Breaking Free: How to Remove Fossil Fuels from Our Food System AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Food Fight

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Episode: Breaking Free: How to Remove Fossil Fuels from Our Food System

Author: EIT Food
Duration: 00:40:29

Episode Shownotes

The food system accounts for 15% of global fossil fuel use, but where does that energy really go? In this episode, Matt Eastland speaks with Anna Lappé to break down the invisible dependence of our food systems on fossil fuels—and the solutions to fix it. From production to processing, packaging

to disposal, every step in our food supply chain is tied to energy-intensive practices, most of which rely on fossil fuels. Anna emphasises that these dependencies are ecological, political, and economic risks we can no longer ignore. Learn how we can move away from synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, why regenerative agriculture holds the key to restoring food and climate resilience, and why ultra-processed foods must be part of the conversation. This is not about technological silver bullets; it’s about systems change and collective action that prioritises people, nature, and a fossil-free future.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_00
As you look down at the food on your plate today, consider this likely possibility.

00:00:09 Speaker_00
That what you're about to eat has been grown with fertilizers derived from natural gas, harvested by fossil fuel driven machines, travelled thousands of miles in petrol and diesel powered transportation, stored using power hungry refrigeration, and arrived at your local supermarket wrapped in oil based plastics.

00:00:30 Speaker_00
Our food system is deeply tied to one of the biggest drivers of climate change, consuming 15% of global fossil fuels. How did we get here? And how can we reduce our reliance on conventional energy sources to produce our food?

00:00:44 Speaker_00
Welcome to the Food Fight podcast by EIT Food, a series exploring the greatest challenges facing the food system and the innovators committed to solving them.

00:00:53 Speaker_00
I'm Matt Eastland, and today I'm joined by Anna Lappe, a leading voice in food sustainability and equity.

00:00:59 Speaker_00
Anna is an award-winning author, co-creating three major books and contributing to over 19 more, a James Beard Leadership Award recipient and a TEDx speaker whose talks and films have reached millions of people.

00:01:12 Speaker_00
As Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, Anna brings decades of expertise to today's critical question, how can we transition food systems away from fossil fuels while building a future that's fair and sustainable?

00:01:26 Speaker_00
Anna, it's a pleasure to have you on the show to discuss such an important topic.

00:01:30 Speaker_02
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here, Matt.

00:01:33 Speaker_00
Great stuff. Anna, I know on your recent Table Debate podcast series, Errol Schweitzer, who's a grocer and merchandising ops executive you spoke to, he described fossil fuels as the lifeblood of the food industry. Do you agree with Errol?

00:01:50 Speaker_00
And if so, can I ask you why?

00:01:52 Speaker_02
Yeah, I loved that quote from Errol in our podcast series. It is the lifeblood of a certain kind of food system, and I would argue it doesn't have to be the lifeblood.

00:02:02 Speaker_02
I mean, when I heard him say that, I thought, well, if you hear that, does it make you feel like, well, take fossil fuels out of our food system and it dies? And of course, no one wants the death of a food system, right?

00:02:12 Speaker_02
We all want the world to be well-fed. And so I think the point that's really important to add to Errol's pithy quote is that, yes, fossil fuels are the lifeblood of a certain kind of food system and one that is in desperate need of transformation.

00:02:27 Speaker_02
So, you know, I imagine many of those listening to our conversation would also share my concern about the climate crisis and know that at root, it is a crisis driven by greenhouse gas emissions at root.

00:02:41 Speaker_02
It's a fossil fuel, gas, oil, you know, that really the need to phase out fossil fuels is critical to fixing the climate crisis.

00:02:49 Speaker_02
So I think what we want to put our finger on in the conversation about food systems transformation is that phasing out fossil fuels in food is just as important as it is phasing out fossil fuels in our cars, in our built environment, etc.

00:03:04 Speaker_02
So that's a bit of my twist on Errol's quote there.

00:03:08 Speaker_00
Okay, yeah. This just seems to be one of those areas which is no one talks about enough. I mean, 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food production. It's crazy that it just doesn't get as much focus as it needs.

00:03:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I would add to that, Matt, so that 15% figure that came from a study that we worked on at the Global Alliance last year, and commissioned some research to help us tease out

00:03:33 Speaker_02
that deeper understanding of what is that nexus between fossil fuels and food. And if you dig into that percent, I think what a couple things struck me about it first, is actually how much more we need to know about this.

00:03:45 Speaker_02
You know, when I look at the data that's out there, connecting the dots between food and fossil fuels is actually really hard. And so I think we need to know more. You know, I think 15% is a conservative figure.

