TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown

Summary

TED Talks Daily: Detailed Summary of "TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown"

Introduction to the Episode

In the February 22, 2025 episode of TED Talks Daily, hosted by Elise Hu, the focus is on transforming the global food system from a significant contributor to climate change into a pivotal solution for combating it. The episode features a special audio version of the short film "TED Explores: Food for the Future," hosted by TED Radio Hour's Manouche Zomorodi. Through engaging discussions with chefs, climate experts, scientists, and innovators, the episode delves into sustainable eating practices, the environmental impact of our food choices, and groundbreaking solutions aimed at creating a resilient and eco-friendly food ecosystem.

The Environmental Impact of the Food System

The episode opens with reflections on the intrinsic connection between food and culture, emphasizing how our daily food choices shape the world. Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist from Project Drawdown, elucidates the substantial environmental footprint of our food system. He states, “We find that agriculture, land use, and the food system as a whole contribute about 22% of global emissions” [06:35]. Foley breaks down these emissions, highlighting deforestation, methane emissions from livestock, industrial farming practices, and rice production as major contributors. He underscores that when considering indirect emissions from food waste and processing, the total contribution to greenhouse gases escalates to approximately 34% [06:35].

The Need for a Second Agricultural Revolution

Sam Kass, a former White House chef and senior policy advisor for healthy food initiatives, underscores the necessity for a transformative agricultural revolution. He explains, “The first agricultural revolution was characterized by expansion and exploitation... That's not an option. The next time around, agriculture depends on a stable climate with predictable seasons and weather patterns” [04:59]. Kass emphasizes that meeting the food needs of a growing global population within environmental limits requires innovative farming techniques that preserve natural resources and reduce ecological degradation.

Impact of Climate Change on Food Production

Dana Gunders, a food waste expert, provides a poignant illustration of how climate change is already disrupting food production. Referencing the collapse of the snow crab fishery in the Pacific Northwest—from 11.7 billion to 1.9 billion crabs in five years—Gunders warns of similar declines in staple crops like wheat and rice due to rising temperatures [09:25]. She articulates the severe economic and social implications, stating, “The malnutrition and food insecurity implications of those commodities getting disrupted... are impossible to comprehend” [10:01]. Gunders highlights that these disruptions could lead to significant political instability and increased food prices, affecting billions globally [11:17].

Shifting Dietary Habits Toward Sustainability

The conversation shifts to the critical role of dietary choices in mitigating climate change. Pinky Cole, founder of the fast-food chain Slutty Vegan, discusses her mission to make veganism appealing and accessible. Through her brand, Cole aims to "debunk the myth" that vegan food is boring, creating "fun, sexy vegan" options that attract a predominantly meat-eating audience [12:19]. Jasmine Crow, a representative from Slutty Vegan, elaborates on the strategy, noting, “If I can make it cool, then I can teach you about the planet...” [14:03]. This approach not only promotes plant-based diets but also fosters community engagement and environmental awareness.

Addressing Food Waste

A significant portion of the episode addresses the issue of food waste and its exacerbating effects on climate change. Dana Gunders offers practical tips for consumers to reduce waste, such as proper storage techniques for fresh produce and mindful shopping to avoid over-purchasing [19:22]. She emphasizes, “If you do a little bit better at managing your food... that literally can avoid that food from going to a landfill and emitting methane” [21:01]. Jasmine Crow discusses her company Goodr’s efforts to redirect uneaten food to those in need, thereby minimizing waste and supporting communities [17:08]. The episode highlights the moral, environmental, and financial imperatives to reduce food waste, presenting it as a "low hanging fruit" for climate action [22:04].

Innovations in Food Production for a Sustainable Future

The episode explores cutting-edge innovations poised to revolutionize food production. One such innovation is lab-grown meat, where animal cells are cultivated in controlled environments to produce real meat without the environmental downsides of traditional livestock farming. Jonathan Foley describes the process: “We take these cells and put them in a cultivator... it tastes just like chicken” [22:47]. Additionally, the discussion covers vertical farming and regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture, as Foley explains, involves “farming with nature instead of farming against nature,” incorporating practices like composting, planting cover crops, and reducing tillage to enhance soil health and carbon capture [23:20].

