Speaker 1: Hi, it's Auksha. Today we are bringing you one of
Speaker 1: our favorite episodes, a conversation with the environmental journalist George Monbio.
Speaker 1: It's about farming, food systems and whether there are alternatives
Speaker 1: to the way we currently use land. It was recorded
Speaker 1: almost a year ago to the day in George's sunny
Speaker 1: community orchard in Oxford. Enjoy and we'll be back with
Speaker 1: a regular episode next week. Welcome to Zero, I'm Akshatrati.
Speaker 1: This week microbial protein, the end of farming, and really
Speaker 1: stinky cheese. Every year, our food system does something amazing.
Speaker 1: We produce enough food for eight billion people and then
Speaker 1: some and although millions still go underfed, the level of
Speaker 1: hunger in the world is much lower than in all
Speaker 1: of human history. It's a remarkable feat when put in
Speaker 1: its history shtorical context. Meanwhile, India's boat problems continue to
Speaker 1: create widespread concern a countryside on the very edge of starvation.
Speaker 1: Back in the nineteen sixties, widespread famine was averted by
Speaker 1: the Green Revolution, a transfer of agricultural technology to developing
Speaker 1: countries that massively increased farming yields across Asia and South
Speaker 1: America and lifted hundreds of millions out of hunger and poverty.
Speaker 1: The population in the nineteen sixties was just three billion.
Speaker 1: We're now at eight billion people, and still our food
Speaker 1: system has managed to keep up. In twenty nineteen, the
Speaker 1: production of primary crops things like cereals, fruits, vegetables, reached
Speaker 1: nine point four billion tons globally. That's fifty percent more
Speaker 1: than in the year two thousand. But all that food
Speaker 1: production comes at an enormous cost. Agriculture is a major
Speaker 1: driver of global greenhouse gas emissions, and almost forty percent
Speaker 1: of the Earth's surface is used for farming. That's something
Speaker 1: that my guest today, environmental journalist and campaigner George Monbio
Speaker 1: argues is a disaster for our planet.
Speaker 2: The crucial environmental commodity which we should be paying more
Speaker 2: attention to than any other environmental metric is land, because
Speaker 2: every hectare of land we use for an extractive industry
Speaker 2: is a hect ten not being used for wild ecosystems.
Speaker 1: In his new book ReGenesis, George argues that the global
Speaker 1: food system needs a radical rethink. That system can sound abstract,
Speaker 1: but picture it as every business and relationship that exists
Speaker 1: to bring Ukrainian wheat to Pakistan or Brazilian beef to
Speaker 1: a butcher in Paris. This conversation is about the difficulties
Speaker 1: facing that system, but it is also about solutions, the
Speaker 1: technologies that George hopes can fix a system in crisis
Speaker 1: and leaders to another greener revolution. We join George surrounded
Speaker 1: by birds and bees in his community orchard in Oxford,
Speaker 1: where his book and his examination of the global food
Speaker 1: system begins. Jorge, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: You open your book sitting in this orchard, pulling out
Speaker 1: a bit of soil, and then you examine the food
Speaker 1: system through the exploration of what's in the soil. You
Speaker 1: write about these systems being in crisis, and you then
Speaker 1: explore solutions to some of the crisis. Let's start with
Speaker 1: the crisis. Where does the crisis in the world's food
Speaker 1: system really begin.
Speaker 2: It begins with the world food system. In fact, the
Speaker 2: biggest problem the world food system faces is the world
Speaker 2: food system, and it's beginning to look rather like the
Speaker 2: financial system in the approach to two thousand and eight,
Speaker 2: which is not a good place to be. There are
Speaker 2: a number of huge, superdominant companies which have become too
Speaker 2: big to fail, so on one estimate, four companies control
Speaker 2: ninety percent of global grain trade, and as their operations
Speaker 2: have become more efficient and streamlined, which might be good
Speaker 2: for each individual business, it makes the system as a
Speaker 2: whole less resilient. And to understand this you really have
Speaker 2: to grasp systems theory and a complex system, which is
Speaker 2: what the global food system is, and indeed what most
Speaker 2: of the important things on Earth are. Is a system
Speaker 2: composed of nodes like the knots in an old fashioned
Speaker 2: fishing net, and the links between them. And if those
Speaker 2: nodes become too big and too strongly connected to each other,
Speaker 2: you lose the four elements of systemic resilience. One of
Speaker 2: those is redundancy spare capacity that's been more or less
Speaker 2: stripped out of the food system. Everything has become super efficient,
Speaker 2: just in time delivery. Another one is what's called modularity,
Speaker 2: the degree to which the system is compartmentalized. Well, that's
Speaker 2: all been stripped out as well, as we've switched towards
Speaker 2: a global standard farm, applying a global standard diet using
Speaker 2: the same seeds, the same chemicals, the same machinery everywhere.
Speaker 2: Then there's circuit breakers, where are the points at which
Speaker 2: shocks which pass through that system can stop being transmitted. Well,
Speaker 2: those have all gone as well. And then there's the
Speaker 2: backup systems. Where are the entirely different systems which you
Speaker 2: could switch into if you encounter a crisis. They're virtually
Speaker 2: non existent now. And so through this global homogenization, which
Speaker 2: seems to make sense every individual step towards it makes sense,
Speaker 2: we see a system that has become systematically fragile. Now,
Speaker 2: complex systems they don't respond to change in linear ways.
