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