>>Female Presenter: I'm Liv Wu. I'm an executive chef. I know a lot of you. I'm just delighted and honored to be introducing
Joel. He's a hero of mine and a hero of a lot of
us on the food team. I'm not going to say a lot except to say -- to
tell you that this morning I was playing around on his website – the website for Polyface
Farms. It's really a cool site to visit foodie or
no or greenie or no. It's full of fun and full of really serious
stuff. And stuff that makes you think hard. But of course I went to the -- I clicked on
the buy turkey link because it's, you know, seasonal and we just created -- if you guys
didn't know -- an ability for us to group by heritage and organically raised turkeys
that will be available to all of us through Google Green Grocer. But I clicked on "turkey," and there was all
of this wonderful language that so Joel. It's wonderful white skin, buttery, moist. You know, it was a great sale. And then, the last piece was a disclaimer
that says 'we will not ship. We don't ship. Please go to your local farmer and buy your
turkey there. And not only that, we suggest you go to visit
the farm before you buy the turkey' and I just went 'huh'. That is exactly what we do on the food team
here. This is what makes us able to bring you great
food and makes our consciouses clear about what we're doing. You may try to drive an electric car or hybrid
car, but in fact, what you eat and how that food is produced is contributing hugely. as much as if not more than, the car you drive
to our environmental footprint. So I love the turkey link. And just with that I will give the floor to
Joel. [applause]. >>Joel: Thank you. Are these yours? [chuckles] I need them but they're not mine. All right. Well, it is a real distinct honor to be here
at Google and I do feel like a fish out of water because I have what is called 'anti
technology karma'. [laughter] Anybody who shows me how to do something on a computer
when I do the same functions, it doesn't work. Took me ten minutes to get out of the parking
lot at the Hilton this morning up at Burlingame because the room key card would not work in
the -- you know, I watched the other cards in front of me all go through, put it in and
run out, put it in and run out, mine it doesn't work and so the gate doesn't come up. So it takes me ten minutes to get out of the
parking lot. That's just the way my life is, you know. But I sure can make dancing earthworms. [laughter] >>Joel: And in the continuum of things probably
most of us, historically and in the future, will be far more dependent on dancing earthworms
than working key card slots out of a Hilton parking lot. So -- and as my life has gone, on I have found
myself more and more kind of -- I call it archaic-- in our culture because we live on
a farm that is -- that has four generations living on it. My mother is a very healthy happy octogenarian
will be 88 this winter. She still rides five miles a day on her stationary
bike. Drives. Ballroom dances. Teaches English country dancing to people
and sings in the Happy Notes which is an old -- it's a group of retirees-- who entertains
and she'll pop in at our house and she drives to sing in this chorus at the nursing home. She says, "we're going to sing to the old
folks" and half of them are younger than she is. But and then of course we have, you know,
Teresa and I are there and our children are there and their children are there. So we have four generations on the farm all
living in a commune. It's quite dramatic. It's quite amazing. And we grow our own food. I feel like we just live in this nest of abundance. We live in a time when a lot of people are
concerned that we're teetering on the precipice of precariousness in a lot of things. You know, economically, ecologically, socially,
culturally. And so, to live surrounded by a tribe that
is devoted to a common denominator and surrounded by abundance. We like to graze. I like to walk through the seasons. We have mulberries and pawpaws and pear trees
and apple trees and grapes and strawberries and I just like to graze. I just have these visions of campuses whether
they're Google campuses or any kind of institutional campuses where all the ornamental landscaping
is converted to edible landscaping and you use your GPS technology to just let everybody
know every morning when you get up with a app the strawberries in quadrant 45 are ready
to be picked today. [laughter] The asparagus in quadrant 87 pick
some spears on your way to your office this morning. Why couldn't we do that? And the idea is to return us as a nest -- as
a nest to an ecological womb. Wouldn't that do a lot to take the edge off
of the fear and the concern that many of us have for some of the big picture items around
our world. You know, we could hook up the exercise room
to water pumps that would pump water back up on to the roofs of all of our buildings
that are growing strawberries and cucumbers. That way we don't have to have any air-conditioning
and it cools down our buildings so much we use our human power to pump the water back
up on the roof. And this stuff can be done. It's not out of the question. So, as I live the more live the more I look
at our culture and I look at the fact that we are if first culture in human civilization
that routinely eats unpronounceable food. You know, we're the first culture in human
civilization that eats food that you can't make in your kitchen. You ever try to make high fructose corn syrup
in your kitchen? We're the first culture in the world, in history,
that has ever put 1500 miles on average under every morsel of food. That's a long ways. You know, in 1930, one calorie of food on
the table took an average quarter calorie to get there. Today every calorie of food on the table takes
15 calories of energy to get there. I mean, these are hockey sticks graphs. And we all know that hockey stick graphs never
last. And so, what happened was -- I'm leading up
to why this book came out -- was that as I tried to describe looking for sound bites
of how do I describe what I think has sustained and rejuvenated and regenerated and formed
the glue for human existence for centuries if not millennia, what I found was that this
blip that we call "modern America" is extremely abnormal. And I run into young people every day like
you know -- it's so fun to talk to a group here at Google. You know, if I talk to a group of farmers,
you know the average farmer is now 60 years old. And they can remember, you know, a day before
supermarkets. Today most of us can't even remember a day
