Why Food Security NOW is Important for the Future | Feeding 10 Billion Founder Paul Matteucci

I'm going to talk about feeding 10 billion today. And I like to know something about my audience when I give a talk. So do any of you eat? Yes. All right, well, that qualifies you. That's all the background you need for this. So I'm going to talk about creating Food System 6.0. And I'll give you some context as to why I call it 6.0. It took me a long time to find this banana. I had to go to like 300 grocery stores to find a banana that actually had this picture on it. We live in a food museum, a future food museum. And what I mean by that is the way we eat, the way we source and distribute our food today is different than the way we did it when I was your age. And it's very different than the way we're going to be doing it by 2050. So we live in a future food museum. And we are in the process of developing something called Food System 6.0. And it's going to happen whether it happens intentionally or not. And one of my theories is what's going to drive change in the food system Primarily and most importantly as entrepreneurs, and I'll talk about that as well. So food system 1.0. 100,000 years ago, for the first 90,000 years of our existence as a species, we hunted and gathered our food. So 90% of the time that something that resembled a human being has been on this planet, we hunted and gathered our food. We've only been doing something else for 10% of our existence. So I love this picture of hunters and gatherers because I cannot tell whether they're hunting rabbits or gathering bunnies. But do we do hunting and gathering today? Well, we do. We call it foraging. People forage for part of their diet. But most important way that we do hunting and gathering today is that we get 50% of our seafood that we eat globally from the sea, which is basically a hunting exercise. 10,000 years ago, we started domesticating plants and animals. This began, most of us believe, in several places around the world. The one that we're always taught about in Western culture is Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates, where it all began. Today, that's basically— system still exists, and we would call it the organic food system. That is basically The way that we select plants that do well from the wild and then nurture the soil with animal waste, et cetera, is basically the fundamentals of the organic food system. About 200 years ago, we started doing things like hybridization, and that was a major change in our food system. You guys probably remember Mendel. Reverend Mendel, who did it with the beans. I'm sure anybody who took high school biology talked about how he spliced certain plants onto other plants and grew new plants. Today we call that the pluot. Basically, a pluot is a hybridized apricot and plum. And once you get— once the plant guys come up with a good idea, then everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon. The results aren't always great. the animals that get hybridized. In Montana, where we have a place that we go sometime, we have the famous jackalope, the giant rabbit with antlers, another science mistake. And then once the animal people do it, then the packaged goods people try to do it and we get things, hybridizations like pancakes and sausage on a stick, haggis pizza. Anybody have haggis pizza? Anybody know what haggis is? No. Yeah. Okay, you probably understand why that probably ended up not being a very good idea. Food System 4.0 is really the synthetic revolution. Some people call it the Green Revolution. Everybody's heard about the Green Revolution. The part of it that we call the Green Revolution came out of World War II when all the ammonia that we were using to create bombs Basically, we needed another use for it. But it turns out that it really isn't the Green Revolution, it's really the Black Revolution, because it's all about the application of petroleum to agriculture. The first stage of that was mechanization. That is, we substituted mechanized labor for human and animal labor. The second stage of that was to dump the oil right on the fields, and that was called artificial fertilizers, petroleum-based artificial fertilizers. And we still do a lot of that today. The 5th stage of our food system is what I call the industrial food system. That's the one that currently dominates the planet. And what's different about that is it has massive scale, vertically integrated supply chains that were created for the fast food industry. What the fast food industry needed in the late 1960s and '70s is a very consistent product to come out every time exactly the same, no matter where you were on the planet. And to do that, they had to build these massive supply chains that were very, very homogeneous with certain kinds of crops, etc. Now, once they did that, people that ran supermarkets and other ways to get food realized that, oh my God, they have an enormous cost advantage. They figured out a way to drive down the cost of calories and we need to adopt that too. So it's basically taken over the planet and eventually it got adopted by big box retailers, and even food service distributors. You guys know Sysco? Really funny story. A friend of mine about 20 years ago bought Sysco stock, and he thought he was buying C-I-S-C-O. And he bought this, and Sysco really went to the roof, and he was really upset at his broker. And then Sysco crashed, and he was really happy with his broker. So what has Food System 5.0 given us? Well, lots of cheap calories. Lots of cheap calories. My wife said, do not go with a Diet Coke from Jack in the Box. So I told her I would tell you that I didn't eat anything there, I just bought a Diet Coke. Processed foods, artificial ingredients. Those of you who are close enough to read this can see that you probably can't pronounce many of the names on this ingredient list. GMOs, ways to change the genetic structure of plants and animals. Monocultures, you know what monocultures are? That is, once you have massive scale on a product that works, you begin— the world tends to be taken over by that product. So a single strain of wheat. You begin to raise apricots not for their taste, but for their ability to be transported without bruising. There's all kinds of things that occur, but what happens is the genetic diversity of what we grow decreases. CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations, way to get massive scale in the meat industry where you bring all the animals together and get all the economies of scale. Trouble is they get sick, so you have to give them a bunch of antibiotics so they won't get sick. And you feed them corn, and they're not used to eating corn. They eat grass naturally. They get sick from eating the corn, so you got to give them more antibiotics. Yeah. So a little bit of a problem. Buying and selling consortia, mechanized distribution infrastructure. You see this ship here. It turns out it has a lower carbon footprint to get a strawberry from Chile to San Francisco than it does to get from Fresno to San Francisco. The reason for that is massive scale, the ability to put a lot of strawberries on the boat, basically. And convenience packaging. Now I'd tell you more about 5.0. Most of you lived it. But in fact, 8 states have passed laws that make it a crime to record or film film what goes on in factory farms or on ranches. So if you're a conspiracy theorist, which I tend not to be, frankly, but I'm surprised that somehow the large-scale ranchers and companies like Cargill have been able to do this to the First Amendment. Thank you.