Speaker 1: Pushkin, I may have Higgins and this is Solvable Interviews
Speaker 1: with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the
Speaker 1: world's biggest problems. My name is Roy Steiner. I'm the
Speaker 1: managing director of the Food Initiative at the Rockefeller Foundation,
Speaker 1: and my solvable is to reduce by fifty percent diet
Speaker 1: related diseases in our generation. Okay, so this is a
Speaker 1: big one, but it wouldn't be solvable if it wasn't.
Speaker 1: When researching this episode, I was blown away to learn
Speaker 1: that today we're in a global epidemic of malnutrition. Of course,
Speaker 1: I know that in some parts of the world, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a hunger problem, but a global malnutrition epidemic. It
Speaker 1: turns out that that means both over and undernutrition. In
Speaker 1: the past thirty years, obesity rates have doubled in adults
Speaker 1: and triple children. The major nutritional issue used to be undernourishment.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, thirty five percent of the world's
Speaker 1: population were undernourished. Now that's twelve percent, and most of
Speaker 1: the countries affected are experiencing conflict or war. So I
Speaker 1: guess that shows that nutrition is linked to many other problems,
Speaker 1: like not just poverty, and again the contrasts are crazy.
Speaker 1: While children in the developed world are increasingly at risk
Speaker 1: of obesity, one out of six children that's roughly one
Speaker 1: hundred million children in developing countries is underweight. Diet contributes
Speaker 1: to almost seven hundred thousand deaths each year here in
Speaker 1: the US from things like heart disease, cancer, and type
Speaker 1: two diabetes. In fact, according to the World Health Organization,
Speaker 1: diet quality is now the leading contributing factor of death
Speaker 1: and disability worldwide. It's actually a super helpful and extremely
Speaker 1: informative discussion between Jacob Weisberg and Roy Steiner. Roy's work
Speaker 1: heading up the Food Initiative at the Rockefeller Foundation is
Speaker 1: all about creating access to nourishing food for millions of
Speaker 1: people in the US and around the world, and supporting
Speaker 1: scientific advances in human nutrition and sustainable food production. This
Speaker 1: is relevant to every one of us, and I think
Speaker 1: you'll enjoy it. It's ultimately very positive and doable, Roy,
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, unsolvable. Thanks nice to be here.
Speaker 1: So what is the problem. In a nutshell, we currently
Speaker 1: have a food system that does not result in good
Speaker 1: health for a lot of people, and it also damages
Speaker 1: the environment. We've optimized our food system for two things,
Speaker 1: production of calories and profit. We have not optimized it
Speaker 1: for nutrition, health, environment, culture, or community. And the food
Speaker 1: system needs to do all of those things. So we
Speaker 1: need to restructure, revolutionize a system so that it really
Speaker 1: does nourish people with the foods they really need. My
Speaker 1: solvable is that we can reduce diet related diseases by
Speaker 1: fifty percent in our lifetime. Ro What is it about
Speaker 1: this problem that makes you want to calcole it? This
Speaker 1: problem affects billions of people, and it is actually getting
Speaker 1: worse rather than getting better. It's one of those trends
Speaker 1: that if we don't address inflict, untold suffering and cost
Speaker 1: on society. So I want to start with a phrase
Speaker 1: you use, diet related diseases. What are diet related diseases?
Speaker 1: So we're starting to understand that there is a whole
Speaker 1: range of diseases diabetes, cardiovastual disease, some cancers that are
Speaker 1: result of not eating what scientists called protective diets. We
Speaker 1: don't eat enough fruits, vegetables, fish, legume, seeds. These things
Speaker 1: actually act in the body to protect us from these
Speaker 1: range of diseases, and they do that working through the microbiome,
Speaker 1: through regulatory functions, through improving cellular function. And we're just
Speaker 1: starting to fully understand how important consumption of these foods are.
Speaker 1: And it's the under consumption of these foods that actually
Speaker 1: increase your risk more than anything else. Maybe a little glib,
Speaker 1: but people sometimes say, we're moving from the problems of
Speaker 1: not enough food to overabundance of food. Do you see
Speaker 1: it that way? We're moving to the problem of overabundance
Speaker 1: of nutrient poor food. We have a lot of ultraprocessed food,
Speaker 1: but that is not what human beings thrive on. We
Speaker 1: are not producing or consuming enough of these protective foods.