before computers. My first book -- I wrote on a typewriter. You know, when I was in college, there was
no computer. I wish you'd just think about this for a minute. I can remember when TV dinners were introduced. Can you imagine, you know, no microwave. I can remember a day when there was no takeout. I could remember when a salad bar buffet started
in restaurants. Started during Vietnam era -- Vietnam war
era. It was one of the biggest shocks of Vietnam
war veterans. They went, they came back there were salad
bar restaurants. [laughter] Where did this come from? It was like boom! It hit the culture. But these are new things in our culture. And as I would explain these things and how,
you know, when I was a kid if you wanted to stay warm in the wintertime you don't have
to worry about this in California but where we are if you want to stay warm in the wintertime
you had to get some heat in your house and so, we would cut wood. We had wood stoves and we would cut wood. And my wife has inherited her grandmother's
majestic wood cook stove that when she and granddaddy went to housekeeping in 1929, that
was state of the art technology -- this majestic wood cook stove that you put little kindling
on the side that's where your dish water got hot. It just kept hot water there all the time. You see all the old westerns and the baby
is getting ready to come and the doctor says boil water. The water was always there. It was always ready. That was new technology at that time. And so, I just started mentioning this as
I would describe these numerous things that we've come to today with supermarkets with
unpronounceable food, with computers, with the technology, you know, iPhones and iPads
and Google. that this represents an abnormal blip in human
history. And so, what is this glue that is normal in
civilization? And so, I want to just spend a couple of minutes
and we'll go right to questions and answer and discussion about some of these things
that I think have been -- are interesting. They're in the book 'Folks, This Ain't Normal'. It describes what I consider to be abnormalities
in our system. You see -- historic -- so I want to talk about
animals for a minute. Because animals are much-maligned in our culture. I got one chapter in the book the title something
like 'my aunt is my dog is my cat is my child'. And what we've done in our culture, as we
have Bambi-eyed and Disney-fied our culture, and we ascribe anthropomorphistic humanism
to animals and so, we have animal rights movement that has eliminated, for example, wearing
fur. When I was a kid, teenagers would actually
get their spending money by trapping foxes and mink and beavers and stuff. I'm not that old. I'm not that old! I'm really 80. That's what good food does to you. [laughter] People would -- you know, I remember
very well old-timers saying back in the 20s and 30s. You know, when I was a boy these are people
that are old enough to be my dad in a community, this is how teens got money to go to the movies
or get their first automobile or whatever. And fox skins brought 50 dollars apiece. Today they're less than a dollar so nobody
traps and a lot of places in our country now are having problems with kids with rabies. One in ten foxes has the mange because of
this explosion because we've extracted humans out of nature. And so, what was the role of animals historically? Let's talk about chickens. Historically chickens -- because everybody
likes chickens. I mean, chickens are like the most -- the
coolest of the farm animals. [laughter] So what was the role of chickens? Well, historically they didn't have garbage
trucks and landfills. And enough excess food to just throw it away. So chickens were a garbage disposal, salvage
operation in the homestead and the farm stead. That's what chickens were. And that's one reason why peasants -- chickens
were a luxury because there was no grain. Now, let me talk about grain for a minute. Because our culture -- when you think "farm,"
you tend to think "grain." That's what we think in our culture. In fact, we subsidize the U.S. duh Don't look
at me like you don't get this. The USDA subsidizes six types of grain annual
production. But in a day before cheap energy and machinery,
if you wanted to plow a field to grow barley or wheat, you had to walk all day behind ox
or a yak or a mule or a horse with a sharp stick and it was arduous work. And you know at the end of the day you looked
back and maybe the area of a size of this room you actually got torn up a little bit. And then you could go back and you could hand
broadcast seeds. Okay? And those seeds would grow. And then you had to hand weed those seeds
to keep the weeds out of them then whatever grew, you could go in with a scythe and scythe
it down and then put in a shock so it could dry. It actually ferments just a little bit because
of the uneven moisture drying of the stalk. And that's one reason why people now have
so much wheat gluten intolerance is because we're harvesting it so fast and drying it
so fast there's no tiny amount of fermentation that occurs in the grain, to change the enzymes
to digestible enzymes in the grain crop. Okay? So. You put it in a shock and then you took it
in to a hard floor maybe a wooden planks or beaten lime or rock or clay that you pounded
real hard. Anyway a hard surface and then you beat it
all right with a flail and then you would winnow it, all right, throw it up and the
breeze would blow through it and drive the chaff and husks away and then you'd get some
barley. Now carefully sweep that up and put it now
in a -- in something that you could store it away from rats and mice in a day before
sheet metal, before mesh metal, in a clay pot somewhere and hopefully that would last
you until the next year's harvest. Folks, there was not enough grain left over
to feed animals. That's why in the Bible, in Hosea, the prophet
talks about a harlot being sold for 9 and a half ephahs of barley. It's not because harlots were cheap. [laughter] It's because barley was expensive. [laughter] I'm trying to help us understand
here that this idea of cheap grain fundamentally -- fundamentally changed the role and the
place of farm animals that had been normal throughout history. And so, now suddenly we had all this grain
with our ability to tillage, machinery, cheap energy. And so, now we can go plow up with a great
machine. Suddenly the traditional role of a chicken
which was right next to the kitchen to eat the kitchen scraps and the, you know, the
peelings and all the stuff that came out spoiled food being in a day before refrigeration. Food spoiled what do you do? You feed it to chickens. And then chickens then in return then cycle