00:03:55 Speaker_02
And then also to look at, you know, where across the food chain are most of those emissions coming from, are most of the fossil fuel use coming from? And that helps us as advocates and policymakers think about where there are real solutions.

00:04:10 Speaker_00
Amazing. And I really want to get into connecting those dots with you today as well. But before we jump into such a massive topic, can I just talk about yourself for a little bit?

00:04:18 Speaker_00
So you've been like a really prominent voice in sustainable food systems for a number of years. Can I ask you what first inspired your advocacy for this cause and how you came to do the work that you do with the Global Alliance?

00:04:32 Speaker_02
I mean, in a way, Matt, I sort of went into the family business. Some of your listeners may be familiar with my mother's work. Her name is Frances Moore LePay.

00:04:41 Speaker_02
And she, more than 50 years ago, wrote a really seminal book about food called Diet for a Small Planet.

00:04:48 Speaker_02
It was before I was born, and it was a book that was one of the first, although many folks have made this point since, but one of the first books to really help people understand that the root cause of hunger is not a lack of food.

00:05:03 Speaker_02
When she wrote Diet for a Small Planet, there was more than enough calories produced globally to feed all of us, but of course there was rampant hunger, but that the root cause of hunger is actually a lack of democracy, that if you're talking about food,

00:05:18 Speaker_02
talking about who eats, who doesn't, what gets grown, what doesn't, how it's grown. All of those questions are more about how we organize ourselves as societies than they are a technological question. And so I was sort of born into this family.

00:05:34 Speaker_02
My mother was an advocate around food systems and my father was an epidemiologist and toxicologist.

00:05:40 Speaker_00
Oh my God, that must have been so amazing. This is in your DNA.

00:05:43 Speaker_02
Very much so. But I didn't think it would be my life's path until my mid-twenties. I was a graduate student at Columbia University and I had a vision for a book that I thought my mother should write.

00:05:56 Speaker_02
This was 30 years almost after she'd written Diet for a Small Planet. She'd written many other books since. But I said to her, look, that's a beautiful insight. Hunger isn't caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy.

00:06:07 Speaker_02
But it sort of profoundly begs the question then, what does that really mean? Where in the world are there examples of kind of food democracy at work?

00:06:15 Speaker_02
Where can you see places where actually people are organizing societies in a way that are getting to those roots? So to tell the stories of a food democracy brought to life. And she said, that's a great idea for a book. And would you help me?

00:06:32 Speaker_02
So initially I was her research assistant, eventually got promoted to her co-author. But as my friends like to remind me, getting a promotion from your mother is not very impressive. But we ended up writing a book together. It's called Hope's Edge.

00:06:45 Speaker_02
And it is a story of a journey around the world to show where there are social movements and city governments and civil society groups really thinking differently about how we organize.

00:06:56 Speaker_02
our communities to really bring about real food, food access, food democracy, what many call food sovereignty. And that was the beginning of my journey. And there's been many twists and turns since, but that book really transformed my life.

00:07:11 Speaker_02
It helped me see the ripple effects of decisions made in the United States by our food corporations, by our federal government on trade policy, on ag policy.

00:07:20 Speaker_02
and activated me to really want to be part of what I see as a global movement to try to get to the roots of hunger, to try to make a food system that really reflects what I think are our shared values.

00:07:31 Speaker_00
Amazing. Wow, what a journey. And going back to the top of the show, I briefly mentioned it, but I really want to hear it from you.

00:07:39 Speaker_00
So we spoke about the journey of the food products from farm to fork, let's say, are very, at the moment, energy intensive and not the good kind. But could you bring this to life for our listeners a bit?

00:07:52 Speaker_00
Can you talk us through how, I think we were talking about potato chips before or crisps in the UK, how they go from being produced to the packet in consumers' hands and what energy challenges that particular potato chip goes through?

00:08:09 Speaker_02
Sure, and I'll just give like the most cursory story of the potato chip because of course it's complicated.

00:08:15 Speaker_02
And so you imagine your potato chip, you've got your bag of chips, you've bought it at the store, you probably aren't thinking twice about this story. So how does this intersect with that food energy nexus?

00:08:26 Speaker_02
The potatoes that you find in those potato chip bags, unless they're marketed as organic, they were grown with heavy amounts of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides.

00:08:35 Speaker_02
You mentioned at the top of the show, most synthetic fertilizer is, it's all very energy intensive. Most of it is produced with natural gas. There are still some synthetic fertilizer manufacturing facilities powered by coal. So even dirtier.

