It Can Be Done Live: The Future of Our Food

[Music] hello everyone thank you for joining us please feel free to say hi in the chat and tell us where you're watching from tonight my name is nate gasmere i am vice president and director of the regulatory transparency project for the federal society this is our fourth and final movement program program for the new documentary this can't be done it's a great film and we've brought together a fantastic panel tonight rtp and just add firewater are excited for a great conversation on the future of our food between the secretary of agriculture sonny perdue ceo and co-founder of eat just josh tetrick and co-founder and ceo of whole foods market john mackey our moderator this evening is anastasia bowden asia is a senior attorney at the pacific legal foundation where she challenges laws that restrict economic freedom and free speech in addition to litigating anastasia frequently testifies before legislatures and her writings have been widely featured in many national outlets anastasia earned her ba from the university of california santa barbara and her law degree from georgetown law school for the complete bios of anastasia and all our speakers you can visit our website regproject.org that's reg project.org a final note for our audience if you have a question for the panel please send it to us through the chat and we will ask it at the end of the program with that anastasia the floor is yours hi everyone thanks for joining i think this is the last scheduled panel on the film but it's certainly not the least in fact i may be biased but i'm partial to this panel i hope by now you've all seen the film and if not i commend it to you it is an optimistic joyful celebration of the power of human creativity and it's really hard to stay down when one considers our capacity to innovate our way out of emerging problems the film is deeply important to me because it is my job to represent entrepreneurs in constitutional challenges to anti-competitive regulations but i think the film has something for everyone come for the lab-grown meat stay for the beautiful filmography and i think the theme of having something for everyone is reflected in who we have here on the panel entrepreneurs in the food space and also someone from the government tasked with protecting the public so with that i will introduce our panelists first we'll hear from the secretary of agriculture the honorable sonny perdue secretary perdue is a former farmer u.s air force captain agribusinessman veterinarian state senator and two-term governor of georgia in 2017 he became the 31st united states secretary of agriculture and with that i suddenly feel very under accomplished secretary perdue's priorities are informed by his experience living and breathing the exhilaration of a great crop and the despair and devastation of a drought he learned by experience what his father told him as a child if you take care of the land the land will take care of you secretary perdue has a beautiful full biography on the department of agriculture's website and i recommend taking a look next we'll hear from josh tetrick josh is the ceo and co-founder of eat just a san francisco-based company on a mission to build a food system where everyone eats well eat just combines a world-class team of scientists and michelin-starred chefs to create delicious accessible healthier and more sustainable products eat just has been recognized as one of fast companies most innovative companies in food and social good entrepreneurs 100 brilliant companies and times 100 new scientific discoveries and of course josh and eat just were featured in the film and then we'll hear from john mackey co-founder and ceo of whole foods market john built whole foods from a single store in austin texas into a fortune 500 company which now has more than 500 stores and 95 000 team members a strong believer in free market principles john co-founded the conscious capitalism movement and co-authored a new york times and wall street journal best-selling book entitled conscious capitalism liberating the heroic spirit of business he's now focused on taking whole foods back to where it started with its emphasis on promoting healthy eating and lifestyle choices before we get started please remember throughout to type your questions into the question box and at the end of our discussion nate's going to hop back on and read some of those questions to our panelists with that secretary perdue i leave it to you well thank you good evening to all of you uh are you can you hear me okay we can hear you i think uh it looks like it looks like secretary we might we might have lost your video i don't know if any can everyone else see the secretary there we go we got you back now really uh no we're good well thank you very much and i'm glad to join you all tonight i think uh the fact that we're very blessed in this country and that we are essentially food independent and farmers and ranchers based on their productivity entrepreneurship and innovation produce enough food to feed ourselves domestically here and many much of the rest of the world so i was thinking during the coronavirus task force if we were dependent upon foreign food it would have been quite dicey uh some of that time i think the very fact that we're able to talk about the future of food and have this conversation is because we live in this abundant country our free market economic system with a focus on innovation and not development has created great advancements in agricultural production and increased access to food i think the world has seen tremendous economic growth and population increases because developing countries have never before had such easy access to a safe and nutritious food especially animal proteins as well and i don't think it's ever been more important to build and protect on these uh on these issues going forward as the global population continues to grow we'll need to build upon the advancements we're if we're going to continue to lead the world in agricultural and food production the the farm is ground zero for this innovation has been incredibly successful over the last 75 years and now is the time to build off of our innovations and expand into animal biotech and cement america as the leader in agricultural prowess based in safe and affordable technology one example this is how the united states agricultural output has grown significantly over the past 90 years we've increased production of food and fiber by over 400 percent while accomplishing this with nearly 10 percent less land this abundance of food and many choices consumers have today when they sit down at the dinner table i think has led to a burgeoning market with lots of options uh there are many countries that love to have the choices that we have mary sends me to the grocery store and i have to call her because we got so many brands and things to choose from i've got a face time with her to find out which one she wants there when she trusts me not very often to go to the grocery store you know you'll find pro you'll find products there i never heard of growing up in fact when we did the cfap program the corona food assistance program there were commodities that i didn't