it -- the ultimate recycling agent-- and give us eggs in return. That was the traditional role of chickens. Today, we think we're great when we take our
banana peels and our waste from the kitchens, put it on a truck run with diesel power --especially
biodiesel-- and truck it off site somewhere to a composting operation and then people
can buy the compost for their house plants or little ornamental flowers. What really would be green would be to attach
a chicken house next to each cafe so that the scraps [applause] went right into the
chicken house, the eggs come right back in and now we don't have to truck the garbage
anywhere or bring the eggs from anywhere. That's what I'm talking about is normal, okay? So, I've just concentrated on chickens but
you could take every single animal. I'll do one more just to show where I'm coming
from. Let's take cows. All right? What is the role of herbivores in nature? Historically herbivores -- the bison on the
American plain. Today the wildebeest on the Serengeti, the
cape buffalo in Botswana. We Americans -- we modern day developed country
people-- are absolutely brain damaged when we talk about grass. When I say "grass," everybody thinks about
this close cropped lawn out here or a golf course, right? When I say "grass," what I think about grass,
is little house on the prairie when ma and pa wouldn't let the girls go out past the
stoop of the soddie lest they get lost. Lost? What do you mean? We think lost, the city beautification committee
would cite me for violating the ordinance for having an unkempt lawn. No, I'm talking about glass, like if you go
today to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, they've preserved a 2-acre native prairie
patch they used it with fire. This grass is 12 feet tall. It's more than half an inch thick at the stem. It's thick as hair on a dog's back. I still get chills every time I talk about
it. It's an absolute biological biomass soil building
carbon sequestering cathedral. [laughter] And you walk out in there in this
12-foot tall grass. I mean, taller than the lights in this room,
okay? And it's over your head and it just blocks
out the world. And then to imagine this rustling waving mass
of biomass for hundreds of miles out through the prairies. I mean, it is unbelievable. And so, civilization -- civilizations coalesced
early on around grasses, perennials and herbivores because that was the only really nutrient
dense product that could be produced without tillage. Because when all tillage was done with a crude
stick or a wooden spade, it was too precious to do in any scale. And so, that's why lamb, goat, camel, cow,
yak -- all right? Became the centerpiece of civilizational diets
and fish all right? Because that could be fished. You didn't have to till to get seafood. And you didn't have to till to get the herbivore. And so, that's why that became the centerpiece
of dietary protocol in every civilization. Today, with cheap grain, we have been able
to abdicate this and plow up everything and confine the animals in houses where they neither
salvage nor do anything except for eat erosive, petrol chemical dependent, ecologically debilitating,
annuals that are subsidized by U.S. domestic policy to make cheap food in concentrated
animal feeding operations that have no comparison either ecologically or relationally or symbiotically
or nutritionally to their forbearers who filled a definite function in their ecology of the
ecological womb. So what we've been able to do is extricate
ourselves from this historic normalcy which was the herbivore is the biomass restart button. The grass grows in an S curve. You with me? S curve. The bottom part I call diaper grass. This is teenage grass and this is nursing
home grass. [laughter] Well, if my job is to take solar
energy and metabolize it into decomposable biomass, carbon sequestering biomass, where
of those three stages do I want grass more often than not? Teenage. Not nursing home into senescence and not diaper
into trying to toddle, but teenage all right? And so, if the grass is allowed to just grow
and get old and die, it shuts down the photo synthetic thing. If it stays very diaper-ish, it can never
really kick into high gear. And so, the herbivore was nature's way before
mowing machines and before cheap energy was nature's way of pruning the biomass to restart
the rapid biomass accumulation. An herbivore is an ecological biomass accumulation
restart button. That's the role of herbivores in nature, all
right? And when we go to grass finished beef, grass
finished lamb, we reaffirm that normal role of the herbivore ecology in nature. We're the first culture -- and I'm almost
done -- we're the first culture that views children as liabilities instead of assets. All cultures in history viewed children as
a blessing. Today we talk about the cost of raising a
child. You know, this is the first generation which
the average child has not had domestic chores. You know, kids used to grow up weeding the
garden, picking beans, helping can applesauce. Helping to cook. Today we call that child abuse. [laughter] >>Joel: And I would suggest -- and I know
I'm speaking into the heart of our electronic, plugged in, techno-glitzy world and so I'm
doing a dance with you here and I'm not a Luddite and I love technology. I love microchip, electric fencing and energizers,
UV stabilized, you know, canvasses and nursery and polyethylene black plastic pipe and stainless
steel and refrigeration and there's a lot of cool things we've got today, all right? But I want to tell you something. Human self-actualization, human self-affirmation,
I think, is actually encouraged and stimulated when we viscerally participate in the physical
elements of life. And there is no comparison with looking back
at the end of the day and seeing gleaming gleaming jars of fresh-made, canned salsa
for example, sitting on the shelf that you've picked the tomatoes and you've sliced and
diced and you've smelled it and you've been viscerally involved, touching, smelling, moving
it, and preserving it for the future. There's nothing that compares with the sight
and the ability to participate and have a visceral relationship with that production
on the shelf compared to being the top performer in the latest video game. One is just cyber. And we see it in our interns. We've had interns come out of Dilbert-cubicle
type situations. And they get there and they describe with
trembling lips and deep emotion that for the first time they were able to build something
