The Future of Food is Better Than We Thought with Walter Robb

My guest on today's episode is dedicated to transforming the food system. An investor, a mentor, advisor to the next generation of American food companies, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, Walter Robb, has a long and varied entrepreneurial history ranging from natural food retailer to farmer to consultant. Today we talk about real solutions to transform our food system including how to reduce food waste. We also talk about food access in Walter's work to make healthy foods accessible in impoverished areas in America. He also shares his vision for the future of food, which isn't as dark as you might imagine. You won't want to miss this fascinating conversation.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, Place for Conversations that Matter. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and we have a great conversation today with the founder, co-founder of Whole Foods, Walter Robb. And I just want to share a little bit about him because he's quite an extraordinary guy. He started out basically as a grocery store guy, and working on the floor, just at the bottom up. But now he's an investor, a mentor. He's an advisor to the next generation of American food companies. He has a long and varied career, an entrepreneur ranging from natural food retailer to farmer. Loves organic farming. I want to hear all about that. A consultant, he's joined Whole Foods in 1991 and in 2010 was named the CEO, co-CEO along with John Mackey. And he also joined the board of directors at that time. He transitioned to leadership in 2017 after Whole Foods was bought up by Amazon and I want to hear about that too. He now does great advocacy work and is passionate about greater food access in underserved communities. He serves as a chairman of the board for Whole Kids Foundation and Whole Cities Foundation, which do great work to bring food and access to good food to all sorts of communities and people and kids. He's on the board directors of Union Square Hospitality Group and many other things, Food Maven, which is about food waste, want to hear about that. And he loves organic gardening. He has his own gardening. He served on the board of directors of the Organic Trade Association and many many other groups. And he's quite an extraordinary guy who's also graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in 1976 and has a father, grandfather, has two sons, a daughter, and four grandchildren.

Welcome, Walter. Dr. Mark, great to be with you.

Thanks so much. That was long-winded, man. I know, right? You got a lot going on. Well, you live long enough, your bio.

Gets longer and longer and longer.

Thanks for having me on. Whole Foods was, you know, I remember being in college and I think I shared this the other day. And I would go to the food co-op and it had dirt floor, everything was in burlap bags. The tofu was in big white buckets with water in them. And you had to volunteer and work there. And Whole Foods sort of grew out of that movement and started off as a very small enterprise and you and John sort of co-created it. And yet now it's this massive company with almost 500 stores. It was recently bought out by Amazon and it's changed the way we think about food in America. so how did you kind of first get started with the idea of being a grocer, working in a natural food store? Were you kind of a hippie back then? Exactly.

Well, to be clear, John started Whole Foods in 1980, and I started my own store in 1978. And we joined forces in 1990. My store was store number 12 for Whole Foods, so. But we were running parallel paths. It's been a remarkable Journey. A little easier to look at backwards and see exactly what happened over that period of time. But I think like every young person, when you're trying to figure out what to do with your life, and I think for me, it was I wanted to do something meaningful. And I think the natural food thing really got started in the mid to late 70s when people said, hey, there's got to be a better way to think about food. And there's got to be a way that's more responsible to the environment and that is healthier for individuals and communities because, you know, we'd seen the advent and the rise of processed food, frozen food, those sorts of things. And so we just kind of found, pummeled, stumbled our way to the idea that, you you know, started selling a little yogurt, a little few grains, a little, you know, natural food. And from there, look what happened. It just grew and grew and grew. I think it was the fact that timing was right, that there was an interest in these sorts of forces of change. And we, but I will say we never could have imagined that would have gotten to the size that we got to at the end in 2017 with almost 500 stores and 100,000 team members and 44 states and three countries. It all happened. I think we were just at the right place at the right time.

Amazing. And when you started, did you have a vision that you wanted to create this giant natural foods business and change the culture, or you just sort of trying to grow and work day to day?

No, the vision which just deepened and strengthened over time was this idea that healthier food was better for the individual and better healthier whole food, whole with a small W, not a big W, was just more health giving. more life giving to individuals. And when you started reading Wendell Berry and you started reading Francis Schaeffer and you started reading some of the other early authors, Robert Rodale, you started to think about these things. You said, wow, this could really make a difference in people's lives. And so we started out and there was this tremendous sense of mission or purpose, and I don't mean ego driven mission, I mean this depth of feeling like you could really make a contribution that I think animated this whole group of people that worked on this and built out and it was this great cause. I mean, we were taking the hill and saying, this is what our generation can do to contribute to a healthier world. I don't even know how to describe it as we look back 40 years now and describe to you, but I suspect it's similar to what you feel in your own work. It's a calling of sorts to say we can do something good here. And I think that's really what bound us together as we built the company over the years.

And you see what happens over history is you see these marginal things that are happening.

Yes.

And, I was involved in it way back in the 70s too and studied. You were getting your tofu out of.

Buckets and stuff like that.

And so was I.

And buying our maple syrup out of a bulk thing. Yeah, you build a thing out of all that. Yeah.

And, I read Wendell Berry's Unsettling America, the Soil and the Soul by Albert Howard and read, Once Robber Revolution by Manu Forcoco and all these books that we're talking about, how do we bring health back to the soil, to the planet, to our own communities. And it really influenced a lot of my thinking. In fact, I actually went to see Wendell Berry speak when I was at Cornell, and I was so excited because I wanted to be an organic farmer. And I told him, he's like, Do not do that. It's tough work. It's horrible. Don't do it. I'm like, okay.

So Wendell Berry. I became a doctor. And you did good and you're doing fantastic work. And I know that you feel that sense of calling and that sense of responsibility to give. I think Wendell Berry talked about eating being an ethical act. And Wendell Berry was my hero. He's still, and now he's become a friend. And if you read the depth of his writing and talks about the reconnecting to the land, I mean, he's a phenomenal individual. But Sir Albert Howard was an economist and an agriculturalist in the 20s who talked about the great relationship of life between soil, between people, and between health. And if you think about that, yeah. You talk about the fundamental insight that he's really talking about. We've come back around to that. in the fullness of time with much more understanding and much more ability to do something with that to create a healthier world. And it starts with soil, quite frankly, because we're losing six inches of soil for every pound of food we grow in the United States today. And the quality of the soil continues to deteriorate. This is where I think sustainable and organic agriculture making a real contribution to building back up the quality of the soil. Because if it ain't in the soil, it ain't in the food.

Well, it's not as simple as that. That's a very powerful thing. I mean, the book Soil and Health is a strange title, right? And yet it was back in the 30s when he laid out the connection between, like you said, that he has this quote, the whole subject of health of, you know, the soil, man and.

Planet is one great subject, right?

That's exactly right.

And I think that we've mattered to sort of approach nutrition from a reductionist standpoint as opposed to a holistic standpoint.

Which I know, which is what your.

Practicing in your medicine.

Yeah, and it's all connected. I think, you know, the whole soil issue is, you know, what you said is frightening.

