Food.
It's a set of relationships.
It connects you to the farmer who grew it.
It connects you to the animals or the plants.
It connects you to the soil.
It connects you to the workers who prepared it.
So there's a lot at stake when you sit down to eat.
Over the last two decades,
thanks to some books and movies,
like the first “Food Inc.,”
something called the Food Movement got started.
People became keenly interested
in where their food comes from, how is it produced.
Today, farmers markets are everywhere.
And even in the supermarket you can buy organic food,
grass-fed, GMO-free.
So, we thought we could create a food system
aligned with our values.
But the food industry is dominated by a small handful
of very large and very powerful companies.
In normal times, the power of the food industry,
of the monopolies that dominate it,
is invisible to most of us.
But when the pandemic hit,
the curtain was peeled back...
...and you began to see that this highly efficient,
consolidated food system is a very brittle system.
There were whole crops being buried,
hogs being euthanized 'cause they couldn't be processed.
Farmers disposing a flood of milk.
At the same time there were shortages in the supermarket
and then people were lining up for miles
because they were hungry.
So this consolidated food system
could not adapt to the changes coming so fast.
We have built a system that depends on predictability
and the one thing we can't count on,
is predictability anymore.
We need a system that is more resilient
than the one we have.
You know, we really thought we could change the food system
one bite at a time.
And as important as that is,
it's not enough, there's more we have to do.
GERARDO REYES CHAVEZ I have been
working in the fields since I was a kid
harvesting different crops.
I heard about Immokalee back in Mexico.
People were talking about if you go to Immokalee
you are going to earn $70 a day.
And that was just a flat-out lie
of recruiters trying to, uh, just bring people,
uh, with those, uh, false pretenses.
Working in the fields, it's mainly Latino workers
and Haitian workers.
The industry wants immigrant workers
because they feel that they can take advantage of us.
If you eat fresh fruits
and vegetables, you're connected to immigrants
who are being paid poor wages and being mistreated.
My whole entry into the world of food and food systems
was in trying to understand how
in the 20th and the 21st century,
we could be abusing and exploiting
the poorest workers in the United States
who are responsible for the healthiest foods that we eat.
In Immokalee, at the height of the pandemic,
state government did absolutely nothing
to protect these workers.
In fact, the state government in Florida
even prevented contact tracing
because if they found people who had COVID,
they'd have to remove them from the workforce.
The idea was, let's not know who's sick
and get as much harvested as possible.
You know we're feeding the country,
so our work is essential
but we as people, we're treated as disposable.
Iowa's always recognized
as a flyover state.
Those of us that live here
understand that there's security in that.
Good morning.
I can take that country omelet on for you.
How are you guys?
It's my job to protect 135,000 citizens
in Black Hawk County.
We very much appreciate your support for the college...
You bet.
There's hardworking, blue-collar,
good, honest,
salt-of-the-earth-type people here.
Here we go, ham and cheese omelet.
- Thank you. - Any hot sauce for you?
- No, this is great. - All right.
- Appreciate it, thank you. - Enjoy.
At the beginning of the pandemic,
we were fearful what we were gonna face.
And all of a sudden, we had people
testing positive in our clinics here.
Almost all of our contact tracing pointed back
to the Tyson meatpacking plant.
So this is the Tyson plant.
Tyson's is one of the larger employers here.
They bring income and they provide jobs.
You don't want to alienate them.
But our disease surveillance officer,
public health director
and myself went into that plant.
We saw people working elbow to elbow,
and reaching over the top of each other.
And no masks, no regulation,
no... no real concerted policy on how to protect each other.
And then we're hearing from people that, you know,
they're-they're stepping back off the line,
puking on the floor, going right back to work.
We walked out of there, all of us, just going,
“Oh, my God, this is horrible.
We are, we are in so much trouble.”
By the end of the month, they had 1,300 positives
out of 2,500 employees.
And then it started to seep out of the plant
into our community.
You know, we had exponential increases
in the numbers of deaths, um, by day.
Not by week, not by month, but by day.
We wanted the ten-to-14-day shutdown of the plant,
but Tyson made it very clear to us
that it just wasn't going to happen.
The meatpacking industry was worried
that local public authorities were going to shut down
their slaughterhouses.
So John Tyson wrote a letter that was published
in newspapers across the United States
raising a fear that we might start running out of meat.
And then the meatpacking companies went to the president
to keep their slaughterhouses open.
- We're working with Tyson... - Should we
- ban exports? - We are.
We're gonna sign an executive order today I believe.
Two days after the Tyson letter,
the Trump administration issued an order
under the Defense Production Act
to ensure that the plants would keep running.
So the industry got the president of the United States
to do exactly what it wanted.
It even helped write the executive order that he issued.
It's a total perversion of the Defense Production Act
to use it to allow a company to do what it wants to do.
The whole point of the act is to force companies to do things
they might not want to do, to serve the American public.
Tyson says that they were doing this
to feed America, but we know that a lot of their meat
goes to China and overseas.
We also know that Tyson had a banner year.
That's blood money.
They didn't care about our citizens
and way too many people paid the price for that.
I am Agriculture USA,
born in freedom.
I have become the greatest provider in all history.
I'm the spirit of progress.
I'm a way of life,
the American way.
During the Cold War,
we talked about why our system was so much superior
to that of the Soviet Union.
And it was the free market that was supposedly responsible
for the greatness of this country.
The 1950s into the early 1960s
was a period of rising wages for American workers.
It's the greatest period of the growth of the middle class
in American history.
And those things are connected to having real competition
and strict antitrust enforcement.
The basic idea behind antitrust policy
is that no one company, that no two companies
should dominate an entire sector of our economy.
There was strict antitrust enforcement for decades
under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
In the 1940s, there was an antitrust suit against A&P.
Their 14% of the market for groceries
was considered a threat to competition.
But one of the big monopolies
that endured was AT&T.
It was argued that we couldn't break it up
because we needed one company to control
all the phone lines.
Uh, the country, in the long run, will be sorry,
and I find it difficult to believe that things
will work as well, uh, in the, in the future
as they have worked in the past.
But then AT&T was broken up,
and pretty soon, there were huge reductions
in the cost of making a long-distance call.
That opened the way for cellular phones,
modems, and the whole Internet economy we have today.
So, breaking up monopolies
is directly linked to creating innovation.
Around 1980, antitrust enforcement
was greatly reduced.
It was argued that if prices were low,
then it didn't matter how much control
over a market one company had.
Those views came to be government policy.
Corporations began to buy up their competitors.