that they could touch, sense, feel, and hear the voices of their team members in person. Powerful self-actualization. And finally, we're the first culture that
has devoted so much time and energy to a national food police -- the food police -- you know
about the food police -- we call them the food safety people. I call them the food police. Who, for the first time in human history,
have told a culture that you know it's perfectly safe to eat Mountain Dew, Twinkies and Cocoa
Puffs but that raw milk, compost-grown raw potatoes and Aunt Mathilda's pickles now that's
deadly [laughter] And so, I want to end -- because of this setting-- , I want to end with a thought
about food innovation. Because folks, what has become normal in our
culture I'm suggesting, you know, DiGiorno's frozen pizza, concentrated animal feeding
operations farms with no trespassing signs, food production models that you have to walk
through sheep dip and put on hazardous materials suit to go visit, it's not food worth eating
and it's created a toxic landscape. Just try living down river from a concentrated
animal feeding operation or from a mono-speciated spraying operation in the San Joaquin valley. We know about this. There are many of us who believe that much
of our pathogenicity, our type two diabetes, the fact that the U.S. leads the world in
the five chronic debilitating diseases of cancer and diabetes and these things. There's a reason why, that there's a connection
here because we lead the world in creating an abnormal food system. Now, if we're going to return our food system
and our landscape policy to a more normal sustainable regenerative system I would suggest
that it's going to require the same kind of innovation that Google enjoys today bringing
innovation to the world. How does innovation happen? It happens in embryonic prototypes. The beginning of Google is not a 15,000 person
campus in California. The beginning of Google is a couple wild ideas
with lunatics sitting on their little computers fooling around with stuff and dreaming and
thinking. But starting small. And so, what we've got right now is a desperate
need in our food system to free up the innovators at the bottom. Farmers like us that are returning with high-tech,
techno-glitzy stuff like electric fencing and 4 wheel drive diesel tractors, with front
end loaders and chipper shredders, large scale composting and all that kind of stuff. But taking that heritage normal biological
cycling with a healthy dose of appropriate technology, marrying the two together and
coming with an innovative anecdote -- antidote not anecdote -- antidote to the problems we
face in our ecology in our food system. And we have to be able to start from the tailgate
of a pickup truck; from an innovative kitchen in our homes. We have to be able to start there to access
our neighborhoods and our communities with innovative antidotes to what Wal-Mart and
Costco are offering us. And so, that's just as much as I'll say. You can ask more questions about the food
police. That's as much as I'll say right now. But it is absolutely an innovation thread
that runs through everything and that's why innovation always occurs in the economic sectors
of least governmental penetration. And that's why government regulation is stifling
true innovation and antidotes to the problems of society. And so, that's all I'll say right there about
the food police. We can go onto more questions and answer. I think I'd like to stop right there. That gives you a few tidbits of some of the
things that are in this book "Folks, This Ain't Normal". I think you'll find it a very broad cultural
and I think many of you when you look at, you know, the result of having a Manhattan
project for ammunition but not having a Manhattan project for compost. You'll get this wonderful epiphany that you
understand some of the wonderful things you've heard about elitism and we can't feed the
world will be set in their cultural context as we carry the past into the future. Because my belief is that the chances are
the next hundred years we will need to return to a more localized, truly solar driven, carbon
cycling, biomimicked, kind of existence than we have learned to enjoy in the last 50 years
as we have abdicated historical normalcy in our civilization. Questions? Comments, anything at all on how all this
works. [Applause] >>Male #1: Thanks for speaking today. So, I think I buy into just about everything
you're saying. But at the same time I think in order for
us to actually have the kind of change you want to have, we need more than just rich
Bay Area people pulling for it. I think the system is kind of stacked against,
you know, sustainable farmers and the real cost of, you know, factory pork isn't what's
reflected in the price but the fact of the matter is if I was spending most of my income
on food, it's hard for me to then also get what, you know, we think is better, more humanely
raised, and sustainably raised stuff. So have you any thoughts on how you get the
people who are not kind of us more bought into the system and make it possible economically
for them to do. People like Alice Waters can say everybody
can afford this stuff but in reality I don't think that's really true in every case. So how do we get people who aren't us to pull
for it, too. >>Joel: Your question is well stated. I think there are two issues here. One is how do we get more people to buy in
just philosophically after all a lot of people are still eating at McDonalds. And a lot of people still think they've eaten
a great dinner out of a box. I ran into a an art teacher in Washington,
D.C. she said I'm going to retire this year. Being a very astute male, I said you don't
look nearly old enough to retire. And she said well, I'm not. I'm frustrated. And I said why. She said because our first art project this
year and the first art project is to bring in a cooking pot. This is tenth grade. Bring in a cooking pot and draw it because
they come in different shapes and sizes and they're fairly basic and easy to draw. And so, yesterday I did the assignment and
all the kids looked at me -- 22 in the class-- looked at me like I had two heads and they
said, "we don't have a cooking pot in our house." Said "what do you do?" "We just open a box and stick it in the microwave." So I think the question is two things -- one
is how do we get more people to just buy into the idea that I should have a relationship
with my food you know. You know, we live in a culture in which people
are far more interested and passionate about the latest body piercing and hair style in
Hollywood than they are about what's going to become flesh of their flesh and bone of