We're losing six inches of soil for.

Every pound of food we're producing. We're producing top soil, which if you track that forward, that means we're gonna run out of soil, right? We're mining the soil. We've had this huge inheritance of top soil because of the 60 million bison that roamed around and making extra great top soil, moving and peeing all over. But now we're cleaning the soil and that's a carbon sink. The quality of the soil is different in terms of the nutrient density, the minerals, ability to hold carbon, hold water. So, we're having so many different effects on our health, on climate, on everything.

And how do we reverse that?

Because even organic farming often uses till methods which disrupt the soil, lead to erosion, and also may contribute to climate change, even if it's organic. So, how do you kind of navigate that? Yeah. Well, do you garden yourself? I mean, do you have a garden?

I do. I have had a garden. Yes. Okay, so do you see-- My mom.

Had a garden when I was a kid. That's how I got into it. to it and then had one in college and pretty much all the way through.

Yeah, well for example, Whole Kids Foundation that we have where we put salad bars in gardens in public schools, you can see when you put kids hands in the dirt and when they actually connect with the food they're growing that their relationship with food changes for life. And they appreciate that soil is a living thing that gives the plants the health and nutrition that then feed and sustain you. But look, I mean, I'm a lifelong gardener, I love it. It's the one thing I can do that kind of relaxes from the stress of business. And you realize when you spend time with the soil or in the garden, you realize the just, and science is now coming around to recognize the incredible amount of life force that's in this soil through the microbebs and through the various entities that are in the soil and beginning to realize that cultivating and nurturing that, supporting that, is got an amazing future to be kind of unfolded. So, Otto, I think first of all you should experience it, If you're disconnected from your food, why don't you try gardening? Why don't you try volunteering? Why don't you see just what it really is all about? And you'll maybe get religion around it.

Number two is how do you support greater sustainable-- oh, but before you jump onto that, you know, it's interesting in World War II, America had victory gardens. That's correct.

Too many people were fighting to grow food. We grew 40% of our food with home gardens. Right. Which is why I said last night the real inflection point in in modern production agriculture was World War II, because after World War II is when the use of the agents that were used in war were converted to pesticides and a whole new system of agriculture kind of emerged post-World War II. But actually getting in the soil and doing it, you'll see for yourself just the difference in soil, a live soil, rich soil. But supporting methods of growing that are, whether they're organic or not, but even if they're just better as more sustainable cultural practices, whether adding amendments, compost, building compost, adding worms, any of these sorts of things that are people are learning about at various places, that's a good way to start to understand and appreciate what Albert Howard was talking about when the soil is what gives rise to health. Yeah, it's interesting.

We're going off in the weeds with soil, but.

It's good, I'm glad you brought it up.

It's all part of it, right?

Because that's where the food comes from. That's where the food comes from. Well, it doesn't, but let's think about where we are now because we now have vertical farming and indoor farming that's actually growing food without soil and their premise is that you can you can control the environment, the bugs, the temperature, the water use, the introduction of nutrients directly. So there's hydroponics, but there's also aquaponics, and there's also aeroponics, which is to say they're growing food without any sort of soil at all, which is an interesting discussion. If the plant, if they can effectively deliver the nutrients to the plant, that's what I wonder. Do you feel like that is food? It's a fair question. I mean, I'd ask you that question, Mark. Do you, are you comfortable with those methods of producing food? It's going to be part of the future. It's already happening in many cities. They're creating jobs, they're creating new methods of producing food more efficiently. So the question is, is there any sort of nutrient difference between the food produced in that way and the food produced outdoors? These are a new set of questions that we didn't really have 50 years ago.

Yeah, I thought about that a lot and I'm like, wait a minute, maybe it's organic, maybe it's healthy, maybe it's good, but what about the phytonutrient content? which actually comes from the plant being stressed, like organic plants have higher phytonutrient content because they're actually stressed. Or what about the unknown things in the soil? We say, well, we just need NPK to grow plants, which is nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus. But maybe there's a whole bunch of.

Other stuff that we're not even aware of. Well, clearly that's the case. We know that the phytonutrient profile is much greater than just the three potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen. That just can't be the whole bucket. nutrients. But I think the future suggests to us that we're going to have to produce a lot more food and the food is going to be produced in many different ways. It's going to be delivered in many different ways that we didn't see five and ten years ago. It's going to be delivered by drones, for example. But the example is we're going to need it and the question is, I think, can we measure the effectiveness or the efficacy of the foods in different ways that will help us to support different methods of growing? The answer is probably yes. Yeah, absolutely. You can move to different methods. We're gonna grow meat. We're gonna grow meat without growing animals. We're gonna grow vegetables without actually putting them in the soil. We're gonna grow new types of foods from new types of plants that we're not currently cultivating for human use. So the whole thing is evolving very, very quickly. I guess what I'd like to see is that, as we talked about, I'd like to see that we kind of agree on a goal that we're building a more sustainable, healthier food system with better outcomes than we're seeing right now that you well know because you treat them in your clinic. And that we kind of have some, we're measuring kind of our efforts to build a healthier world and we know right now that that's just not the case with the 20% of our GDP being spent on chronic disease and preventable. And the condition, the disparity in life expectancy that we're experiencing throughout the United States right now. this is not acceptable. And this is a future we need to change through taking some very positive steps.

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. My goal as a functional medicine physician is to discover what it means to achieve optimal health and share those discoveries with all of you. Today I want to share one of my biggest tips for busy folks. We're going to talk about what I call food emergencies. When your blood sugar starts to drop, you're hardwired to eat anything and everything in sight. Thinking you can use willpower to control your hunger or cravings contradicts the science of how your brain controls your behavior. See, the more willpower you use, the more it backfires. You'll find yourself automatically overeating and binging or just eating whatever happens to be in front of you. I call it drive-by eating. This is what I call a food emergency. Even I fall prey to a food emergency from time to time when I'm traveling or I'm in an airport. Sometimes they get stuck, but I usually.

Put stuff in my bag so I.

Don'T get like that. To avoid food emergencies, I recommend having an emergency snack pack at all times on you, either in your bag, in your backpack, in your car, somewhere where you can get it when you don't have to think about what you're doing. Now, I'm on the go probably 90% of the time, so it's important for me to have my favorite foods and snacks easily available. An emergency food pack almost guarantees that you won't make terrible food choices. I never leave home without some snacks that contain a little bit of protein and healthy fats. And this combo keeps my blood sugar stable and keeps me feeling good and having energy all day. So what are my favorites? Well, I love grass-fed beef jerky or turkey jerky or bison. Sometimes if I can get elk jerky, that's awesome. Nuts and seeds are always a staple. My favorite is a mixture of almonds, macadamia nuts, and pumpkin seeds. I also take travel packs of nut butters. These little packets that are super awesome. You can stick in your pocket. I keep a can of wild salmon also with me in case I'm in a pinch for lunch. A little smelly, but it's okay. Always keep dark chocolate on hand for a tasty treat. And if I'm traveling short distances, I'll pack things like hard-boiled eggs, berries, cut up vegetables, maybe a little guacamole, hummus, and a little glass container may be better. Simple planning in advance can keep you focused, satiated and happy. Even if you don't think you'll be hungry, always keep healthy snacks around. That way you'll stop yourself from reaching for something that you're going to regret and that isn't going to make you feel great. So thanks for listening and now back to the episode.

