Why Obesity, Hunger, And Malnutrition Are Found Together In The Same People with Tom Colicchio

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

So much of what else this country, this nation can be cured if we can get people to eat healthier, but the only way to get people to eat healthier is get them the dollars that they need to eat healthier.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and it's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And if you care about what's happening today in the food industry, in the restaurant industry, why we should care. And you should be listening to this podcast because it's with an incredible leader in space of food and restaurants and food policy, Tom Colicchio, who is the chef and owner of Crafted Hospitality, which is got a whole bunch of restaurants all over the country. My favorite that I've been to is Craft, which was down the street from me in my apartment in New York City. And he is just a mover and a shaker in the food industry, as well as just being an incredible chef. He's Got incredible restaurants all over the country. And he opened this really cool restaurant in New York in 2018, which I'm sure is struggling right now, called Small Batch in Garden City, New York, which is a casual dining restaurant that celebrates the pride of place through commitments to local ingredients and local purveyors and people, which is pretty awesome. So really decentralizing food. He's also been an incredible food activist. He also was an executive producer in an incredible movie called the Place at the Table, which I saw in 2013 at Sundance Film Festival, which blew my mind. It was really about the causes of hunger hunger in the United States and the often parallel and coexisting problem of hunger and obesity. We don't typically think of people who are overweight as hungry, but it's really problems that go hand in hand. And that led him to go to Washington, D.C. The chef goes to Washington. He becomes a citizen chef activist and has been advising members of Congress and holding them accountable for being an integrity around food and food policy. He worked with Michelle Obama on the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act and is really a leading citizen chef activist in the space. So I'm so excited to have Tom on our podcast. Welcome, Tom.

Thank you, Mark. You make me feel so much more important right now.

You are, you are. You know, I always look for the people out there who are not just doing what they do in their small world, but actually seeing the connections between everything they do. So you're in the space of food and providing some of the best and most amazing delicious food in the country and have been given all sorts of awards. But you also realize that it's not so simple as just serving up food in your restaurants, that we live in a food system. and that it's broken and that people are hungry and suffering and sick. And that is really what you focused your work on. And I'm so excited about your new podcast. Everybody should be listening to this podcast called Citizen Chef. Only one episode is out as we're recording this, but it's going to be coming out more and more every week. And it really highlights some of the underbelly of the dark issues in our food system and also the possibilities for reimagined food systems. So, Tom, you've been to such an icon for me, both because I love eating at your restaurants, I love your food, but also because you are an example of what I think chefs should be. And I think chefs can be a leading voice for change in our food system. And you certainly are one of those. So I'm so glad to have you on the podcast.

Thanks. So to be clear, the reason why I was an executive producer on that movie was because my wife was producer and director.

Well, you got in, you got in there. But it helped you understand that there was bigger issues out there in America.

Oh, absolutely. No, no. What was really amazing about the film, and when Lori, my wife, Lori Silverbush, when her and her partner Christy Jacobsen started working on the film, very, very quickly we figured out that people weren't hungry in this country because of famine, because of war, because of drought. People were hungry in this country because they often didn't have the necessary funds to actually buy healthy food. And we didn't have a government that felt that they had a responsibility to make sure everyone was well nourished in this country.

It was striking to me, and I learned about this just reading medical journals, that those who are most food insecure, have the highest risk of obesity and diabetes. So can you talk about why that might be the case?

Yeah, in a phrase, in this country, calories are cheap and nutrition is expensive. And so if you have very little dollars, just spend on food, you buy the cheapest food possible. Typically, those are the foods that are high in saturated fats, high in salt, high in sugar, they're dense in calories, but they don't actually offer much nutrition. And so that's why often you see in the same households, people that are malnourished and obese at the same time.

Yeah, what's fascinating from a medical point of view is that in studies they looked at what happens when people are allowed to eat as much processed food as they want versus real food. And, they eat about 500 calories more when they have access to processed food and not real food. And, the reason is that we are looking for nutrients in our food. We're biologically programmed to look for those nutrients. Just like a kid will eat dirt, if they're iron deficient, we're going to keep looking for love in all the wrong places because we're never going to find it in the processed food. So people are actually eating a lot more to try to find the nutritional density, but they're not getting it. And that leads to this obesity problem. So it's pretty striking when you look at these scientific studies, and we see this across America that, you know, people who are among the most food insecure are the most sick and overweight. Now, you've been an advocate for food and hunger issues for a long time and been lobbying on Capitol Hill to change our food system. How did you as a chef go from the kitchen to Congress?