And they got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Back then, the four largest beef companies
controlled only 25% of the market.
Today, the four largest beef companies
control 85% of the market.
Three companies control 83% of the cold cereal market.
Two companies control 70%
of the carbonated soft drink market.
Two companies control 80% of the baby formula market.
Why do companies buy up their competitors?
It's because they don't want to compete.
And when they don't have to compete,
consumers have to pay more,
farmers and ranchers get paid less,
and the difference goes to those corporations
as higher profits.
But that's not the only problem.
A highly consolidated market becomes a fragile market.
In 2022,
when Abbott had to shut down a single factory,
43% of the nation's baby formula
was suddenly off the shelves,
and mothers had to start scrambling
to find food for infants.
There is no formula within, like,
three hours of where we live.
I haven't been able to find formula for, like, a month.
I've been going to stores, like,
almost every day, every other day.
What are our options here?
What do y'all want people to do,
'cause I don't know about y'all...
...but this is scary.
When you have monopoly power over baby formula,
and one company has a problem at one factory,
suddenly, some infants don't get to eat.
Wisconsin is the dairy state.
It's not an accident.
It makes sense that we're producing dairy here.
We have good access to water.
We have good growing seasons.
So, this is a really great place
to have animals and produce milk.
Hello, there, ladies.
Dairy is really in the blood
of Wisconsin farmers, but it's crushing us right now.
We've just had continually low prices
paid to us for our milk.
We are considered a medium-sized farm
by Wisconsin standards.
When I married my husband in 2007,
we were only milking 250 cows, and now we're at 450.
And that's because we're just trying to run faster
to keep our head above water.
Farmers are overproducing,
which is leading to a lower price.
And what people do,
and what the bank tells me to do,
is to just keep trying to produce more.
We kind of create a vicious cycle,
because then we're producing more and more
and then the price is going down
and then we're producing more to try to stay afloat.
It's really a disaster.
Well, I think that we're huge, at 450 cows,
and then we're trying to compete
with these thousand-cow dairies.
And they're looking at the 5,000 cow dairies
and then the 5,000-cow dairy
is trying to compete with the 10,000.
And now you hear about 20,000-cow dairies,
30,000-cow dairies.
Where does it stop?
Now there are fewer and fewer processers
because they've all merged with each other.
So it used to be that if I didn't like the price,
I could find other processers to buy my milk.
But now, because of consolidation,
I can't move my milk to another place with a better price.
We've lost half of our dairy farms in Wisconsin since 2007.
Lots of people going bankrupt.
The corporate control pushing folks like us
to just throw up their hands and say, “I'm done.”
The food system is often at war
with nature.
And one of the great examples
is when you watch the dairy industry
move from wet, grassy places like Wisconsin and Vermont
to deserts like California and Arizona.
How could this possibly make sense?
Well, as dairies get bigger,
they move to places where there are very few regulations,
where land is cheap and you can grow crops
to feed your cattle all year round.
But the environmental cost to this is insane.
The rain will oblige you in Wisconsin
and grow the grass for you.
But in the desert,
this is water that must be pumped deep out of the aquifers
to irrigate the crops and hydrate the cattle.
These mega-dairies are rapidly draining the water table
in the Colorado River
and leaving neighboring communities
without drinking water.
So the logic of capitalism
and the logic of nature are at war.
It's a classic example of profits over sustainability.
My great-great-grandfather,
he settled here in 1894.
My dad came in 1975 and farmed for the next 40 years.
And then, uh, I took over the operation.
Things have really changed,
just from my father's time to mine.
In Iowa, we used to grow a multitude of crops.
You know, 100 years ago, we used to have apple orchards,
and every farm had livestock.
But when you drive across Iowa now,
you see nothing but commodity crops:
corn and soybeans,
because those are the crops the government subsidizes.
And that's why, that's why farmers do what they do,
is they follow the policy, because they're in business
to make money just like everyone else.
But the thing that is not factored into that
is what is the result to the land?
Our best resource here in Iowa
is the richest soil in the world.
But because of the intensive farming that we've done,
half of our topsoil is already gone.
We're losing soil faster than we're making it.
And I get reminded of this every year
as I'm farming next to the fence lines.
And you can see a drop-off
between the fence line and your field level,
and that tells you exactly how much soil you've lost.
I-I think any Iowa farm boy growing up
wants to farm full-time.
But I farm about 300 acres,
and 300 acres is not enough to feed a family comfortably.
So I work off the farm, as do a lot of folks.
How's, uh, a load of seeds sound here,
uh, later this morning?
Stop by and, uh, drop that off...
I sell seed and I sell farm inputs,
chemicals to help eliminate pests and weeds.
So let's look at this field here.
You got a lot of potential value...
I make recommendations
to use synthetic fertilizers
to get the highest return off of their land.
So, I make my living from what a lot of people
would call the industrialized food system.
However, I have big concerns about the future.
- That's 40 bags. - Okay.
If we stay on this path
where we continue to subsidize commodity crops,
that's not good for the long-term
of our farming communities, our soils, our water quality.
So, I'm trying to come up with a whole new system
so farmers like myself can grow things in a way
that changes the rules of the game.
- Hi. - Senator, how are you?
- I'm very good. - Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you as well.
Farmer Steve, I'm farming.
Uh, all right. All right.
- Cory. - We're thrilled
to be able to have Senator Cory Booker,
appointed earlier this year
to the Senate Agriculture Committee.
You have no idea how exciting it is for me
to be standing here in a field in my own state.
It was 15 years ago this month that I was elected
to be mayor of New Jersey's largest city.
If you would have told me 15 years ago
that I would use every point of leverage I had in the Senate
to become, uh, a member of the Ag Committee,
I would have not believed you.
I want you to know I am so excited to have
the top of my agenda right now,
uh, dealing with, uh, America's food system,
which is savagely broken.
I-I come at this
through lived experience.
I watched what our food systems
were doing to my family members and to my community.
Being on the ground as a local leader,
I started seeing that the systems within Newark
were really failing kids, families
where they didn't have access to healthy foods.
These foods were being pushed in a way
that seemed, to me, to prey upon low-income people.
They need the cheapest food possible,
but they're living in the middle of a food desert,
where a Twinkie product is cheaper than an apple.
African American kids, in the last decade alone,
have seen their diabetes rates double.
So it just made me want to drastically change
the food systems for, then, my community,
but now, of fixing the broken food systems
in the United States and globally.
This part of Montana
is a place where buffalo had a hard time surviving.