So Whole Foods really is a disrupter and you know, was on the margins.

And now it's... We've been called a.

Lot of things, but thank you for that.

Coming towards the center.

We've been called a lot of things, yeah.

Whole paycheck and all that, right? Holy foods.

Holy foods and half foods and every other thing. That's... That was a great thing you.

Said the other day. You said, I don't want to eat half foods. I want to eat whole foods. No, what I said is this, that when we went to the inner city.

Communities, people said, Don't bring us half foods. We want to have the same choices other people have, you know?

But yes.

So what's happening now is a radical shift. I mean, we're here at the Milk Conference on the Future of Health. And I'm just shocked, even year over year, the change in consciousness about food. There's a whole session on food is medicine. There's talking about nutrition, sustainability, climate change. I mean, you were on a panel with Dan Barber from Blue Hill and Michael Milken and Senator Cassidy, and it was fascinating to hear this discussion about food in a very different way. So, what I've heard you say is that you see there's a big shift happening in the culture and business and the evolution of our food system. I wonder if you could share in a little detail what are those changes you're seeing? What makes you feel hopeful? And can we really fight big food or not? I mean, or should we now fight them? Should we join them? What is the right strategy to move the food system from one that is a disease promoting food system that damages the climate, that damages the soil, that creates inequities in our society, that leads to challenges in national security where 70% can't fight because they're not fit? I mean, how do we how do we deal with this whole conglomerate of issues?

Well, I think let's just start with, you know, where are we at the present time? I think we see we're at a place where there are kind of two food production systems that are on the landscape. One is the modern production agriculture system that America has pioneered and that exports around the world and tends to get vilified. I know many of the farmers feel like they're seen as not good stewards of the land or using too many chemicals and many in the local organic community say those sorts of things. I'm not sure that's helpful. I think that modern production agriculture, particularly the leading edge of it, is really trying hard to become more sustainable. They may not get to organic, but I think we have to approach them and appreciate them in constructive ways to encourage them to make steps forward because their scale matters in creating a healthier future. You see some of the more responsible companies out there making gigantic steps, a unilever for example, with their sustainable living plan. Paul Polman, the CEO, one of the best in the world in my opinion, has incorporated an ethos of sustainability in the chart of that company and is making meaningful impact in their supply chain. So at the same time, we have the local organic food system, which I think is now proven to be a viable economic path to market that's creating real jobs, real economy, real gains, real health gains. I think we've approached this point where these two are kind of touching and can learn from one another, and we need both to contribute to this healthier food system. And so I think I'd start with a Can we create a constructive dialogue where there's not the criticism back and forth? But how do we learn? How do we grow? How do we encourage? How do we find common ground? But what I see at this point is that A, we've reached a critical mass where people now understand that the quality of food actually does matter with respect to the health of the individual, the community, the planet, the world. That was not true 10, 20, 30 years ago. I was up for debate.

More calories.

Up for debate, or the weirdos over there talking about that stuff. that's really not the case now. We've, food's sexy. We're, it's back in the conversation in the national dialogue in ways that we've, you know, we just didn't see 20 years ago. Maybe before World War II when everybody sat around the table, but only three out of 10 Americans eat three meals a day at home. It just doesn't happen that way anymore. So, so, but we're at this place where, okay, there's a kind of a baseline set that food matters in whatever way you think about that. Okay, then second of all, let's look at the changes. We have a generational change. We're moving from the Boomers to the Millennials. Millennials are now in the majority and moving into leadership positions. They have a different approach to life just like our generation did. They have a value set that says, I expect brands to behave responsibly. I want them to be accountable. I want them to be connected to my life in some way that's meaningful. I want to see them do good things in the world. We have a change in technology, a revolution in technology that's bringing new types of capabilities, whether it's to communication, whether it's to processing of information, whether it's to the options that customers have in terms of receiving goods and services. We've just never seen this revolution, which is proceeding extraordinarily. We have a change in capital markets that are saying that we're willing to look at this food and agriculture space in a time that it's- A lot.

Of investors are looking at it.

It's been an under-invested category for many years because it's been pretty boring. And now people see, wow, the combination of food and technology and these choices, it's worth deploying capital here. So we have an interest in the sector that's allowing the pace of innovation, the pace of investment to move faster.

But I was shocked was even big food companies are investing in these sectors.

Well, they are because they can't grow-.

So because investing in Beyond Meat or something.

Well, they are.

$100 million, ridiculous amounts of money.

Well, and that's not ridiculous amount for them because they're fairly large. But the fact is they see that this future is emerging as well. and their job is to grow their company and they realize they need to start putting some chips down in this future where it's going. So you've got this confluence of factors all happening that I think bring us and you have the consumer, the customer ultimately saying, I want different food choices. You have a whole new generation of entrepreneurs creating new companies and everything from seed to table. You have this, what I call inflection point where we're now creating the new world order of food and agriculture from the ground up. It's literally happening before our eyes right now because the demand has shifted over here. I want different proteins. I want more plant-based foods. I want more responsibly grown meat. I want more accountability for my companies. I want to understand how this food affects my body. Tell me, I don't want to stay sick. I want to get well. So you have this extraordinary time that we're sitting in right now where this thing really is being reshaped and with challenge and comes great opportunity. And I think that's, you know, the same thing for your line of work is there's now an appreciation for functional medicine. We're just talking about Alzheimer's, right? Okay. Now you can approach a subject that everyone's just gone, God, what are we gonna do about this? You actually have some answers. So I think we find ourselves at a very exciting and creating time if we just will have the willingness and the courage to say let's go and create that world that we think can be more healthy, more inclusive, more humane, more compassionate, more diverse, and more responsible.

Yeah, that's true. You know, a lot of people have thought of Whole Foods as sort of elitist, but actually things start on the margins like that at that level, but they filter in and they actually influence the culture and they influence, like you're seeing now, that move towards healthy food, the move towards organic, the move towards rethinking our food system. And it challenges the paradigm in a way that it seems to be dismissed, but now it becomes more the center.

Which is pretty amazing. Well, let me respond to that because I often get a little defensive about that. But to say the Hoftuts was elitist, elitist because we started on the margin and we were only appealing to two or three percent of the people. And perhaps even at our peak, we got up to 20% of people. But you know what? So what? I mean, Are you one of those people standing on the sidelines saying, Hey, it's Alist, what are you doing about it to make stuff become more? Also, we were there building a company, doing our very best to continue to push. So maybe things need to start there, but it's not about where it started. It's about where it's trying to go and what sort of influence it's having.