Speaker 1: In fact, that most ten percent of Americans and Ethiopians
Speaker 1: eat the optical amount of fruits and vegetables, for example.
Speaker 1: They may not eat the same things they should eat,
Speaker 1: but surely they eat different things they shouldn't eat. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is correct. I mean I have to think the
Speaker 1: problem is just very, very different in the United States
Speaker 1: and then in other developed countries, and then in the
Speaker 1: developing world. Yes, I mean there's still lots of places
Speaker 1: in the world where people aren't getting enough food, like
Speaker 1: we have under nutrition, not enough calories, but We are
Speaker 1: increasingly finding that people have enough calories, but they don't
Speaker 1: have enough nutrition. And that is actually a universal problem.
Speaker 1: That's not just in the United States or in Africa,
Speaker 1: or in China or India. It's everywhere, and where they
Speaker 1: don't get enough calories, that's increasingly a political problem, right,
Speaker 1: It's absolutely food isn't getting to them because of civil
Speaker 1: war or bad government or some sort of crisis that
Speaker 1: the system can't deal with. Yeah. Absolutely, almost every famine
Speaker 1: is the result of poor governments or conflict. You make
Speaker 1: this a little more vivid for us, I mean, what
Speaker 1: are the kinds of consequences. I know, diabetes obviously in
Speaker 1: this country, and their range of diseases that come from
Speaker 1: not having the protective diet you're talking about, But what
Speaker 1: does this look like to someone like you who's trying
Speaker 1: to get a global perspective on it. Well, one of
Speaker 1: the most extraordinary trends you see in the world, in
Speaker 1: the United States and everywhere else is this dramatic rise
Speaker 1: in diabetes and pre diabetes. Right now, we have four
Speaker 1: hundred million people in the world with diabetes. That's going
Speaker 1: to grow to six hundred million in ten to twenty years.
Speaker 1: Fifty percent of American children, if the trend continues, will
Speaker 1: suffer from diabetes in their lifetime. And when you think
Speaker 1: about this trend, which you know right now, India has
Speaker 1: seventy million people with diabetes, China is on track it
Speaker 1: has even more, and the consequences are incredibly severe. During
Speaker 1: the entire Irana Rock War there is a thousand and
Speaker 1: seven hundred amputations, which is just terrible for the soldiers.
Speaker 1: But just last year alone, there were eighty three thousand
Speaker 1: amputations due to diabetes in the United States, and we're
Speaker 1: going to increasingly see that all over the world, and
Speaker 1: the suffering and pain and cost of that is really
Speaker 1: going to be a huge burden on healthcare systems. Some
Speaker 1: people have said that our food system right now is
Speaker 1: bankrupting our healthcare system. You see it as inevitable that
Speaker 1: developing countries follow this path in the United States towards
Speaker 1: over consumption of overly processed foods that are cheap, partly
Speaker 1: because of governmental subsidies. Right now, that is the trend.
Speaker 1: We're hoping that we can change that trend by a
Speaker 1: number of interventions, including education, but changing the supply chain,
Speaker 1: and as you said, subsidies really do influence the food
Speaker 1: system in a very dramatic way. Of the agricultural subsidies
Speaker 1: in the United States go to six crops, eighty five
Speaker 1: percent of research goes to those same six crops, So
Speaker 1: we're ignoring actually the foods that make us really healthy,
Speaker 1: that protect us, and we need to rebalance that. You're
Speaker 1: solvable is to reduce diet related diseases by half over
Speaker 1: a generation. What has to happen for that to be possible?
Speaker 1: What diseases get reduced and how can you see that happening.
Speaker 1: The most important thing is that we actually start eating
Speaker 1: optimal levels of these protective foods fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, lagoons, fish, etc.
Speaker 1: The nutritional science is showing that when you do eat
Speaker 1: those levels of optimal foods, we see dramatic reductions in
Speaker 1: a range of these diseases. The most quickest way the
Speaker 1: sea impact is actually in diabetes pre diabetes, but we
Speaker 1: think that that has impact on cardiovastral disease and multiple
Speaker 1: other diseases which happen over a long period of time.
Speaker 1: These are chronic, noncommunical diseases. People in this country, and
Speaker 1: I don't think they're alone or they're diet is a
Speaker 1: very personal thing. They don't necessarily like people on the outside,
Speaker 1: whether they're medical experts or policy experts, or people in
Speaker 1: the media telling them that they eat too much, that
Speaker 1: they eat badly, that they're too heavy. This is a
Speaker 1: cultural issue, not not just a dietary one. Right. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: the last thing I want to be in my family
Speaker 1: is the food police. You know, people take their diets
Speaker 1: very personally. No one likes to be told what to eat.