But you can actually raise a hell of a crop here.
In fact, I was supposed to finish seeding my peas today,
but as you can tell, best-laid plans.
Things don't tend to work when it gets cold,
including me.
I never felt appreciated as a farmer.
I raise food, but food is treated like a commodity,
it wasn't treated like something you'd eat.
And I said to my wife,
“If we don't do something to improve our profit margin,
w-we're gonna be selling out just like everybody else.”
I would say there's about 150 bushel in the truck.
In the late '80s, we converted to organics...
...and we raised durum for organic noodles.
It was the first time since we'd been farming
that I actually felt like I was doing something
that people appreciated, that people wanted.
But now, we're seeing an all-out attack
on family farm agriculture.
The corporate business model
is killing rural America, it's killing it.
And that's not the way it should be.
There needs to be people living out here producing food.
But as far as changing things,
there's really only one place you can do that,
and that's Washington, D.C.
We've seen a mass exodus off the land.
In my small town, as an example,
when I graduated from high school,
there was a thousand people in that town,
now there's about 600.
There were two hardware stores, now there are none.
There were three grocery stores, now there's one.
And maybe the most distressing is there were five bars,
and now there's only two.
I'm the Senate's only working farmer,
and I want rural America to be vibrant again.
That's my motivation here.
Testa.
Booka.
How you doing, man?
Good to see you.
Jon Tester is,
he's been a mentor to me in the Senate.
He, early on, talked to me about the absurdities
- in the Ag world. - And you could make...
It's this odd combination
of a guy from Montana
and a guy from New Jersey, and yet,
we have so much common ground.
If you want to reestablish rural America again,
if you want to have people that are able to live there,
- y-you got to have opportunity. - Yeah.
And if you're gonna have opportunity,
then you got to have fair prices.
But when you have consolidation,
now you, now you've got people setting prices.
They go out on a golf course and play a round of golf
and determine what you're gonna get for a-a bushel of wheat
or, o-or whatever-whatever you're talking about.
But as long as we're, uh, doing nothing,
you're gonna continue to see more consolidation
and you're gonna continue to see
the demise of the family farm.
So, in many ways, they're picking winners and losers.
The winners are the handful of multinational corporations,
the losers are all the rest of us.
We are so connected.
The challenges in my community
are directly connected to a system
that's driving farmers out of business,
hurting our soil and our rivers,
hurting the food workers, hurting the end consumers.
And as a nation,
we are dramatically subsidizing,
with our tax dollars, the foods that are making us sick.
And only a small fraction of our subsidies
go to the healthy fresh foods
that we should be eating as a majority of our diet.
I don't want the government to be telling someone what to eat,
but I sure as heck don't want my tax dollars
subsidizing the things that are making people sick,
and now we have to pay for the health care costs
of-of the chronic disease
that we're fueling with our food system.
So, this is a conundrum to me.
We have here the world's largest potato.
I'll say that's a large potato.
And here's what's in it.
I've had a long career
about looking at food and nutrition
as ways to examine really important problems in society.
Food connects to everything.
By the 1980s, agricultural production
had increased so much in the United States
that the number of calories in the food supply
increased to about 4,000 calories a day per person.
And that's twice as many calories available
in the food supply as anybody needs.
This puts enormous pressure on food companies.
How are they gonna sell?
Food companies are businesses with stockholders to please.
The profits have to get bigger and bigger,
sales have to increase and increase.
And food companies figured out lots of ways to do that.
Wendy's Baconator is
the ultimate bacon cheeseburger.
They opened up fast-food places
all over the world.
They made foods in larger portions.
One enormous sandwich.
If you are presented
with a very large amount of food...
Our biggest entrees ever.
...all of the research shows
that you're gonna eat more from that portion
than you would if you were given a small portion.
And then, food companies made foods
available any place that you could think of.
You go into a clothing store,
and there's candy bars at the checkout counter.
So, food companies
are doing everything they can to get people to eat
anytime, anyplace, day or night, in large portions.
What better way to sell foods, whether people need it or not?
It's time for Fourthmeal.
It's a late-night meal, between dinner and breakfast.
So, I think it's just very hard
to resist a food environment
that is just yelling at us all the time,
Eat more! Eat more! Eat more!
In the 1980s,
I worked as a pediatrician in the outskirts of Saão Paulo.
Since then, we have observed
a decline in child malnutrition,
and an increase in obesity.
We had, in Brazil, each year,
one million new cases of obesity.
Our research found a decline
in the purchase of salt, cooking oils, table sugar,
and-and then I say, “Whoa, these are supposed to be”
the determinants of obesity, right?
If they are declining, that's...
“this doesn't make sense.”
But then we realized that that traditional,
whole foods like rice and beans,
were being replaced by soft drinks,
packaged snacks, sausages, instant noodles.
All these products are formulations
of nutrients and additives.
Colors and flavors,
emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners.
These are chemical compounds
totally unknown to our metabolism.
And these foods are submitted
to intensive processing.
So we decided to call this food group
ultra-processed foods.
We raised the hypothesis that the consumption
of ultra-processed food could be the main driver
of diabetes and other chronic diseases.
In 2019, one researcher,
Kevin Hall, decided to test our hypothesis.
I was first pretty skeptical of this idea.
And I would ask, “What is it about ultra-processed foods
that causes people of overeat?”
Is it the nutrients that's driving this,
or perhaps it's something about the processing of these foods?
So I decided to design two diets.
In the ultra-processed diet, we had 80% of calories
coming from ultra-processed foods,
whereas in the minimally processed diet,
we had zero percent of calories from ultra-processed foods.
But the meals were matched for the calories,
matched for salt, sugar, fat, fiber and protein.
We told people to eat as much or as little as desired.
When people were exposed to this ultra-processed diet,
they ended up eating about 500 calories per day more
compared to the mostly unprocessed diet.
Usually, in studies of this type,
you find a difference of 30 to 50 calories a day.
But 500?
I mean, that's an unbelievable result.
On the ultra-processed diet,
people gained weight and gained body fat.
And when we switched them to the unprocessed diet,
those people spontaneously lost weight and lost fat.
And so, this study suggests that there's something else
about ultra-processed foods, independent of the salt,
the sugar and the fat and the fiber,
that's driving people to overeat.
The easiest way to explain
the different categories of processing is corn.
Corn on the cob, unprocessed, it's been peeled and washed.
Canned corn, minimally processed, salt has been added.
But Dorito chips have color, texture
and flavoring additives.
Ultra-processed.
Processed food,
you can make at home.