know what they were i had to look them up and google uh what they were we're so so diverse and so abundant there so uh i think new restaurants and chefs are constantly trying to find new products and cuisines in order to attract a more educated and interested consumer i think again the social media it's a social media ages amplified all these choices it's great for the businesses who capitalized on these changes in the market it always amuses me to see millennials uh taking pictures of their presentation before diving in to eat and putting it out on instagram in that way but i think all of that is really a luxury of uh our affluence of wealth consumers to eat local and organic foods but those products i don't think will feed the world food insecurity we have in other other continents there americas spend about six percent of their disposable income on food and when i ask our chief economist to compare that with other developed countries we learn that french consumers spend about 13 percent of their disposable income on food so if you do the math if american households spend as much as the french do on food at home there'll be about an 830 billion dollar less to spend on other priorities so as wealthy choose these types of food it's important remember there are folks who can't afford to make these choices and they have to be able to purchase foods at affordable prices so this culture of choice has led folks to believe that in the normal conventional faith because of a a brewing marketing battle uh let me ask you i guess uh uh certainly the perception is is that organic is mortritious and more healthy than conventional foods in the in the past farming started out as a noble profession to feed ourselves and our families now foods produce from a marketing perspective and what can we grow that will sell the most when i like an old proverb i don't know if it's chinese or not but it goes like this when man has enough not enough to eat he has one problem when he has enough to eat he has many problems and we have created many problems in society today because of the our affluence and our choices and the reliability of our food supply so i'm a i'm a capitalist i'm a free economic free market kind of guy i believe marketing is all fine and good but when there are statements that are not based on sound science like the health benefits of non-gmo foods or that organic is better than conventional i think we run into those kind of problems i mean people from all around the world are falling behind that industrial agriculture is unsafe harmful to environment and less nutritious but i simply ask where's the evidence for that food in america has ever been safer yet we've never felt more unsafe our food is safe because of our food safety standards that lead the world really behind the usda and the fda the production of organic agriculture also has its costs to prove chemicals for organics like spraying copper are actually more harmful for the soil and more intensive than conventional agriculture so agricultural innovation is producing more food while using less inputs not reverting back to subsistence farming or other forms of agriculture that use more chemicals than fertilizers i think we in the industry as agriculture and food production missed the boat on the gmo labeling and marketing the organic industry has been very successful in using this as a tool to put fear in consumers it's not based on science and evidence so no one's gotten sick that i know of or evidence from a gmo food in fact i believe the opposite is true with the advent of gmo crops more people around the world have access to safe and affordable food and therefore reducing malnutrition in fact innovation can help us to be healthier as a society the great thing about biotechnology is the more you learn the more you realize there is to learn it's unending my vision from a biotechnology standpoint is we'll be developing food for health therapeutic we'll have medicinal food we'll have food that actually addresses the individual specific dietary needs to make us healthier not just nutritious in a general way but nutritious in our own general needs i think we need to see in the very near future frankly food is medicine and something it's really exciting about so right now consumers have never had more choices when they go the supermarket thanks to the innovation and success of american agriculture and we must work to ensure that remains the case by supporting american farmers and purchasing foods grown in america and by properly communicating our food is safe and wholesome so i look forward to other opinions and look forward to discussions certainly that's uh one thing i love about the film and about these panels is that we've had guests from a variety of perspectives and it's it's nice that we're able to uh to hear from all sides and i suspect you'll you'll hear some pushback from some of the other guests uh that josh i hand it over to you well i think we probably agree on a a handful of things too secretary good to be with you john honored to be with with you on this panel um i'll i'll share a little bit about my background and explain how i got into all this i i was raised in the south in birmingham alabama i thought that i was going to be a professional football player so if i was going to play for the university of alabama and then i was going to play somewhere in the nfl as a linebacker i had the chance just to play football for a bit at west virginia um realized uh about after maybe half a practice uh that i probably didn't have a future in the nfl because most folks were better than me but i stuck it out eventually buckled down academically got into sociology eventually went to law school and spent some time going back and forth living in nigeria south africa kenya and liberia and my work in sub-saharan africa was really non-profit focused international institution focused i spent some time with un uh school where i was helping get kids off the street in in the school in south africa and i found the um the whole non-profit experience in sub-saharan africa really frustrating i would uh i'd call home i'd tell my friends about it they'd think i was doing something meaningful and i knew that i really wasn't i was spending a lot of money on myself to feed myself to clothe myself and when we were looking in the metrics of how many kids were actually helping the numbers just weren't there and i was frustrated and i um went to the world economic forum for africa which is held every year at the cape town convention center and that's where i saw a quote from a book that really changed how i think about things that got me here there's a book written by a guy named c.k prahlad called fortune at the bottom of the pyramid and the premise of the book is if you want to solve the world's biggest problems use capitalism and it was the first time in my life that that had that very obvious truth to me had had been presented to me i had friends who when i asked him you know what do you want to do with your life they would say the only thing you can do if you want to do something good for the world is work for the government or or work for a non-profit i didn't realize that the energy and the force of capitalism