And now it matters more to everybody and everything. It's like, you know, it's like smartphones. You know, they were only available to those who could afford it, and not everybody had them. And now pretty much you go into some village in Africa and someone's got a smartphone.

Well, that's right. Well, I mean, I, I mean, I think it just, I think it's like you have to start somewhere. The point is, do you start? Are you doing something to move towards a healthier future? That's what we did. And we built those. We didn't ever say was the girl in the grocery store is a voluntary activity. You don't have to go to Whole Foods. You can go wherever you want. And we just kept building. And as we kept building, we get larger. We had the ability to try to make more of an impact. through different activities, setting standards for different categories of foods or building in inner cities of America, whatever steps we took as we tried to move towards the trend, I think, of democratizing access to high quality food and to quality food for more people. Yeah, that's absolutely true.

And I want to sort of touch on that because, you know, I don't think people are aware of some of the activities of Whole Foods to go into Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, underserved areas, South Chicago and Deep City in Detroit where I hadn't been a grocery store since 1950 or something. And actually try to work with those communities, not go in and impose what you're doing, but actually work with them, collaborate, and then create a lot of spin-off activities that support those communities. Someone shared a story of going into Whole Foods in New Orleans. There was an African-American guy who said.

I saw my brother got shot and.

I don't want that to happen to me. I'm going to learn how to cook. The story from last night. Yeah. And I was like, wow, that's That's amazing. People who you wouldn't think would be attracted or go there. And I think people are longing for that. And so I think I'd love you to share a little bit about Whole Cities, Whole Kids, the activities you're doing and why they matter and how they can influence the spread and the sort of dealing with some of the inequities in our food system.

Yeah. Well, it was actually at Milk N many years ago that I first made the statement, you know, I want to do something about elitism. racism, and I want our company to try to make a contribution towards those forces in society. And it was kind of a provocative statement, and it got a lot of coverage. But to be clear, Whole Foods is a team effort. There was a great team there. We all worked together. This was my particular passion, Whole Foods' core contributions, I think, around just raising the standards on the quality of food and trying to create a different sort of workplace around love and respect. but this particular effort was saying at that point we had some 400 stores, we could afford to go into and try this idea of taking healthier food, which when we set out to build the company, we didn't say healthier food for some communities, we said healthier food for the world, which means that we needed to challenge ourselves to go into more communities that perhaps didn't have the type of access that you and I enjoy every single day. And in fact, look at the government statistics, there's over 6,000 communities that don't have, by their own definition, access to fresh, healthy food. And all you have to do is go look at the public health statistics to see the consequences of that. Now, the reason those consequences, health consequences are there are a result of a number of factors and no one's been able to pin it down. And it's just the fact that there's all the fast food joints around and they don't have what we have. But the fact is we decided to try to do something about it and our first effort was in in the city of Detroit, at the corner of John R and Mack, we built a small store and opened in June 5th, 2013. And it was my proudest day as a grocer, really, because we spent three years building connection with the community, and we partnered that with a program called Let's Talk Food, because we learned it's the access, it's also the education and the cultural relevancy that makes that happen. So I've seen firsthand that people are they're living their lives with a different set of challenges. Maybe they're on the SNAP, maybe they're used to shopping twice a month, maybe that the choices they have are that the public transportation system doesn't work so they can't get to the store. So, you know, these sorts of efforts on our part, we did it because we wanted to stretch into our mission of bringing healthier foods to the world. We wanted to try taking that, and I can tell you that as a company, we learned so much more from the city of Detroit than I think we gave to the city of Detroit. We learned about what it means to truly partner with a community. We learned what it means to truly listen to people about what they truly needed and where they were and to meet them where they were. We learned about how they saw where Whole Foods was elite and that some things were just not relevant for them. We learned about local products that they made at we gave them shelf space. We put 50 new suppliers on the shelves. and Whole Foods and help them to start their companies to create the jobs. We partnered with the local public markets to be able to help facilitate that relationship. So I know I'm getting wound up on this subject, but I am, I am really passionate about this, this mission, which I talked about at the beginning when we started, like, if you, if you live your life from a sense of purpose and values, and if those for me are wanting to create a healthier world and with whatever abilities or whatever abilities our company had. It takes you to places that you wouldn't, that are not just safe, but are places where you're willing to say, all right, let's stretch into what that can do. In this case, it took us to these four cities of Detroit, Chicago, Newark, and New Orleans to try to make a contribution to what the community themselves already wanted, which is a healthier future. They are losing their citizens. They are telling me, the pastors are telling me, their parishioners are dying. They can see the health consequences. They themselves say they want different choices. You go there to try to support their own desire for a healthier future, not your idea of what their healthier future is, their idea of what a healthier future is. And you go there in service of that and in contribution towards that. And you mentioned last night, I'll just finish with this, you mentioned about, we went to New Orleans in partnership with the Broad Community Connection which was a nonprofit trying to revitalize the Mid-City neighborhood. Liberty's Kitchen, which is a nonprofit startup that takes disadvantaged youth, teaches them culinary skills and kills skills and puts them, tries to give them a path forward in the world, which is the story you heard last night with First Line Schools, which is the group that's supporting the charter schools in New Orleans. And with Tulane Medical School, who opened the first teaching kitchen for doctors. And we were all in the same building. and we're a half a block away was the Katrina Watermark of these buildings that were abandoned and not used. And together we created a wonderful, creative sense of change in mid-city New Orleans that's still there. And anyways, the point of the story is that everyone here that cares about a healthier future, everyone that's listening to your podcast, everyone that's your friend or associate that you're working with, if we share a common goal of a healthier future, it has to be for all communities and all people, not just for some people. And I think that's how we push through the elitism thing and we say that this is not just for some people, this is for all people.

What were the learnings out of Detroit five years in now? You mentioned some of them, but what changed in the community? Did they welcome it? Did they change their diets? Is there health outcomes that you've seen change? What have you noticed? Because you're in a tough neighborhood and with a very strange product for that neighborhood. I mean, I remember being in Cleveland, we ran a cooking class in a very poor area, healthy cooking, and 300 African-American women showed up desperate to learn how to make healthier food. And they didn't know what kale was or an avocado was. You know, it was fascinating. And so what has happened in the shift in that?

Yeah, well, the truth of it is they don't really want to hear from you or me in a black community. Yeah. They want to hear from Dr. Akilah Williams Wright that you met yesterday that we hired to, who's a PhD in nutrition who started teaching classes called Let's Talk Food and can talk in a culturally relevant fashion from where they are. They're how you cook the greens traditionally, you were taught and to not use the lard and to make shifts. So, I mean, she's able to, she was able to talk to them about, and she's got 300 plus people showing up in her classes. And I know from being there and watching, that she's created so much meaningful change in their lives. Do I have the metrics for you? I don't have them with me right here. I can get them for you from her program. She's been teaching five years now. So, and more importantly, she started to deputize or train other folks who are now teaching in the churches and the community centers in Detroit as a result of her efforts. And we're now taking that program through whole cities to other areas to start those educational programs. My real goal, and John started a wonderful thing called the Intensive Health Intensive, which is a week-long session where you just focus on food and health. And we want to do that in the inner city.