Well, so I go back to my childhood. My father was, you know, president of his union. He was a corrections officer. My mother worked in school cafeteria. And so that's kind of, if I had to go back to my childhood, that's kind of where I think it was rooted in some of the work that my dad did. I remember him campaigning for someone who was running for sheriff in Union County. I grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And so I think that was ingrained in me. And they were, you know, good voters. I mean, they were out there, you know, they voted in every election. And so there was this idea of politics that was always discussed in my house. But then, I mean, obviously I had a platform from being a chef, but then also from being on TV. And so when we produced the film, you saw it at Sundance, that's where it premiered. It did have a theatrical release, but we actually took that film around the country, college campuses, showing it to various civics groups. And so that gave me a platform to start talking about the issue a little deeper. But because we made the political argument in that film that you can't solve hunger through food banking and through charity, that you actually need government response, a massive government response and a much bigger response than we currently had. That put me squarely in Washington. In fact, I testified while we were making the film, I actually testified in Congress, in committee, they were debating the Hunger Act. Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act. And it was Congressman George Miller, it was his committee, he was a congressman from California, and I was scared to death. I always had a problem with public speaking. You wouldn't know, but I was really nervous. And I also had a speech that I had to read. I have a very, very difficult time reading speeches, or reading and speaking at the same time. I'd rather, you know, read the materials and then sort of do it off the cuff. And I'm much better that way, but I had to read this. So I'm really nervous. Plus, I go into the chamber to meet Congressman Miller, and we chat a little bit. And so, you know, not knowing the process, you walk out and you're in the committee room, and it's like you see on TV. You're down below, and I'm popping up here, and I'm freaking out. And I'm testifying along with Secretary Vilsack, And then another general, retired general from Mission Readiness, along with someone, I'm forgetting his name, and blanking it out from the Heritage Foundation. And so, I read my piece and that was fine and they all kind of do their thing. And then it comes time for Q&A. And at one point, I got so angry at the guy from Heritage that I turned and started addressing him. And I got a reprimand from the bench.

That's a conservative think tank.

Right, right. And I got a reprimand from the bench saying, no, you address us. But then I had another Democratic congressman who kind of bailed me out and steered the conversation to where I was heading. So it was a really good lesson, but it was also a lesson in civics and sort of how the sausage is made. And I know how sausage is made. I know how they're both made now. They say there's two things you don't want to see: laws and sausage. I've seen them both made, and I'll stick to cooking. But no, but that, so the film came out and really gave me a platform. Right after the film came out, I co-founded an organization called Food Policy Action. Co-founded with Ken Cook, who was at the time still running the Environmental Working Group. And he had this idea to model food policy action very similar to the way the League of Conservation Voters is set up. So we published a scorecard. So we graded Congress on how they voted around food issues. Yeah. through farming issues and fishing and so that was clearly put me in DC.

You didn't give people a good score, maybe they want to talk to you.

It worked out both ways. So if we didn't give someone, there's some people got really bad scores and they just kind of blew us off. And then there were some people who got so-so scores and they would say, well, if had we known there was someone keeping track, we maybe would have voted differently. That's exactly why we're here. And so, and so I would go to Washington sometimes, you know, eight to 10, 12 times a year, and we would go to lobby. And now, so I was an unpaid, unregistered lobbyist, but working through this organization, I would always go with professional lobbyists and you would have meetings. And then at the end of the night, I would end up going to another congressman's house, I guess I can name her Shelley Pengry.

Oh yeah. She's an organic farmer.

Yeah, she has a 400-acre organic farm in Maine. And so we would go to her house and a bunch of members would come out, usually like 40, 50, 60 members and they would always make a big deal when some of the senders would show up. And so I would just give talks and that just kind of blossomed from there. And the James Beard Foundation started moving directions and getting involved more in advocacy. and they started a boot camp to teach chefs how to advocate for things that they cared about. So we would bring those chefs to the Hill. So we would have 60 chefs on the Hill, and that made a pretty big impact. And so that really showed you the impact, but the grassroots impact that you can have, but it takes a lot of work. And I remember talking to George Miller when he was retiring, and we were at a press conference together, and I took him aside and just congratulate him on his retirement.

He was a congressman?

Congressman from California, yeah. And he took me aside and said, listen, we keep coming back and we recognize this. They said a lot of celebrities, they come up here for a photo op, they come here one day, we never see them again. He said, you keep coming back and he said that's being recognized. And so you have more of a voice because you're not going away. And so that's how I got involved. That was it. And it was, And food policy action.

Is a great organization. I think in the last election, they were able to unseat two congressmen who had bad voting records through a massive social media campaign that was really driven through citizen action. So people feel disempowered and they feel like they can't do anything and their voice doesn't matter. It actually does. And by collective action, you can actually unseat people who are bad actors.

Right. When I was there, I'm no longer involved and I may be getting back involved, but When I was there, we actually went after one member of Congress from Florida, Steven Sutherland, who almost single-handedly killed the farm bill. And we went after him and we don't have a ton of funding, but we went after him, did a few town halls, and I think he lost by about 3,000 votes. Gwen Graham beat him. Now we picked a good candidate. Gwen Graham had a big name. Her father was a senator and a governor from Florida. So she had a big political name. But it worked and now with an election where Democrats got hammered.

So you're in Washington, you're talking to all these senators and congressmen, and you're so clear about the linkages in our food system between healthcare, climate change, education, employment, the economy. Do you think that the congressmen and senators had an awareness of this and why isn't this part of our national discourse in politics?

Some do. The members of Congress that are on the ag committee do. You know, we had a great partner in Pat Roberts, a Republican senator from Kansas. His opposite is Debbie Stabenow. They actually, on the last Farm Bill, did a great job of partnering together. Yeah, there's people who do focus on it, but they don't necessarily understand the connection sometimes. That's what you have to do, you have to make those connections. and I think also because of the scorecard, people, you know, you can't discard it. People want a good record. They actually want to be the best. If you're running for office, just by nature, you're competitive and you actually want to say, hey, I did the right thing. And listen, we're talking about nutrition. We're talking about people who are hungry. You know, we're, this shouldn't be controversial.