Speaker 1: They're not complicated. I mean no, it's not complicated, like
Speaker 1: more than complicated exactly. So an engine is a complicated system.
Speaker 1: It's got lots of moving parts, but they behave in
Speaker 1: predictable and linear ways, whereas a complex system is composed
Speaker 1: of billions of decision points stochastically interacting with each other,
Speaker 1: but has this weird property of being self regulating within
Speaker 1: a certain range of stress. But then if you push
Speaker 1: it beyond that stress range, those self regulating circuits within
Speaker 1: the system become self amplifying. And this is the same
Speaker 1: you know, whether you're looking at the global food system,
Speaker 1: global financial system, ecosystems, the atmosphere, the oceans, the human brain,
Speaker 1: the human body. This is how complex systems consistently behave
Speaker 1: and so they'll absorb stress and self regulate and maintain
Speaker 1: an equilibrium state up to a certain critical threshold. And
Speaker 1: you describe that threshold to be flickering, that you will
Speaker 1: start to see signs of it breaking down. And are
Speaker 1: there signs you're seeing in the food system that respond
Speaker 1: to this sort of flickering in a complex system?
Speaker 2: Yes, you're quite right. So as a system approaches a
Speaker 2: tipping point, its outputs begin to flicker and we see
Speaker 2: things which don't seem to make any sense. Just like
Speaker 2: in the approach of two thousand and eight, we saw
Speaker 2: these wild and fallbacks in equity values, and so what's
Speaker 2: going on here? And then suddenly the whole system was
Speaker 2: on the verge of going down because of the subprime
Speaker 2: crisis in the US, which wasn't a big deal in
Speaker 2: terms of global financial flows, but it was a butterfly's
Speaker 2: wing which nearly tipped the whole system. Well, in this case,
Speaker 2: we're seeing those wild fluctuations in output values. Now, it
Speaker 2: should give us a few example. So in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: something very weird happened. Between the nineteen sixes and twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: we saw a steady decline in chronic global hunger, fewer
Speaker 2: and fewer people going hungry. And then suddenly in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: we saw that trend turn and we started seeing the
Speaker 2: number of chronically hungry people rising and that's continued ever.
Speaker 1: Say, I mean, there's the pandemic that's made it worse
Speaker 1: that this start.
Speaker 2: This was long before. And the really weird thing about
Speaker 2: this is that between twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, global
Speaker 2: food prices fell dramatically. The global food price Index in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen was one hundred and fifteen. In twenty fifteen
Speaker 2: it was ninety three, and it stayed below one hundred
Speaker 2: right up until halfway through twenty thirty.
Speaker 1: There's more poverty and people kind of afforded. That's why
Speaker 1: those hungry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the opposite to what you would expect. You know,
Speaker 2: you'd expect food price is full hunger fuls, right, but
Speaker 2: it rose. And what has been happening here is that
Speaker 2: as the system has lost its resilience, shocks are more
Speaker 2: easily transmitted through. So even something relatively small like a
Speaker 2: speculative surgeon one commodity, like an export restriction by one
Speaker 2: exporting nation, those shocks instead of being damped down by
Speaker 2: a healthy system, get amplified by a system which is
Speaker 2: becoming fragile. We and the rich nations hardly notice that,
Speaker 2: because we've got the buying power, we've got the hard currencies.
Speaker 2: It's the poor nations which are food insecure, which are
Speaker 2: buying food with soft currencies in a hard currency market
Speaker 2: or at the end of that chain, and as the
Speaker 2: shock gets amplified through the chain, it lands on them.
Speaker 2: And so what you see is these sudden disruptions of
Speaker 2: supply in the poor nations which caused local price spikes.
Speaker 2: So even while the global price is low, the national
Speaker 2: price spikes, and that's what seems to have been driving
Speaker 2: chronic hunger. So we have the pandemic and people say, oh,
Speaker 2: there's an issue with food supply here, and then we
Speaker 2: have Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Oh, there's an even bigger
Speaker 2: issue with food supply, and people assume that that's what
Speaker 2: caused it. But actually those problems, which are real problems
Speaker 2: and definitely exacerbated it, have revealed the systemic fragility. They
Speaker 2: haven't caused the systemic fragility.
Speaker 1: And in twenty fifteen, of course, the Paris climate agreement
Speaker 1: was signed. Yes, it was the World War point nine
Speaker 1: degree celsiuswarma then pre industrial times. We're at one point
Speaker 1: two almost now. Yes, and climate change is contributing to
Speaker 1: some of these problems.
Speaker 2: Well, a classic example was this year, after the invasion
Speaker 2: of Ukraine, India stepped forward and said, don't worry, we
Speaker 2: can fill the gap because we've got a bumper wheat
Speaker 2: harvest coming and there's going to be this massive shortfall
Speaker 2: of wheat ex sports from Ukraine. We'll make up that shortfall.
Speaker 2: We'll become a super exporter this year. Literally, just four
Speaker 2: weeks later, the Indian government came forward again and said
Speaker 2: about those exports, we're imposing a total export ban because
Speaker 2: we were hit by this massive heat wave which has
Speaker 2: shriveled the grain on the plants, and our weak howves
Speaker 2: is going to be much much lower than we thought.
Speaker 2: And so what we saw there was a climate crisis
Speaker 2: coinciding with a geopolitical crisis, and we're going to see
Speaker 2: more and more of that, and some of the predictions
Speaker 2: for how environmental change is going to affect the global
Speaker 2: food supply are really terrifying. Absolutely, is staying awake at
Speaker 2: night sweating terrifying, But.