Speaker 1: And the fact is we have a lot of information.
Speaker 1: It's an information, isn't the problem. I mean, all of
Speaker 1: our mothers told us to eat our foods and vegetables.
Speaker 1: So it's got to be a lot more than that.
Speaker 1: And it starts with changing, for example, the food environment.
Speaker 1: We have surrounded ourselves with really bad food, food that
Speaker 1: increases our risk. You just think about the kinds of
Speaker 1: lunches that are often served in workplaces and in schools.
Speaker 1: They're just ultra process and there isn't choice to eat
Speaker 1: in healthy ways, or the healthy food is not necessarily
Speaker 1: tasty or cost effective, and so we have to actually,
Speaker 1: you know, people are going to make choices based on taste,
Speaker 1: on convenience, and on cost. And if we can't make
Speaker 1: healthy food, protective foods, tasty, convenient, and lower cost. We're
Speaker 1: not going to be able to do the shift, but
Speaker 1: we can do all of those things. An economist looks
Speaker 1: at this and says, well, this is an easy problem.
Speaker 1: Instead of subsidizing the unhealthy food, tax the unhealthy food
Speaker 1: and subsidize the healthy food. I mean, isn't that the
Speaker 1: core of it. Well, I think that would be helpful,
Speaker 1: but that's not going to solve the entire problem. Yes,
Speaker 1: taxing sugar, for example, and subsidizing the healthier food will
Speaker 1: definitely be part of the way. You have to bring
Speaker 1: people along. We have to get the chefs of the
Speaker 1: world to really help us make this shift, and they're
Speaker 1: starting to do that. There's a real movement in the
Speaker 1: food industry to create healthier, tasteier food, and you really
Speaker 1: see that, certainly at expensive restaurants in New York or
Speaker 1: Brooklyn or San Francisco. But the problem isn't people who
Speaker 1: have the means to eat healthy. They probably are eating healthier, right. Yes,
Speaker 1: the biggest burden, as so many things in society, falls
Speaker 1: on the poor and the vulnerable, who suffer from higher
Speaker 1: levels of these dyed related diseases and to a large
Speaker 1: extent is because they don't have access to it. There
Speaker 1: are cultural issues, and it does cost more. We talk
Speaker 1: about the Green Revolution, which the Rockfeller Foundation was intimately
Speaker 1: involved in, as a kind of lightning strike, a sea
Speaker 1: change that change the problem of malnutrition fundamentally. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine something comparable that has a transformative effect on global diets? Absolutely? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, the Green Revolution took twenty five years, so
Speaker 1: changing the food systems is a long term game. But
Speaker 1: I think we have to. It's not a question whether
Speaker 1: we want to or should. If we don't do that,
Speaker 1: our healthcare costs are going to get even more exorbitant
Speaker 1: than they are. And the food system is currently the
Speaker 1: largest emitter of global warming gases, and so we have
Speaker 1: to create a food system that's both more nourishing and
Speaker 1: environmentally sustainable. It is something that has to happen if
Speaker 1: we're going to have the future we would desire. You
Speaker 1: mentioned Ethiopia as a country that's tragically gone from classical
Speaker 1: malnutrition to in a way more modern kind of malnutrition.
Speaker 1: They have solved our ended process of solving the issue
Speaker 1: of undernutrition, and it's not all the way there, but
Speaker 1: you know, in the last five years, Ethiopia has made
Speaker 1: men the strides, so that a country that once was
Speaker 1: best known for images of starving children is actually exporting
Speaker 1: some commodities. But they, like almost every other country in
Speaker 1: the world, have this trend towards you know, lots of
Speaker 1: carbohydrates and not enough of these protective foods. We're in
Speaker 1: the developing world, ROYD. You see positive signs are their
Speaker 1: places where government policy or cultural changes are leading to
Speaker 1: improvement in the quality of diet. You see pockets of it.
Speaker 1: You know, the countries that stand out for really making
Speaker 1: good dietary choices are places like Chili and Canada and
Speaker 1: the Scandinavian But you'll see increasing emphasis in for example,
Speaker 1: Rwanda or Ethiopia on supply chains of these nutritious foods.