in in many ways is the most effective force for change and i eventually moved back to uh to uh the u.s i had an ex-girlfriend who let me hang out on her couch for a little bit while i figured my life out i had a best friend who um was there right with me when i was trying to figure out what i want to do next his name is also josh and i said josh you know i feel like i should do something in business i don't think this non-profit thing's for me and he said let me tell you about the food system and he had been really working and reforming the food system with human society united states for a number of years and he told me about animal agriculture he told me about the significant volumes of soy and corn that we don't feed to the billion people that are going to bed hungry every single night but instead we feed to the animals we eat he told me about some of the environmental consequences and then i thought about how it was raised and i thought about the history of heart disease that i have in my own family the history of type 2 diabetes and i started to think well let me take control of my own life and let me do something meaningful to make the food system a little bit better but you need a place to start so we decided the best place to start was to look at a tool out there in the world that's grown by farmers that is almost um entirely underutilized and that's the plant kingdom but there are well over 350 000 species of plants all over the world growed by farmers in the midwest grown by farmers in africa and asia across latin america and far less than one percent of them are used to make our food better do we consume or use to make food products better and i thought what if we could use one or more of these plants that are mostly undiscovered to fundamentally change one of the world's most consumed animal proteins which turns out to be the conventional egg do we begin a process of screening through plants we eventually found a plant that at the time i'd never heard of before called the mung bean and it turns out the mung bean has a protein inside of it that gels at the same time in temperature as a chicken egg and then we eventually launched a product called just egg that were lucky as on shelves at whole foods and elsewhere across the country and then a couple years ago we began thinking about meat and we began investigating ways of identifying cells from animals whether across a bridge in marin in san francisco or on a farm in japan whether beef or chicken and we work with farmers to do that we identify cells from these animals we identify nutrients to feed these cells and then we're able to ultimately manufacture meat in a clean safe very tasty way and today we're we're doing that at about a thousand liters in northern california and i wish we were together because i'd give you a sample of our our chicken breast um so you could you say you could try it uh yourself but um got a team that deeply cares about making the food system better 150 people um and you know this is the the work of our lives um and we we obviously have a lot more to a lot more to go uh but it's uh it's an honor really here to be with you uh uh secretary um in particular you john uh you've influenced me in ways that you wouldn't uh you probably don't even uh realize uh but uh i i don't think i'd be here if not for your leadership so really good to be here with you well josh i'll uh i'll take a rain check on that chicken breast john how about you well hey thanks that was uh i feel deeply moved by uh what josh said so thank you josh uh you're one of the you're one of my heroes your innovations are changing the world and i think that's one of the things i want to emphasize here that um i'm forever being asked about the future here's the thing future is unknowable because innovations are not always predictable we innovate in in ways that we wouldn't anticipate so when people talk about the future they take what they know and they draw a linear thing upwards and they can never account for innovation and so innovation is continuing to accelerate it's accelerating in food and i think back in my lifetime and it's just astounding and i and i'm i'm sure the secretary perdue would tell you that how the different the world is today than it was 40 or 50 years ago it's astounding um some of the positive things that have happened that i think about how different like when i got whole foods going there was no local agriculture around austin texas back in the in the late 70s and early 80s it it it had gone to a mass market system in local agriculture it sees largely cease to exist and that's completely changed now we see farmers markets exploding everywhere we see local local production everywhere small towns have have uh farmers markets craft and food artisans have just it's incredible how many entrepreneurs are in the food space i mean i i think about when i was a kid growing up and a young man if you just wanted beer there was there was just you know there was budweiser and schlitz and i remember coors was the the craft beer of when i was a young man and and today every city in america has has craft artisan beer makers and the quality of beer in america which used to be a laughing stock around the world is now the best in the world there's no doubt about it i i it's just it's incredible what our craft producers are doing same thing with wine now it's the craft production of alcohol and vodka in in bourbon in tequila it's it's amazing what's happening there and then all types of of um it's it's just from let's take plant milks they didn't exist when i got we had no plant milks tofu was a revolution back in the late 70s and 80s in america and now we've gone to plant milks started out with soy milk silk made a fortune by putting soy milk on grocery shelves but now silk is just kind of a another product because almond milk came and took that over now oat milk is exploding it's it's just it's a fantastic what's happening and craft ketchup makers and salsa makers and every kind of food stuff pickles everything you can imagine is being we're bringing entrepreneurship innovation to it and transforming the food supply um what what josh has done with just is amazing when what's happening with what ethan brown has done with beyond and what impossible foods is doing bringing in plant-based products to transform and get products that taste remarkably similar if you try try you try adjust egg you know if you did a blind taste test you probably couldn't tell the difference same thing i think i i i have to confess i've been vegan for 17 years so i haven't had any any animal foods but for a long time but i do when i try beyond or impossible to me they taste remarkably similar to how i remember me so it's these are done by entrepreneurs that are fundamentally transforming the type of foods that we can eat and i think that's positive josh made mention of cellular-based meats what he's doing but there are other companies that are doing it i think it's going to transform the meat industry in the next 15 to 20 years because i think they're going to be able to do it cheaper and they're going to not need the same kind of land animal agriculture is is any way you slice it it's it's got a heavy carbon footprint