Ultra-processed foods, you don't have the ingredients,
you don't have the additives,
and you don't have the machines.
The reason you process food
is not that there's anything wrong with it
in its natural state,
it's that you make a lot more money.
You know, the money in the system is not at the farm end.
The farmer's getting less than 15% of your food dollars.
No, the money is going to the processor
who's benefiting from the fact that we're overproducing
and driving down the cost of raw materials.
The food processors
buy those cheap agricultural commodities
and then turn it into the panoply
of ultra-processed food products in your supermarket.
If you complicate that food
in the form of flavor or novelty,
that's where the money is.
Ultra-processed food ensures
that a consumer will buy more and more and more,
because these products
are made to be consumed in excess.
Eating worked pretty well
for humans for an awfully long time.
We ate what we needed,
our needs were in balance with our appetite.
And it's really only recently
that something about our relationship with food
got disturbed, distorted.
Now we find ourselves literally eating ourselves to death.
Animals have similar nutritional needs
to ourselves, so what do they do?
They, on some intuitive level, know what to eat.
It's called nutritional wisdom.
These mama cows are over in this field eating alfalfa
because that's rich in protein and they're supporting a fetus,
so they need the protein.
But these steers, they're over here in this field
and they're eating rye grass which has got sugar
and carbohydrates in it because they're laying on fat.
And they do this on their own.
They're somehow attracted to the food they need.
And humans are no different.
Millions of years ago,
our ancestors, walking around the jungles of Africa,
there was no label on the fruit that they ate,
they didn't know about the calories.
But this experience of just looking
for the food that tasted the best
is what nourished them.
It's how they had a nutritious diet.
You think of something like a delicious peach,
that flavor that we experience is the brain's system
of analyzing the nutrition that's within a food.
Flavor is nature's language of nutrition.
For decades now, we've been manipulating
the sensory characteristics of food.
Thanks to flavor technology, we can make anything we want
taste like whatever we want it to taste like.
Fake flavors but, also, artificial sweeteners.
We haven't really questioned what the consequences of this
has been, we just assumed it's a good idea.
Well, now we have new research that is showing
that this is actually a terrible idea.
That we're actually interfering with the brain's
and the body's ability to metabolize food.
My interest is in how
the brain processes food reward.
I did the first neural imaging study,
um, of feeding in humans.
We were measuring brain response
as they were eating little pieces of chocolate.
I really wanted to understand
areas of the brain that represent
the pleasure of the, of the food.
Pepsi was interested in our research.
I think they wanted to try to understand
how to make healthier foods.
And so, they came to me with a question,
“Is it possible to decrease the amount of calories
in a typical sugar-sweetened beverage”
without compromising reward?
So, in the lab, we created a series of beverages
where we manipulated the sweetness,
independent of calories.
So that way, we have equally sweet drinks
but drinks of different calorie amounts.
You're gonna be receiving liquids
through the mouthpiece, okay?
We looked at the brain's areas
that are responsible for reward.
What we thought was that the highest-calorie beverage
would become the most-liked beverage,
but that's not what we found.
Instead, it was actually the middle doses,
where sweetness and calories are matched,
that was eliciting the greatest brain response.
In nature, the relationship between sweetness
and energy is-is pretty stable.
So, when you manipulate sensory information
without regard for the nutritional content,
you're essentially creating mismatches.
And so, we conducted follow-up studies
to see what was going on.
Comfortable under there? - Yep.
And what we found
was that when sweetness matches the calories,
then the body metabolizes that energy.
But when something was too sweet for the amount
of calories or not sweet enough for the amount of calories,
the body's ability to metabolize those calories
was-was blunted.
Those calories are not being used as a fuel.
Instead, they might be converted into fat.
So, if you reduce calories by adding artificial sweetener,
you could actually be doing more harm than good.
When I saw the findings, I shared it
with our collaborators at Pepsi right away.
But this result, that I thought was super exciting,
because we're gonna learn something new...
This is really cool... um,
had the opposite effect that I thought it was gonna have.
I received a bunch of emails from Pepsi
saying that the data made no sense,
really saying that they didn't believe
what we were reporting.
Uh, they-they pulled our funding.
And it wasn't until much later that I realized the problem
was not that they didn't believe me,
but in fact, that they did believe me.
And that's what made them worried.
The moment you know that something is bad for health,
ethically, you have to correct it.
I think they wanted deniability,
because what our research suggested
is that their products could negatively impact health
in unanticipated ways.
When you walk into a supermarket,
it's not just artificial sweeteners.
There is a whole arsenal of additives
designed to mislead the brain.
There's fat replacers, artificial flavors,
so-called natural flavors.
So how does your brain react when it keeps getting fooled
by the food it eats?
The best way to think about it is the fuel gauge on your car.
Imagine if you looked at it and it said it was full,
but it might be empty, it might be half full.
Imagine it was uncertain in the way
that modern food has become uncertain.
What would you do?
Well, you-you'd fill your car up a whole lot more often.
Well, that's what your brain does.
When it keeps getting fooled,
when one day sweetness means calories
and the next day it means no calories
or just some calories, it goes, “I better eat more food
to make sure I don't get ripped off.”
We're short-circuiting an evolutionary process
that's hundreds of thousands of years old.
And we've learned through the i-ingenuity of food science
to fool the human body.
Um, but you pay a price for that,
in losing your taste for real food.
And as we lose our taste for eating plants,
we lose all those antioxidants,
we lose all those protective factors.
When you have that premade meal,
it's hard to know that it's unhealthy,
but it's all been designed to manipulate you.
The eye, the taste buds,
and get you to eat as much as possible,
ideally, to addict you to it.
In the United States,
the average consumption of ultra-processed foods
is about 58% of total energy intake.
But in most of the world,
consumption of ultra-processed food is much lower.
And most calories still come from real foods.
Today, these big food companies,
they are targeting markets in many countries
with aggressive campaigns.
These countries
are not prepared to defend themselves
from the health problems
created by ultra-processed foods.
I have worked in fast food
for over 20 years.
I have worked at McDonald's,
I have worked at Popeyes.
I'm currently at Taco Bell.
I have two children.
My kids are my world.
But it's been hard.
There have been times I can't afford the heating bill,
there have been times where I can't afford to pay my rent.
There's been times where I couldn't afford
to put food on the table.
I have a gas bill.
A light bill. Internet bill.
Rent, $715.
If I miss a day,
one of these becomes a shutoff notice,
a disconnect notice.