Speaker 1: You're talking about getting fresh fruits and vegetables and grains
Speaker 1: and nuts and seeds to market. I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of the problem is that many of these foods are
Speaker 1: very perishable, unlike foods that get highly processed and have
Speaker 1: our shelf stable. We think, for example, a place like
Speaker 1: African countries, they are suffering from supply chains that are
Speaker 1: pretty inefficient and you will lose often fifty percent of
Speaker 1: your crop because of poor transport or spoilage, and matching
Speaker 1: supply and demand in that environment is really important. But
Speaker 1: we have a lot of the tools that are necessary.
Speaker 1: A lot of this is data, a lot of these
Speaker 1: are these new technologies for storage and processing and drying.
Speaker 1: The solar technology is revolutionizing every aspect of the economies
Speaker 1: in those countries, and we think that that can change
Speaker 1: the way agricultural supply chains operate. So what does that
Speaker 1: look like in Rwanda? Say we could have solar powered
Speaker 1: processing and drying so that instead of tomatoes rotting, you
Speaker 1: can dry them and that makes them much more shelf
Speaker 1: stable for a long time. Or fruits like mangoes and
Speaker 1: passion food, etc. Also process in a way that allows
Speaker 1: them to last longer. There's some very interesting solar powered
Speaker 1: cooling solutions, for example, that create ice and then you
Speaker 1: can keep things a lot longer in those contexts, and
Speaker 1: those were just not cost effective vibe or even or
Speaker 1: ten years ago, but they're becoming because of technology. Because
Speaker 1: of innovation, those things are now possible. Right. There's the macro,
Speaker 1: which we've been talking about, and then there's the micro,
Speaker 1: which is people's behavior and people's habits. And I have
Speaker 1: to ask you, as someone who's been reckoning with this issue,
Speaker 1: what kind of evolution has happened in your own diet,
Speaker 1: your own family. How have you tried to move towards
Speaker 1: a more protective diet at the Steiner home. Well, that's
Speaker 1: why I say, no one really likes being told what
Speaker 1: to eat. I think you have to make changes by
Speaker 1: yourself and by educating others, and over time that starts
Speaker 1: to influence the family. My son and wife still really
Speaker 1: love bacon, and that's not a protective food, but they
Speaker 1: eat very high quantities of fruits and vegetables. And at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, it's really as long as
Speaker 1: you're consuming enough of these protective foods, you can eat
Speaker 1: your other favorite foods. It's really a matter of balance.
Speaker 1: And I think we will gradually as we develop taste
Speaker 1: and we get more comfortable, we're going to see these shifts.
Speaker 1: And you're already seeing them in the new generation. Right
Speaker 1: there's this incredible shift in demand for healthier food in
Speaker 1: the millennial generation. I'm having a vision of Roy's plate
Speaker 1: at dinner, heaped high with keenoa and peas and broccoli,
Speaker 1: the other plates at the table having different different proportions
Speaker 1: of things that people might be more excited to eat. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: you know, the difference in meals is mostly breakfast, where
Speaker 1: I eat very differently than my family. But I think
Speaker 1: lunch and dinner, I mean, everybody, there's so many taste
Speaker 1: dishes that you can make. And you know, we love
Speaker 1: fish and make that a regular part and we'll eat
Speaker 1: foods that are cultural all the time. I think we
Speaker 1: make a mistake when you get very rigid. We just
Speaker 1: don't know enough to say this is the best diet
Speaker 1: for this particular person. We know what to say about
Speaker 1: diets at a population level, but you and meat can
Speaker 1: have very different optimal diets. You know, we know now
Speaker 1: that the microbiome is very influential and on how we
Speaker 1: take in food. We have genetic factors, there's emotional factors.
Speaker 1: Food as touches on so many aspects of our reality. Well,
Speaker 1: its behavioral changes go getting people at scale tax or thoughts.
Speaker 1: It is probably even harder than the challenge of getting
Speaker 1: them to evolve their diets. Well, both are really hard.