Conclusion

The episode concludes by emphasizing the multifaceted approach required to transform the global food system. Combining high-tech solutions like lab-grown meat and vertical farming with traditional practices and individual actions to reduce food waste can collectively lower the food system’s environmental impact. As Manouche Zomorodi aptly puts it, “We can eat within the environmental limits of the earth, but we need to get going” [24:51]. The episode serves as a compelling call to action, encouraging listeners to adopt sustainable eating habits and support innovative solutions to secure a healthy and sustainable future for our planet.

Notable Quotes

• Jonathan Foley: “When we think about the environment and climate change... agriculture and our food system are actually one of the biggest things we've ever done to the planet” [03:35].

• Sam Kass: “Meeting this goal will require nothing short of a second agricultural revolution” [04:59].

• Dana Gunders: “It's not only morally inadequate, environmentally inadequate, financially is absolutely absurd” [16:37].

• Jasmine Crow: “We do hold out the hand, we grab your hand and we bring you into this community” [14:52].

• Dana Gunders: “Reducing food waste really is the low hanging fruit” [21:23].

Final Thoughts

"TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown" offers an insightful examination of the intricate relationships between our food systems and the environment. By highlighting both the challenges and innovative solutions, the episode provides a comprehensive roadmap for creating a sustainable and resilient food future. Whether through individual actions or systemic changes, the discussions underscore the urgent need for collective efforts to mitigate climate change and ensure food security for generations to come.

Transcript

[Elise Hu]

Support for the show comes from Mint Mobile. I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. Unfortunately, those traditional big wireless carriers also like taking and keeping my money too. And after years of overpaying for wireless, I finally got fed up. So I switched to Mint Mobile especially for my daughter because now I have a daughter who has added a phone line. We chose Mint Mobile for that and we said bye bye to overpriced wireless plans and unexpected overages. Mint Mobile rescued us with premium wireless plans starting at 15 bucks a month for the first three months. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop [e-mail] talks that's mintmobile.com talks upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra C Mint Mobile for details Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded. Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in. Businesses use Vanta to establish trust by automating compliance needs across over 35 frameworks like SoC2 and ISO 27001, centralized security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster, and proactively manage vendor risk. Vanta not only saves you time, it can also save you money. A new IDC white paper found that Vanta customers achieve $535,000 per year in benefits, and the platform pays for itself in just three months. Join over 9,000 global companies like Atlassian, Quora and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. For a limited time, get $1,000 off [e-mail] TedAudio that's V A N T A.com Tedau for $1,000 off Ted Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house we subscribe to everything. Music, TV, even dog food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One Mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn [e-mail] Subscriptions Terms and Conditions apply. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'M your host, Elise Hu. When it comes to food, we often ask, is this healthy for me? But it's also worth asking, is this healthy for the planet? Today we're featuring a special audio version of our short film, TED Explores Food for the Future. Hosted by TED Radio Hour's Manouche Zomorodi, the film explores how to turn the world's food system, currently one of the major causes of global warming, into a part of the climate solution.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Food is very important because it's part of our daily life.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

Food is culture, food is life.

[Jonathan Foley]

It's part of who we are.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

You remember the moments that you share over food.

[Pinky Cole]

It's magic.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

This is what binds people together.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

What we eat really, really shapes our world.

[Jonathan Foley]

When we think about the environment and climate change and things like that, we usually think about smokestacks and tailpipes and burning fossil fuels. And that's fair. But it turns out agriculture and our food system are actually one of the biggest things we've ever done to the planet. And it's only number two to fossil fuels when it comes to climate change.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Every day we make hundreds of decisions about food. What should I eat for dinner? Will it taste good? Is it healthy? But we also need to ask, what's it doing to the planet? I'm Anoosh Zamarodi, a longtime journalist, a TED speaker, and a mom. I care about the planet. I'm well informed. But I didn't know until recently that as much as a third of emissions that are warming the globe come from food. A third? The way we grow, process, package transport. All we eat and throw away is a product problem for the climate. But changing what we eat can go a long way. Food can also be a solution. On this show, we are talking to chefs, climate experts and scientists, all kinds of people who are finding ways to help us eat sustainably and make sure it's still delicious. And to understand exactly what that means, we need to start with why things have to change.