Speaker 1: We have to acknowledge and sit in this sort of
Speaker 1: discomfort that this food system that we've created has been
Speaker 1: able to supply food for the ever growing population. We
Speaker 1: had about two billion people at this time twentieth century
Speaker 1: who were fed, and yes there was more hunger proportionally then,
Speaker 1: and now we have eight billion people. This year we
Speaker 1: cross that threshold, and we are still being able to
Speaker 1: feed them. Yes, hunger is going up, but it's still
Speaker 1: relative to where we were at a much lower level.
Speaker 1: So the system that's allowed us to get here does
Speaker 1: have problems. But how do we sit with that discomfany.
Speaker 2: Yes, so it's kind of like the man falling out
Speaker 2: of the window and the top of the skyscraper saying,
Speaker 2: so far, so good. It has served us well so far,
Speaker 2: and we have been very fortunate. You know, we've seen
Speaker 2: this great surge in food production which is outstripped population growth,
Speaker 2: such that we now produce roughly twice as many calories
Speaker 2: as humans need to survive on. Now, a huge amount
Speaker 2: of that is wasted by being channeled through livestock, by
Speaker 2: being used for biofuels. Some of it disappears in food
Speaker 2: waste as well, but we can turn out enormous volumes
Speaker 2: of food. Unfortunately, this system is now being hit by
Speaker 2: all these causes of fragility which we're just not attending to.
Speaker 2: And governments just don't seem interested, They don't even seem
Speaker 2: to understand what's happening here. And it is like the
Speaker 2: financial system before two thousand and eight, where it looked great,
Speaker 2: It looked really healthy. You know, equity values were really high,
Speaker 2: the bank shares were soaring. It was all looking great,
Speaker 2: and then suddenly and it required this massive bailout. Now,
Speaker 2: the thing is that you could bail out the financial
Speaker 2: sector before it completely collapsed by drawing on future money.
Speaker 2: You can't bail out the food sector by drawing on
Speaker 2: future food.
Speaker 1: What is it that got us to this point? There
Speaker 1: are the ability for us to be able to make
Speaker 1: food for eight billion people. What were the steps that
Speaker 1: led us to this point? And then where in those
Speaker 1: steps did we go wrong?
Speaker 2: Sure, the answer is the same to both questions. That's
Speaker 2: a curious and paradoxical thing here. The answer really is
Speaker 2: a green revolution which moved towards these very high yielding,
Speaker 2: very successful new varieties which respond very well to a
Speaker 2: particular formula of treatment. You know, it's the same seeds,
Speaker 2: it's the same fertilizers, it's the same machinery. You roll
Speaker 2: it out worldwide, and you're producing a huge amount of food.
Speaker 1: And as somebody who grew up in India, that was
Speaker 1: tremendously valuable because we were on the verge of facing
Speaker 1: hunger in levels that we'd never seen before.
Speaker 2: No question, no question at all. I mean, all the
Speaker 2: predictions were we were going to see unbelievable and horrendous famines.
Speaker 2: And that system saved the lives of huge numbers of people.
Speaker 2: But it has these inherent instabilities for all those reasons
Speaker 2: that I mentioned, you know, and it's apparent health today,
Speaker 2: like the apparent health of the financial system becomes ever
Speaker 2: more illusory as time goes on because of the problem
Speaker 2: of systemic fragility.
Speaker 1: And so this concentrated agricultural system that's feeding the world
Speaker 1: right now, how exactly is it contributing to climate change?
Speaker 2: Well, food production as a whole is responsible for roughly
Speaker 2: one third of all our carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions,
Speaker 2: even if we eliminated all other sources of greenhouse gas emissions,
Speaker 2: if we don't tackle that by the end of the century,
Speaker 2: it will exceed by between two and three times the
Speaker 2: amount of greenhouse gases we can safely produce just the
Speaker 2: food system alone. But there's an even bigger issue, which
Speaker 2: is the carbon opportunity costs. So those greenhouse gas emissions
Speaker 2: I'm talking about, you could think of those as a
Speaker 2: current account, the current climate account, but the capital climate
Speaker 2: account is the carbon opportunity costs, which means what you
Speaker 2: could be doing otherwise if you weren't doing this particular thing. So,
Speaker 2: for instance, if you so.
Speaker 1: Those emissions that are generated are coming from the fertilizer production,
Speaker 1: from changing the land user you're deforesting, and from the
Speaker 1: manure that's coming from livestock, and all those exactly.
Speaker 2: So the livestock themselves produced methane, their manure produces nitros oxide.
Speaker 2: These are both very powerful greenhouse gases. But the biggest
Speaker 2: question of all is this capital account that land might
Speaker 2: otherwise be harboring, for instance, forests or wetlands, both of
Speaker 2: which are very high carbon habitats, And if the forests
Speaker 2: and wetlands are allowed to come back, they will draw
Speaker 2: down a great deal of the carbon dioxide we've released
Speaker 2: into the atmosphere. In fact, we now know that merely
Speaker 2: decarbonizing our economies is no longer enough. Clearly, we have
Speaker 2: to decarbonize them as quickly and as effectively as we
Speaker 2: possibly can. But even if we did that, we would
Speaker 2: almost certainly exceed two degrees of global heating. We need
Speaker 2: to draw down some of the carbon dioxide we've already produced.