it takes up we we mow down forests and we we take down the rain forest to plant crops that are mostly soybeans and corn that feed to livestock animals we won't need to do that any longer with cellular-based meats so the environmental footprint is going to be a lot less obviously animal cruelty will be a lot less as well on the negative side food revolution towards processed foods has been a complete health disaster and the statistics are astounding right now i mean this is i mean the whole world is there are some people that are going to bed hungry every night but they're increasingly disappearing and what's happening is the world's getting fat and america's leading the way we are now 70 percent of adults in america are overweight and an astounding 42 and a half percent almost 50 percent of adults in america are obese having a bmi above 30. and that's the trend line is not slowing i mean it's not declining we have not peaked it is continuing to get worse and as a result heart disease diabetes stroke cardiovascular diseases of all kinds are exploding and continuing to be a very a huge problem in america [Music] also the environmental impact of the meat industry cannot be underestimated is it is very challenging and hence the the the need for us to innovate towards these cellular-based technologies um unless america changes the way it eats and begins to eat real foods again as michael pollan caught it he caught it for the generation eat real foods mostly plants and not too much and if we don't change the way we eat then we're gonna we're gonna face a health crisis that we're not gonna be able to easily solve children today are obese at very young ages and it's not a nefarious plot of capitalism it's the choices people are making and the food addictions that we're all struggling with so um i guess that'll be my opening remarks i've probably got some controversial stuff out there that'll spark some conversation well thanks to you all and uh in thinking about your comments i was struck about uh what you said about craft kraft foods in general but particularly craft beer because there's another wonderful documentary that the federal society has done about the development of craft beer because actually that was stalled of course because of prohibition era regulations and just a small little change allowed people to start home brewing and then from that it kind of grew and grew and now we have these wonderful craft beers and so it's sort of a wonderful story about the power of regulation to foster entrepreneurship and how the american dream relates to american craft so i uh i guess in that case that was illegal entrepreneurship well yeah i mean as i would point out in the film right you know uber had to sort of break in in order to to get established because a lot of times there's no other way to get your foot in the door and then once the consumers like you enough um it's hard it's hard to roll that back josh i want to start with a question for you in the film we heard about eat just's efforts to create lab-grown meat and all the regulatory obstacles that you faced and in my experience representing entrepreneurs and small businesses sometimes these regulations are well-meaning no doubt about it but other times the laws are efforts by incumbent businesses that are trying to shut out the competitors through regulation can you shed some light on the biggest obstacles that you've encountered and to what extent they're well intentioned and to what extent they're motivated by essentially cronyism yeah there's a little bit of each i'll i'll start with uh i'll start with me now anastasia today you call it lab-grown meat but when it's made in facilities four hundred 000 square feet right clean coming off the the assembly line it's going to be clean manufactured large-scale meat right it won't be in the lab anymore uh but today the the usda and the fda actually in the process of setting up the regulatory framework for this kind of need um and i want to commend the secretary for thinking through this um we don't um we think the regulatory issues that relate to culture meet include everything from what you call it um we think it should be called meat secretary i'll propose my my my suggestion um the same thing as beef it's made an entirely it's made in a different way but there's an aiming issue right uh there is a um there's a safety issue right in the usda i need to feel good about others there's a process that we're undergoing that other companies are undergoing right now to make both feel good about the legitimacy and the credibility of the safety of it but the us is the only country that we're looking for um i think i think we might be having trouble hearing you oh um that's better okay well i'll just just in case someone heard a little bit i'll keep this one short um so there any number of regulatory issues for cultured meat uh one is what do you call it so our proposal would be what you would call it meat um just because you don't need to kill an animal to make it doesn't mean it's not actually substantively meat if you have uh a chicken allergy anastasia and i give you the chicken breast um you're gonna have an allergic outbreak right so it is substantively compositionally meat so we do think it should be called meat uh but that's one issue obviously proving the safety of it's a really important thing and i think that's an example of of regulation done well not not done poorly i think the work that the fda and the usda are doing right now to prove out the safety particularly in terms of the process of it um is well founded and we're really supportive of that we're also working in other countries too right in terms of doing this we're not necessarily just relying on u.s regulators to get over the finish line now in terms of uh our other product we make an egg that comes from a plant so it doesn't come from an animal which is the assumption people made from a long time an egg needs to come from an animal alright comes from a plant and we worked hand in hand with a with a very thoughtful fda on the name just egg and a statement of identity that says plant-based scramble so it gives consumers the awareness that it is from a plant so i think that's an example of the push and pull that you're naturally going to have between someone like me and my company that we want to go right i'm very impatient i want to i want to make this happen and and also regulators who are responsible for ensuring that it's done safely that it's done transparently and i think we've learned throughout the years to how to how to work successfully with them but you know still a long way to go yeah and i uh i didn't mean you're right clean me i should pay attention i i have no pejorative association with lab grow me i'm excited to try it one day uh but i i i will pay closer attention and clean me is a is a much better way of phrasing it um why would that i would say not even anastasia just think when we talk about lab grown meat right it that's only because it's a small scale right now we used to have lab made yogurt right but now now you you know whole foods have sold tens of millions of gallons of yogurt probably a week right it's not made in the lab anymore so i think that large-scale