But the thing that's challenging here is that there's the farm bill, which has the SNAP or food stamp program in it, which feeds about 46 million Americans, including one in four children in this country. So there's a lot.

Right now, it's much higher. Right before COVID it was about 38 million. And that number is probably doubled at this point.

Yeah, I'm sure it's more. And the issue with SNAP is it's called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, except there's no provision for nutrition. There's no guidelines around the nutritious quality of the food and nutritional density.

Yeah, except for the Double Bots program. The Double Bots program that is in the Farm Bill, you know it, but I'll just spell it out anyway. It's actually started by a good friend of mine, Michel Nischan and his organization, Wholesome Wave, where if you're using- Another chef. Right. If you're using SNAP to shop at farmers markets, again, this is how you make nutrition more affordable. if you are using SNAP in a farmer's market, you'll get double the amount of money you're spending. So if you spend $40, you go and get another coupon for an additional $40 to spend in the farmer's market. Now, what's great for this is it expands your dollars that you can spend on nutritious food because you're in a farmer's market, you're buying fruits and vegetables. Number two, that money goes to farmers. That was the key here. And this is how you actually work both sides of the aisle. You work from the nutrition side and take care of the sort of liberals who want to feed hungry people. But then you actually are making sure that you're giving money to rural communities and farming communities because otherwise that money is spent in a supermarket where it goes to a large company. And so this is a way to take billions of dollars and move them into.

So how many billions or how much money of the Food Stamp program goes towards Double Bucks? Do you have a sense of that?

Actually a small amount of money and it's a public private partnership. I believe that the first farm bill that was introduced was $100 million and I think it doubled down. So it's only about $200 million.

Yeah, so that's 200 million out of 75 billion a year. It's very small.

Point well taken, yeah.

So one of the things you focus on, which is interesting, is not just erasing hunger through giving calories, but making sure people have nutritionally dense food. Can you talk about that?

Well, again, this is, if you want people to have nutritionally dense food.

My.

Experience is that people who have limited means, it's not that they want to buy junk food. They actually would prefer to buy nutritious food. They just have to make their dollars stretch as much as possible. And so again, how do you make nutritious food more accessible, more affordable? Accessible, meaning there are places in inner cities, but also places in rural areas where you have to travel pretty far to get to a supermarket to be able to buy a fruit or vegetable. And so there's the accessibility issue and there's the affordability issue. And so how do you make that work together? How do you do it through subsidizing fruits and vegetables? Maybe not, but can you do it through actually research and development so those farmers can actually get studies and data and information on how to grow more fruits and vegetables on the same acreage? So if you're producing more, the price will come down, but you're also selling more. The other thing that I think is critically important is nutrition, and you know this. If you start at an early age teaching kids about nutrition, it'll last a lifetime. And so making sure that nutritious food, making sure that there's a system, and this is in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, making sure that there is money so farmers can get food directly into school systems, so fruits and vegetables can get into the school system. But here's something that's missing. Most schools are actually open, especially here in the Northeast where I am, when farmers are producing most of their food, schools out of session.

Right.

And most schools, most cafeterias, no longer process food. They only take food in and reheat it.

That's right.

So we need to actually create a system, a regional distribution, where food can come from a farm and get processed. When I say processed, I mean minimally processed, meaning taking peas and blanching them, taking broccoli and blanching or carrots and having fresh foods, fresh fruits and vegetables now that can be frozen and ready for school years. Nothing wrong with frozen. Nutrients are there, but now you're actually taking the food from the farm, you have that processing source and then it goes into the school system. This is crucially important because if you get kids the nutrition early on, it'll stay with them for life plus. Studies have shown that kids then introduce those foods to their parents.

Parents, yeah. It's true.

It's really important. So also teaching about nutrition in school. We don't do that. We don't teach nutrition. In fact, when you went to medical school, how many classes on nutrition did you have?

You know, they're mostly about scurvy and rickets and, you know, malnutrition.

How many, you know, things that you see in your practice that can be cured if someone actually had better diet?

Most things? Most things. I mean chronic disease is predominantly caused by what we eat and it's mostly cured by what we eat.

So here's something that Congress, both sides of the aisle, care about. How do you lower healthcare costs? That's your answer. Yeah, except they don't connect the dots.

Tom, between- God forbid, we're the nanny.

State and we tell people how to eat more nutritious. Yeah. And so, but this is how you do it. So we spent $200 billion a year on healthcare costs. And everybody wants to know how to make that come down. How does that come down? Obviously pharmaceuticals can come down. Sure. But how do you make people healthy so they don't need that intervention?

Actually, the budget for Medicare is $1.3 trillion. It's a lot. And then you count all the other healthcare programs in the government. It's about 60% of our total healthcare costs.

But now we have to make sure that people can afford healthy food. And so SNAP doesn't go far enough. Snap just kind of gets you by. In fact, most families run out of SNAP three weeks into the month. Also, most families who are on SNAP have at least one member of the family working full-time, and they're still on SNAP. Also, you've got to also bust the myths around SNAP. People believe that people are just abusing the system. Most people, most families are only on SNAP for about eight months. Also, a single-bodied adult with no dependents, otherwise known as A-Bots in the lingo, they can only receive SNAP three months out of any three years. Also, most people don't know, if you're a college student, you cannot receive SNAP unless you work 20 hours a week. This is crazy. And college campuses, there's food pantries opening up on most college campuses now, because these kids go to school, maybe the first in their family to go to college, They barely have enough money to get the kid to college. They don't have enough money to pay for a meal plan. And the kids are hungry.