Speaker 1: And that being said is you know, I don't think
Speaker 1: we underestimate how difficult behavior change is, but we have
Speaker 1: done that in the past. I mean, just think about
Speaker 1: the change in smoking or dry or safety. You know,
Speaker 1: used to be no one wore seat belts and cars
Speaker 1: are really quite unsafe. Now they're incredibly safe as a
Speaker 1: result of behavior change, new regulations. Smoking is an example,
Speaker 1: where everybody used to smoke indoors in airplanes, which seems
Speaker 1: unthinkable now, but that changed over the course of a
Speaker 1: generation because of multiple efforts to make that change. I've
Speaker 1: read conflicting things about obesity in the US. Is it
Speaker 1: still getting worse or has it flattened out or started
Speaker 1: to get better. It's still very very high. I mean,
Speaker 1: the estimates are thirty to forty percent of the United
Speaker 1: States are obese. Another third are overweight, and so you
Speaker 1: really have two thirds of the population that are suffering
Speaker 1: in some form from metabolic disease. I have not seen
Speaker 1: any of the statistics that show that that's actually getting better.
Speaker 1: I do know that pre diabetes and diabetes continue to increase,
Speaker 1: and everybody knows that our healthcare costs continue to go up.
Speaker 1: The rate of increase almost has to decline because it's
Speaker 1: at such a high plateau. As you say, such a
Speaker 1: high proportion of the population is a besa overweight. What
Speaker 1: role do doctors play in this? I mean, surely when
Speaker 1: people are dealing with the consequences of their diet, they're
Speaker 1: in a medical setting. That is a major area where
Speaker 1: we can improve. It turns out that the recommended number
Speaker 1: of days that a doctor study nutrition out of four
Speaker 1: years is four days, but in fact, on average it's
Speaker 1: only four hours. So essentially doctors learn almost nothing about nutrition,
Speaker 1: even though we now know that sixty to seventy percent
Speaker 1: of all noncommunicable diseases are diet related. So that's a
Speaker 1: really big miss there, and that's true for many for
Speaker 1: nurses and other healthcare practitioners, and so we have to
Speaker 1: change that. Nutrition needs to become a really important part
Speaker 1: of medical training, and another Rockefeller Foundation will certainly help
Speaker 1: make that shift. Well, what sort of initiatives are underway
Speaker 1: where you see something positive happening in the way doctors
Speaker 1: or healthcare professionals are trained. There is a movement among
Speaker 1: doctors who just recognizes that reality to increase the amount
Speaker 1: of training and focus on this. The other really interesting
Speaker 1: experiment that's being done is in what are called fresh
Speaker 1: food pharmacy prescriptions. So instead of writing a drug prescription,
Speaker 1: there are some hospitals and doctors that are experimenting with
Speaker 1: writing prescriptions for fruits and vegetables and the results are astounding.
Speaker 1: So there's this one study the Geisinger Health did where
Speaker 1: they took about one hundred poorly managed diabetes patients and
Speaker 1: they put them on a fresh fruit prescription ten meals
Speaker 1: a week over the course of the year. The cost
Speaker 1: of that program was about two thousand and five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars around per person, but they saved fifty to two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars per person because it reduced costs and
Speaker 1: the health outcomes were far better than any known drug
Speaker 1: on the market. We need to enable doctors to prescribe
Speaker 1: nourishing good food because it's increasingly the right thing to
Speaker 1: do in a better way than our farm of focused
Speaker 1: a medical system. Thinking about policy in this country, we
Speaker 1: have a Department of Agriculture which administer as a lot
Speaker 1: of the subsidies and of course runs a lot of
Speaker 1: health programs and other things, but we don't have a
Speaker 1: kind of organ of food policy driving this change that
Speaker 1: has a seat at the cabinet table, for instance. Do
Speaker 1: you think that would help? Is that possible? Well, anything
Speaker 1: that raises the issue of food and nutrition in government
Speaker 1: I think would be very helpful. I mean, there's some
Speaker 1: people who have proposed something like a National Institute of Nutrition,
Speaker 1: which would be similar to the natural when the stud
Speaker 1: of cancer, etc. And I think something like that, where
Speaker 1: we have credible institutions that really start funding nutritional research
Speaker 1: at the levels it should and can act with a
Speaker 1: credible voice, is really important. Right now. There's so much
Speaker 1: confusing information, in some cases very purposefully confusing. People want
Speaker 1: to confuse the public. We need institutions that people can
Speaker 1: trust and say this is what we know about what's
Speaker 1: healthy for you and what's not. I think, yeah, increased
Speaker 1: effort in that area it could be very very helpful,
Speaker 1: right I wonder if you can break your takeaways out
Speaker 1: into two categories, what people should think about doing in
Speaker 1: relation to their own diets, and then what they should
Speaker 1: think about trying to do about this problem nationally and globally.