My biggest fear is winding back up in a position
that I had to crawl out of, and living out of my car
and living away from my children.
This is everything we own.
Our clothes, shoes.
This is me and my family's prized possessions.
It's all we own.
I don't ever want my family
to have to experience that again,
but it-it's hard, on the wages we make, and you almost...
it's almost impossible for us just to survive.
Most people will say that these jobs
are for people that are just starting out.
But the average fast-food worker's a 30-year-old woman.
Not-not a kid.
This-this is someone's mother, someone's sister,
trying to make it to feed their family.
I have a cheesy sausage toasted burrito
and a regular coffee, $4.10 today.
The cost of living is steadily going up,
but our wages aren't.
How can I go to work for these billion-dollar companies
and feed all these people,
all to come home to hear my son's stomach growl?
For-for the ones that have all the sauce on it,
they're cheaper.
Four dollars.
Right now we have $13.97. All right.
I do not get sick leave.
I do not get health care.
As an adult, I've never been able
to afford to see a doctor.
I got it. 20, 40...
I'm tired.
And nobody knows how tired I am
except for those people that go through it just like me.
Today, the federal minimum wage
is seven dollars and 25 cents an hour.
It's been at that level since 2009.
Adjusted for inflation,
it's almost 50% lower than it was in the late 1960s.
So the poorest workers have seen their pay cut in half.
The CEO of Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell,
earns more in an hour than the typical Taco Bell worker
earns in a year.
And we're paying so that they can have cheap labor.
Walmart and McDonald's
are two of the largest employers of workers
who are dependent on food stamps and on Medicaid.
So it's taxpayers who are supporting these companies,
as opposed to these companies supporting their workers.
It's not only fast-food and supermarket workers,
it's millions of other workers in the food system
who are being exploited in ways that are hidden from view.
The agricultural industry
depends on more than three million workers.
Agriculture has always been a place
where exploitation has happened.
Because it emerged out of slavery.
70 cents a day. 70... 70 cents all day job.
When slavery was abolished,
it didn't disappear, it just changed form.
One farmer looked at this
and said, “We used to own our slaves.
Now we just rent them.”
The whole industry was still
just refusing to recognize that the workers deserve
to be treated as-as human beings.
Today, slavery continues to happen,
even though it's a crime.
One case of modern-day slavery happened in our community.
Workers escaped from a U-Haul truck
where they were tied with chains.
The defendants have been accused
of threatening,
slapping and kicking farm workers.
Chaining them to a pole, beating them,
locking them inside U-Haul trailers,
keeping them in debt and forcing them to work for free.
So, as workers,
we organized to fight back.
When I got involved
with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,
we were focusing on the big tomato growers,
thinking that they will have to listen to us.
There were articles
about slavery.
Our company's name was listed
because we're one of the largest growers
here in Florida.
We've always heard about wage theft,
of sexual harassment, of bad operators.
But you never think it's going on in your house.
When you've got labor contractors
providing workers to a farmer,
it creates an environment where there's a step back
from any responsibility about how they're being treated,
how they're being paid.
The growers
just closed the door on our nose.
They didn't care about our demands
or about anything that we had to say.
So we need to widen o-our understanding
on what can influence this industry.
And then we realized that the market power
was with the corporations
that buy millions of dollars of tomatoes.
These companies want to create a friendly image
towards the consumer that buries behind
all the abuses that are part of our lives.
And we knew that if we bring this message that injustices
are going on behind the food that everybody's eating,
companies would have to respond.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers started
what we call the Campaign for Fair Food.
We created alliances all over the country.
Students were organizing in support of the workers.
So we were able to bring the power of consumers
to be part of this fight for our rights.
One of the most encouraging developments
has been the emergence of consumers
who want to reform the system,
who want a more humane system, a more sustainable system.
But it doesn't always work.
Because they're up against such powerful corporations
that they can be thwarted at every turn.
For example, one of the most brutal conditions
under which our food animals live are female pigs,
who spend their lives in a “gestation crate,” it's called,
that is barely bigger than they are.
The voters of California voted by a significant margin
to outlaw the sale of pork
from animals that were living in gestation crates.
And the industry would not let that stand.
So they took it to the Supreme Court,
where they nearly succeeded in getting this law tossed out.
So we have allowed these giant, consolidated food companies
to accumulate so much power that they exercise a veto
over the consumer and over the voter.
They have also perfected the art of obfuscating
the role of the meat industry in climate change.
No single food contributes as much
to global warming as cattle.
And in fact, one third of greenhouse gasses
are produced by the food system alone.
That's second only to transportation.
But we're up against a very powerful industry.
The food industry spends more on lobbying
than the defense industry.
That has bought them
an incredible measure of power in Congress.
But there are corporations out there that fully recognize
that the consumer wants to see
a different kind of meat industry.
The question is, what are these corporations
gonna do with this?
Is this gonna drive real change or the appearance of change?
I was a professor at Stanford.
My job was basic biomedical research,
just trying to understand how cells work, how genes work.
I had a sabbatical, and I decided
to use it to try to figure out what would be
the, uh, most impactful thing I could do, uh, next.
And, uh, very quickly, I came to the conclusion
that it's to completely replace animals in the food system.
Even if we just replaced cows,
we could give ourselves a 30-year pause
in the rise of greenhouse gasses.
And possibly more important is that
the total number of living mammals,
birds, reptiles,
amphibians and fish on Earth
is less than a third what it was 50 years ago.
The collapse in global biodiversity
is overwhelmingly caused by habitat destruction
to graze livestock or raise crops to feed them.
And you see it happening in real time,
when you watch the Amazon burning
to expand animal agriculture.
So, I quit my job at Stanford, a job that I loved.
I felt like, “Okay, well, I got to do this.”
You're not gonna solve the problem
by trying to persuade people to change their diets.
That's never worked.
You just have to realize that people aren't gonna stop
wanting meat, we're just making it the wrong way.
My first challenge was to understand
what makes meat taste like meat.
The answer was that animal tissues
contain very high levels of a biomolecule called heme,
and it turns on the chemistry of meat flavor and aroma.
We've genetically engineered a yeast cell
to make the heme directly.
Pat Brown's not making
a big health claim for his products.
It wasn't designed to be a health food,
it was designed to fake the meat experience.
So this is your not-so-secret ingredient.
You can taste it if you like.
We've done a lot of work thinking about
how to bind the burger together,
and we needed to make it something so robust
that you could stick it on a grill and flip it without...
- And it wouldn't fall apart? - Wouldn't fall apart,
and, you know, you can make meatballs with it...