You have that for your employees, but.

You know, we do that for our team members and we will, I think, ultimately open up to our customers. And there you actually measure your metrics and then you measure them at the end of the week and you're given the tools to live a healthier life going forward. we start with our sickest team members who really can benefit from food as medicine. But I want to bring that program to the inner city and adopt it culturally so that those sorts of tools and resources are available again for more communities. I think the future we're talking about together that you're involved in and I involved in from whatever skill set we bring, it's just got to involve, we've got to break through and involve more people. And that means it's got to be more diverse in it's approach. We've got to be open to reaching people where they are and in ways that they can hear and listen and respond to. And they got to be part of that, creating that solution. Yeah.

I mean, and I see Whole Foods as a drugstore, you know, because what's that one before? Yeah, it's a drugstore. It's a pharmacy with an F, you know, like doctors pharmacy. Doctors pharmacy. When I go through the aisle, I go, okay, what are these things doing? And I have the knowledge to say.

Okay, well, this has glucosinolates and this has lycopene and this has, you know, various galacto catechins. Yeah. Well, Mike said that last night, didn't he say that the grocery store is.

The 21st century pharmacy? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, I know there's a grocery store in Cleveland called Heinen's and they have a health coach and nutritionist in the store. And then your doctor writes a prescription, you go to the store and you get work through the program. It's pretty amazing because people don't know how to shop.

They don't know what to do. They don't know how to cook. They don't know these basic skills. So you're bridging those gaps. It's quite-- well, this is a question back for you. People are overwhelmed with the amount of information coming at them about nutrition. I mean, you're a doctor, but the microbiomes are out there now. Personalized medicine. Do I eat this? Do I eat that? What do I do? How do I make sense of this? I have a busy life. What do you say to your patients?

And they come and say, I'm overwhelmed. I said, what am I supposed to do? I said, read my book, Food, what the heck should I eat? Which is why I wrote it, because people are so confused. They are. so I basically, that's what I wrote the book for because that was a question I was always asked and my patients were just like vegan, paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, low fat, high fat. I mean, it's enough to make people.

Kind of give up. Well, we give up. People start on some of these things, well intentioned, and then it's hard for them to hold on to it. So, there's something that's being lost. We're given the information, but it's, you know, we see in the intensives people fall off and and they go back to their patterns. So what would you say about, how do you say to your patients, it's like, oh, stick with this, or what changes do you see that are actually sustainable?

Well, that's a great question. So I always say, functional medicine, I've studied the intricacies of biology, how do you change biology, how do you affect the immune system, affects the microbiome, optimize health on a molecular, biochemical, genetic level. And I did that for years and would get people better if they did what I asked them to. And then I realized that the other part of the equation is behavior change. So I know how to change biology, but how do you change Behavior? So I really began to study that. And I, and I had a really great Insight when I went to Haiti after the earthquake with Paul Farmer, where he cured TB and AIDS in the second poorest country in the world, the worst, poorest country in the, in the Western Hemisphere, where half the people that won less than a dollar a day, and they don't have sanitation, clean water, everybody giving up on these people with TB and AIDS. So it's too hard to treat. You need, you know, make sure you take the drugs at a certain time, and it's a schedule, and they don't have a watch, and it's like basic stuff. So he realized this wasn't a medical problem, this was a social problem, and they needed a social cure. And he realized that the causes of these diseases were what we call structural violence, sort of the social, economic, political conditions that drive disease. And then I began to realize that we call chronic disease NCDs, non-communicable diseases, but that's absolutely false. They are totally communicable. Chris Hau's work at Harvard showed that if you look at obesity, you're more likely be overweight if your friend's overweight than if your family's overweight. And if your friend's friend is overweight, you're still more likely to be overweight. So it's these social connections. We know that your zip code is a more powerful determinant of your health than your genetic code. So I realized that the social support was really key. And I realized that we needed to build people together in communities and groups to help support each other. And that's how you change behavior through accountability, feedback, support. And that's what we did with with the Daniel Plan with the faith-based community in Saddleback Church, where we got 15,000 people lose a quarter of a million pounds together in small groups without a doctor, nutritionist, health coach, nothing, just the curriculum, which was based on functional medicine and how to eat to get healthy. And not only did people lose weight, but all these health conditions went away, autoimmune disease, digestive problems, migraines, depression. It was quite stunning.

And it was the power of these small groups. And that's what we're doing at Cleveland Clinic. We've got- yeah, that you mentioned that when we were- Shared medical- Taking a walk the other night, I was really interested that you actually are bringing people can come in groups to the Cleveland Clinic. You're finding that the outcomes change almost daily just by being part of a group as they're facing these problems together. Yeah. Their results improve, which is amazing.

And they share stories, they collaborate, they share recipes, they share tricks and struggles. And it's an extraordinary thing. And I think we all are social beings. That's why we've seen the explosion of social networks, but it may be disconnecting as opposed to being not, you know, Facebook, but face to face, which is.

By the way, actually, that, you know, people say that retail is, is transform, transforming, which is, but which is why physical retail, physical stores will always remain. And that is because, because humans want to go where humans are. Yeah. Humans going to go where there's connection and spontaneity, as, as my friend Jack Dorsey says. And that's why five years from now, 70 of business will still be done in physical stores because people want that. environment where they connect. There's no substitute for that as a human being.

People can go have coffee at home, but they want to sit in a.

Coffee shop and work because they're around people.

Exactly. Same for the grocery store. So yeah, the behavior change is key, but you know, what's interesting around the peer model is that that's why we see the change in our food system. You know, when we see people of our friends and our colleagues and our family members changing their diet and looking at how they're doing things and the culture as a whole is starting to shift its thinking. It sort of brings people out from the margins and into the center and really creates a shift. So I think that's what's happening and it's powerful.

Powerful, it is powerful. Yeah.

So the other thing I want to talk to you about is food waste. Now, the statistics are staggering. There's $1.2 trillion globally of our food, I mean in the United States is our food system, of that 480 billion is thrown out or wasted, which is almost half 40% of our food is wasted. And people say, we don't have enough food, we have to grow more food, we need GMOs, we need more access to food, there's food insecurity, we've got people starving around the world, there's 800 million people who go to bed hungry, although there's over two billion that go to bed fat, which is pretty frightening. It's more than twice.

I've never heard it said so starkly, is that true?

Yeah, it's true. So, when you think about the food food waste problem. Not only is it is it just wasteful because you waste everything from, you know, the seeds to the labor to the soil to the water to the.

You know, to the human effort.