Speaker 1: I think people can start thinking as much as possible
Speaker 1: about consuming adequate quantities of these foods that are protective.
Speaker 1: It's not so much around on not eating the other stuff.
Speaker 1: It's much more positive to think, like how do I
Speaker 1: eat more of fruits and vegetables and nuts and in
Speaker 1: a way that satisfies your taste and creates joy. I
Speaker 1: think we need to demand better food for children and
Speaker 1: at our workplaces, and that is something parents everywhere can
Speaker 1: do to help shift institutions so that they are procuring
Speaker 1: food that's more nourishing and sustainable. I think removing junk
Speaker 1: food from shop checkouts. We've designed our food environment so
Speaker 1: it's almost impossible to eat really well, and we're constantly
Speaker 1: triggering the purchase and consumption of foods that are just
Speaker 1: not good for us in large quantities. Then finally, I mean,
Speaker 1: actually look at your plate that you're eating. It should
Speaker 1: be at least half fruits and vegetables, about a quarter
Speaker 1: whole grains and other things, and then a small slice
Speaker 1: of protein. We're just not eating enough of these other
Speaker 1: whole foods that are protective. And what can people do
Speaker 1: about the problem globally? If anything, you affect the globe
Speaker 1: by your individual action. When we are industrialized countries, we
Speaker 1: need to be encouraging the production and consumption of protective
Speaker 1: foods when we're doing international development work, for example, So Roy,
Speaker 1: the first question we ask everybody to get them warmed
Speaker 1: up is what did you have for breakfast today? I
Speaker 1: had some fruits and nuts. I really like pecans, apricots,
Speaker 1: and some yogurt. And in your case, I'm gonna ask,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna have for lunch? Oh? I always
Speaker 1: have vegetables and salad for lunch, and then I'll splurage
Speaker 1: for dinner. Do you eat meat? I consider myself a
Speaker 1: flexitarian or I have a plant forward diet where I
Speaker 1: try to eat as many plants as possible. But I
Speaker 1: always make multiple exceptions. So the first exception is I
Speaker 1: will eat anything anybody cooks for me with love. You know,
Speaker 1: when I go to somebody's house, I will not say
Speaker 1: I have a dietary restriction because I don't really have
Speaker 1: a health issue. And then the second is for the
Speaker 1: exceptionally delicious. There's a specific food that my mother used
Speaker 1: to always make called Gorma sebzi. It's this incredible lamb stew.
Speaker 1: If I ever get a chance to eat that gorma
Speaker 1: subsy that I'm going to eat that gorma subsans. Food
Speaker 1: is about joy and about connection. There's a spiritual dimension
Speaker 1: to food, so it's not simply about the nutrition. It's
Speaker 1: about all of these other things. That makes us human.
Speaker 1: So the roystin or food rules are plant forward, don't
Speaker 1: be a pain in the ass for other people, enjoy food,
Speaker 1: don't be too rigid. Yes, I think that's a good
Speaker 1: set of rules. How do we maximize joy and health?
Speaker 1: I just loved that conversation. You know, Roy has multiple
Speaker 1: degrees and a PhD in agricultural engineering and all arrestivos,
Speaker 1: and he's telling us that to save our own health
Speaker 1: and the planets, we need to maximize joy when it
Speaker 1: comes to eating. I really appreciate this holistic take on food.
Speaker 1: The way we eat today is not sustainable. Agriculture accounts
Speaker 1: for seventy percent of all freshwater use, it takes up
Speaker 1: roughly half of the planet's vegetated land, and it's responsible
Speaker 1: for almost a quarter of all global greenhouse gas emissions.
Speaker 1: That's more than every car and ship and train and
Speaker 1: plane on Earth combined. So for our own sakes, let's
Speaker 1: shine a light for Roy and his work at the
Speaker 1: Food Initiative. Plant Forward Baby Solvable is a collaboration between
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Chalk
Speaker 1: and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Engineering by
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrell and the fine Folks at GSI Studios. Original
Speaker 1: music composed by Pascal Wise. Special thanks to Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Heather Faine, Julia Barton, Carlie Mgniori, share Vincent, Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving today's
Speaker 1: biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org slash solvable. I'm
Speaker 1: Mave Higgins. Now go solve it.