So, what was the breakthrough?
- Can you share that? - Um, you know, methylcellulose
was a really big improvement for us.
- Sounds like a tree product. - It is a tree product.
Cellulose comes from trees.
Um, it's a really abundant molecule in the world.
- POLLAN And where do you get it? - I think it's a byproduct
- from a lot of the paper industry... - Mm-hmm.
- Mm-hmm. - And, uh...
wood pulp?
It's cleaned up enough that it doesn't taste like w-wood pulp.
- I'm sure not. - Yeah.
This is a facility
that has none of the horrors of a slaughterhouse.
I think we have a plant-based food,
with a fraction of the environmental footprint
of covering the planet with cows.
You can make a case
that the Impossible Burger
represents a good alternative to meat as we now produce it.
It doesn't have hormones in it, no antibiotics in it.
But make no mistake,
this is built on commodity agriculture,
and it's an ultra-processed food.
So there are trade-offs.
I like a burger experience as much as the next guy,
and if I can have it without implicating a cow
and all the problems that come with cows,
maybe that's a good thing.
We are at a very interesting moment.
Food science is being dedicated to a nobler goal
than it has in the past:
to move us off of a heavy meat diet,
onto a more plant-based diet.
The Impossible Burger is now
in every Burger King in the country.
There's a willingness on the part of the consumer
to experiment with these products.
But they're... questionable.
Um, they may solve one problem and create another.
I think the thing that troubles me most
is the implication that this is health food.
Because the phrase “plant-based”
has a, has this aura of greenness,
of health, and that is deceptive.
My relationship with food
is complicated.
Very complicated.
Because I have type 1 diabetes.
You know, I think most of us love food,
but we don't have to think about it every day, every hour.
I measure my blood sugar before and after every meal,
and the simpler I eat,
the more level my blood sugar is.
As a journalist,
I am very much interested in new foods.
...been able to extract proteins from it.
I needed to find out how they were made,
find out what it might mean for my own body.
Is it clean label? Like what does it...
- As clean as it gets. - Yeah.
Our products are 95% mushroom roots,
with some flavoring.
We've got this super salmon filet
made entirely out of plants, without hurting a single fish.
I worry that
these new food companies,
um, are following the footsteps of Big Food
with foods that are empty calories,
high-impact on my blood sugar.
Now, what are the proteins that you're producing?
That's something we can't talk about it, kind of right now.
These founders of start-ups
have compelling ideas that they're so passionate about.
So, at Sundial Foods, we're making
plant-based chicken wings with only eight ingredients.
And you are the founders of the company?
We're both cofounders.
We actually met in a class in UC Berkeley,
so all of this started as a school project.
The new food has become
the cause for every tech investor.
They want something in their playbook
that speaks to saving the world.
- We-we produce dairy without a cow. - Okay.
So, we've made molecular coffee.
We're the first ones to make it without coffee beans.
So, it's uh, world's first uh, real honey made without bees.
Some of these start-ups are raising
hundreds of millions of dollars.
Tyson, JBS,
Hormel, they've all invested
in alternative meat companies.
But what happens down the road?
These big companies are only thinking about their profit.
What's it going to be like for the everyday consumer
walking through the supermarket?
How will they navigate the new landscape?
So now, food made by scientists
has led to cultured meat.
Meat that is the multiplication of actual meat cells.
This really is meat.
So this is called EPIC.
When I was practicing
as a cardiologist, the question was,
what if I practiced for the next 35 years?
I would likely be, you know, involved
in saving 3,000, 4,000 lives.
But what if we could start
saving trillions of animal lives
and also, positively affecting billions of human lives?
When I was working at the Mayo Clinic,
we would have patients that would come
with a very large heart attack.
So we would take stem cells from that patient
and we would reinject them into the heart,
to regrow the heart muscle.
That's where my idea came from,
of growing meat directly from animal cells.
I always want to know,
“How does this product connect to the farmland,
to the earth?”
What's its relation to nature?
Here, you're not on any kind of farm.
You're back in a lab
manufacturing a broth out of amino acids.
So, any of these cultivators here
- can grow chicken or beef... - Yeah.
- ...or pork or... - The same cultivators...
- Essentially. - ...depending, and you can put
- different things in them. - Any species.
Essentially, we've got a couple of tanks here
that are holding the-the feed for the cells.
And, uh, we have recipes of nutrients
for each type of animal that we're making.
- There's actually chicken in there. - Yeah, there's chicken.
Imagine that this is outside of the...
this is the body of an animal.
- Right. - Inside of it, there's cells that are growing.
Those cells are doubling every 24 hours,
and after a certain number of doublings,
you have a lot of cells in there.
In a, in... for instance, a cultivator like this,
every five days you can have a batch of meat.
Meat of the future could be local,
it could be regional.
Just like you go out and see beer being made,
you can also go and see how your meat's being made.
Mm-hmm.
This is all chicken.
I was gonna ask you about the ingredient label.
It'll be “chicken cells.”
So, when we started off,
that small piece would be a couple of thousand dollars.
And the challenge is to make it at a cost that is affordable.
Ultimately, in five to ten years,
we'll be able to get the prices that are very similar
to what people will be used to paying for, let's say,
- an animal that is butchered. - Right.
Could've fooled me.
In fact, we were fooled.
We subsequently learned that the chicken breast I sampled
did not come from the tanks we were shown
but from a more costly and labor-intensive process.
The technology to produce whole-cut chicken at scale
is not as close as the industry would have us believe.
If alternative meat products can help shrink
the industrial meat system, that'd be great.
But I think there is a place for animals
in American agriculture, in any agriculture.
When it's done sustainably and animals are used
in such a way that they're feeding the soil,
feeding the plants.
Uh, that you have this closed loop
of animals and plants, recycling nutrients.
That's a sustainable farm to me.
So I don't think the goal needs to be eliminating meat,
but we sure need to shrink the meat system.
There's no question about that.
Last Friday,
I resigned, uh, from my position
as a, uh, Pioneer seed rep
so that I can put a lot more focus
into, uh, this project that's called The Stock Cropper.
I think a lot of people will look at it and think,
Zack, you're completely insane.
It's probably a...
probably a well-placed, uh, criticism.
With The Stock Cropper, we've devised
a farming system that is truly regenerative,
good for the soil, good for the environment...
...in a more positive direction for the future of agriculture
than the one we're currently on.
This barn is mobile, so that our animals
are always passing into fresh ground, fresh pasture.