And when you're hungry, you can't learn. That's a staggering amount of hunger on campuses to talk about that. I mean, I think most people don't realize that college kids who you think.

Of as fairly middle class, well off, actually are hungry. Right. And what happened COVID? They closed all the college campuses. So what happened? Housing. The kids got thrown out of school, so they didn't have housing anymore, and they couldn't eat anymore. Yeah, so, you know, so much of what else this country, this nation, can be cured if we can get people to eat healthier, but the only way to get people to eat healthier is get them the dollars that they need to eat healthier.

So one of the issues that isn't really talked about a lot is who are the hungry? And it's really often the poor, obviously, but many of those and the 50 million food insecure, are mostly Black, Latino, Native American. And they're really- On a percentage basis, yes.

Yes.

And they're disproportionately affected by coronavirus. And with this whole issue of systemic racism, how does systemic racism play a role in both the issues around food insecurity and hunger, as well as the farm and food workers? Because I think there's two subjects I wanted to get into.

I think it's- It's pretty easy. Systemic racism has disproportionately affected Black communities where they don't have wealth and they don't have wealth built up over generations because they weren't allowed to own property. They were promised 40 acres in a mule. They never got that. And then when they moved up north, they moved into places like Chicago where they were redlined when they couldn't get a mortgage. And so how do you build up wealth and families? It's through property. It's through homeownership. Also, that and the constant sort of push on wages. And so, of course, it's pretty easy to understand how it affects the black community disproportionately. And so, again, into health outcomes, again, you asked one question, who's on SNAP? Yeah. Really? Children, people with disabilities, vets. Those are the categories. Think about whether they're black, white, Latino. They're actually more whites on SNAP, but as a percentage, there are more people of color. But that's who's really going hungry. And so you have elderly who have to make decisions whether to actually take their medicine or their food. Or their medicine needs to be taken on a full stomach and then their stomachs aren't full so the medicine's not working. or it's getting sicker. You have people with disabilities who can't work, people with disabilities who end up getting locked up because we don't have a mental health care system to take care of them, so we lock them up. Children who are living in homes that are food insecure, they are affected. Or then the parents who are feeding their children in those homes, they're not eating themselves. And so this is a thing that really sort of Looking at COVID right now, and this is what I'm hoping on the hunger side that comes out of COVID Right now, states like Maryland, I know there's been a 70, almost 75% increase in applications for SNAP. If you extrapolate that out throughout the country, you know, we're looking at probably 50, 60 million people on SNAP, right? These are people who are lining up for food pantries in cars. You see these lines that are two, three hours long. These are people who never, three months ago, in a million years, thought that they would be lined up for food pantry. They had jobs. They actually, you know, they went to school, they got a good job, they're lined up, okay? So I'm hoping that the language around people who are on SNAP, it's always, they're not deserving. Yeah. Bad decisions.

Nobody wants to be on SNAP.

Well, hold on. Maybe they made bad decisions in life. It's their own fault. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Or, why did you have so many children? You hear this. It's your fault. And the government shouldn't take care of you because it's your fault. But now we're seeing people, no fault of their own, are hungry. And so what we're hoping, what I'm hoping, is that we have a deeper empathy for people who are struggling. People who are born into poverty, they don't ask to be born into poverty. they're born into poverty and so how do we how do we I I think there's going to be a deeper know, empathetic sort of feeling around who's struggling this country and how we can fix that becausecause people again, who never thought they'd be in this situation are going to have to reach out to the government for help. And so, um, hopefully there is a better understanding about who's healthy, who's hungry, why they're hungry, and Why we should feed them? Now, we already touched on the health benefits for why people should be fed. But then, take it a step further. When you're healthy, you have better educational outcomes, right? Better health outcomes, obviously. You get a job. You have a job.

More productive and more effective.

More productive. Therefore, you're paying taxes. Therefore, it's actually good for the country. And so, if this country wants to get back on its feet, and even when we were at close to full employment, you want to make sure that people are healthy enough to thrive so they can actually contribute to the country. And so this is an argument that now is a very different argument. It's not an argument about my liberal knee-jerk reaction to make sure people are taken care of. This is now a different conversation about what's good for America. So now you make an argument for why feeding people and making sure that they're properly nourished is actually good for our country. So you wrap this in the American flag right now. Now we're having a different conversation.

Absolutely. It's good for the economy to have people healthy and working in every way. And speaking of working, the biggest employer in the country is the food system. And when you look at food and farm workers and restaurant workers all across the food chain, it's 20 million people. And a lot of those people now are out of work and restaurants are struggling. but even before they're out of work, they're often marginalized workers. They're often paid low wages. They're often migrant workers that often have no benefits. You know, Carrie Kennedy has been on the podcast talking about the state of farm workers in New York who never got a day off Christmas or anything and had to work crazy shifts and had no benefits and no rights. And I think these are things that people don't understand when they're buying their food at the grocery store. What happened all along this food supply chain that led to some of the workers that are producing the food being really adversely affected. So we really don't have the kind of fair labor laws for most of the farm and even food workers, and we're paying the price for that.