commercial transition will happen right that makes sense um john there's a healthy degree of skepticism towards capitalism nowadays and uh towards big business i think in popular culture so even in litigation i sometimes hear from the government when they're you know on the on the opposite side when we're uh suing them that they say that dog eat dog competition needs to be contained otherwise it's a race to the bottom in terms of wages and quality now you've written a book that is essentially a defense of capitalism and an explanation of why it's moral so can you explain that for everyone a little bit well i am i can try i did write a book so it's not a it's complex but um the first thing is that course that the metaphors we use to think about business are very unflattering dog you know we use war metaphors we use darwinian metaphors and we use sports metaphors they're almost all unflattering they all focus on hyper competition and whereas competition is one aspect of business it's not the dominant aspect of business the dominant aspect of business is creating value for other people you create value for your customers and you and in order to do that you have to employ people so you create jobs and then you buy things from a whole foods case tens of thousands of suppliers and you create value for them and you're creating value for the investors and they turn around and reinvest that capital in the in in other businesses and that helps the economy to flourish and prosper as well as benefiting the communities through taxes and through employment and through um the philanthropy so business is fundamentally creating value for other people competition is one small part of it so the dog-eat-dog world is fundamentally not true it's not really what's the most important thing competition is an element but not the dominant element and it's not the lens or the framework we should see business through business is fundamentally good because it creates value for other people no one's forced to trade with business if you don't like whole foods market and plenty of people don't right i'm always getting attacked for a whole paycheck this or whatever so you don't have to shop there you don't have to other people do we do about 20 billion dollars in sales now so somebody likes us but they're not forced to shop with us and plenty of alternatives in the marketplace and that competition by the way helps us get better forces us to innovate forces us to up our game lower our prices get more productive and we do the same thing for our competitors so competition actually helps the capitalistic engine improve itself no one has to work for whole foods we do pay the best in the food retailing business and we have great benefits and we've been named one of the 100 best companies to work for for 20 consecutive years whole foods are great place to work and so we have low turnover and people work with us for decades but nobody has to if you don't like it you leave our suppliers don't have to trade with us if they don't like what whole foods does or if we're on if they don't they they're not forced to trade with us we don't have any coercion nobody when we were public company for 25 years nobody had to buy our stock anybody was unhappy could sell their stock again they were voluntarily exchanging with us it's true of all the stakeholders capitalism is fundamentally ethical because it's based on voluntary exchange for mutual gain and it's not a win-lose game it's a win-win-win game all of these stakeholders are winning but they wouldn't be exchanging with the business if we just go back 200 years ago this is these statistics are true you can google it you can find out 94 of everyone alive on the planet earth 200 years ago lived on less than two dollars a day 94 that's down now below 10 and these are inflation adjusted the illiteracy rates were 88 now they're down to about 12 the average lifespan was 30 and now it's 72.6 across the world that's been capitalism that's been business that's been innovation capitalism is misnamed it should be called innovationism because it's capitalism that creates innovations that create the progress in the world and it's lifting humanity literally out of the dirt actually i'm i will say capitalism is the greatest invention that humanity's ever done to me it's not even close it has been the engine that's driving humanity to greater and greater prosperity greater freedom uh better lives for for billions of people longer lives better lives it's not perfect so you can always pick at it and criticize it because human beings aren't perfect there are they're unethical players in business just like they're unethical players and in medicine education certainly in government and politics so um business is generally judged by its worst actors and that's unfair it should be judged by overall what it's creating in the world so yeah that's a short cap i love capitalism and i'll defend it until i'm no longer on the planet yeah that brings to mind i once saw um euron brooks speak and he said charity is great charity has done wonderful things business has changed the world and that really stuck with me you know and how has business done it through competing and i always thought just like you said capitalism is better called innovationism that competition we need a new word for competition because competition implies some sort of win-lose thing when actually competition is good for everyone and so uh it's important to to think about our word choices and what associations we have with them secretary perdue i was pleased to see like i said earlier that the film includes a variety of perspectives not just entrepreneurs but also the people who are tasked with protecting the public the people who whose role it is to enforce those uh regulations and to get a perspective from them too before you entered public service you were a farmer and an agro-businessman and i'm wondering how your opinion of regulation has changed if at all now that you're on the other side of it well again i think at usda our role is really just safety it's about food safety and our motto is to do right and feed everyone i was unable to hear josh's response to your questions but i love john's response over the definition of capitalism that's really what we're about regulation has to be there to balance out those evil players maybe that may not want to play by the rules may want to cut corners may want to do things that are not healthy and safe and our challenge at usda is to keep a modern technology platform because it will always trail innovation as john was talking about innovation we can never be ahead of innovation because we're not innovators we are regulators in that regard but we need to be very uh up to speed over all the kind of things innovations that both josh and john have talked about regarding plant-based meat and other things that's one of the reasons that we work with fda on the cell cultured meat early on to determine the the protocols that would work when it be in the lab and when it would be harvested that way in order to make sure the public had access to uh safe healthy products to consume so regulation is important obviously i viewed as an entrepreneur you felt typically on most