So we have our ruminant animals out front,
uh, like my friend the sheep here,
and what their job is to do is to be the lawn mowers
and mow down the pasture and process that vegetation.
And then, following behind the sheep and goats,
we have the pigs.
The pigs graze on what's left, and their snouts
are essentially our tillers to kind of move the soil around
and incorporate some of the manures.
Our animals are our manure spreaders
as we move through the field.
And then, the annual pasture is allowed to regenerate.
What we're in right now is only about
three weeks since it was grazed and we already got regrowth.
So, the beauty of this system is we're putting livestock
back on the land, but we're doing it in a fashion
that holds nutrients in place
so they'll be available to next year's crop.
You know, this system is completely different
than the conventional system I use on the rest of my farm,
where we have to replace a lot of the things
that these animals are doing naturally,
uh, with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
And the end product is a higher quality,
tastier meat animal.
Something that's a premium product
to add value to my farming operation.
Well, Zack,
until recently, you were a Pioneer dealer.
That's correct, I was.
- But you gave it up? - I did. I gave it up.
You gonna take a hit on your income, then?
- Yeah, for sure. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Why would you do that?
'Cause I wanted to wake up in the morning
and believe in what I was doing.
I see the path that...
what the current commodity game is on,
and it's a path that, uh, it doesn't do a lot of good
for the things I'm passionate about, which is the land
and water quality and c-communities and...
Um, I could've kept on doing that same stuff,
uh, or I could've said,
“I've got this alternative system and maybe
this will provide some opportunity,”
and I s... you know, you only live once, take a chance.
And so, what will the old boys think when you, when you say,
“I'm gonna have goats in a cage...
...and give up my Pioneer dealership?”
I-I'm just happy that I can provide entertainment
and something for them to talk about in the coffee shop.
That's my contribution to the community.
Oh, that's good. Yeah. - Yeah.
It's my way to give back.
So this is what I mean by “Iowa bullion.”
You know, there's a lot of places in the world
that would kill to have dirt like this,
and that's why I want to keep every inch of it here,
uh, on my family's land where it belongs.
Not blowing in the wintertime, into the ditch.
Or not, you know, washing off,
you know, through the low spot into the crick.
This is, this is what, this is...
- this is wealth right here. - Right. Right.
Well, I mean, the corn looks beautiful, really.
Yeah.
There's definitely an excitement
about The Stock Cropper.
I've attracted a lot of other people
that farm weird, uh, like myself.
We're gonna walk down through this path here,
if you follow me.
Okay, so this is the-the original system.
We basically did sheep and goats out front, pigs behind.
You can barely smell these hogs.
Outside a typical hog confinement building,
you'd be retching right now.
When you explain that the animals
are feeding the plants
and the plants are feeding the animals,
and it's all happening in this one space,
you can see the looks in their eyes.
They got what we were doing.
So now the moment, uh,
that we've all been waiting for.
The new Clustercluck Nano here.
In order to really, truly be scalable,
you have to have the ability to have autonomous movement
without being here.
This is solar-powered, electrically driven,
on a programmable basis.
This is a big deal.
And I've got folks that are really interested,
but they're also skeptical
because they see the challenges to scale this up.
1898, we had a tractor.
- Yeah. - We could use it.
Took clear till the '50s, 1950s,
- to get rid of the horses. - Right.
So, I mean,
you're dealing with a crowd
- that does not like change. - Yeah.
And that's okay, but change comes eventually,
and we're hoping that we're...
betting on the right, the right horse, so to speak.
The biggest issue right now
is that the big four meat companies
have essentially blocked the path
for independent producers to process livestock.
And what we need is a shift in policy that makes possible
smaller and regional packing facilities.
That will open up the floodgates
for farmers to get their products to consumers.
My passion in this is to create a system
where there's more farmers out here like myself
being able to feed their family with...
instead of thousands of acres, maybe several hundred?
And produce high-quality food products.
That's my dream.
All right.
Here we go.
I used to be a fisherman
chasing fish around the globe.
tuna, herring,
lobster, cod.
It was great,
you know, fishing day and night,
being in the belly of a boat months at a time.
The problem was, I was fishing
at the height of industrial, extractive
food production.
Huge trawlers with half-mile nets
ripping up ecosystems.
And so, we got too good at what we did.
The answer everybody told us was fish farming.
I was gonna help feed the planet
and I was still gonna be able to work on the water.
The smell of fish was still gonna come home with me.
So I went out to these pens, and I'm pulling them out.
And it's neither fish nor food, they got a grey color,
there's sea lice on them.
I swear to God, they're stupider than regular fish.
And so, it's borrowing all the bad practices
that are happening on land.
Heavy use of pesticides, antibiotics.
This was industrial pig farming out in the ocean.
So I ended up just really trying to figure out
how do I be a steward of the sea
and switch from pillaging to regeneration?
I asked the ocean,
What does it make sense to grow?
And it says, “Why don't you grow things”
that don't swim away,
that you don't have to feed
“and that breathe life back into the ocean?”
So I decided to grow kelp.
I mean this is an embarrassing thing
for a fisherman to do, right, growing plants underwater?
When I first came down,
I was getting l-laughed off the docks.
I lied to people, told them I was growing hemp underwater,
which seemed like it was a little better.
You can see the white buoys out there in the distance.
That's our ten-acre farm.
Below the surface, we're able to pack
so many crops along that vertical water column.
We have our kelp at one level, then we've got our mussels
and our scallops and our oysters and clams.
The power of the ocean is that I don't need to fertilize
like a corn farmer.
You don't need tractors,
you don't need buildings, you don't need to buy land.
Every one of our oysters, all our kelp,
also is restoring our ecosystem.
An oyster filters 50 gallons of water a day.
And our kelp soaks up five times more carbon
than land-based plants.
I really believe that kelp
is gonna be the most sustainable food on the planet.
As a chef, I'm always looking for new ingredients,
new flavors.
Kelp is amazing
because not only can I use it like an herb,
but also, I can sauté it really simply the way I would spinach.
Kelp dolmades.
Trying new things just needs
to become the normal
instead of something that's outlandish or weird.
You know, sushi wasn't even widely accepted
until relatively recently.
Kelp is affordable, it's nutritious,
and it will absolutely be a part of the future of food.
The question is what kind
of industry will we have going forward?
Is this gonna be about thousand-acre farms
owned by a couple global companies?
Or is it gonna be about thousands of ten-acre farms
dotting our coastline?
Replication, that's what's powerful,
not consolidation.
There is another way here that we can be proud of.