Yeah, well, in fact, in the Fair Labor Standards Act, farm workers were left out of it. They didn't have the protections that other industries were afforded. It wasn't until Chavez started organizing people what they got in some rights. But yeah, so what we're seeing now, and this is what's interesting, you read stories about these food processors that are just getting ravaged because of COVID where some plants where there's 3600 workers, over a thousand have COVID, where this could have affected 90% of the meat production in the country. Well, that's because you have two reasons. Number one, you have low-paid workers that you know, are being forced to go to work. They should stay home like the rest of us, but they're being forced to come to work. They're getting sick and they end up going to work because they have no savings. So they end up going to work and they end up getting sick. And so our food system is built on, and this is our food system originally was built on slavery. Let's be honest here. And so it hasn't changed that much. It's using low pay workers to produce food. But now all of a sudden they are in a position where they're essential. Well, why weren't they essential all along? And why aren't they getting paid more all along? Really, this can be taken care of pretty quickly.

How would you do that?

Over the last 40-50 years, these big food producers bought out the little guy. They are all very centrally located. It's very, they become monopolies. When you have four companies that process the majority of meat that we eat in this country, they become monopolistic. And we can break them up. And they should be broken up because our food system should be spread out. It's too centralized right now. So if we spread it out, this is actually one of the things that we talk about on our podcast, one of the issues we deal with. We spread it out, we actually put it into communities. And so when you have a processor that is in the community, they're not a big agribusiness that is actually Brazilian, or in Smithfield's case, owned by the Chinese. Yeah.

Smithfield sounds like an American company, but it's owned by the Chinese. Most of the pork in this country.

Yeah. And so when you have processors now that are part of the community, wages will go up. And listen, there's just a so last week, the Justice Department actually is going after these processors for racketeering for essentially price fixing. And so they price fix wages. They're pushing wages down because if you're working in food processing, it's only game in town. So you're going to take a job for ten dollars an hour, twelve dollars an hour. You're working crazy hours. You don't get breaks.

I mean, here's stories of these people.

Working in food processing plants that wear.

Diapers because they can't take a bathroom break. Yeah, they have to process 150 chickens a minute. Crazy numbers. And so we have to break this up a little bit and sort of spread it out. And this is all, again, but there's.

Obstacles to that, right? How many the policies that are in Washington have to change in those policies?

We don't have to change policies. We already have policies in place to actually break up monopolies.

It's called the Sherman Antitrust Act, but it's been a little bit rolled back by Reagan. So it's allowed all this consolidation of the food industry and seed companies and everything.

Right. But if you look back in the 20s when we broke up big monopolies, the reason we were able to do it was because it was couched in terms of this is anti-democratic, because now you have companies that are too powerful and they have an outsized vote. They have an outsized reach when it comes to Washington. They can create laws. So there's 800 meat processors in this country. 800, 50 of them produce 90% of the food, 90% of the meat. There's also 20 licenses that the USDA gives out. The big guys make sure that you cannot get those licenses. Now if you're a small farmer, maybe you can get a license where you can kill maybe a couple thousand birds a week, you can only sell them whole from your farm. You can't put them actually into a distribution model. Or maybe you can actually kill animals and sell them directly to the public, but you can't sell them to restaurants. So there's again, there's 25 different licenses, and the big guys make sure that you cannot process a portion meat out and sell it to supermarkets.

That's crazy. So basically, the government is keeping the status quo and preventing Absolutely. These companies from being able to sort of liberalize and actually allow small producers.

To-- that young farmer who wants to stay on his family's property, but he can't make it because the government's not letting him. I'm out on the north end of Long Island on the North Fork. It's a farming community. It started out as potatoes and broccoli and cauliflower and hops. And now it's mostly grapes, but you still see a lot of farmland. I have friends of mine who are raising animals. They have to ship them off the Long Island to Connecticut to slaughter them and then bring them back to sell them on their own farms. That's crazy.

It is crazy. You know, we're talking about some of the disparities in farmers and, you know, some of the challenges of sort of racial injustices on the farm. And I, I was recently listening to a podcast called 1619 about the way in which black farmers have been prejudiced against through USDA policy that allowed local banks and local white communities, which were in control of the loans, the crop loans for the farmers, to limit their loans, to delay the loans, to cause all kinds of trouble for the farmers that made them go out of business because the white farmers didn't want them. And as the source of the biggest class action civil rights law suit in history. And I think it's a set of systemic and I think it makes it hard for us to have a fair food system.

Right. Well, now you're squarely now making the argument for reparations. Yeah. Well, the land was taken and that's the root of the reparation.

Yeah, I think Lincoln offered the freed slaves 40 acres and a mule and Johnson who followed him was a slave owner and a southerner who repealed that and that land today would be worth $4.6 trillion, which is staggering. But I think giving small amounts to each individual African American in the country probably isn't the right solution. It's probably revitalizing communities and empowering communities in ways to rebuild themselves, led by themselves.

Yeah, I don't know what the solution is, but HR 40, which is the bill that's been introduced to the in the House, I don't know how many times John Connors, I believe, has been responding to that bill. It's just to study this. It's actually not to say, well, here's what we're going to do. It's like, let's study this issue, and Congress says, no, we're not going to study it. And so, yeah, I don't know how to figure out how to, you know, compensate people. that's way above my pay grade, but we should study it.