regulations that you could understand the purposes unfortunately there were some that i didn't understand the purpose and i thought as a country we were over-regulated uh in many ways and uh in those kind of things but for the most part i view agriculture in really a sustainability fashion of three it's got to be environmentally sustainable of course but it also has to be socially sustainable for people to be able to afford it then it has to be as john talked about capitalism it's got to be economically sustainable in order for people to continue to do that so regulations should balance those aspects of that in order for the public good to continue to have food when we talk about usda's motto is to do right and feed everyone that's just our motto we're not the ones that are feeding everyone the innovators and the producers and the creators of this amazing food network that we have so many choices are the ones that feeding everyone our goal is to allow them to do that safely and with modern innovation and technology i think uh the film takes a pretty fair perspective of regulation where it says that there is a role for regulation just that there's uh too much of it and oftentimes it's going to stifle entrepreneurship and i'm wondering what you all think the role is if any for the government in helping to foster new businesses or innovation well i'd love to respond to that i think again in february we announced our ag innovation agenda this week i was on the phone with the private equity investors in the food and space we want to be conveners we want to be again partners with the private sector helping to understand where they're going and what they're doing and what are these products coming along so that we can design regulation paradigms that will match what they're trying to do again all with the theme of safety and health in that regard so we want to be we want to be a catalyst at usda to help innovations come along whether it's plant-based or or cultured or other types of things that are coming and we were out at uh benson hill uh this past week over looking at different types of genetic engineering of different manipulation of many of those plant-based crops that josh had talked about earlier of how that can be even medicinal type efforts for uh for us from a health perspective i certainly agree with john over our obesity crisis uh in america and that uh that's what we're doing to ourselves so i think regulation needs to have the balance there that's what we're trying to do food seems to me something that's very vital to so many aspects of our life it's vital to the way that we feel obviously to our health and that translates to health care costs um to the land to the environment to jobs the treatment of animals and i wonder uh if you think it's one thing that it's an area that people aren't thinking about enough and uh what are the biggest obstacles right now in terms of of making food better for humanity um and how we gonna get there where do we need innovation most well if that's is that for me you would like me to answer that anyone who wants to answer it maybe i'll i'll i'll take that a crack at it quick i mean yeah i can't hear josh's i don't want to interrupt him is he speaking can you how about now is this any better [Music] i can hear this is okay you can hear me okay all right i'll uh secretary i hope i hope you can hear me um sorry about that sound issue so you know i think you know even look at you know look at the presidential debate we just had the other night how many times was food mentioned not one right food that is more than anything will reduce the risk of chronic disease right whether you're talking about heart disease whether you're talking about most forms of alzheimer's that we spent a lot of time talking about trying to put band-aids on something right and we spend very little time talking about very straightforward simple things we can do to improve our own lives right um and i think that should be talked about a lot more it should be talked a lot more in halls of congress it should be talked a lot more in classrooms certainly in medical schools um in families in communities and the responsibility that all of us have simply to eat better we don't have to make it that complicated let's just eat better whole plants as john said it's pretty simple all plants are good you don't need to eat a lot of it and that goes a long way towards mitigating chronic disease do what we need to do um and and you know listen are there many ways to get to a healthier safer more sustainable food system i don't think the only way is taking yourself from an animal and identifying nutrients and growing it or identifying a mung bean that scrambles like an egg we can also create a level playing field to grow kale in the same way that we grow corn as an example um so i think there are a lot of things we can do and i think what what gives me a lot of hope and i think uh what what john you know is touching on and what the secretary mentioned is that there's such a fire of entrepreneurship happening right now and from my perspective the more that the the government can not be a limiting step that's step one before we even talk about anything else let's just not limit the ability of farmers to do what we need to do let's create equal playing fields for someone making a a plant-based egg or a chicken egg or to grow kale uh instead of corn and i think we'll have taken a good step towards making this thing better john i wonder if you have a perspective on you know why people aren't eating better what is the the obstacle that to that is it that we need more education more public education about how food is it it's the way we evolved for most of our evolutionary history food was extremely scarce and secretary perdue made it clear that one of the great accomplishments of american agriculture was creating abundance for most of history food was not abundant it was extremely scarce so we evolved if starvation was our issue so we evolved to crave calorie density which was pretty rare you couldn't maybe you could pull down a uh some gamey animal from time to time but it's not the kind of meat that people eat eat today in general we we were up against it getting enough calories so we crave foods that have a lot of calories in them it's in our dna we love them and now we can have them all day long we can eat ice cream at every meal we can have pull the butter on our popcorn we can eat candy and candy bars and just super rich food lots of calories and we love it it tastes good and so that's what people do the heavy processed foods a lot of salt a lot of fat a lot of sugar refined carbohydrates and so we become addicted to them because calorie density tastes good and so we eat it and we get gradually get fat and fatter and fatter it's just kind of in the dna so we have to become conscious enough to choose a healthy diet re-educate our palates away from craving fats and sugars and salts and you know you can do it but you have to you have to you have to practice it you have to work at it it's not a nefarious plot by greedy capitalists it's not a it's just consciousness to choose foods that nourish our bodies and each person has to make that journey because we