Speaker 2: If we bring back forests and wetlands in particular, they
Speaker 2: turn CO two into C into solid carbon, and in
Speaker 2: doing so, they could determine whether or not we get
Speaker 2: through this century. You know, in fact, it's very hard
Speaker 2: to see how we're going to sustain our life support
Speaker 2: systems unless as a mass restoration of wild ecosystems like
Speaker 2: forests and wetlands, and the biggest impediment to that is
Speaker 2: livestock keeping.
Speaker 1: In your book, you mentioned this statistic which is stunning,
Speaker 1: which is that we produce twice as many calories as
Speaker 1: humans consume. But of course that's because vast majority of
Speaker 1: those calories are not being fed to humans. They're being
Speaker 1: fed to livestock, and that creates its own set of problems.
Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, so we have this grossly inefficient system that
Speaker 2: we've created of eating animals and it divides into two categories,
Speaker 2: as the intensive animal production, which involves these gigantic factories
Speaker 2: with tens of thousands of chickens or thousands of pigs,
Speaker 2: all these giant feed lots with loads and loads of
Speaker 2: cattle kept in horrendous conditions, massive animal cruelty being fed
Speaker 2: on grain often shipped from the other side of the world,
Speaker 2: particularly lily sawyer growing in the Sahardu and the Amazon
Speaker 2: in South America, with devastating ecological consequences. And then when
Speaker 2: they've eaten those that food, there's a huge amount of
Speaker 2: nutrients comes out the back end of those animals, and
Speaker 2: there's nowhere for those nutrients to go. They can't easily
Speaker 2: be transported because they're very low value and high volume,
Speaker 2: so farmers spread them on the surrounding fields. The fields
Speaker 2: can't absorb them. All the surplus washes off into the
Speaker 2: rivers and the rivers die and all over the world
Speaker 2: now we're seeing the global standard river being created by
Speaker 2: intensive livestock farming, which is over fertilized, which means you
Speaker 2: get these blooms of microalgae which when they respire at night,
Speaker 2: suck all the oxygen out of the water and kill
Speaker 2: everything else, and so they're turning into sewers effectively are
Speaker 2: beautiful rivers. And this is happening all over the world.
Speaker 2: So that's the intensive livestock farming. And everyone says, oh,
Speaker 2: we hate that, and they say, so, the answer then
Speaker 2: must be extensive livestock farming. In other words, crazy, exactly
Speaker 2: happy farming. And we see all the images and we've
Speaker 2: got this long Bucolic pastoral tradition of the shepherd with
Speaker 2: their flocks or the cowboy with the cows, and we
Speaker 2: think that's the answer. But if there's one thing worse
Speaker 2: than intensive livestock farming, it's extensive livestock farming. And the
Speaker 2: reason for that is that, by definition, extensive farming means
Speaker 2: using more land to produce the same amount of food.
Speaker 2: That's the definitional quality of it and the crucial environmental
Speaker 2: commodity which we should be paying more attention to than
Speaker 2: any other environmental metric is land. And the amount of
Speaker 2: land you use is the key determinant of whether our
Speaker 2: life support systems survive or not, because every hectare of
Speaker 2: land we use for an extractive industry like cattle ranching,
Speaker 2: for example, is a hecten not being used for wild
Speaker 2: ecosystems such as forests or wetlands or savannahs or natural grasslands.
Speaker 2: And so we're seeing this is the biggest driver of
Speaker 2: all of habitat destruction. I mean, agriculture is the worst
Speaker 2: thing we've ever done to the planet.
Speaker 1: Right it's where is that big oil?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, well, yes, because of the full spectrum assault
Speaker 2: on the planet. I mean, it causes a massive amount
Speaker 2: of climate breakdown, more than global transport does, for example,
Speaker 2: considerably more. But it also is the greatest cause of
Speaker 2: habitat destruction by a very long way, the greatest cause
Speaker 2: of wildlife loss, the greatest cause of extinction again by
Speaker 2: a very long way, the greatest cause of soil degradation,
Speaker 2: greatest source of cause of fresh water use, one of
Speaker 2: the greatest causes of water pollution, of air pollution, and
Speaker 2: of climate breakdown as well. And the lion's share of
Speaker 2: a cow's share of that is caused by livestock farming.
Speaker 2: And the more extensive that livestock farming is, the more
Speaker 2: damaging it is because of the sheer amount of land
Speaker 2: it requires to support it. There was a study in
Speaker 2: the United States saying, what if we did what all
Speaker 2: the food is and chefs and some environmentalists say we
Speaker 2: should do, which is to switch from grain fed cattle
Speaker 2: production to pasture fed cattle. And it looked at it
Speaker 2: and fact, oh, yes, we would have to raise the
Speaker 2: amount of land used to keep cattle by two hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy percent. That would mean more than the entire
Speaker 2: surface area of the United States. You'd have to demolish
Speaker 2: the cities, You'd have to cut down all the forests,
Speaker 2: you'd have to water the deserts, you'd have to dig
Speaker 2: is at the national.
Speaker 1: Parks, take all the golf courses, yes, worst of all,
Speaker 1: and you would turn the whole US surface into a
Speaker 1: cattle ranch.
Speaker 2: And then you'd still need to be importing loads of
Speaker 2: your beef from the Amazon, which incidentally they're already doing
Speaker 2: and calling it pasture fed. It's an absolute environmental catastrophe.