Yeah, it's a huge issue. So let's talk about restaurants because that's your business. And I think right now the restaurant industry is under a staggering blow from COVID-19. It contributes $1 trillion to the economy each year and 4% of the GDP, but it's been hit harder than any other industry. And you've developed this incredible group called the Independent Restaurant Coalition to lobby Congress to get relief for the restaurant industry. so tell us what is happening. I mean, you know, for me, just thinking about it as a, as a lay person, nobody's eating at restaurants. A few people are doing takeout. How do they staff the restaurants to even make up money doing that? I mean, how, how, how is this unfolding?

And where are we going here? You don't make money. And just to be clear, I, I was one of the, I'm one of the founding members, only because someone called me first or second and said, actually, so the independent restaurant Coalition, you formed, I think it was March. 14th, 15th, I got a phone call from a friend of mine who's not in the restaurant business. He's the agent who represents chefs and said, you know, you have a foundation, maybe you can help out. And I said, hold on to your money because this is way too big. And then right after that call, I got a phone call from a friend of mine, Scott Faber, who is one of the lobbyists that I worked with.

When I was at Food Policy Action.

Yeah, Environmental Working Group. Yeah, I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group. So, yeah, so Scott called me up. and Scott, you know, to tell me about something else. And I kind of in passing said, yeah, and he asked me what I was working on. I said, well, we got to do something for restaurants. And I said, I think we need a lobbyist. And he said, okay, let's do it. And so I called my friend back. I said, I think I know how you could spend your money. And then he had talked to a few other people and we managed to get some money. Within two days, we hired a comms team. We hired lobbyists, not Scott, but we hired lobbyists. And we were on our way. And then it kind of branched out and we found a group down south that were about 100 restaurants strong that were working on something and found another group in Chicago and then San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. And then we found chefs from all over. Right now we have about 60,000 people on our list. Actively every morning on a Zoom call, there's probably 100 or so restaurateur chefs and we're set up, you know, solely the lobby. And so we were the ones who really were focusing on PPP and the fixes to PPP. And we just got that, it just passed the Folk Chambers and it extended the period where we can spend the PPP money from eight weeks to 24 weeks. It changed the split from payroll to rent or other expenses from 75 to 25 to 60-40. It also, if the portion that wasn't forgiven, the portion that is a loan, was extended. The payback period was extended from two years to five years. There were a few other things in there, too. So we lobbied hard for that and got it. We were invited to the White House on one of those kind of, you know, press little hits, I guess. But we didn't make a difference. And now, right now, we are asking for $120 billion specific to the restaurant industry. And before everybody chokes on that number, We employ 11 million people. I'm talking about independent restaurants. And so we define that as restaurants that are not publicly traded and restaurants that have fewer than 20 locations. And so that money will go to higher our stats back, will give us the necessary pay our vendors and give us the necessary runway to actually get open. Because as you pointed out, when we open up, we're opening into a very depressed market. Number one, we have to take out half our seats. Also, we were forced to close. And we have to take out half our seats. There's additional money that we're going to have to spend making sure the restaurant is constantly sanitized and making sure people are wearing masks and the whole bit. And so we're looking at maybe 30% of our business, maybe. We can't make money doing that, so we're going to lose money. And so the question now, if Congress is going to put a stimulus bill out there, The restaurant industry is uniquely positioned to take that stimulus dollars and have it all go out. Because typically 90 cents to 95 cents, every dollar that we take in goes out the door in terms of wages or suppliers or rent. And so if you want to actually take money and flow it through a business, so it goes to a lot of people, until they spend money and that's actually keep the economy going, we think that the restaurant industry is is where they should look. And in the scheme of the money that's going to be needed to actually keep the economy afloat until we get a vaccine, we're talking trillions of dollars. So 1.2 billion is actually a pretty low number.

You said 1.2 billion? I'm sorry, 125 billion. Yeah. But the challenge is that even if you do that and get the money in, the restaurants aren't going to keep losing money because 30% occupancy It's still losing proposition.

Yeah, right. So that $120 billion number actually comes from about 75% of income replacement for about five months, I think it is. And so I might have those numbers wrong. But what that does is if that money is flowing through, right, then we stay in business because we're not losing money anymore because our payroll was paid for, our The suppliers are paid for. We're actually taking that money that's coming through and that's what's floating our business. So if all we're paying at expenditures or some hard costs, meaning rent and our food costs, then we can make it.

And then you think it'll open up within a year or two? I mean, 'cause it seems like a long trajectory to restaurant opening.

Vaccine. The economy will stay depressed until there's vaccine. There are some places that will do really well. Food stores will do really well. The Amazons of the world are going to just crush it. Zoom is doing okay. There are pockets that will do really well during this time. But restaurant industry is not going to come back. Also keep in mind, one of my restaurants, River Park, So we're on the near NYU, 60% of our business is private functions. We have a conference center. Yeah, this isn't coming back anytime soon.

Right.

So we have and that's not coming back until there's a vaccine. And so listen to the other day, he thinks possibly by fall there could be a vaccine.

There could be. But, you know, there's a lot of questions about it. It's not like a typical vaccine for measles polio, these vaccines are hard to do for respiratory viruses. They're not 100% effective. And yeah, there's a lot of questions. I mean, I hope it's going to be a miracle and maybe they will be, but I just worry about it. I worry about the restaurant industry because people are afraid to go out. People are concerned about how to stay safe when they go out. And I mean, it's the thing I miss a lot because I used to eat restaurants a lot, but people are struggling. How are you? you know, as a restaurant owner, how are you navigating this? I mean, as an individual?