Human effort, the labor, the production of the food, all those things, the retail, it's just massive. And also the effect on climate. And so you've been very focused on this and Whole Foods is a grocery store. So I'm sure you have a lot of waste as part of that. And so you've really been active in this. Can you share some of your work around this and what you do at Whole Foods and some of the other.

Projects like Food Maven that you're working on? Yeah, I can. Well, let's just make sure we, you.

Know, because the people hear the word.

Food waste, you know, what does that mean? Well, yeah, what does it mean actually? But I mean, I think your 40% number is a good number in terms of the amount of the food that's produced. We're really good at producing food in America. We've gotten exceptionally good at producing very high yields. We're pretty good at eating it. We're not very good at using all of it. And that's kind of where we are right now. And we've come to a point in consciousness where people are able to actually think about this, where I think the first last number of years, it was just like, well, we got to produce this stuff and we got to figure out how to do it. And now we're, now we're at this place that, as we said, the, this sort of been a baseline established that the quality of food matters or certain things set in place. The food conversations evolve to a point where we can actually talk about, well, wait a second, we're wasteline. 25% of landfills is food. Yeah. It's just thrown away. So But why is that? I want to make sure your listeners understand it's not the scraps on the whole food salad bars at the end of the day. That's not really the tonnage is more the mismatch between supply and demand in the food system is where a lot of the food waste happens. So let me give you an example. Let's say a lettuce producer sends a couple of pallets of butter lettuce to the Whole Foods Distribution Center in Denver. Okay. The produce gets, it could be any grocer's distribution center, it gets kicked. which in parlour, grocery parlours means that it was not to spec or to it's perfectly good food, but it just doesn't hit the cosmetically spec. Whatever. So where does that go? But if you send it back to the farmer, by the time it gets back, it's no good. So there's nowhere for it to go. So what happens now is it goes to the dumps or it goes to Salvation Army or somewhere like that. So what, what, what is what food Maven has done, the company I'm working with based out of Colorado Springs. And I think the first it's based in basically in the Denver Metro, the first company that's actually put together old school logistics of picking up the food and then making a market for it into the retail food service industry. So they're saying, hey, they collected and they put it with New World Technology, meaning creating a platform with data and AI that's helping to learn quickly as to where the match could be. And by signing contracts with a, signing a contract with a major hotel chain is looking for help with respect to that. So you have now where you're basically using markets to solve a problem.

Food service providers. Yeah, I mean these people buy a.

Lot of food, but they're looking for a deal. Essentially they're going to chop it up for different meals. There's no reason they can't use perfectly good food. So in real time what happens is Food Maven picks it up and warehouses it and then makes a market for it into a market that hasn't really been served in that way. They get a deal, the grower gets something, and Food Maven takes a cut for its services. A win-win-win model. Everybody's model. Yeah. And it's cheaper. So another example, let's say a chicken production company produces 200 pounds of fresh chicken breasts. The customer in the end only wants 100 pounds of it because we don't know in retail who's going to come in that day or how much they're going to buy. I mean, as good as we're good, we can't predict it. So what happens to that 100 pounds? Do they freeze it? Now they've got an extra expense, they've got an extra labor, they've got to worry about the inventory. Do they sell it off price? No, they don't. cuts the brand, where does it do? They got nowhere for it to go. It's a problem. So again, Food Maven steps in, takes that and makes a market for it, again at a discount, but the chicken producer gets something for their work. The food service folks get a deal and the food is used. So there's a good example and there's others that are starting to say, Imperfect Produce is another company that's doing a nice job taking on a subscription basis to homes, saying, Hey, we'll give you some of these off-form produce. And Whole Foods, in fact, has tried some pilot programs. I've heard that in the produce department saying, Ugly fruit, ugly produce. But really, it's a structural problem here that doesn't really, it's never really had a new world or a new era solution employing some of the technology platforms and the data to make markets. And that's what I think FoodMaven is doing. So we have, as you point out, we have 20 million kids in this country that don't have food every morning. So we have places for the food to go and we have a lot of people that are eating more food than they really need to. But mostly what we have is a sort of a standard and we have, there's a lot of food that gets wasted in the fields. Some innovative programs that are gleaning and taking into food districts, but the purchasing policies of school district are such that they can't really use that. There's food safety concerns. There's a lot of these sort of institutional roadblocks. to getting this food into the system. And a lot of those are being taken on now by some of these different non-profits. But I think the main point here that you're reiterating is that for the first time, the UN has made food waste a concern and put it on the whiteboard of saying, this is something we're going to do something. So it's surfaced now in a way that people can actually begin to really think about and be more aware of. And in fact, in the hometown of Austin, Where I am, the city of Austin has just passed an ordinance requiring all their businesses to have a food waste provision. In other words, to make provision for how much food they waste and how they're using that. That's the first time I've seen a government actually say we're going to incorporate this into our code of responsibility for a business. Now, how that's going to work, too early to say. It just passed. The University of Texas is now dealing with what they're going to do in their own food service business with respect to this ordinance. So we're seeing signs of life that people realize, ah, we got to stop wasting the food.

Even, you know, Denmark, for example, has had composting. So you can't throw food in the garbage. You've got it's mandatory composting. San Francisco's done the same thing, you.

Know, where even your home waste has to be recycled. Yeah, but I'd rather see it, I mean, I get the regulation is important, but I'd rather see it come out of people's awareness that, man, it takes a lot to grow this food and we need this food. And so how do we think differently about our responsibilities? possibilities in, in, in using all of it.

And not only that, in terms of.

And Chef Dan, by the way, as you know, has created all sorts of meals out of, out of peelings and clippings, but also just stuff that people wouldn't use. He's actually to highlight the fact that you can actually cook great meals with, with food that otherwise would go to.

The, well, like the potato peels and the carrot peels. And I had that meal.

It was like a, it was like a scratch. Well, that's dramatic, but I'm You could take that chicken breast or that butter lettuce, it's perfectly food. It may not look as good as what you might want to buy, but the point is that you can make it perfectly nutritious.

So you have to make ugly food sexy by saying it's got more phytonutrients, it's better for you, you know, saving the planet.

I mean, it needs a PR campaign. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's risen now to the air where people realize this is a serious concern because there's so much food. that is being basically going to the dumps. And I think there's a chance to really do something about it.

And the reason it's bad going to the dumps is not just that it's wasted, but it's a huge contributor to climate change, because it releases methane, which is a much higher sort of toxic.

Gas into the atmosphere.

And also, Paul Hawkins works as the third solution of all solutions to draw down carbon. If we fixed food waste, it would be the number three best way to reduce carbon in the environment. Well, you know, another thing that's happening.