00:08:49 Speaker_02
And pesticides themselves are fossil fuel based. So synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, the kind of bedrock. linchpins of industrial agriculture themselves really need to be seen as part of the fossil fuel tree, another branch of that tree.

00:09:04 Speaker_02
And then there's the energy used on those fields, so there's the energy used for irrigation, there's the energy used for farm machinery.

00:09:13 Speaker_02
Yes, there's a push to try to electrify transportation and machinery, but most farm machinery is still powered by diesel fuel. Then there's energy used to collect those potatoes.

00:09:24 Speaker_02
There's the energy used to process those potatoes, to ship them first to where they're processed, then to process them. And then, of course, there's packaging, packaging them into those plastic bags.

00:09:34 Speaker_02
And as you mentioned, you know, plastic is basically fossil fuels in another form. there's energy used to ship to distribution centers, there's energy used to put them on our shelves, and then they eventually end up mostly in landfill.

00:09:48 Speaker_02
Landfill itself is another part of the climate story in that many emissions, methane emissions, come from landfills.

00:09:55 Speaker_02
So that is my attempt, trying to give you a little bit of a glimpse of the story, but that's not even the full story, but I hope it helps to paint a little bit of the picture because I think when

00:10:07 Speaker_02
When you get on an airplane or you get in a car, many of us have that sense of, yeah, we're using fuels right now.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
you open up a bag of chips, you might have second thoughts about how healthy it is for you, but you probably aren't thinking about this connection to climate.

00:10:26 Speaker_00
Thank you for bringing that to life. I mean, I kind of feel a bit sorry for the humble potato chip now, because it feels like it goes through a hell of a journey.

00:10:34 Speaker_00
And can I ask on that journey of that potato chip, which parts of the journey are the most energy intensive and need solving first? Which area would you go after?

00:10:46 Speaker_02
It's a great question. And one of the things that makes talking about energy and food really complicated is that's a different answer depending on the food you're talking about. So we're talking about potato chip.

00:10:58 Speaker_02
The answer would be different if we were talking about the beef patty in a McDonald's burger, be different if we were talking about a non ultra processed food like an apple.

00:11:07 Speaker_02
But generally what we're finding from the data is that food production is a significant portion of fossil fuels You know, some of the figures put it out about a fifth of all fossil fuels in the food system come from the production side.

00:11:21 Speaker_02
I've seen some figures, which we quote in our study, estimate that about 42-40% of fossil fuels in the food system come on the other end, come from processing and packaging.

00:11:32 Speaker_02
Transportation often, again, we're generalizing here, and there's exceptions, but often transportation is not the biggest kind of energy use impact of our food.

00:11:43 Speaker_02
And this was something when I wrote my book on food and climate more than about 15 years ago, when I would talk about the links between food and climate, almost everybody I would mention this to, everyone would immediately think I was talking about transportation.

00:11:57 Speaker_02
And they would say, oh, right, it's all about eating local. And I would say, eating local is very important for so many reasons. Climate, it's not the biggest reason. When you're talking about transporting food, it's often done in quite efficient ways.

00:12:13 Speaker_02
You're talking about moving huge amounts of food, often also because increasingly we are cleaning up our transportation. So where do we need to focus?

00:12:22 Speaker_02
I would argue where we need to focus is those places where we can see both the biggest impact, biggest improvement on climate, with the most important co-benefits for other things we care about.

00:12:34 Speaker_02
So for instance, I talked about that humble potato ending up in that bag of potato chips. We're talking about the high use of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides to produce that food.

00:12:45 Speaker_02
We do not need to be using pesticides and synthetic fertilizers to produce abundant food.

00:12:51 Speaker_02
And even without shifting to those very ecological models, even just tweaking industrial agriculture around the edges, we can dramatically bring down the amount of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides we're using today without actually

00:13:07 Speaker_02
doing anything to impact food security. And in fact, the data is showing it's in many cases better for food security.

00:13:13 Speaker_02
In the US, just to give you one final example on this, nearly 50% of the pesticides being used on produce in the US were used just for aesthetics.

00:13:23 Speaker_00
Really? Good grief.

00:13:25 Speaker_02
Mostly because of pressure from retailers on those farmers to deliver only produce of a certain size, produce without any blemishes, etc.

00:13:34 Speaker_00
Definitely. And I like the fact that we're moving into solution mode, which is what I love about this show. We get to talk about the solutions rather than challenges. But just before we do that, just one other question. I'm interested. So

00:13:46 Speaker_00
What do you think are the risks that the food system remains so dependent on fossil fuels? Are there other issues here about us putting all of our eggs in one particular fossil fuel basket, like supply chain fragility?