Well, my restaurants are all closed. I thought it was important and, you know, I weighed, you know, trying to open up and do community service or something. But I thought, and this is me personally, and I'm not casting aspersions to anyone who made a different choice, but my decision was keep my staff home, keep them with their families, keep them safe. I have a few friends of mine that are ER doctors who both had COVID, came out the other side, they're back to work and maybe telling horror stories. And so my feeling was keep people safe. My employees are coming in on public transportation and so I didn't want to make them come to work. Plus, knowing that the federal unemployment bump up actually put a good amount of dollars into people's pockets. especially since people weren't going out. So I got a good sense from my staff that they were doing okay. Out of all the employees that we laid off, I think it was close to 420, I think 470 somewhere in there. Only about 20 couldn't receive unemployment. And we helped them out. So that was why I made that decision. But as things are starting to get a little better in New York, one of my restaurants, Craft, we may open up next week. is a meal kit restaurant. Meaning we'll do all the prep, you still may have to some of it at home. So for instance, we cut all the vegetables and we'll marinate them in olive oil and herbs and we'll, you know, plastic wrap them and we'll have a whole chicken that's already been brined and tied and ready to go. And we'll give you some directions and even do a video of taking those vegetables, putting them in a roasting pan.

Put it in the oven for 50 minutes.

So it's like Blue Apron, but for yeah, I love that. And so, and other restaurants are doing it. It's not my idea. and also turn our private dining room that we just renovated, we can't use, into a butcher shop and a gourmet store. Because people who live around the restaurant, maybe they don't want to go to a big supermarket and they want to support restaurants. And so we'll sell olive oils and vinegars and mustards and we'll sell beans and flour you can't buy anywhere. So we'll sell flour because we could buy 50, 50 you know, pound bags and break it up. And so we'll sell flour and beans and stuff like that. And we'll have, you know, six to seven pasta and sauces. So you can buy pasta that we make, fresh pasta, and we'll give you pesto sauce, or we'll give you bolognese. And so we'll bring together a menu of things that you can assemble at home very quickly. And that's how we're going to go forward with that restaurant.

I have another question.

Will that be profitable or it'll just.

Be a way to.

No idea. Yeah. No idea.

Because you can't do the same volumes you did.

No, no, luckily for me, I have a landlord that's working with us. We've been there 19 years and so they want to keep us there and so they're working with us. And, you know, because of PPP, I'm paying my staff through PPP. So that's an expense I'm not using and paying whatever rent I'm paying through PPP as well. And so I may have a shot at making it. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. But those are, you know, those are right now, those are the food businesses that are busy, supermarkets and a lot of gourmet stores in Brooklyn. Olmsted, it's a great restaurant. Greg, the chef there, he moved very quickly to this model and it's been doing pretty well from what I understand.

And this is actually a way for America to get cooking again, which I think we all need to do, right?

It is, it is. People are, you know, Day one of like, you know, I closed the restaurants and in the morning I woke up and I was on Twitter and something along the lines of, you know, I know many of you out there, you know, don't cook regularly if you have any questions like that. And then I went about my business all day long and like 11 o'clock, 4,000 questions. Not only that, it created a community. I used the hashtag cookingthroughacrisis and it started this community of people who were helping each other. So I didn't have to. And it was like someone had a question about X, Y, Z, and someone else would say, well, try this, this, and this. And it just created this great community. Actually, People Magazine picked it up. It was pretty funny. But so, my restaurants, you know, what I miss most, I miss seeing my team. I see them occasionally on Zoom meetings, but not the bartenders, not the waitstaff, not the baristas, not the porters, I'm seeing my management team. but restaurants are like families. And the funny thing is, I have seven restaurants, two are in Las Vegas, so I don't own them. But the restaurants that I own, the four in New York, they're all individual families. We do get together occasionally, maybe a holiday party or something. But for the most part, they become their own little families, and people are missing each other. We did a Zoom meeting for the staff last week, and the chat was all, just miss you, miss you, miss seeing you. And so that's the mission, miss that connection and I think that's the goal. It's like people, you know, they're not interacting. Luckily for me out here, I have a few families that I know have been safe and we're starting to interact again outside, not inside and our kids are playing but we have to trust each other. You know, I most likely if I go to New York and open a restaurant, I'm gonna have to sort of step back for two weeks or so. So that's the kind of system that we've worked out for friends to start to get together. And so far we've been okay.

Yeah, I mean, it's a new world. I think the other question I have for you finally is, you know, a lot of restaurants are not as big or successful as yours, and they might have survival issues long term. And I think that in addition to the restaurants, a lot of the suppliers of the restaurants are struggling. independent farmers. How are these restaurants and farmers innovating to stay afloat and what's going to happen going forward? I mean, it seems like there's going to be a lot of people that are just going to go out of business.