their bone at 5 o'clock. And this is abnormal. Now, the answer to that is simply we have
to lead by example. And that's where this headquarters is leading
in the institutional edge by example. What you've done here with your meal plan
and with all these -- with sourcing and all that is leading. I call it leadership and that's what needs
to happen is leadership by example. But the second part of your question is about
the high price. And essentially it is the charge of this is
really an elitist movement. This is really about elitism. Now, when anybody ever comes up to me and
talks about the price -- that they can't afford this food -- I know this is very unpolitically
correct. You won't find very many politically correct
things in this book. My first response is: right now we'll get
in your car and it better be a cheap car not an expensive care and we're going to go to
your house or apartment wherever you live and this is what we're not going to see in
your house because you can't afford this. This is what we're not going to see. We're not going to see any sodas. We're not going to see any alcohol. We're not going to see any a tobacco. We're not going to see any coffee or tea. You really can live without those things. We're not going to see TVs or iPods. We're not going to see lottery tickets or
Disney vacation cruises. We're not going to see hundred dollar designer
jeans with holes already in the knees. [laughter] We're not going to see -- are you
with me. >>Male #1: Yeah. >>Okay. Here's the thing. The fact is very, very, very few people have
no choice about how to spend their money. And I would say -- and I know again it sounds
very uncharitable--, but I would say instead of us sitting here today picking the lint
out of our belly buttons stewing over how to deal with maybe the 2 percent who really
have a problem, let's instead look around and say, "well, all of us that can, what's
my problem? What's my excuse?" And the fact is if the 98 percent of the people
who could do something would do it, it would so fundamentally change the fringes that the
argument would change in a way that we can't even imagine. You know, it's like people with a 4-acre suburban
lawn coming together at their garden club meeting and stewing about, you know, the 4-child
single mom in Harlem that can't grow a garden. Why don't all you people grow a garden? We got 35 million acres of lawn in this country. 36 million acres growing food and housing
and recreational horses. That's 71 million acres. That's enough to feed the whole country without
a single farm. So the point is every one who can should. And if everyone who could would, it would
so fundamentally change the parameters of the argument that we can't even imagine the
innovation that would punch out the other side. And, if it became more normal again, a lot
of things would happen -- economies of scale just regular things that happen when something
becomes more normal. Next question? Yes. >> Male #2: Hi. I'm from the big island of Hawaii. I have a farm and a community there. We've had -- we integrate chickens. We make biochar. We generate all our inputs. It's all very lovely. >>Joel: Wow, you are weird. Okay. >>Male #2: Yeah. Yeah. >>Male #2: A lot of us here are technologists. And sometimes when technologists get into
the carbon, we geek out on agriculture. >>Joel: Absolutely. >>Male #2: Anyhow. Ultimately though, like many people in agriculturally
sustainable parts of the world, it's not economically sustainable. We weren't able to for instance build a house
for our growing family. So like many many families one of us has to
leave and go to the city -- or Google in my case -- and be either wash cars of rich people
or be a software engineer -- my case -- and send the money home to the farm. This is like -- it's a -- it's common. It feels -- it's tragic in a way. I mean, I would love to be there with my chickens
and grass and everything. But is this -- could you say some words about
the people who have to leave the farms to make it work? Because the system is stacked against actually
doing it the right way. >>Joel: Yes, yes. Well, if you would like me to, I would say,
" bless you my son.." >>Male #2: Thank you. Amen. >>Joel: But in actuality, we haven't gotten
where we are overnight and we won't get out of it overnight. And as you know, all innovation requires disturbance. We know that. All succession, all, you know, freshing up
whether it's for ideas, technology, policy -- it all requires disturbance. And so, what you're going through in your
life right now is the disturbance of an innovative idea that you have brought to your home, your
family. Chance are you didn't grow up on a farm. Chances are you have this green bug in your
genes somewhere, you know? Both Gen and Jean. You have this thing that is wanting you to
move forward that way. And a lot of people do. A lot of people really want to do something
with their hands as a craftsman or an artisan. And I think our culture has failed the blue
collar craftsmanship of our age by worshiping just intellectual, academic, cerebral pursuits
without appreciating the balancing groundedness that calluses and not to mention immunofunction
occurs when we assault our immunofunction with exercise with calluses and splinters
and dirt under our fingernails or grease or whatever. And so, what you see, then, is you see people
with physical, visceral hobbies whether it's building sailboats or gardening or doing something. We've got people now learning to cut meat
in big cities. It used to be like big Tupperware parties. Now it's meat-cutting parties. [laughter] Because people want to get in there
and touch it, sense it. It's the Lexus and the olive tree phenomenon. And so, in a place like this you see it very
acutely. And so, I think what you're trying to do is
absolutely phenomenal and laudable and I think there are principles that hopefully -- I wrote
a book "You Can Farm". >>Male #2: I read it. >>Joel: That can hopefully help stimulate
some creativity in how to jump start that forward. But at the end of the day what you're trying
to do is leave a legacy that has moved us innovatively in some direction. And maybe you won't accomplish it completely
even in your lifetime. In fact, I've heard, if a vision can be accomplished
in your lifetime, it's too small. My dad used to say, if you don't suck a seed
just suck and suck and suck until you do suck a seed. So just keep after it. And remember that anything worth doing is
worth doing poorly first. We've all heard Grandma. We come do adulthood. You know we're children and we're willing