00:14:04 Speaker_00
Look at what's going around the world with geopolitics. What else is at play here if we continue to go on this path?

00:14:11 Speaker_02
There's lots of risks. I put them into two big categories. There's ecological risk, and then you were just alluding to it in your question, political risk.

00:14:20 Speaker_02
The ecological risk is that we are already witnessing a really catastrophic decline of biodiversity, of insect populations. One in three bites that we eat

00:14:33 Speaker_02
we can thank a pollinator for, and yet we're seeing how much pesticide use, for instance, is impacting pollinators. Continuing this way has profound risks to how well we will be able to feed ourselves.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
We're seeing dramatic decreases in soil health, which impacts how productive our food can be. We're seeing the dramatic impacts of this agrochemical use on aquatic species of all kinds.

00:15:00 Speaker_02
We know there are hundreds of dead zones being created in the oceans because of runoff from synthetic fertilizer. So I think there's this ecological risk that I think many people are taking very seriously. So there's that risk.

00:15:14 Speaker_02
I think the other risk you were getting at is a kind of political risk. You said, what's the risk of putting all of our eggs in that fossil fuel basket?

00:15:23 Speaker_02
What's important to remember about the fossil fuel industry, like a lot of the food industry too, it's highly concentrated.

00:15:30 Speaker_02
So producers are reliant on just a few companies for their inputs, whether those are seeds, whether it's pesticides, or synthetic fertilizer.

00:15:40 Speaker_02
So if you look at what happened just in these last couple of years to fertilizer prices, we saw this huge spike in fertilizer price. And what you heard from industry is, oh, this is geopolitics. It's because of Russia and Ukraine.

00:15:53 Speaker_02
And that's kind of the story that some of us consumed kind of the mainstream reporting on what was happening to fertilizer markets.

00:16:01 Speaker_02
What was really happening to fertilizer markets is a really concentrated sector kind of exploiting this geopolitical moment and charging a lot more. The fertilizer industry made record profits in these last couple of years.

00:16:14 Speaker_02
And on the other end of it, producers who are really at the mercy of a concentrated market, didn't have real competition, didn't see therefore prices really fair, you know, on a kind of fair free market. And so we're really impacted by that.

00:16:28 Speaker_02
So I think that we need to take both these risks seriously. And I think for food producers, when we're talking about the benefits of production models like organic, I mentioned, or agroecology, or regenerative agriculture.

00:16:47 Speaker_02
They're models that also help food producers not be so vulnerable to really concentrated markets.

00:16:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, I get that. And let's talk about the positive stuff. So the solutions across the food supply chain. Thinking about that poor, humble potato chip, you know, food production, I think you alluded to this earlier. I mean, are we talking

00:17:11 Speaker_00
and a large scale regenerative agriculture or focusing on soil health? Is it all of that? Because we need to move away from fertilizer use, obviously synthetic fertilizer use.

00:17:23 Speaker_00
So do you think that something like regenerative agriculture is a good step in the right direction?

00:17:28 Speaker_02
For sure. And I think what's been really encouraging for me to see over the last 25 years I've been working on these issues is how much more research there is about the benefits of in the U.S. We have a really robust certified organic program.

00:17:43 Speaker_02
There's been a lot of research about organic agriculture on even large scale commodity crops, showing, for instance, that organic field trials compared to conventional field trials of corn, for instance, that corn

00:17:56 Speaker_02
Yield was either equivalent to conventional or in times of drought or times of flooding did much better. So the evidence of kind of the resiliency of investing in these ecological models of agriculture is really clear.

00:18:10 Speaker_02
For me, the other critical piece of the solution story is not just how we're growing food, but what we're growing and what we're growing it for.

00:18:19 Speaker_02
In the US, most people are shocked to hear that less than 1% of the acreage of corn in this country is growing the corn that you and I eat off the cob. Nearly half of it is now being grown for corn-based ethanol.

00:18:33 Speaker_02
And then the rest is going into industrial livestock production or going into other kind of industrial uses of corn. So we're using some of the world's best farmland, like in the United States, in our Midwest,

00:18:48 Speaker_02
to make a questionable alternative to fuel in the form of corn-based ethanol.

00:18:53 Speaker_02
So a lot of the solutions I see as very common sense, you know, not radical at all, but these really common sense ideas of, hey, you know, farmland should be used to feed people directly.

00:19:03 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think we can all agree on that. But it's one of these things, isn't it, where I imagine back in the day when these decisions were made that people probably thought that that was trying to solve another problem.