Mark, is that upcycling has emerged. There's now at least that I'm aware of 15 companies that are coming to market with customer brand, you know, to the customer with what they call upcycled product, which is to say they're going up into the manufacturing process and the byproduct of manufacturing, they're turning that into upcycled chips or other products they're bringing to market that are more fully using the food products at the point of manufacture. So keep an eye out for upcycled products, that's pretty cool. And/or taking the waste stream and then turning it into pet food or some other usable. So the ingenuity of American capitalism is beginning to say, all right, how do we use some of these byproducts or these products and create new revenue streams? The upcycled companies are cool. Quinn Snacks is one example, if you want to check it out. and then on the pet food side, there was a company out of Colorado that's actually taking the waste stream. And then Whole Foods does kind of cool and actually takes some of that in banana boxes from produce and then sends it back where it's made into compost and then we sell it back to customers as a garden amendment. So there's lots of creative ways to use this. So we grow it, we eat it, let's use it all.

So could Whole Foods get to zero food waste?

Hard to do. You know, the health department has a lot of regulations about food safety for good reasons. A lot of the food, it really bothers our team members at the end of the night when the food from the hot bars and they say, Where does that food go? We have to throw it away for food safety concerns. So we're not there yet. We have several stores, the ones in Colorado, for example, are really close to zero food waste, but it's a good goal. I know Dave Lewis that runs Tesco in the UK has set that as a goal for his supermarket chain and is kind of leading the charge amongst grocers to show people how they can do it. Many manufacturers have set that as a goal. We're not there yet. We're a long way from there yet.

But the point is, it's in the conversation now. And they have all the expiration dates, but they're not necessarily, it's best buy.

But it's not bad after the expiration date, right? Yeah, you watch the customers pick up those labels and they think, oh, God, I'm going to freak out if I eat this. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. The point is that it's the ingenuity of the business that's going to think, and the customers are ready now for products that are upcycled or products that are made from waste streams. They understand that this needs to happen and you're seeing the beginning or the birth of a whole other set of products that I think customers are going to support.

I heard some crazy stories about some kids who were dumpster diving. I don't know it was a major grocery chain and they had all perfectly fine food that was in dumpster, like pounds and pounds of meat that, you know, just little past due. And, and the, the store folks came out and got the police after them and protecting their garbage, which I thought was.

Well, we actually did that ourselves. We, we actually, in California stores, we had a company come in and audit our dumpsters, and they laid out the tarp and they went in the dumpster and they laid all the stuff that was in there. And you can see that what, there's some truth. that, that it's, you know, when you're trimming lettuce or you're cutting a steak, you know, if you see a little bit of this and that, it's just easier to say, hey, I don't want to take a chance on the customer safety on the quality standards. I'm gonna just toss it in. There is some rationale for that. But when you actually get in there and look at a dumpster and you see what does go out, you say, wow, maybe there's a way that this.

Okay, granted, it may not make the.

Counter anymore, but there's a place it can go and be used productively.

And I think that's where we are. There's a new business. dumps. Save me.

When you say it like that, it sounds so great. But, yeah.

No, but it's awesome. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, you, you're, you're doing is you're helping a lot of other companies and you're seeing the trends. So can you share some of the things that you're seeing in the marketplace that give us hope and that help you think about the future and what the future of food is?

I can. I appreciate your asking. Here's a couple examples. I think, you know, the this confluence of food and technology, I'll give you a couple company called IUNU. Seattle is using computer vision. He's built a robotic system to essentially measure indoor production, but this in case floral, but it'll move to vegetable where by visual imaging and then using the data analysis is able to help the producers find 20 to 50% more efficiency in their production. waste less water, grow more efficiently, more food per inch in terms of the production and the capital investment. What's cool is I think ultimately that platform could measure attributes as well as just the metrics of say water or growth measurements. That's an interesting company and I think you're going to see and you are seeing a whole new suite of tools in ag tech or production tech that are, I think, beneficial to to making food healthier, but also just making us be able to use the production resources we have more efficiently and productively. Another company I love is called the Food Corridor. I love the CEO, Ashley Colpart. What she's doing is essentially built a software platform for the community kitchens. So she's given them the back-end tool set that allows them to rent out their commercial kitchen space for entrepreneurs to produce products. and her next product I think will be to Uberize those spaces so that people can just pop on and say, all right, I want to go create a brand, I want to create a product. And for example, when we were opening our stores in inner cities, we wanted to support 25 to 50 new brands. Where are they going to produce their food? They need a commercial kitchen, a safe place to produce their food. So the food corridor is trying to address that need through the use of building out software and tools. that's another example. I like, Once Upon a Farm is my friend John Foraker who has launched this new fresh baby food nationwide and essentially said, we're not going to just do it pasteurized, we're going to do it fresh for, and bringing that sort of innovation to that category is kind of cool. FoodMaven you mentioned already, which is trying to address the area of food waste. Appeal Sciences is another wonderful company, James picked as one of the top 50 disruptors in business today by CNBC. And what he does is essentially take food waste and he's turned it in through a process, he's a material scientist from Carnegie Mellon, into a spray which he can then apply to different types of produce to extend their shelf life. So using natural principles, he's in avocados, he's in citrus.

Met that guy.

Moving into. So here, what I love about what I told James I love about him is that you think back Rachel Carson Silent Spring 1963 talking about, hey, there's a problem here with some of this pesticide stuff that's affecting the broader world. Instead of saying, I'm going to solve this big problem about food waste through dominating nature, he's learned from nature and using nature's principles to do the same thing. I love the fact that philosophically he's used science It's modern thinking, but he says that's a wonderful, a wonderful company. You know, CC Vegetable Noodle Company in Austin, what he's done is essentially take vegetables and he's created a machine that can turn them into, you know, pasta. And now he's figured out how to turn them into pasta shells. So for all the paleos out there, for the people that want to eat more vegetables, he's figured this out and giving customers a wonderful way to enjoy vegetables that they might not otherwise do making it easier for them to.

Yeah, we had back in the day was spaghetti squash.

What's that? Spaghetti squash. Exactly. We heard about that last night at dinner. But, you know, I think there's, there's just, there's many more. I'm, you know, my son has a wonderful company called New Barn, which I'm excited about what he's doing with organic almonds. And so there, there's a, there's a host of companies out there, but I think all of them kind of go on the trajectory of how do we, how do we make a more healthier world. That's the big tent. That's the big goal that everybody's moving towards, whether it's on agriculture, agricultural tech, food production, or new food products. We're seeing a new generation of entrepreneurs that says, I want to do things differently. And I want to use modern tool set, but I want to use eternal principles or age-old principles. And I want to do it in a way that my customers are going to really, you know, whether it's prebiotics or probiotics or Dr. Heaber told me last night he's got a new word, post-probiotics. I don't know if you've even heard that term. No, not yet. The confluence of what you work on in medicine, the confluence of what I worked on as a grocer, the confluence of these new tool sets from technology and data are creating these opportunities to.

Create more wholesome food and healthier lives. It's pretty fascinating. There's a lot of conversation at this conference on food tech and ag tech and the fact that food and agriculture have never been sexy places for investors. venture capitalists and big investors looking at the food and ag space to innovate around it. So what do you see 10-15 years from now? What is the food space going to look like? Can you kind of imagine if you could? I mean, I don't know if you could have imagined when you started Whole Foods if it was going to be today, but how can you project forward and see where we're going?