Right. So let's tease this out a little bit. There's two food supply chains in this country. One are farmers that sell into supermarkets. The other are farmers that sell predominantly to restaurants or to farmers markets. And so when you read stories of milk being thrown out, right? That's because you have a milk producer who has a deal with a processor. That process may be that processor processes milk for institutional places like colleges or hotels where they're putting it in five gallon containers and it's not labeled the same way the milk would be labeled for the consumer. And so that business dried up and so that farmer doesn't have an outlet anymore. So that's why they're dumping their milk. That processor can't change very quickly and start putting milk in quarts and half gallons. with proper labeling. So that's why you're seeing milk being thrown out. Same thing with big farmers that are killing their animals. You know, an animal's 200 pounds, it needs to get processed.

That processor closes down because of COVID It's crazy. There's all these hungry people not getting.

Food and there's all these farms that are having to throw out their food. I mean, it's kind of that, too. If the government just, and this is Jose Andres, you know, he's putting out there in FEEDAC, which is starting to get some steam, if they just started taking dollars and putting them into restaurants, we could have kept that supply chain intact and just kept producing food for communities. That would have been a very easy way not to break that link. Right? You have to plan for that. You know, we could have very easily turned on a dime, but you have to have a plan for that. Our government didn't have a plan for that. Yeah. Hopefully the next one we will. And so some of the farmers have done a pretty good job of getting their CSAs together. More people are getting CSA boxes. Dan Barber, the chef up at Stone Barns, is using his farmers to put together CSA boxes for his clients. That's a way of keeping that supply chain intact. That's some of what I'm going to do when I reopen craft. And some farmers haven't been able to make that pivot, and so they're in trouble. So the James Beard Foundation did a survey of chefs and restaurateurs, and only 20% of the chefs and restaurateurs they surveyed say they will open up. only 20%.

20% of the restaurants that open up. That means 80% are going to go out of business.

80% don't know. They're going to close. They just don't know. They're unsure of the future. Most chefs, most restaurateurs, they don't have the wherewithal to get through this. I only have really five restaurants and, you know, we're, you know, without PPP, we're out of cash. Yeah. And so we'll figure out a way to get open, but it's going to be tough.

And these are marginal businesses at best. They're not high profit margin businesses.

Not at all. And over the last 10 years, it's become even more difficult. Rents are going up, especially in big cities. I had to close a restaurant because my rent doubled. I at least ran out. The rent was doubled. I had to close. crap bar. But, yeah, so listen, we're in trouble with the problem. And again, this is why we're arguing why the restaurant industry is the place where you want to put stimulus dollars, because it's not only the restaurants, it's the farmers, it's the fishermen, it's the wine makers, the cheese makers, the person who delivers my linen, even musicians who may play a Sunday brunch. You know, all of those people are part of our, you know, our ecosystem. Yeah, our ecosystem. And so, you extrapolate that out, it's close to 20 million people. And so, you don't want to see that go away. You don't want to see a farmer have to lose their land because they can't produce food. And so, this is why we're making the argument for why restaurants should be safe.

And you think that will actually get past, do you have a sense what's happening in Washington around that? Because it seems like a great idea.

Well, who knows? When the jobs report came out last week, and we added two and a half million jobs, but we lost 16 before that. So maybe more than that before that. So I'm not sure why we're sort of rallying around that. There was all of a sudden just like, you know, the deficit's getting too high. We can't put any more money out there. The Federal Reserve came out today and said we're going to see a long sort of many, many months, maybe years of employment being at, you know, 10%. So I think they're going to have to stimulate the economy, especially since this is an election year. So that's what we're going for. We also just put out a pretty in-depth financial study where we are making the argument that $120 billion that are spent will actually return $2.5 billion or $250 billion worth of economic activity. So we think we're making a really good argument and hopefully Congress will come through. Right now, Senator-- I'm sorry, Congressman Blumenauer, who's a congressman from Portland area in Oregon, he wrote a bill. It's going through committee right now. He has a partner on the Senate side in Senator Wicker, who was a Republican from Alabama. He was working with Kristen Cinema and Cory Booker. So we have both sides of that working on this. and hopefully we can get buying from a few more people.

Well, I hope so, because we all have restaurants and that industry goes under. It's going to be hard to pull it back. All the, you know, 20 million food and farm workers are involved in some way or another. And I think it's a moment for us to stop and think about how do we want our food system to be? We want it to be so centralized, we want to decentralize it, we want to make it more equitable. How do we create a more just and fair food system? And this sort of highlighting some of the cracks in our food system that need to get fixed. And you were at the center of it, unfortunately.

But it's, yeah, it's, and without restaurants, we're going to see more, more of a centralized food system. Restaurants are where those independent farmers are actually selling their food into. So this is another reason why you need restaurants.

That's right. Well, you're one of my heroes, Tom, and I can't wait till I get to go back and eat at craft. I'm gonna go get the takeout stuff for sure.

Yeah, come and see us. I think by next week we'll have it up and running. But thanks for having me on the podcast.

Of course.

Great seeing you, I'll see you in person soon.

Yeah, so everybody who, this is my cat.

We're all excited at home. Our dog, after 11 years, passed away in November. And I took a lot of sort of Breaking down my wife to get another puppy, but we got it two.

Weeks ago, so we're pretty psyched around here. Well, I encourage everybody to check out Tom's work. He's written a number of great books. Think Like a Chef, Craft of Cooking, Witchcraft, Craft of Sandwich. And definitely check out his podcast. It's top of my list. Citizen Chef, which is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you love this conversation, we'd love to hear from you.

Please leave a comment, share with your.

Friends and family, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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