00:19:13 Speaker_00
Yeah, I guess somebody thought this was a great idea and to kind of green up our fuels, but then we're like, hold on a second, you're diverting that away from humans.

00:19:22 Speaker_02
Right. And then you get the lock-ins, the political lock-ins, right? So we have a whole industrial built environment catering to corn-based ethanol. You have these farmers who've really, it's their livelihood now.

00:19:34 Speaker_02
You have policymakers who have no incentive to rock the boat. So you get into these kind of policy lock-ins that get really, really complicated to free ourselves from, which again, goes back to kind of my original point that so much of

00:19:49 Speaker_02
the thorny climate problems we face are less technological than they are political. How are we going to build that political will to make the change we need?

00:19:58 Speaker_00
Indeed. So let's carry the journey on then. So we get to manufacturing and processing. What are some of the most promising solutions you've seen there for reducing fossil fuel reliance?

00:20:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, one of the best things that we can do is to think about what are the ways that we can support communities, individual eaters to eat more real food. Ultra-processed food, all the science is showing us it's not good for our health, right?

00:20:25 Speaker_02
And it also has, whether we're talking about the plastic packaging or all the additives, the energy it takes to produce the ultra-processed foods, it has this energy impact as well.

00:20:34 Speaker_02
So when we talk about how do we reduce fossil fuel use in the food system, it's really thinking about how do we promote more whole foods diets, which, you know, is a systems issue.

00:20:46 Speaker_02
Well, then that kicks up a question of how do people have the time for that? We're thinking about these potato chips, and we just had U.S.

00:20:53 Speaker_02
Thanksgiving, and I hosted many, many family members, and one of the things I made one of the first evenings of our holiday together was an amazingly delicious potato's tapas dish from the Ottolenghi cookbook.

00:21:06 Speaker_02
And it was delicious with a drizzle of a tahini dressing and pomegranate seeds. It was amazing.

00:21:12 Speaker_00
Oh, you're killing me. You're making me hungry.

00:21:13 Speaker_02
It took me a very long time to make that. Would it have been quicker if I got a Costco-sized bag of potato chips and a Costco-sized bag of dip? Yes, it would have been much quicker. Wouldn't have been as healthy.

00:21:27 Speaker_02
So, you know, we have to put these conversations into a bigger conversation about time. But I think moving away from ultra processed foods is a fundamental. And then to get away from gas stoves at home.

00:21:42 Speaker_02
So I cooked those delicious Otolingue potatoes in my induction oven. So, you know, all along the way, I did my best.

00:21:51 Speaker_02
But again, it took the ability of being able to have some policy incentives to support my family to purchase that induction stove, the knowledge that induction stoves exist, and the ability, again, to have the time to make it.

00:22:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, not easy. Is there a role for retailers in here? Because they have a lot of power and I've always found that retailers can influence down and up the supply chain.

00:22:17 Speaker_00
Is there anything in the retail space that they can do to reduce the fossil fuel consumption?

00:22:23 Speaker_02
one of the key players in many food environments today are food retailers. They're absolutely driving decisions going all the way back to the farm field.

00:22:36 Speaker_02
So when you have a retailer like a Costco, for instance, that actually has a commitment to having organic lines, You have producers that have a market in the form of Costco that are incentivized to produce food organically.

00:22:50 Speaker_02
When you have a company like a Trader Joe's that I was just reading in industry press are kind of moving away from sourcing organic, that's going to have a huge impact on supply chain. And I hope that a company like Trader Joe's rethinks that.

00:23:02 Speaker_02
So, you know, I talked earlier about pesticides being used just for aesthetic purposes, just to make their products look good.

00:23:12 Speaker_02
You could imagine what a powerful positive impact it would have for retailers to say, we're going to do a marketing campaign to our customers that says,

00:23:20 Speaker_02
You know, Love Your Ugly Fruit, which has been a campaign, I think, in the UK and other countries, you know, love your ugly fruit and vegetables. And then, of course, there's the things that retailers themselves can do.

00:23:30 Speaker_02
Innovations in refrigeration, the supermarkets that have their cold storage with no doors, so they're just leaking all that cold into the store. So there's innovations there.

00:23:41 Speaker_02
And then the other thing I would say is that there's also how we can innovate to ensure that consumers can get access to good, healthy food, even bypassing supermarkets.

00:23:50 Speaker_02
So in COVID, this new coalition, I think it's called the Farmers Market Coalition launched, and it's a global network of farmers markets.