[Sam Kass]

About 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm. This agricultural revolution was a turning point in our history that enabled people to settle, build, and create. In short, agriculture enabled the existence of civilization. Today, approximately 40% of our planet is farmland. In the future, how can we feed every member of a growing population a healthy diet? Meeting this goal will require nothing short of a second agricultural revolution. The first agricultural revolution was characterized by expansion and exploitation. Feeding people at the expense of forests, wildlife and water, and destabilizing the climate in the process. That's not an option. The next time around, Agriculture depends on a stable climate with predictable seasons and weather patterns. This means we can't keep expanding our agricultural lands because doing so will undermine the environmental conditions that make agriculture possible in the first place. We can feed humanity within the environmental limits of of the Earth, but there's a very small margin of error.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

So we know food contributes a lot to climate change, but a third of all emissions. How did we get to such a huge number? Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist from Project Drawdown, breaks it down by the numbers.

[Jonathan Foley]

We find that agriculture, land use, and the food system as a whole contribute about 22% of global emissions. Let's look under the hood and see what's involved in this. The first is deforestation. That's about half of all those food emissions at 11% of global emissions. To put that in perspective, the entire US economy emits 10 to 11%. Deforestation is even bigger. Second is methane from livestock. Now, we hear a lot of jokes about what cows do and all that kind of thing, but the science is actually really clear. Livestock are a huge emitter of methane, and methane's a very big driver of climate change, and we have to make that connection. Third is basically industrial farming methods, especially overusing chemicals like fertilizers and treating soil really badly. We have to think about that, too. And then finally, we have rice production, another methane producer, at around 2%. But that's not all. Beyond these direct emissions of food, that 22%, there are some indirect ways. The food system emits greenhouse gas as well. For example, discarded food might end up in a landfill somewhere, rotting and producing methane. And then we have to think about all the energy and materials it takes to grow food and then later to process, transport, package, and prepare it. So when we look at these data, it tells us that, yes, food releases 22% of greenhouse gases directly, but when we add all the other sources, it grows to something like 34%, roughly a third of all the greenhouse gases on Earth. In other words, we cannot solve climate change unless we also address the problems of food alongside fossil fuels and energy. We also need to look at diets. Now, this one gets a little bit tricky, and people don't like to talk about it, but we're going to need to, because it turns out some foods end up emitting a lot more greenhouse gases than others. What do they all have in common? They're all animal products. Beef at the top of the list. It's literally off the chart. So this is kind of a big deal. And that's one of the reasons, among many that shifting diets towards more plant rich options is a good idea for climate.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

So the way we produce food and the food we choose to eat certainly affects our climate, but it's also a two way street. Our warming climate is already affecting our ability to grow food in more dramatic and personal ways than you might think. To learn more, I went to a very unusual dinner party with chef Sam Kass a decade ago. Sam was both a White House chef and senior policy advisor for healthy food initiatives. Then in 2015, frustrated that food wasn't on the global climate agenda, he hosted a much talked about last supper featuring foods threatened by climate change. He's been hosting these dinners ever since.

[Dana Gunders]

Start with the crab cakes. In the Pacific Northwest, two years ago, they closed the snow crab fishery for the first time in its history. That fishery had gone from 11.7 billion crabs to 1.9 billion last year. That's over an 80% collapse of that population in just five years. Let's turn to fruit. Last year we lost 95% of the Georgia peach crop in our lifetimes. I don't believe we'll be growing peaches in Georgia at all.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

There are going to be some people listening who are like, well, boo hoo. You and your fancy friends can't have your champagne, your cava and your crab cakes. Exactly. How do you explain the stakes to them?

[Dana Gunders]

Oh, I wish I could stop there. So let's keep going. Let's talk about wheat and rice and chickpeas.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Staples.

[Dana Gunders]

Staples. 60% of the world's calories comes from wheat, rice and corn. 60% from those three crops. The models on wheat. So wheat will be around for our kids. It's just going to become more expensive. For one degree of warming, we'll see about a seven and a half percent decline in yield. That's also true in rice. They go up to 40% declines of yields for rice. If we start to hit the 2 degrees warming. 3 and a half billion with a B. People rely on rice for a daily part, if not the majority of their calories. It is impossible to comprehend genuinely the economic implications of declines of staples on that magnitude. The malnutrition and food insecurity implications of those commodities getting disrupted like that, and the political instability that that will bring.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

How soon?

