This content was created by Josh Trent. This content was uploaded by Josh Trent. This is a YouTube video titled "CAN ORGANIC SAVE YOUR LIFE?" created on April 26, 2010, discussing the San Diego Food Justice Conference. The content includes multiple speakers, including Josh Trent, Dominic, Malachi, Raj Patel, and James Trant, discussing topics related to sustainable food, local food movements, and the global food system. The video captures a series of interviews and speeches at the conference, highlighting the importance of local food sourcing and the influence of corporations on the global food market.
Questions this video answers
One billion people
94% of the global packaged tea market
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus
Chapters
San Diego like this food justice Conference.
Awesome. And where can people find out information about slow food?
You can go to our website at www.slowfoodusa.org. slow Urban San Diego Dinner.
All right. Thanks, Dominic.
You're welcome.
So we're here with Malachi, who just gave an excellent discussion about sustainable food. And I wanted to ask you one quick question. What is the most important thing that everyday people in San Diego can do to actually improve their food source? Just simple things that people can do to produce better food.
Okay, I think I've looked at that question a few times. My first thing that I say is let us think local. So the first thing, buy your food local. Know the local farm around you. Just let's start a local movement. So local can be you can grow something in your backyard or you can support the local trader, whether it is somebody who's making soap or somebody who's just farming. Be involved in your community gardens. When you start the local economy, it begins from home.
Thank you, ma'.
Am.
Appreciate that. All right, guys, we're waiting here at the San Diego Free Justice Conference. We're about to see Raj Patel speak. The demographic here is amazing. We have people all the way 12 years old, all the way up to 85. Let's go check it out inside. Come on.
Right now, in fact, Lucy, since we met, the number of hungry people has gone up. Today there are now a billion people who are getting less than 1,900 calories a day. And at the same time, there are a billion people around the world who are overweight. And I don't have anything terribly sophisticated to offer in terms of analysis or PowerPoint, but I notice a whiteboard here. So I'm just going to trundle over here and Instead of a PowerPoint, I'm going to ask you to use your imaginations. This is a diagram about basically the kind of world we find ourselves in. I disturb stare at this, otherwise the feedback kind of kills it. But at the top, if you imagine all the farmers in the world, the millions of farmers around the world who produce the food that we eat every day, and at the bottom, the billion six, nearly 7 billion people on earth today who eat every day if we can. And in the middle, as arbiters of the food that goes from farmers to us, there's just a handful of full of corporations. And this sort of hourglass diagram is a very sort of back of envelope representation of the way the world food system works, but it is an accurate one. In the world today, in every major commodity in every major food commodity, whatever that commodity is, they're usually five or six corporations that control the global trade in that commodity. Commodity. It varies according to, according to the thing that we're talking about. The global market. In tea, for example, the world's market and packaged tea is 94% controlled by one corporation. By Unilever, 94% of the global market is controlled by just one corporation. But in every major sort of commodity market, there is sort of what we have five or six in grain. In the global trade in grain, there's like an ABCD of these corporations. There's Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus. These are the corporations that sort of run the global grain market. And you may think, well, you know, maybe it's all right to have corporations distributing our food for us, because when you have corporations competing, you win. Or so we are told on late night television. But of course, in the global market in food, there is no such thing as a free market. And particularly when it comes to food, there's not really that much competition. Now, you don't have to take my word for it. You can believe the words of a man named Dwayne Andreas. And Dwayne Andreas, when he said the quote that I'm about to give you was the chairman of Archer Daniels Midland, one of the largest corporations involved in the manufacture of food. And he had to say this about competition. He said, the customer is our enemy and the competitor is our friend. And there is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market.
Not.
Not one. The only place that you see free markets are in the speeches of politicians. People who are not from the Midwest do not realize that this is a socialist country. That's an odd thing for a CEO of a Fortune 500 company to be saying that actually we don't live in a free market. We live in a world where corporations are basically suckle on the teat of government money. And a couple of years ago when I was sort of trying to explain this to people, particularly in America, people saying, oh, that could never. That's not true. We would never have corporations holding out their hands and the government's giving away trillions of dollars. So it's a little easier to explain that now.
So we just got out of the most powerful lecture I've seen pretty much all year, comparable to chef Ann Cooper's lecture. I received my why vegan paperwork out here, which has nothing to do with it. I'm just gonna check this out for later. But I did Want to let you guys know, one of the best speakers on agricultural policy, on organic foods, on agribusiness, and just the entire spectrum of how we eat and the food that goes around bodies, we just learned a whole lot of knowledge in that. In that stadium right there. It was amazing. So you guys check out websites related to. Do a Google search on Raj Patel. He has the book called also the Power of Zero. Check it out. Get educated. Make some changes before, you know, disease and sickness happen to you. So here with James Trant, lead singer for Sky Evolutionary Orchestra, we're just wondering why you're here. What are you doing?
Well, we're here today to support the Cultivating Food Justice Conference, which has been lovingly created by a committee of people over the past several months that it's talking about issues of food justice, and that's access to food, both local and global, and all of the economic, political, and other factors that go into that. And we've just. We're really excited. We're about to perform right now. We just had the keynote speaker. Raj Patel just gave a great, rousing speech up at the Arts and Letters building. Really wonderful. So we're so stoked to support this effort because food supply is such an integral issue in all kinds of ways, political, economic, even spiritual. Food kind of cuts the root of everything, food and water access. So we're really excited to be part of it.
Excellent. Thanks, man. We're looking forward to it. All right, Josh.
Oh, yes. You owe it to yourself. You must. Stop contemplating all the ways you've been suffering. Try again, try again. Try, try can it ever too late now.