00:23:58 Speaker_02
all around the world and really helping policy makers to see farmers markets as a really key player in a domestic food system, not as just a bit player, but that they can really be a really key way for producers to get access directly to customers and for customers to actually get really direct access to good, healthy food.

00:24:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, and it's that classic model, which is effectively cutting out retailers. And we had a guy called Pete Russell on who's developed a platform for all small scale farmers in the UK and beyond.

00:24:28 Speaker_00
Basically, he's just taken all of the challenges away from the farmer and said, you know what, you just focus on producing great food and I'll help you get it to the consumer and of course that means they get paid more.

00:24:41 Speaker_00
I really feel that disruption coming. Retailers must be probably scared by it. I think they should probably embrace that as well because I know that there's more that they can do on it. Can I ask the question?

00:24:53 Speaker_00
I mean, we've had somebody on the show before talking about this, but why are we still using plastic for packaging, given that the food industry knows how damaging it is to the environment? Is the obvious answer the right one, which is cost?

00:25:07 Speaker_02
Mm-hmm. It's funny, in my mind, went to, it's probably the obvious answer, which is corporate influence of markets and policy.

00:25:16 Speaker_00
Which is probably cost in there somewhere as well, but yeah.

00:25:20 Speaker_02
So I was just listening to this author and filmmaker and brilliant thinker who I love, Astra Taylor, and she was talking about this idea of public luxury.

00:25:30 Speaker_02
What she was saying is that, you know, when often we talk about the changes we need to make to address the climate crisis or, you know, being more of an environmentalist, it often gets framed as sacrifice.

00:25:41 Speaker_02
Actually, what if we thought of it more as public luxury? In her case, she was giving the example of like public swimming pools used to be really common in the United States, much less so today, but that's a public luxury, right?

00:25:53 Speaker_02
And I think the same framework can be brought to thinking about food. And this is bringing me back to plastics. So I think about why is plastic still everywhere? It is ubiquitous. in our food system.

00:26:07 Speaker_02
And partly it's, yeah, it's a really effective way to preserve food.

00:26:11 Speaker_02
But it's also because the plastics industry has lobbied heavily against any attempts to regulate it, any attempts to demand better production practices, any attempts to say, you know, no, actually we want to have other pathways to get products to people and not have it all wrapped in plastic.

00:26:30 Speaker_02
So, you know, I think about my community now, just in the last couple of years, we have

00:26:35 Speaker_02
a network now of refill stores where instead of having to get my olive oil in a plastic container and many, many things in big plastic containers, I can go with my glass containers and fill it up with, speak of public luxury, like really delicious ingredients or really high quality detergents or really flavorful spices without having to get individually wrapped plastic

00:27:01 Speaker_02
containers. Now, is this a solution that I could have just done on my own? Absolutely not. I needed this network of stores to be able to support me in doing that.

00:27:10 Speaker_02
Could you imagine a society that actually incentivized the opening of stores like that in every community, that actually incentivized all of us to use less plastic? We could imagine that.

00:27:22 Speaker_02
We could imagine all kinds of policy mechanisms to make that more the norm. And

00:27:28 Speaker_02
Going back to public luxury, yeah, not only are those like better ingredients, but we're learning about all the microplastics and the toxins that leach from plastics into our food that are causing all kinds of health crises, whether it's fertility decline or certain cancers.

00:27:44 Speaker_02
That's not public luxury to all be getting sick when we don't need to.

00:27:48 Speaker_02
So I think that there's a way to get at this, but again, not to complexify everything, but it is about really needing to change a system and that it isn't fair for each of us to be like, oh, it's on my shoulders to fix this.

00:28:01 Speaker_02
There's lots of ways to make these changes happen. And again, my obvious answer of why we're not seeing more of that is because of so much influence on our policymakers by industry that really benefits from the status quo.

00:28:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, there's a lot that needs changing for sure. What does a fully fossil-free food system look like for you? And I guess the other question is how far away from that, how far away from you achieving it?

00:28:29 Speaker_00
I mean, you're talking a lot of what you're saying makes complete sense. A lot of it is actually very practical and simple. A lot of it also makes good corporate financial sense when you start thinking about the efficiencies.

00:28:44 Speaker_00
So, you know, what does that look like for you? What's the kind of things that you would really like to see changed? And, you know, do you think it's achievable? How confident are you that it's achievable?

00:28:58 Speaker_02
How confident am I that it's achievable? I mean, one thing that I learned 25 years ago when we worked on that book together with my mother was people would ask us after that journey whether we were optimistic or pessimistic.

