eat when we eat meat.
208	10:26	This lab-grown or cell-based duck meat
209	10:28	has very little threat of bacterial contamination,
210	10:31	it's about 85 percent lower CO2 emissions associated with it.
211	10:35	Eventually it can be grown
212	10:37	like those crops inside vertical farms in decentralized facilities
213	10:42	that aren't vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions.
214	10:45	Valeti started out as a cardiologist,
215	10:47	who understood that doctors have been developing
216	10:52	human and animal tissues in laboratories for decades.
217	10:55	He was inspired as much by that
218	10:58	as he was by a 1931 quote from Winston Churchill that says,
219	11:02	"We shall escape the absurdity of growing the whole chicken
220	11:05	in order to eat the breast or the wing,
221	11:08	by growing them separately in suitable mediums."
222	11:12	Like Heraud, Valeti is a quintessential third-way thinker.
223	11:16	He's reimagined an old idea using new technology,
224	11:20	to usher in a solution whose time has come.
225	11:24	I've met with dozens of farmers and entrepreneurs and engineers
226	11:29	who emulate third-way thinking, all over the world.
227	11:32	They're using modern breeding tools like CRISPR
228	11:35	to develop nutritious heirloom crops that can withstand drought and heat.
229	11:39	They're using AI to make aquaculture sustainable.
230	11:43	They're finding ways to eliminate food waste.
231	11:46	They are scaling up
232	11:47	conservation agriculture and managed grazing.
233	11:50	And they're reviving ancient plants,
234	11:52	and they're recycling sewage and gray water
235	11:54	to develop a drought-proof water supply.
236	11:58	The upshot is this:
237	12:00	Human innovation that marries old and new approaches to food production
238	12:05	can, and I believe, will usher in this third way
239	12:09	and redefine sustainable food on a grand scale.

Amanda Little: Climate change is becoming a problem you can taste