to experiment with things. And we come to adulthood and we become paralyzed
with analysis and fear because we can hear Grandma over our shoulder, "if it's worth
doing, it's worth doing right." And the fact is, nobody does it right the
first time. Nobody. I mean, it would be equivalent to, you know,
to going to a family shindig and here's a little toddler and the first time Janie tries
to stand up, she gets up on a chair she's wide eyed, "Oh look Janie's starting to stand." Of course she gets this great big grin, she
loses her grip on the chair and falls down on her diaper and all the adults gather around
and say "Janie, if you can't walk any better than that just quit". [laughter] We don't do that do we? We say, "oh, wow, she's doing." And the fact is all of us toddle first. And so, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing
poorly first and just be encouraged by that and keep going after it. >>Female #1: Your answer to -- so Kevin's
question was more or less -- there's a lot of people out there who can't afford to eat
well and your answer was well they can afford to eat well they just choose not to. So how do you change the mind set and convince
them that it's something worth doing as opposed to something that's not worth doing. And I have a second question which is, if
you were king for a day and could change three policies or behaviors or do three things to
fix the U.S. food system what three things would those be. >>Joel: Oh my. You moved this question -- okay. So we'll go to your king for a day one. Yeah, because I do believe that it is a mind
set. I did a class for a college. It was a real elite girl's private college
on global food issues. The professor of global food issues wanted
me to come and be a guest lecture. I said, "let us do something different. Get us a classroom with a cooking range in
it. You go get some salsa and some good local
artisanal cheese. I'll bring some apple juice from our neighbor's
biological apple orchard. I'll bring some eggs and some skillets okay? So we went in there and I did omelets for
these college students. You know, sixty-second omelets. And we had the salsa; we had this cheese. We had this apple juice to die for. It's cold pressed; it's got an inch of sediment
on the bottom. You have to be careful eating it because you
could guzzle it and ooh, I just ate six apples. And you have 24 hours to work through this
event. [laughter] But anyway, we did these wonderful
omelets for a buck 50 a plate in two minutes per. So I asked the students. I said so -- because college students are
always forlorn no money, no time, blah, blah, blah. I said so how many of you watched a movie
this week. All of them. How many of you put money in a vending machine
this week? All of them. Okay? See? We live in a culture that's all about victimhood. Victims, victims, victims. I mean, and we're hard wired to remember what
stops us not what makes us go. That's why we call them stoplights and not
go lights, okay? So we dwell on the negative. We dwell on the negative. And so, the positive part of the question,
if I were king for the day what couple of policies would I do to really move this forward? Ooh, that is a big one. The first one I would do, is to eliminate
all farm subsidies. All subsidies. All these things that -- and you know what? There are a lot of things that aren't overt
farm subsidies. They're kind of sweetheart deals. You know, things that, for example, make it
cheaper to bring a container load of apples from China than pick apples from our own trees. Because that's, you know, if you use -- because
of all the laws regarding that. So I would certainly eliminate all the subsidies. The second thing I would do, is amend the
constitution with a food emancipation proclamation. [laughter] And I would grant every citizen
of the United States. And I am dead -- it's funny but I am dead
serious about this -- I would grant every citizen of America the right to food freedom
of choice. We do not have that in our culture. And the Food and Drug Administration now,
in response to several suits filed by the farm to consumer legal defense fund, which
I call the NRA of food choice in our country. And everybody should join it because I want
it to be as big as the NRA. Because you see we've been granted the freedom
to own guns, worship, assemble and speak. Well, what good is it to have those freedoms
if you don't have the freedom to choose the fuel to feed your 3 trillion member internal
community of beings that fuels you to go, shoot, pray, and preach? [laughter] It happen only reason that our
founders did not give us the freedom of food choice is because they couldn't have imagined
a day in which you couldn't, you know, buy raw milk from your neighbor and California
has now, you know, incarcerated these three folks down in Los Angeles for having the audacity
to take their herd share goat milk from their own animals off the farm and drink it in their
own homes with their own families. Now, folks this is tyranny. And we're supposedly fighting tyranny around
the world with our military while our own USDA food police sends swat teams out to farmers
and confiscate food out of domestic freezers to keep families from being able to eat foods
of their choice. So I would emancipate food from its enslavement
by Monsanto's agenda. And anyone who thinks Monsanto is your friend,
think again. You know, we have trespass law in this country. If I came to your house or your yard and dumped
a bunch of garbage on your lawn that you didn't want, I'd probably -- the prosecuting attorney
would come against me for trespassing violations, right? But Monsanto can go and dump promiscuous pollen. Those are interesting words. [laughter] Promiscuous pollen that runs rampant
around the community creating sexual orgies in my plants with life forms of garbage that
I don't want and our country -- our own president -- our Democratic president thinks that I
should have to pay Monsanto a royalty for the privilege of their promiscuous pollen. This ain't normal. So. I would absolutely say, "you know what? You own you". And you can word it however you want to. But I would say every person is now -- if
you want to take responsibility for your own person hood and your own 3 trillion member
of internal community of beings, you can do it. You can do it. [laughter] You know. Now, if you don't want to and you still want
a USDA stamp on all the food you eat to certify that it's gone through the industrial food
fraternity, that's fine with me. And you will find me -- I will not be picketing