00:29:14 Speaker_02
And I came to realize that either optimism or pessimism implies a certain hubris because it implies that you know what's going to happen.

00:29:25 Speaker_02
It implies you either think it's going to be really bad or it's going to be really good, but it presumes that you know the future. whether you're an optimist or a pessimist. And what we like to call ourselves, we're possible-ists.

00:29:39 Speaker_00
I like that, that's good.

00:29:40 Speaker_02
In the sense that we really have no idea what's possible. So, you know, let me give you an example from that journey.

00:29:46 Speaker_02
So 25 years ago, we arrive in Kenya to meet with a woman named Wangari Mathai, who is the leader of a social movement called the Green Belt Movement. It's led by women. You know, most people in the movement were women.

00:30:02 Speaker_02
And it was a tree planting movement to basically prevent desertification in Kenya.

00:30:07 Speaker_02
It was also about reclamation of traditional foods, of this real food diet, of growing food to feed communities, not food for export, not eating ultra processed packaged food.

00:30:19 Speaker_02
And the time we met Wangari, met women in the movement, it was incredible to see the network on the ground. But they were up against such political opposition.

00:30:29 Speaker_02
Agricultural experts that she was working with that were teaching community folks how to grow food organically were being threatened with arrest. They were under incredible political threat. They had just lost their biggest donor.

00:30:41 Speaker_02
It was a European donor agency. It just pulled out their funding. My mom and I left that visit thinking, wow, Wangari Maathai is one of the most amazing women we've ever met. We became really close with her family.

00:30:52 Speaker_02
And we said to ourselves, hopefully, the Green Belt Movement will exist for a couple more months. But we don't know. Flash forward a couple of years later, there was regime change. Wangari Maathai won her seat in Parliament.

00:31:07 Speaker_02
Flash forward a few more years, Wangari was driving down a Kenyan road with one of our friends in the car and her phone rings. And it was the phone call to say that she'd been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:31:20 Speaker_00
That's amazing.

00:31:21 Speaker_02
And so my mother and I, when we think about Wangari and think about that story, we think, how can you exist in the world and not be a possible list?

00:31:30 Speaker_02
So when I think about what we're up against, which is very depressing, you know, we're soaring past our Paris Climate Accord agreement limits of warming. We're soaring past, you know, threats of biodiversity loss.

00:31:46 Speaker_02
We're definitely careening in a bad direction at the same time. At the same time, we are seeing incredible solutions on the ground all around the world.

00:31:56 Speaker_02
Solutions that again, going back to what I kind of a theme, it's like, we know that actually it's better for our bodies, better for the planet, better for the climate, better for all of us to be eating fossil fuel free food.

00:32:11 Speaker_02
And we know there are pathways to get there. So I like to retain a sense of possibility, even though most of the indicators around us are certainly pretty grim out there.

00:32:22 Speaker_00
What a lovely balanced, but I'm not going to say positive, but possible-ist way to kind of round up the show. And I thank you for that. I'm also, I really like that possible-ist. It shows that there's hope no matter how difficult things seem.

00:32:38 Speaker_00
So thank you for that.

00:32:40 Speaker_02
Yeah. And I'll say really, you know, so quickly on that note, I mean, the other thing that gives me hope is nature itself.

00:32:48 Speaker_02
I remember going a couple years ago to a farm in Wisconsin that just a few years before had been absolutely soil destroyed with decades of fertilizer and pesticide use. It had just been row crop corn.

00:33:03 Speaker_02
There was no insects, no animals, just rows and rows and rows of corn. This farmer had taken it over and in just in a couple years using agroecological practices and biodiverse crops and really building back healthy soil.

00:33:19 Speaker_02
I was standing on the land and I had my recording device. I was interviewing him. You can hear in the recording the sounds of the birds, the sounds of the insects. He was telling me, he's like, Anna, it's amazing.

00:33:31 Speaker_02
The frogs have come back to the pocket ponds and the birds are back. We really need to remember that, that there is a natural inclination toward health in our bodies. We know this from our own study in the human body.

00:33:46 Speaker_02
When we get off of ultra processed foods, when we bring our bodies back to eating food that's good for our bodies, health is our kind of natural orientation as humans. The same is true for nature.

00:33:57 Speaker_02
So we need to remember that, you know, nature's resilience too.

00:34:03 Speaker_00
Yeah, the word that always comes to mind is regeneration. You know, nature is really good at regenerating if you give it the opportunity and the chance. Anna, I could listen to you talk for hours.

00:34:16 Speaker_00
Unfortunately, we don't have time to do that, but I am going to read your books.