Speaker 2: The most damaging of all the farm products is organic
Speaker 2: pasture fed beef. And the reason for the organic bit
Speaker 2: of that is that organic needs even more land and
Speaker 2: produces even more greenhouse gasome.
Speaker 1: There's a stunning stad in the book, Rich said, we
Speaker 1: use twenty eight percent of the land on the planet
Speaker 1: to create one percent of protein that humans consume.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the land issue is so interesting and so important. Right.
Speaker 2: We all hate urban sprawl, right, and we're right to
Speaker 2: hate urban sprawl because it's very bad for the countryside
Speaker 2: and it's also very bad for our cities. But the
Speaker 2: entire urban area that humanity uses, whether in towns, villages, whatever,
Speaker 2: is one percent of the terrestrial planet's surface. Right. Much
Speaker 2: of the rest of the world is ice cap, desert,
Speaker 2: rocky mountains, which you know, we can't really use for
Speaker 2: extractive industries, and about fifteen percent is protected area. Forty
Speaker 2: percent is used for agriculture. But of that forty percent,
Speaker 2: the twelve percent is used for growing crops, and roughly
Speaker 2: half of that of those crops are going into livestock.
Speaker 2: But then what about the twenty eight percent. That twenty
Speaker 2: eight percent, the biggest thing, the worst thing we do
Speaker 2: to the planet is entirely for pasture fed animals. Of
Speaker 2: that from the animals which get their food from grazing alone,
Speaker 2: they produce just one percent of our protein one percent.
Speaker 2: This is the most wasteful, profligate, destructive way of producing
Speaker 2: our food you could possibly imagine. And you might ask
Speaker 2: yourself why in the twenty first century are we using
Speaker 2: a neolithic means to produce our protein rich foods.
Speaker 1: After the break, Jorge discusses the technologies that can help
Speaker 1: bring farming and protein production into the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: I want to move to the solutions part of the
Speaker 1: book because there are different solutions. There is growing meat
Speaker 1: and laves, there's insect protein, there is using AI for farming.
Speaker 1: But the solutions that you put forward are much more
Speaker 1: radicals to do away with the farm entirely. You call
Speaker 1: it the techno ethical shift.
Speaker 2: What is it? So? I'm not calling for an end
Speaker 2: all farming. I am calling for an end of all
Speaker 2: livestock farming. I think that we just can't afford to
Speaker 2: indulge this way of feeding ourselves anymore. It is an
Speaker 2: indulgence that the planet cannot accommodate anymore. There's just not
Speaker 2: the space for it. If we're going to get through
Speaker 2: this century, we have to stop livestock farming. It really
Speaker 2: is as simple as that. Yeah, you like your steak,
Speaker 2: but I quite like a habitable planet, an all state
Speaker 2: habitable planet. Tough choice, right, So what I'm calling for, Yes,
Speaker 2: it's the end of livestock farming, and we are incredibly
Speaker 2: fortunate because just as we need that shift, we have
Speaker 2: the means of doing it far more effectively than ever before.
Speaker 1: At this point, I would go, you're talking about lapgrown meat, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, except I'm not. I thought. I thought when I
Speaker 2: started research for this book that lab grown meat was
Speaker 2: going to be a big part of the answer. This
Speaker 2: cultured meat where you can actually like grow your steak
Speaker 2: or grow your lab chop, or grow your tuna, fill
Speaker 2: it in a flask in a factory, in a bioreactor.
Speaker 2: I think there are now just too many technical and
Speaker 2: financial barriers to doing that at scale, not least because
Speaker 2: you need to maintain clinical standards of hygiene to do it,
Speaker 2: which is very expensive because if you don't. The issue
Speaker 2: is that mammalian cells double every twenty four hours. Well,
Speaker 2: bacterial sells double every twenty minutes. So unless you've got
Speaker 2: clinical standards, you're going to have a bacterial culture, not
Speaker 2: a mammalian culture. And that is where actually the answer
Speaker 2: comes in bacterial cultures, because bacterial cultures are really really
Speaker 2: easy to grow and super productive and much much cheaper,
Speaker 2: not just than cultured meat, but in fact, any protein
Speaker 2: rich food that we produce today.
Speaker 1: Well they've had three billion years efficient.
Speaker 2: That's right, and I was I feel very privileged. This
Speaker 2: is a pure vanity thing. But when I went to
Speaker 2: Helsinki to look at a company which was one of
Speaker 2: the early movers in this field. It's called Solar Foods,
Speaker 2: and it's producing this protein rich flour from a hydrogen
Speaker 2: oxygenating bacterium found in the soil, which whose feedstock is hydrogen.
Speaker 2: It doesn't eat any photosynthetic product. In fact, it turns
Speaker 2: hydrogen into its useful energy and creates itselves that way.
Speaker 1: And we can make hydrogen by splitting water using sunlight.
Speaker 2: Anywhere on Earth, well particularly places which are hungry, which
Speaker 2: tend to have a lot of sunlight. And so you
Speaker 2: got this enormous potential. So anyway, I was the first
Speaker 2: person outside the lab, and this is where the vanity
Speaker 2: comes in to eat a pancake made from this bacterial flour,
Speaker 2: a small flip for man, and amazingly, it tasted just
Speaker 2: like a pancake. You had to dilute it because normally,
Speaker 2: you know, if you're making a Western style pancake, you
Speaker 2: start with your wheat flour, right, and that doesn't have
Speaker 2: enough protein and fat to make a proper pancake. So
Speaker 2: you add eggs and milk. But in this case, because
Speaker 2: the bacterial flower is like sixty percent protein or about
Speaker 2: thirty percent fat, you have to dilute it. Otherwise you'd
Speaker 2: make an omelet. So and so mix it with wheat flour.