Well, I mean, what we see if I, you know, I'm a retailer by, you know, for many years, but what I see is that we have an industry that's essentially, as I said last night, A trillion two out of a total economy that's call it 15, 16 trillion. So it's a meaningful part of the economy in retail itself. What's going to happen or what's happened already is that the customer expects to be served holistically. So the retail of the future is a, is a, is a brand that's serving you physical stores, mobile pickup delivery and digitally. Right. So you'll be, you know, what the grocery store of the future obviously is going to tilt more towards more fresh. more local, probably smaller, center of the store probably gets fulfilled automatically. You probably have a checklist and you call your home device and you just ask it. In fact, we were working with one of the major appliance folks to actually make a Whole Foods refrigerator, which would, you'd be on the plane, say, coming home, you'd look at your phone, it tells you what's in your fridge. You say, I want to put an order for these things. And it's there in your fridge when you get home. We're looking at a futuristic world where these things are all connected and you serve more seamlessly. And by the way, you don't ever have to go to the store, you can actually have it delivered by drone or you can have it delivered in some way how you want. And you could have, there's a wonderful new company called Territory Foods, which is essentially building, is uberizing local chefs to produce medically specific meals or dietary tailored mousse from local ingredients. So this thing is evolving incredibly quickly. I think it's all going to be driven by a customer who A wants healthier choices and B wants the convenience and third is wants the optionality to have it how they want it when they want it and they're going to be able to do that whether it's a range of ethnic foods or whether it's a range of restaurant meals, they're going to be able to do that in any way, shape or form and I think the connected home is going to support that happening. The connected home and the connected retailer is going to allow that to happen very, very seamlessly. I already know people that don't even go to the store anymore. They just use the tool set to, you know, they see food as a function. They don't see food as pleasure, which is what I do. And I'm sure you do too. Absolutely. I love going to the grocery store, but then I'm a grocer. So what would you expect? So I think we're going to see a world that is, and it's got a whole new suite of choices because we are now seeing, you know, biology and technology develop cellular based meat and more plant based foods that are put together in the lab. some of those things I'm not that excited about. But you're also seeing the development of, yeah, you're seeing the development of new, really new, exciting plant proteins, a new appreciation for the pulse crops and some of these other forms of protein that perhaps have been underappreciated and will continue to evolve. You're seeing an appreciation for just generally whole foods in general. And so I think the future will be more plant-based I think they're going to see whether it's used for, I think the flexitarians are really driving that, not so much the vegans. The vegans are 3-4%. But these flexitarians are saying, Hey, I'm willing to try choices two or three nights a week and that's driving this whole new proliferations of plant-based foods that are going along. They're still eating meat, but so, and I think you're going to see, you're seeing generally under all the food companies a realization that the customers don't want preservatives out of it.

When McDonald's comes out, when he's buying Campbell's chicken cream of chicken soup.

Yeah, well and frankly that soup is only about, I guess, less than 20% of their business all, even though I still think about it as the can of tomato, the Andy Warhol tomato soup. But what you're seeing is underlying all this is every food company today is realizing that the customer no longer wants the products of the last 30 years. They want new types of products. McDonald's is taking the preservatives out of their hamburger. McDonald's is cooking fresh hamburgers. I mean if that's a beacon of American American food culture, you see that this is a pretty fundamental change that we're going through.

We've got anti-antibiotics out of chicken.

And I don't see it changing because I think the new generation is driving this sort of change from a new appreciation for food. And so I think you look to 10, 20 years out, that's why I say last night we're creating a new food future and it's being driven by the customer who's asking and expecting for these sorts of changes and it's being helped by doctors like yourself that are helping people to realize that food, in fact, is medicine. As Hippocrates said, Let food be thy medicine, let medicine be thy food. And it's being driven by the media who's saying, Hey, there's concerns here that we need to talk about. Did you realize this is going on? It's driven by manufacturers who realize that what they used to sell isn't selling so well. They've got to meet the customer's needs, and it's being driven by grocers who want to give customers what they want. so you've got all these things sort of coming together to create this new food future, which for me as a as a grocer spent 40 years kind of pitching the idea that healthier food matters is pretty damn exciting to see. Actually, come in and I often say, like, I'm an older guy now, you know, I'm 65, so I've been doing this 40 years plus. And I say to the young entrepreneurs, I said, we got it this far. We got the ball to the 20 yard line. I said, whatever sport analogy you want to use. Yeah, it's now to you. to take these things and create this future that we can imagine that's more inclusive, more diverse, more humane, more sustainable, and that's truly what I hope happens.

That's great. Okay, last question. If you were king for the day and you had complete power to make any sweeping changes you want, what would you choose to do to help make the food better or the world better?

Well, first of all, it doesn't have.

To be one thing.

First of all, I picked my queen, Danielle, to be with me so that we could do it together. But I'm not sure I would ever get King. I'm not much of an autocrat, but much more of a Democrat or a, or a team, a team-based player. And I've seen the power of team. But look, I think that, you know, I think that what I've seen is that the, the real change happens in the local, on the local community level and from businesses. And I, I would, I would find ways to, to really encourage business to take risk, innovate. Obviously, the farm bill is, moves as fast as it can. I mean, I don't even know where to start. I think the government is, is, it's just bogged down right now. So what I want to see is meaningful change. I want to see people take risk and take steps towards the future we've talked about this morning. So what would I do? I would, I would, I don't know. I guess I'd put a national, let's, how do we create the, the modern day equivalent of Peace Corps or the Race to the Moon, where we say, let's have a race to the future, the healthy future. And I would somehow use the bully pulpit to create a profile of some large scale program that enrolled young people and rewarded young people for giving service to making that healthy.

Farm Corps?

Yeah. Could be Farm Corps. Could be food. Food Corps is actually out there, which is actually, that's a nonprofit that's actually working to do that. But I would make a bigger program than that. It sells, you know, American Health Core or something that rewarded innovation, courage, risk, and enrolled young people in the great business and the great proposition that we can, in fact, can build a healthier future.

So you're really talking about building a society of engaged citizens who care about their future and feel empowered to change it.

I think so.

That is awesome. Well, thanks, Walter, for joining us in the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thank you, Martin.

It's an honor. Yeah, if you've liked this podcast and this conversation, please leave a review. We'd love to hear from you, share with your friends and family on social media, and please subscribe wherever you subscribe to podcasts, iTunes or Google Play, and.

We'Ll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, I just wanted to remind you all that the information in this episode is not intended to be used as medical advice. Always work with your doctor, and if you can, Find a functional medicine doctor. My staff, including physicians and nutritionists at the Ultra Wellness Center in Massachusetts, is trained in functional medicine to find the.

Root cause of disease and create health.

For you every step of the way. For more information about the Ultra Wellness.

Center, visit www.UltraWellnessCenter.com Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you.

Can enjoy every episode without any breaks.

Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.