[Dana Gunders]

I mean, in some ways it's already starting to happen, but you start to get into those numbers in the next 15 years. Like that's not that far away.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

I think there's gonna be some people who are like, oh my God, first you told me what I needed to Eat for my brain, health for my body. Then you told me I needed to go to the farmer's market and buy organic when I can. And now what do you want me to do? What do you want them to do?

[Dana Gunders]

And they're right. I'm annoyed, too. This is the one place in our daily lives that we can collectively have a really big impact and exercise that feeling inside of, like, wanting to do right by the next generation. Wanting to help play a positive role in this and how we eat gives us a shot every single day to try to do a better job. And it doesn't have to be some big overhaul. I'm not saying don't eat meat. I eat meat once a week. You know, making a shift to not do a steak and to do something else adds up to be really big numbers.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Okay, so let's talk about it. Meat. Love it or hate it, it produces more greenhouse gas than anything else humans eat. And no one likes to give up something that they love. But eating sustainably doesn't have to mean giving up on enjoying food. It does mean introducing more people to different kinds of food, which can be way more fun than you might think. Atlanta entrepreneur Pinky Cole is famous for a chain of fast food restaurants called Slutty Vegan.

[Jasmine Crow]

Hello to all my fellow sluts in the audience.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Yes, you heard that right. At a recent event, the crowd went crazy for her because she's done the seemingly impossible, made the idea of eating vegan fun.

[Jasmine Crow]

When you come into the doors of Slutty Vegan, the first thing that you're going to hear is, we got a slut in the building.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

I went to check out the secret behind the Slut sauce for myself.

[Unknown Speaker]

Hi.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Okay, what are we making?

[Jasmine Crow]

Okay, so we are making the Hollywood hooker.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Okay.

[Jasmine Crow]

And the secret to this is, like, you just put your mayonnaise on the side and you have to, like, gooey it with mayonnaise.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

I mean, let's be clear. This is not like, health food, right?

[Jasmine Crow]

Technically, no.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Pinky grew up in a vegan Rastafarian household, but she's taken pains to create a brand that doesn't equate going vegan with anything remotely pious or righteous taste, she believes has to come first.

[Elise Hu]

It's delicious.

[Jasmine Crow]

People love that sandwich. They go crazy over it.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

This is fun food.

[Jasmine Crow]

This is fun food. This is the brand where every single time somebody comes through the door, they want to take pictures.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Okay? The weird part is, like, fun, sexy vegan.

[Jasmine Crow]

Like, that's fun, sexy vegan. Because historically, vegan has always been Looked at as boring, very green. It's a salad. And I'm like, I want to debunk that myth. I want to add some razzle dazzle to vegan food because people identify to cool.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Yeah.

[Jasmine Crow]

And if I can make it cool, then I can teach you about the planet, Then I can teach you why it's good for you. Then I can teach you why you need to do this. Because then this is the wave.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Is that what we need to do in other parts of dealing with climate change?

[Jasmine Crow]

We do. Because the minute people hear climate change, they like, check out. The average person in America is not thinking about climate change. So I think that the messaging and how we as a people navigate through this is make it relatable for people to understand. If that's what it takes to get there, if we can get to the finish line, then again, it's a win for everybody.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Do meat eaters come in here?

[Jasmine Crow]

That's my audience.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

What?

[Jasmine Crow]

70% of my audience is the meat eater.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

70%.

[Jasmine Crow]

70%. A lot of people come up to me and say, hey, Pinky, if it wasn't for you, I never would have even knew what vegan food was like. People don't even realize you eat vegan food every day. Most of your sides are vegan. Right. What we do is we hold out the hand, we grab your hand and we bring you into this community. And then you look up and you don't even realize, like, oh, I'm vegan and oh, I love this movement. And then we can begin to start having those conversations. And I feel like it is my responsibility as a vegan restaurateur in this hospitality space and a space where it's still this, you know, people are still trying to figure it out. It is my responsibility to be that change agent in this space.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

So changing our eating habits isn't easy, but it is doable. But what about the food that gets left on our plates? Every year in the US alone, nearly 40% of the millions of tons of food produced goes unsold or uneaten. We need to waste less food.