Speaker 2: You bring the wheat flour in and mix it with
Speaker 2: the wheat flour. And it was just uncanny. This is
Speaker 2: a pancake. It's just an ordinary pancake. Now, obviously they're
Speaker 2: not just in the business of making pancakes, because what
Speaker 2: you can do is to produce the exact mix of
Speaker 2: proteins and fats and things that you need a to
Speaker 2: replace animal products very very cheaply eventually, and with a
Speaker 2: tiny fraction of the land footprint, the water footprint, the
Speaker 2: nutrient footprint, all the key elements of what it takes
Speaker 2: to make food.
Speaker 1: That's even after you account for the solar farms and
Speaker 1: the wind turbines and the electorallyzers that would split water
Speaker 1: absolutely will be needed for all the hydrogen.
Speaker 2: So on my estimates, you could if you wanted to
Speaker 2: do it all in one place, and I very strongly
Speaker 2: advocate that we don't, that it should be a highly
Speaker 2: distributed system, but you could produce all the world's protein
Speaker 2: in an area the size of Greater London. Wow. And
Speaker 2: that then gives us this tremendous ability to release land
Speaker 2: for ecosystems, for rewilding, to bring back the forests and
Speaker 2: the wetlands and the savannahs and the natural grasslands on
Speaker 2: which we depend on which our entire life support systems depend.
Speaker 2: I mean, if we can't restore much of what we've
Speaker 2: destroyed on this planet, the entire Earth system is going
Speaker 2: to reach its tipping point. I mean that again seems clear.
Speaker 2: You know, we're seeing the flickering. These wild weather events
Speaker 2: that are hitting us more and more look very much
Speaker 2: like the flickering in a complex system that precedes a
Speaker 2: tipping point. Right.
Speaker 1: Well, so you're looking at the food system. You're saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: we need proteins and vitamins and carbohydrates and fat, and
Speaker 1: the protein and fat could come through this system. But
Speaker 1: we've some vegetarian diets. I grew up in India with
Speaker 1: a vegetarian diet for a very long time. They are
Speaker 1: not being adopted more widely. So why do you think
Speaker 1: people would turn around and say, yes, George, you made
Speaker 1: a really good point. That's just all flip for right now.
Speaker 2: It's not going to happen like that. That's not how
Speaker 2: change happened. I mean change that the margin happens. And
Speaker 2: you know, I've got a plant based diet. You know,
Speaker 2: a small percentage of people in Europe have plant based diets,
Speaker 2: but that's no way catching up with the tremendous speed
Speaker 2: of expansion of animal farming. So we can't rely on
Speaker 2: that moral suasion to get people to change. It's partly
Speaker 2: going to be on price. That these new technologies have
Speaker 2: steep cost curves and it's not going to be long
Speaker 2: at all before they undercut even the cheapest form of
Speaker 2: plant protein, which is soil, which is a lot cheaper
Speaker 2: than any animal protein. So they'll compete very well on price,
Speaker 2: but also on quality. I mean the plant based substitutes
Speaker 2: for me, a lot of them are not great, and
Speaker 2: it's because they are dealing with these big, complex ingredients
Speaker 2: which have to be broken down and extracted. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of processing involved. You have to disguise some of
Speaker 2: the flavors, particularly if using coconut, often the fats are
Speaker 2: greasy rather than juicy. You've got a whole lot of
Speaker 2: issues and these can be much more easily tackled through
Speaker 2: precision fermentation, where you're making the exact proteins and components
Speaker 2: that you want, and so you have much less processing,
Speaker 2: much healthier products, cheaper products. You first of all, can
Speaker 2: replace the great majority of the meat wheat, which is
Speaker 2: the meat that comes from factory farming, that is in
Speaker 2: all the chicken nuggets and the burgers and the sausages
Speaker 2: and stuff, and then you can start moving up that
Speaker 2: value chain. But even more importantly, I think we're going
Speaker 2: to see a great flowering of new diets of things
Speaker 2: we can't even conceive of any more than the first
Speaker 2: Neolithic farmers to capture a wild cow. We're thinking about
Speaker 2: camingber right. There's going to be a whole load of
Speaker 2: products emerging from these new technologies which we haven't imagined.
Speaker 1: There was an ad that came in two thousand. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've seen it. A spaceship in the
Speaker 1: form of a Coca Cola bottle lands on Mars. It
Speaker 1: shoots out straws and all the aliens martians come and
Speaker 1: sip on the Coca cola and finish it up, and
Speaker 1: then they form a message on the planet that says
Speaker 1: send more cocoa. That is the kind of aspiration that sells. Clearly,
Speaker 1: do we need a send more coke version for this
Speaker 1: new form of eating.