have to overcome our food addictions and that's not easy to do anastasia combined also with a very sedentary lifestyle our ancestors had to work much harder physically throughout their lifetime in order to feed themselves uh most of us now have a very sedentary lifestyle we're working remotely and uh sitting mostly we've even developed stand up depths so we can at least stand but that combination of that desire for calorie density food with a sedentary lifestyle is a combination for obesity hopefully a peloton and the innovation of a treadmill desks uh we're working towards something else uh josh i had a question on a lighter note i think the people want to know what happened to ian oh you're muted oh there you are um just tell me if you signaled me if you can't hear me anastasia um ian uh thankfully ended up at a farm sanctuary um across the bridge in the in the marin area so he's hanging out he's he was a good sport so we uh we thought you know best best to take them out of the system entirely and and give them a life on the sanctuary so that's where you can find them today so if if uh is can people still eat ian that the more of an example i think of what is possible right we don't need to live in a world where we have tens of billions of animals that are fed trillions ultimately pounds of soy and corn that require all of this land and all of this water we can actually say no to that world and we can choose a different world we can choose a world in which we can eat really tasty meat the best cake i didn't grow up eating lagging technology okay with cultured meat with cultured meat technology you can eat wagyu beef ultimately at a large scale at a low cost in in the long term um and that's the world that we can choose right and it doesn't just have to be one company doing it there are a lot of great companies out there that are doing it and you know we're fired up about it and ian was uh we like think one of the forerunners in in making this happen maybe one day there'll be a statue of ian somewhere i uh yeah i thought that was one of the most uh impactful moments of the movie and just you know not only from um a moral perspective and it's very stirring emotionally um and just also the incredible innovation aspect of it and how important entrepreneurship is and how amazing you know things you would never even thought possible i mean you can imagine 100 years ago if they knew that you could do that it would just seem like magic it is magic and i think that's it was a really poignant piece i'll get give give a shout out to my my filmmaker who did that to anastasia he like a lot of people that work for the company they of course they like that they're getting paid and they have equity but they really feel a sense of frustration at our food system today and they want to use their lives to make it better and they bring their own former creativity whether that's in biochemistry or computational biology or process sciences or or filmmaking to it so it's it's always good to see it come to life absolutely well nate did we have any questions from the audience we wanted to bring in [Music] yes we've had a lot of questions certainly there were a lot of uh people picking up on the obesity crisis and asking uh are there free market solutions is there a role for government specifically the usda to meet uh the obesity crisis i know we've talked about it a little bit but i just wanted to see if there was any other discussion we wanted to have in that regard well i would think again john brought up a great point this is personal choice i think anastasia would love to sue the usda if we started telling them what people should or should not eat if based on their taste so i think again from a health and safety standpoint that's what we're there for but the consumption of quantity and those kind of things obviously i don't think that's where people want government very good any any other comments on that i think we've covered it um i was gonna then pivot to the covid crisis i know the usda has had the uh farmers to families food box program i don't know uh mr secretary if you wanted to mention anything about that uh and its uh recent success i i think it surpassed over a hundred million uh boxes delivered is that right that's right just this past week we delivered a hundred bucks 100 million boxes and it was uh i think a real a sudden awareness of all of us and that over half of our food had been being consumed outside the home and when the crisis hit and all of our food service establishments shut down very very suddenly we had a dual alignment of supply chain food supply chain one that served facilities like john's through retail groceries and others served the food service establishments and that business was gone we had produce being plowed under we had milk being dumped we had animals potentially euthanized that way so we had to pivot very quickly and uh we our folks at usda came up with this process that would contract with the distribution system in the middle they would contract then with the producers and then we would use the charitable organizations of this country to deliver the food for to people in need that may have never found themselves in that situation before so i looked at it as a win-win-win we've been all over the country it's been widely acclaimed and people having access john to maybe vegetables they haven't been exposed to since a child so maybe we have helped to educate some people about uh how to eat differently in that regard uh going forward with the farmers to families food box but i think it's been a real try effect to win and we're we were honored to be a part of that very good and josh uh do you have a i might have missed it in the conversation but do you have a uh an idea of where cell cultured meats will be available in terms of globally uh first or uh green green lit by government uh well uh secretary we would love cultured meat to to be available first here um we we just gotta get it gotta get that regulatory framework over the finish line uh that that i know you and the fda are taking leadership in but that's certainly our preference right i would like nothing better to serve it at a dinery i used to go at in in birmingham alabama is the is the first place that we uh we put down our chicken if it's not here i think it'll likely be uh it'll likely to be one country in asia but we you know we need to sort out the naming and obviously need to ensure that we have a robust package so everyone feels confident and safe about the product um i'll just say i'll say a note on covet obviously it's not lost on anyone that next to each other right or on this call um and i saw kim kim i don't know what your last name is but kim says listen this talk it seems like you guys think all is hunky dory so i want to say something to kim uh because because i certainly uh and i know every everyone here doesn't think it's hunky-dory um that you know covey is zoey not at risk and we don't call covetous united disease enough and then when you break down the abstraction what it means when we say disease it just means that disease is jumping from an animal to a human and that doesn't happen by accident if it happens because of the actions that we decide to