[Pinky Cole]

One of the most, let's say low hanging fruits that we have when it comes to sustainability is reducing the amount of organic waste that we are putting into the environment.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

The amount of food that is wasted in Europe is equivalent to the amount of food that is produced in Africa every year.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

Anaerobic decomposition of organic matter. This is without oxygen. Oxygen generates methane. And so when we leave food in.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

A landfill with no oxygen, it starts spewing this methane.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

1 kg of organic waste is 3.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Kg of CO2 equivalent.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

Basically, 1 kg of organic waste is like 1.3 liters of gasoline.

[Pinky Cole]

800 million people suffering physical hunger every day.

[Jonathan Foley]

It's nuts.

[Pinky Cole]

And at the same time, wasting the food is wasting a lot of money. So it's not only morally inadequate, environmentally inadequate, financially is absolutely absurd.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

So how do we solve that problem? The people are hungry, and food that gets tossed usually ends up in a landfill where it's covered with other garbage emitting massive amounts of planet warming methane. Someone who understands the full scope of this problem is Jasmine Crow, Houston.

[Unknown Speaker]

Hunger is not an issue of scarcity. It's a logistics problem. And in the US particularly, we spend $218 billion on food we never eat.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

She's the founder of a company named Goodr that's redirecting uneaten food from grocery stores, restaurants, and businesses. Instead of getting tossed, Goodr workers sort them into three broad categories. If they haven't expired, Goodr puts them aside to take to food kitchens, schools, and churches. If the food isn't rotten, it gets delivered to farms for animals to eat. The rest gets composted and turned back into good dirt. Jasmine says companies pay for waste management anyway. They might as well pay to have their excess food donated. Plus, this way they get a tax deduction. The goal is to turn food waste into a win, win, win. Better for hungry people, the climate, and businesses. So what is specifically being brought in today?

[Unknown Speaker]

So lots of breads, lots of breakfast items, snacks, bagels, English muffins.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Do you ever get people who are like, ugh, this is so annoying. This company is creating more hassle for.

[Unknown Speaker]

Us, you know, sometimes at the top, but not at the bottom. A good example of that is when the Atlanta airport is one of Gooder's customers. What we found is when we went over to the airport and I started talking to different employees about it, these are people that themselves are living on the marginal poverty line, making nine, ten dollars an hour at the airport. And so many of them said, I love Gooder. I used to hate having to throw this food away when I needed it at home for my family.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Somebody's watching this, and they're like, yay, Jasmine. Go Gooder. But what can I do?

[Unknown Speaker]

If you're an everyday person and you're working, you're supporting your local stores, your local businesses, ask them what they're doing with their food waste. This is your opportunity to get them to do. And that has been the catalyst for a lot of the customers that we have today.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Jasmine's got a great solution to get food that would be wasted to those who need it. But what can we do? How can each of us waste less food? At a grocery store in New York City, I roam the aisles with food waste expert Dana Gunders.

[J]

In grocery stores, oftentimes in the produce section, you see this like piles, right? I don't know. It puts us into a head space where we want to buy more.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

Yeah.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Dana says that food waste has five times the greenhouse gas footprint of the entire aviation industry and we all contribute to it every day. This is a lot of cilantro and I, I feel like it always ends up at the bottom of the drawer wilted.

[J]

I actually store them in a jar of water in my refrigerator and I find it helps double, triple the amount of time that cilantro can last.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Small changes at home, like the way we store fresh produce, can add up to big change. Dana's got other tips too.

[J]

Shopping is really where we commit to food and so we need to be careful not to over buy. Old school things like shopping lists and meal planning really help. Next. As I tell my friends at the end of dinner, love your leftovers. They are the only true free lunch. And when you get sick of them, you can move on to number three, which is freeze your food. Your freezer is like a magic pause button and so many things can be frozen that you don't think of. Bread, milk, cheese, and that half jar of pasta sauce you didn't use. Next. Use it up. Be sure to shop your fridge before you restock it. And lastly, learn your labels. Best Buy and Enjoy Buy are really just guesstimates of when food is at its best best. They're not an indication that it's gone bad.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

I think one of the things certainly when it comes to climate is people feel like, well, you know, little old me, if I do one thing, really, what difference does it make? How do you explain to people that they should pay more attention?