McDonalds. I will not be picketing the World Trade Organization. I will not be picketing Monsanto. What I want is to let we native Americans
who honor heritage indigenous foods to be able to eat it and for you to be able to buy
it. And if we did that, folks, if we did that,
you would see an explosion of cottage industry and domestic food systems like you cannot
imagine. Everywhere I go around the country. This is a very unusual group for me to talk
to. My bread and butter group have been sustainable
ago groups farmers and greenie type food people. And everywhere I go there is just this almost
like a bull in the stall at the rodeo right before they let him out or a horse right before
the horse race. There's just this chafing at the bit ready
to make egg noodles or quiche from my garden produce or lacto-fermented sauerkraut or charcuterie
or artisanal cheese. There's this -- people are just nuts about
this. But in between them and their neighbor and
you is this huge food police that says, "Oh, you can't make pickles in your house and sell
it to a neighbor, that's manufacturing. You live in a residential community." So I have a lady in Texas that told me she
got fined by her homeowner's association because there's antifarming language in her homeowner's
association and she grew a tomato plant in her vegetable, I mean flower garden and that's
farming. So we have created -- we have taken our western,
Greco-Roman, reductionist, linear, compartmentalized, fragmentized, systematized, disconnected,
individualized, parts-oriented, kind of thinking to an unbelievable philosophical apartheid
and I think that those of us who want to come back together in a more eastern holistic,
we're all related, and let me own my own body -- those of us who want to do that and live
in our tepees and have our medicine man and educate as runners instead of mathematics. Those of us who wanted to do that, should
be able to opt out of the greater cultural that normalcy may not vanish from this side
of our world. Question. >>Male #3: Well, how to follow that one up? So it seems that you're describing a really
wedged situation here with the laws and how the money flows. And you know one of the characteristics of
a wedge like that is that the people who are benefiting the most are the beneficiaries
and they have power. How do you break a cycle like that. >>Joel: How do you break a cycle? Well, that's why I didn't say -- see? Notice I didn't say if I were king for a day,
I would shut down Monsanto. See, a lot of my friends would say that. If I were king for a day I would outlaw concentrated
animal feeding operations or I would outlaw -- you know what I'm saying? Or I would outlaw genetic modification or
whatever. You see? I didn't say any of those things. I really believe and I think I'm at home in
this company here to say this. I really believe that the greatest innovation
and the greatest opportunity is when we allow people to self-actualize their own individual
expression. That's why on our farm we create habitats
to preserve and enhance the pigness of the pig, the chickenness of the chicken, and the
tomatoness of the tomato. It's in that environment of phenotypical distinctive
expression that you capture the essence of the person and the essence of the gifts and
talents they bring to the table. And so, yes, it is a wedge. And that's why I think rather than try to
regulate out and cherry pick what we don't like and regulate that out. If we just allow the people -- I mean, right
here the people who want to eat differently and buy differently and by one meal at a time
create a different landscape for their grandchildren. If we allow them to do that, it would just
completely topple Monsanto, Tyson, Ciba Geigy. The only reason they're able to enjoy their
position at the top is because they're protected from competition at the bottom that is absolutely
-- that has absolutely jumped ship. You know, very few people I think really trust
Kraft Food to take care of them anymore. We've been there, done that, okay? And look where we are. We've exchanged 18 percent food costs and
9 percent health care to 9 percent food costs and 18 percent health care. We've been there done that. Just like people who are looking for breast-feeding,
Lamaze, home schooling, free food in an institutional setting. Who would have dreamed of this five years
ago? Who would have dreamed of it, okay? This is indicative of an entire desire to
not entrust the current powers that be with my body, my food, and my being. And so, what we need to do is just free up
that -- free up that move, okay? Let it go. And that's what scares the current big players
to death. But that's where I'm coming from freedom from
the bottom up not from regulation top down. And that's the difference. >> Liv Wu: I love finding this. And I want to read it and have you comment
on it. You call it "scaling up without selling your
soul." [reading] "Many successful entrepreneurial
startups morph into Wall Street empires that lose their distinctiveness and in the process
the business chews up and spits out its workers and founders in a mad scramble to dominate
something. Does middle ground exist between the calm
talking stick circle of indigenous circle of eastern tribal cultures and the mad scramble
frenzy of western capitalism. Or perhaps more to the point, in light of
recent Wall Street and economic developments, what values are more important than growth? Especially since cancer is growth." Please talk about this whether it's the food
chain or larger. >>Joel: Sure. What she just read is something that I wrote
actually. You didn't say that I wrote it, but I wrote
that in response to -- I'm going to be very personal with you as our farm grew and as
our business grew we saw small entrepreneurial endeavors like ours be gobbled up. Look at organics today and look at the take
overs of the little innovative organic players in the game and they've been bought up by
the big food companies. We got scared frankly because we didn't want
to get gobbled up like this and sell our soul. And so, we developed a ten-step value statement
for Polyface farms that is a totally anti-Wall Street empire-building capitalistic value
statement that I gave first to Fortune 500 middle managers at the Innovation Immersion
Summit in Phoenix, Arizona about five years ago. And I've given it several times. It probably should be a book. But as we looked at what is it that defines
us as a opposed to a typical, you know, a typical like global, Wall Street-type, capitalistic
corporation? There were distinctive that came about. And I won't give all ten of them to you but