Speaker 2: Well, it certainly needs a publicity boost because a lot
Speaker 2: of people say, oh, I'm not eating bacteria, and I say, well,
Speaker 2: hang on a minute. First of all, you eat bacteria,
Speaker 2: that's right. In fact, worse than that, you're composed to
Speaker 2: a large extent of bacteria, and we deliberately add live
Speaker 2: bacteria into some of our food. I mean, I mean,
Speaker 2: let's let's think about cheese, right, Okay, So cheese. You
Speaker 2: start with the mammary secretions from from another species called
Speaker 2: a cow, and you mix those traditionally with a chemical
Speaker 2: extracted from the fourth stomach of a nursing calf called rennet,
Speaker 2: and you mix that up with the mammary secretions. You
Speaker 2: create this wobbly mass of fat and protein, right, and
Speaker 2: then you inject bacteria into that, and the bacteria digests
Speaker 2: that wobbling mass, and then they're excrements turn into this yellow,
Speaker 2: stinky stuff and if you leave it long enough, it
Speaker 2: gets really nice and stinky and moldy. And then we
Speaker 2: eat that yea, and people say, ook bacteria no, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 2: hang on a note. You know what we're looking at.
Speaker 2: What's coming out the end of this process is basically
Speaker 2: a flour. It's just a protein rich flower, that's what
Speaker 2: it is. It happens to be made from bacterial cells.
Speaker 2: But you wouldn't see the difference between that and any
Speaker 2: other flower except it's incredibly high in protein and fat
Speaker 2: and you just smell it and think, oh, well, that's nice,
Speaker 2: you know, because we've got a very strong attraction to
Speaker 2: protein right as humans. And then you can turn that
Speaker 2: into anything without all the cruelty, without the epidemics of disease,
Speaker 2: without all the slaughter house and the blood and the
Speaker 2: guts and the gore and stuff. And do you think
Speaker 2: microbial feed is disgusting?
Speaker 1: So the other solution, if we solve protein and fat
Speaker 1: with these precision fermentation thats is to try and address
Speaker 1: the crop problem. And you look at perennials.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is I think a really exciting way
Speaker 2: forward here. The great majority of our grain crops come
Speaker 2: from annual plants. In other words, plants which live and
Speaker 2: die within one year. And now large areas covered by
Speaker 2: annual plants are quite rare in nature, and they generally
Speaker 2: only occur in the wake of a disaster, so where
Speaker 2: there's been a landslide or a fire or a volcanic eruption,
Speaker 2: and it clears the ground, and the annual plants are
Speaker 2: specialists in colonizing bare ground, and so they'll quickly colonize it.
Speaker 2: They'll reproduce very fast, dominate for a couple of years,
Speaker 2: and then the longer lasting plants are perennials, which live
Speaker 2: more than one year. They then come in and swallow
Speaker 2: up that space and push the annuals out. So almost
Speaker 2: all our grain crops are annual, and that means that
Speaker 2: to grow them, we need to create a disaster every year.
Speaker 2: We need to clear the land, and we do it
Speaker 2: either by plowing or by spraying, and then we carry
Speaker 2: on spraying to kill the competition and to kill the
Speaker 2: pests which might eat these very tender little shoots which
Speaker 2: are coming up. And then we have to splash on
Speaker 2: the fertilizer and use loads of water and really pamper
Speaker 2: them to get them going. And it's a catastrophic system. Now.
Speaker 2: For the past one hundred years or so, some scientists
Speaker 2: have had the dream of replacing these annual crops with
Speaker 2: perennial crops because they see the enormous difference that could
Speaker 2: make in terms of environmental damage but also potentially food security.
Speaker 2: And finally, at last, that dream is being realized, driven
Speaker 2: primarily by this group called the Land Institute in Selina
Speaker 2: in Kansas. One of the crops has gone all the
Speaker 2: way and is fully commercialized and it's a variety of
Speaker 2: rice which they've developed with unan university in southern China.
Speaker 2: Already there's many thousands of hectares of this rice being grown.
Speaker 2: In some cases, it's been harvested six harvests continuously and
Speaker 2: is still producing the same meals as annual rice produces,
Speaker 2: and the farmers are desperate for it. A because there's
Speaker 2: much less soil erosion involved. You don't have to plow
Speaker 2: every year. I mean eventually you have to replace the crops,
Speaker 2: but after several years rather than every year. And secondly
Speaker 2: that they're desperately short of labor because a lot of
Speaker 2: the young people have moved to the cities. And of
Speaker 2: course you don't have to plant every year. So I've
Speaker 2: eaten this rice. It's just the same as any other
Speaker 2: short grain rice. You know, I really would could not
Speaker 2: tell the difference, and then they're developing a whole series
Speaker 2: of other grain crops now types of wheat or related
Speaker 2: species to wheat, barley, sorghum, sunflower, beans, peas, lentils. Not
Speaker 2: all of them have gone very far down the line.
Speaker 2: Some of them are progressing faster than others, but they're
Speaker 2: tremendously exciting, not just because you create less environmental damage
Speaker 2: in growing them, but also because they appear to be
Speaker 2: more resilient to environmental crisis. So, to give you an example,
Speaker 2: the Land Institute is developing this very promising perennial sunflower,
Speaker 2: and it's been growing its blocks of perennial sunflowers alongside
Speaker 2: blocks of annual sunflowers, and one year it was hit
Speaker 2: by a major drought, completely wiped out the annual sunflowers,
Speaker 2: and the perennials just sailed through. And the reason for
Speaker 2: that is their roots are down deeper, their structures above
Speaker 2: ground are tougher and more robust, and yeah, they just
Speaker 2: shook the drought off. Well.