[J]

I think one of the most important things is to not be all or nothing. You know, if you do a little bit better at managing your food and you one night a week, make a choice to use what you have instead of getting takeout, even if you're kind of tired, that literally can avoid that food from going to a landfill and emitting methane.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Okay?

[J]

And we as consumers are the largest source of food going to waste in the U.S. so if we don't start to work on this as individuals, we will not make a real dent in this problem. These strategies are not earth shattering they're things that many of our parents and grandparents did. And you can be sure that my son is learning them as well. Because as we tackle this massive climate crisis, reducing food waste really is the low hanging fruit. But no matter how sustainably we grow that fruit, it's only a good use of resources and nutrition if we all do our part to make sure that it actually gets eaten.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Eaten. Clearly, we cannot grow and eat and waste food like we've been doing. But the global food system is complex. It's intricate and different everywhere you go. And that is why some food innovators are looking to pinpoint certain problems with approaches that may take more getting used to. Here's a peek at some of the exciting things happening in the field of food production that might help us bend the curve on our emissions from field to Table 1 idea. Technologists are using animal meat cells to grow real beef, chicken and duck meat in labs.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

So we take these cells and put them in a cultivator that provides a.

[Jonathan Foley]

Safe and nurturing and warm environment for the cells to grow into chicken meat.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

Once we grow this meat for about two weeks, we are ready to harvest.

[Jonathan Foley]

It and shape it into the products that we love.

[Manouche Zomorodi]

This can be done with beef, salmon, duck, or any species that you can imagine. It's a kinder way to make meat, but it's also kinder to the environment. It is real animal tissue, it's real animal cells. The taste is phenomenal. It tastes just like chicken.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

It could be a long time before you order a lab grown burger in a restaurant. But meanwhile, farms are using all kinds of AI sensors and robots to monitor their crops and cut down on resources. There's also a lot of talk about regenerative farming using older traditional techniques that till the land less, letting the soil restore itself and capture more carbon.

[Jonathan Foley]

I would define regenerative agriculture as farming with nature instead of farming against nature. So that would be practices like applying compost, planting cover crops, reducing tillage, managed grazing, planting perennials, basically anything that builds healthy soil.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

We'll also be introduced to more types of food that may be less familiar to us.

[Pinky Cole]

Now we will have to learn how to eat many more insects. When it comes to animals, we're normally eating about 10 species. There are about 2,000 edible insects and we will have to learn how to incorporate that in our diet. We'll have to learn how to incorporate seaweeds in a massive way. We'll have to learn how to cultivate many crops in our cities vertically, so we can use less land, less water, less energy.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

Vertical farming is no longer some fluffy.

[Jonathan Foley]

Futuristic concept, but it's already here as.

[Elise Hu]

We speak today to change our lives.

[Jonathan Foley]

And our planet for the better. We don't use any pesticides. We can recycle most of the water that we use. We don't even need arable land. In fact, one of our farms used.

[Elise Hu]

To be a Budweiser factory.

[Anoosh Zomorodi]

It will take all of these methods, from the most high tech to the lowest cost, to revolutionize farming as we've heard. We'll also need a global shift to more plant based diets and much less food waste. All of this combined can put less pressure on our planet and help us make more of what is available. We can eat within the environmental limits of the earth, but we need to get going. This is just the beginning of this new chapter for food, but I hope we wet your appetite to learn more about the people working hard to make what we eat sustainable, nutritious and tasty. You can see the full talks from all of our speakers and many [e-mail] Bon appetit.

[Elise Hu]

That was TED Explores Food for the Future, a production of the TED Idea Studio with There We Go Films, hosted by Minouche Zimorodhi. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. TED Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything. Music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn [e-mail] subscriptions terms and conditions apply.

[Unknown Speaker]

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[Manouche Zomorodi]

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