We got really good at fishing, right?
Too good. Maybe we'll really get good
at solutions this time around.
Here in Florida,
the Fair Food Program has implemented agreements
with growers from the agricultural industry.
Now, there is a code of conduct
that guarantees that the abuses that happen
will not be tolerated.
Workers are protected to speak free of retaliation,
and they receive a bonus at the end of the week.
So it's an increase in wages.
When we signed the Fair Food agreement,
I got some pretty nasty phone calls
from our competitors/friends in the industry.
Does it impact my bottom line? Sure.
But doing the right thing, running a clean business,
is always gonna cost more than breaking the fucking law.
Today, 90% of the tomatoes
being produced in Florida
are covered by the Fair Food agreement.
And 14 corporations
that buy from these growers have signed onto it.
But not everybody has come on board.
Wendy's decided to actually cut purchases
from growers for adhering to the Fair Food Program.
Instead, they went to Mexico to buy from mega-farms
that do not respect the rights of the workers.
If Wendy's were to join
the Fair Food Program and pay an extra penny a pound
to farm workers, it would cost maybe $500,000 a year.
It's a tiny portion of their annual revenue
and might increase the cost of a Wendy's hamburger
by 1/30th of a penny.
There are other corporations
that refuse to participate on the Fair Food program.
But if they would sign on to it,
then we would see an increase in wages of almost double.
And now, the Fair Food Program has become the blueprint
for labor relationships in many other parts of the country.
In Latin America,
many countries are making progress
to reduce consumption of ultra-processed foods.
In Chile, they use black warning labels
saying “too much sugar, too much saturated fat,”
too much calories.
And in Mexico, for instance, they say,
if a product has a warning label,
they cannot have anything other thing
saying the product is good.
No health claims.
In Brazil,
every day, we have 40 million meals
prepared in public schools.
The Brazilian dietary policy
is that real food is essential.
Cooking is essential.
And basically, avoiding ultra-processed foods.
Children that have access to this program,
really are acquiring healthy eating habits.
DANIELA CANELLA
This program promotes the demand for healthy foods.
The municipalities, they are obliged by law
to buy unprocessed and minimally processed foods.
And they should buy 30% of food from local family farmers.
Come on guys, get in line.
Normally, school districts
purchase food from a distribution company.
But the Camden city school district
is now providing food
direct from the farmers to the table
right in our school cafeterias.
We have asparagus fries today with Parmesan and...
It's so successful.
There are more students selecting salads than ever.
There was a time where they're gonna walk past it,
get a cheeseburger, get tenders, get whatever.
To be able to serve fresh, fresh, fresh produce,
straight from the farm,
it makes all the difference in the world.
It makes them want to come to school.
Yeah.
We're partnering with
The Common Market to build relationships
with our local farmers.
So those were grown on farms near here.
We saw there needed to be a link
that connected communities like ours with the abundance
of farmland and the abundance of good food
that's grown in our region.
It's largely federal policy
that is supporting these large, multinational companies
who are selling cheap and processed food.
Programs like ours demonstrate
the kind of policy change that we want to see.
Policy that's beneficial for both farmers in rural places
and urban consumers.
Buenos días.
So, you feel good about the hearing today?
Yeah.
The coalition around these nutrition issues
has grown from family farmers to civil rights activists
to environmental justice people.
They see this potential coalition
that could really make real change.
- Good luck. - Thank you very much.
I'm now the chairperson
of a powerful subcommittee on nutrition.
And I want to be a part of letting people know
a lot of these pressing realities that moved me
to want to deal with our food system.
So it's a tremendous privilege
and responsibility to focus Washington on an issue
that I believe is at the center
of human life, American life.
Now, let's be clear, the majority of our food system
is being now controlled by just a handful
of big multinational corporations.
These food companies carefully forment... uh, formulate
and market nutrient-poor, addictive,
ultra-processed foods which now comprise two-thirds
of the calories in children and teens
in their diets in the United States.
And these companies want us to believe
that the resultant diet-related diseases,
such as obesity and diabetes, are somehow a moral failing.
That they represent a lack of willpower,
or a failure to get enough exercise.
That-that is just a lie.
It's a lie.
And so, I believe we need to rethink
the way we approach food and nutrition policy.
Our lives literally depend upon it.
By fixing our food system,
we will create health and well-being
in-in every aspect of our lives.
But the forces of Washington right now are really invested
in sustaining these broken systems.
Because it's creating big profit
for very powerful interests.
Tyson Foods, in the last quarter of 2021,
their net income rose from $469 million
to $1.2 billion, that's one quarter, okay?
; I've got a piece of legislation
right now to put more transparency
on those big meatpacking companies
and have a special investigator with subpoena power.
Make sure these folks aren't doing antitrust activities.
But make no mistake, there's gonna be a lot
of money thrown against me.
They're gonna say, “We're not gonna let
some bigmouth senator from Montana stop us.”
And so, bring it on, guys.
How'd the hearing go?
- Really well. - Yeah.
Now we're being filmed doing an illegal activity.
We're jaywalking here.
I think the light's gonna change for us maybe?
You think so?
Sometimes the law has to catch up to where you are.
That's right.
I really think that this is
a moment in history where we can expand
the innovations going on in the American food system
to show people that there's a better way of doing this.
It's all doable,
it's all fixable.
If we tackle the big problem of antitrust
and agricultural policy.
We need to change the incentives,
so the government is subsidizing healthy calories,
not unhealthy calories.
Just imagine if the government decided
to step in on the side of the consumer and the citizen,
rather than on the side of the big food companies.
We had a pandemic
and saw how brittle things were.
So let's create resiliency
by empowering the folks that raise their food
in our local and regional food systems.
The future doesn't have to be
cornfield after cornfield.
If we want to see change happen,
we have to change agricultural policy.
We get the right policy,
and we'll start taking care of our soils,
which in turn makes healthy food.
Like, it's not rocket science.
This is our chance
to chart a new course.
We can actually grow good food, create good jobs,
while we're also healing the planet.
And that's sort of the world I-I'd love to live in.
- Fifteen! - Stand up!
KC!
I want to see everybody
treated fairly.
We are the ones
that make this company successful.
- Who runs this Taco Bell? - We do!
I want to see life.
I want to see people living life,
not just fighting to survive.
We can have a food system
that produces healthy food for consumers,
that provides a safe workplace and decent wages to workers,
that treats animals like they're living beings
and not industrial commodities,
that treats the land in a way that's sustainable
and not destructive.
We not only can do it, we have to.