Speaker 1: Now, the solutions you are suggesting may take the same
Speaker 1: industrial route that some of the solutions that are now
Speaker 1: problems have taken. So you might get consolidation, you might
Speaker 1: get these varieties being grown. You know, just like we
Speaker 1: have big agriculture, we might have big fermentations. Yes, and
Speaker 1: so would that be okay?
Speaker 2: Well no, I mean we have to be constantly on
Speaker 2: our guard against these tendencies, the tendency towards concentration, the
Speaker 2: tendency towards monopoly. There was a time when governments were
Speaker 2: they had strong anti trust laws, they had weak intellectual
Speaker 2: property laws. But it's it's turned on its head now
Speaker 2: and we now have weak anti trust laws and strong
Speaker 2: intellectual property laws. And that creates consolidation and drives the
Speaker 2: process and mergers and acquisitions as corporations try to concentrate
Speaker 2: intellectual property in one place. And that is deadly. It
Speaker 2: doesn't matter which sector you're looking at. It's harmful to competition,
Speaker 2: it's harmful to human welfare, it's harmful to workers. I mean,
Speaker 2: right across the board. This is bad news. And we've
Speaker 2: been given this great gift to humanity, which is precision fermentation,
Speaker 2: which has come along just when we need it most.
Speaker 2: Are we going to squander this by allowing a few
Speaker 2: big corporations to control Well, no, we must fight that.
Speaker 2: And you know the problem is not the technology it's
Speaker 2: the same with all of these issues. It's the control
Speaker 2: of the technology, it's the ownership of the technology, and
Speaker 2: that is something we need to get ahead of. And
Speaker 2: instead of just sort of sitting there and waiting for
Speaker 2: it to happen, we need to be campaigning vociferously to
Speaker 2: ensure that we have a distributed food system rather than
Speaker 2: a concentrated food system, because that's one of those elements
Speaker 2: of resilience. If it's still got its backup systems and
Speaker 2: the circuit breakers and the modularity within the system which
Speaker 2: a distributed and diverse food system can give you, then
Speaker 2: it's much more likely that the system as a whole
Speaker 2: is resilient than with this kind of situation we've got today.
Speaker 1: Now, capitalism has its problems, yeah, but one thing it
Speaker 1: does is while it's concentrating capital, it also makes things
Speaker 1: more efficient, and some of the solutions you're suggesting need
Speaker 1: to become more efficient. And so how do you split
Speaker 1: the problems that capitalism brings with the advantages that it does.
Speaker 2: Have is a very good question, and the answer always
Speaker 2: is regulation. I mean, I would love to see much
Speaker 2: more public ownership. Incidentally, and I don't just mean state ownership,
Speaker 2: but community ownership. I mean, this orchard where we are
Speaker 2: today is part of a commons which is managed collectively
Speaker 2: by the two hundred and twenty plot holders who run
Speaker 2: this allotment system. Now, you can have a commons with technology,
Speaker 2: and you know, Linux is a classic example of a
Speaker 2: technological commons. You can have it with open source technology,
Speaker 2: you can have it with creative commons licensed technology. And
Speaker 2: I want to see far more of our economy directed
Speaker 2: into the commons. But even within the capitalist economy, which
Speaker 2: is a totally different economy to the commons, we need
Speaker 2: to see far more regulation, far more response to the
Speaker 2: generalized needs of humanity rather than just the needs of shareholders.
Speaker 2: And with food that is more of an issue than
Speaker 2: in virtually any other sector, because well, we all kind
Speaker 2: of depend on it.
Speaker 1: If there was a billboard outside of your house, what
Speaker 1: message would you put on it?
Speaker 2: Ah, that's a good question. Private sufficiency public luxury explain that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's enough ecological space on Earth and enough physical space
Speaker 2: for us all to have wonderful public parks and public
Speaker 2: tennis courts and public swimming pools and public transport networks
Speaker 2: to have luxurious public domain which we share. But there's
Speaker 2: simply not enough for us all to have private luxury.
Speaker 2: You know, some people have private luxury only because other
Speaker 2: people don't. I mean, if everyone had their own swimming
Speaker 2: pool and tennis court and the rest of it, London
Speaker 2: would be the size of England, and Englan would be
Speaker 2: the size of Europe. Where would everyone else live? And
Speaker 2: there's not enough ecological space as well. So we can
Speaker 2: have our own private sufficiency, our own small domain at
Speaker 2: home where our basic needs are met. But if we
Speaker 2: want luxury, we do it together.
Speaker 1: That was a fascinating conversation. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: It was a total pleasure. It's really great. You asked
Speaker 2: all the right questions, sir. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Food is such an integral part of our lives, but
Speaker 1: we rarely think about how it's produced and it's stunning
Speaker 1: impact on the planet. If the numbers in our conversation
Speaker 1: didn't already blow your mind, I'd highly recommend reading George's book,
Speaker 1: Read Genesis. The solutions he lays out may seem fanciful,
Speaker 1: but they can work, and they're not the only technologies
Speaker 1: we have to tackle this problem. Thanks for listening to Zero.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe.
Speaker 1: Tell a friend, or tell your favorite farmer. If you've
Speaker 1: got a suggestion for a guest or topic, or something
Speaker 1: you just want us to look into, get in touch
Speaker 1: at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is
Speaker 1: Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Riskell. Our theme
Speaker 1: music is composed by wonderly many people help make the
Speaker 1: show a success. This week thanks to Samarsadi, a podcast
Speaker 1: producer in London who makes sure that the growing podcast
Speaker 1: team always has food to eat. I'm Akshatrati back next week.