00:34:19 Speaker_00
So I'd like just to leave on where can listeners find out more about yourself, your companies or get in touch and are there any final words of advice that you might have for anyone listening about what they can do right now to reduce that reliance on fossil fuels in the food system?

00:34:36 Speaker_02
Well, I'll start with that question and then say a few words about our work. But what you can do right now, I mean, like I said, please do not leave this conversation feeling guilty.

00:34:47 Speaker_02
There's no finger pointing here, finger wagging, you know, it's we live in food environments that don't encourage us. to make the right choices. But what can you do right now? It is those really, in a way, basic things.

00:35:02 Speaker_02
When you are making food choices, to the extent you are able to, choose food that was not grown with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. So in the US, that's organic certified. Other countries have other labeling schemes.

00:35:15 Speaker_02
supporting your local food economy. So, you know, do you know your local food producers?

00:35:21 Speaker_02
You know, there are many, many ways to get connected to your local community, whether through farmers markets or community supported agriculture is something we didn't talk about, but another way in.

00:35:31 Speaker_02
If you are a renter, talking to your landlords about electrifying your building, getting gas stoves out of your apartments, out of your homes. If you're a homeowner and you're in need of replacing your stove, you know, going for induction,

00:35:45 Speaker_02
So yes, there's things we can do individually, but again, please do not leave this conversation feeling like it is up to us as individuals to fix this. This is a complicated systems problem.

00:35:55 Speaker_02
So it's thinking about what you can do as an eater and then as a voter, voting for elected officials who share your values, and then thinking about what you do for your day job.

00:36:05 Speaker_02
What is it that you do to try to be part of this community of possible lists, trying to make the world a better place, as cheesy as that sounds. It's a fun line of work at the same time. So that brings me to just how you can find us.

00:36:18 Speaker_02
I currently run an organization called the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

00:36:23 Speaker_02
We're a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations, so we work with philanthropy, and our members are funding work all around the world that is very much about this place-based, often really local, as well as national and global work to change food systems.

00:36:37 Speaker_02
and we're at futureoffood.org. We have a lot of resources there, including this report on the food-energy nexus called Power Shift, but lots of other resources on our website. You can find us there.

00:36:49 Speaker_00
Amazing. Anna Lappé, this has been a fascinating, fascinating episode. I really, really have enjoyed talking to you and learning from you. So, you know, thank you for sharing that. I know our listeners are going to love it too.

00:37:02 Speaker_00
And yeah, can't wait to read the books. So that's the next on my reading list. So thank you very much, Anna.

00:37:07 Speaker_02
Thanks, Matt.

00:37:12 Speaker_00
So what an amazing interview from Anna there. And I'm kind of left feeling inspired and hopeful.

00:37:20 Speaker_00
And we could talk about all of the amazing takeaways there, the stats, the data, the challenges that are faced with the food system in terms of our reliance on fossil fuels, but also the many solutions that she's spoken about.

00:37:34 Speaker_00
But actually, rather than doing it this time around, I'd actually just like to finish on the sentiment that Anna left us with. I really liked her term, possiblest.

00:37:45 Speaker_00
It adds a certain sense of realism to it, but actually the story she shared about what is possible in this space was really amazing.

00:37:54 Speaker_00
And I would encourage us all to think more about being possiblest, about what is possible, and to do whatever we can in order to make the food system better from a fossil fuel perspective, like Anna spoke about a lot.

00:38:10 Speaker_00
Look down at your plate and give a consideration to the food that you're eating and think about how energy intensive is this? Could you have made better choices? And yes, like Anna said, this is not all on any one individual.

00:38:22 Speaker_00
But actually, if we all just make a few small changes, then together, collectively, that could make a massive change. So that's what I'd like to leave everybody with now.

00:38:33 Speaker_00
And given the time of year that we're coming into in the season of Goodwill, once again, it's a time where we all traditionally, regardless whether it's a religious thing or not, we get round together and lots of us all sit down and we have family time across meals and food and just spare a thought for the food that you're eating.

00:38:51 Speaker_00
And have you made the best possible choices? And next year, could you make better ones? So happy holidays, everyone, from that perspective. And make sure you keep eating great food. That just leaves me to say everyone, thank you all for listening in.

00:39:03 Speaker_00
This has been the Food Fight podcast. If you'd like to find out more, head over to the EIT Food website at www.eitfood.eu. Also, please join the conversation via our LinkedIn channel at EIT Food.

00:39:16 Speaker_00
And of course, if you haven't already, please hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thanks, everyone.