I'll give a few. The first one was so we resolved ourselves
that we would never have a sales target. No sales target. We don't measure success by sales. As soon as you start measuring success by
sales or you create quotas or you say we want to be at this stage by such and such a date,
this many customers, this many sales. As soon as you do that, you begin looking
at people as commodities to buy, sell, and trade. In my scramble to the top of the heap. You know, notches in my hatchet if you will,
okay? And so, we want sales to be an organic -- almost
a serendipitous outgrowth of quality and service. And so, we don't assume -- this brings me
to my second segue. The second one is: we will never advertise. All growth, if it's going to be, has to come
from satisfied word of mouth. Now, it's fascinating to me that even the
companies that spend 2 million dollars for a thirty-second Superbowl ad still get 70
percent of their customers according to business journals by satisfied customers -- word of
mouth. It still works. And so -- and that is certainly a mantra here
at Google. It works. So we don't assume, if sales drop off, we
don't assume we're not spending enough on advertising. We assume that we must not be giving the quality
or service or whatever. Okay? In other words. And what this does is instead of immediately
making us look outside, it makes us look inside and we think that's healthy for the organism. Another one is that we will never patent or
copyright. Whoa -- talk about anti-Wall Street. Here's the deal. We want to be lean and mean. And if we never patent anything, then that
means, we have to stay lean and mean to stay ahead against the copiers. And if we can't stay one stride ahead of the
copiers, then we don't deserve to be in charge. Because really, all these ideas are just gifts. And I know -- boy, that's a real big one,
okay? Especially since this morning I was reading
about Steve Jobs and the antipathy between Apple and Google and I'm watching all of your
Apple computers here. [laughter] And realizing a lot of Google money
bought Apple computers. So anyway, the idea here is that innovation
really in a lot of ways is just -- is very much a stroke of blessing, genius and epiphany. And so, the innovators should be sharp enough
to stay a little bit ahead of the copy catters. So those are just three. But there are ten of these that we have identified
-- one is defining our -- a fourth one is defining our market. We won't deliver more than four hours away
from the farm. Because four hours out and 4 hours back is
about as much as one person can drive in one day. Which creates an ability for transparency. We don't want to ship anywhere. We want people to come to the farm. We have a 24/7, 365 open door unannounced
policy. Instead of a no trespassing sign, we want
to put up a sign "trespassers will be impressed." [laughter] And that's our commitment to transparency. We're not concerned about copy catters. We're not concerned about diseases, because
our animals have an immune system. [laughter] We want people to come and viscerally
participate in this so that, when we sit down to dine to this intimate experience of dining,
there is a partner we've danced with prior to meal. And that creates integrity. Maybe one more question -- what's our time
like? One more and we're over? OK, one more. >>Male #4: Thank you Joel for everything you
do. Really really appreciate it. You mentioned the power of word of mouth. And that's definitely something we're working
on here at Google and aiming to make it better at. We've announced some things that are coming
along those lines. I think you'll find some people in this room
and this company that will be very willing to help you get your message out. Given your difficulty with the swipe card
at the hotel this morning is there anything we can do as a individuals or as a company
to help you get that message out. >>Joel: [chuckles] Thank you. I would say well for one is -- that's one
reason I like to write. Because to me, that is a way -- and this is
by the way available on audio and Kindle, you know -- this book. But to get this kind of thinking penetrated
into our culture. But you guys -- when you said you want to
help, you have a great big voice here. You have a huge voice. And your voice to bring balance can be extremely
powerful. And so, I think that individually in your
ripple of influence, you can add things to the pot whether it's how you eat, where you
recreate, what you do, what you value as a individual and then as a corporation, as a
business. There are certainly things that you could
do -- like you're doing -- more of the same. And continuing to use your purchasing power
-- I mean, I'm hearing about buying whole animals. That's a big deal. So the cafes have to work together. This one does T-bones this one wants meatloaf
and so you get together and you use the whole animal. And you use some blemished fruit. And you use some blemished tomatoes. Maybe Google could start a cannery here. Maybe you could have some canning classes
and take this one step further in domestic food preparation to stimulate domestic culinary
arts. Because ultimately this big change is not
going to occur -- I mean, it can't occur just with the farmers and just with the food preparers
or chefs or processors. It ultimately has to penetrate to the way
we live so that our homes -- rather than just -- and our kitchens -- rather than just being
a pit stop between everything that's important in life out there actually become an epicenter
of how we live, use our lives and our economic commerce that we domesticate our values. And that is something that all of us can work
on. And that's something I'm sure Google can continue
to work on when I hear about 3 hour commutes and that sort of thing. And so, you know, telecommuting, working from
home, those kinds of things are ways to move that -- to take this information economy and
move it to the next step which is the regenerative economy. That's the next step we've got to go. We've been the agrarian, we've been the industrial,
we've been the information, now we've got to move on to the regenerational economy. Okay, everybody. Thank you for letting me visit with you. [Applause] >> Joel: Now, may all of your carrots grow
long and straight. May your radishes be large and not pithy,
may your drip irrigation never spring a leak. [laughter] May your kitchens be places of
aesthetic, aromatic, romantic sensuality. And may we all commit ourselves to making
the world better than we inherited. Blessings on all of you. Thank you so much. [Applause]