take whether those actions are large-scale deforestation whether those actions are encroaching on um other habitats of animals whether those actions end up being the way that global intensive animal agriculture ends up playing itself out and we can take different actions right we can take actions that significantly de-risk our food system and just like the health issues we don't always have to deal with everything as it's in emergency right um a stent is a perfect example of dealing with a thing on the back end right instead of the front end and we look we can look at zoonotic diseases in the same way and the answer to the both of those things from my perspective is the very simple straightforward responsible thing of putting healing things in your body instead of things that are harming and that's that more than anything that that's my wish and that's what i want to fight for john uh pivoting to you just uh questions about uh how your company has met the covid challenge and what you've seen in in terms of innovating the way uh market uh interacts with the public i know you told me any any sort of new investments at the company are top secret going forward but reflections on how your store has met the crisis well um let's start out by saying 2020s has been the worst year of my life and it's been a terrible year for for america it's been over 200 200 over 200 000 200 5 000 people now lost their lives from covid we've seen tens of millions of people's economic lives ruined through economic lockdown it's been a disaster and uh we can't get postcode soon enough as far as i'm concerned um in terms of whole foods we put safety first we've we've been repeatedly named as the safest grocery store in america during the copic crisis we were one of the first to do temperature checks put mandate mass for our team members disinfect our carts and our equipment that comes into contact as well as having our customers also wear masks so we've been very safety conscious but social distancing it's been difficult because we're humans we're social we're social beings we're social animals we need we need to connect with each other and i can tell you whole foods a very huggy culture and people you know nobody's hugged each other as far as i know for many months in our stores and uh you're always talking in masks and it's it's very very unpleasant and difficult i always think the company's made a lot of goodwill deposits in our team members for for decades and we're making withdrawals now and that's unfortunate it's hard it's very hard for the team members and we've done all we can to keep people safe but these are hard times and it's challenging for everybody and i'm just really want to get past this and begin to return to normal so very good secretary perdue uh question for you what are uh i guess the changes you're most proud of since you've been secretary over at usda and the things you're looking forward to accomplish uh at the department going forward well again when we begin uh we talked about becoming uh the most effective the most efficient and the most customer focused agency in the federal government i think we've worked on changing the culture to do that including we we we view our consumers as customers we view our producers as consumers everyone in that food supply chain that we learned a lot more about this year about uh how efficient and how effective it is but also how fragile it is based on these kind of things so that's what we're trying to do is to reach out and to figure out how we can fulfill that motto of doing writing feeding everyone in the most effective and efficient way possible that's what what we've done we've got a good group of people there uh mostly uh uh frankly pretty much apolitical in a large sense that just want to do right in helping people have good nutrition anastasia do you have further questions you'd like to ask the panel the only thing i was going to ask was if there's any particular innovations anyone wanted to mention coming up you know josh anything at your company going on or anything uh from the secretary or anything at whole foods anything that you're excited to tell people about because it's interesting and inspiring i'll i'll just uh i'll tell you one thing so um and again just note to me if you you can't hear me i'll speak up louder so every every year we come out with um an improved egg um and the thing about plant technology is it's only on day one so there's a lot of room to improve um we want to improve the taste and the texture and ultimately the cost and ultimately we want to get to a place where we have the most cost-effective egg on the planet the average cost of an egg globally is about 8.2 cents so we want to be significantly below that cost and we want to taste in a blind taste test um we want 75 percent of people to prefer it to a pasteurization um and we're launching uh version three um one of the first places that it'll land uh will be a whole food market before the before the end of the year and it's just the the continued um really good work of a group of people by company that are that are pushing hard and trying to trying to make the food system better uh in their own way so i'm proud to share exciting to me that we all have uh you know different roles different places and i think uh we agree on more than we disagree about so uh it's a pleasant way to end this conversation well before we do i did want to ask uh since we have the benefit of john mack on the line i know he's got a new book uh uh that just came out in september and it talks about how humanity can be elevated through business i wonder if you could share with us a little bit about uh that book john yeah i'd love to it's called conscious leadership elevating humanity through business and we need conscious leaders conscious leaders are leaders that put purpose first they lead with love they integrity in all things they they look for win-win-win solutions they think long-term they innovate and create value they're costly evolving their team they are continuously learning and growing their entire lives and to be a conscious leader is not easy because it requires a lot of inner work love is a skill it's not just an emotion and we can get better at it but we have to practice it we do not think win win win most people think win lose if somebody's getting rich somebody else is getting poor if someone else is succeeding someone else is failing there's good and there's evil there's light and darkness it's a very binary world view and it's not very accurate in fact we need to replace that with a win-win-win ethical system where everybody's winning we're taking we're taking everybody in america with us we're becoming more affluent we're we're becoming more equal we're making great progress and we need conscious leaders in business but we also need them in politics we need him in government we need them in education we need them in health care we need them in the military and if you think about it right now i mean don't you isn't it obvious that we need more conscious leaders i mean it's just so obvious to me i just i look out and i just see we're squabbling with each other we're tribalized we're we're calling each other's names we're bullying we hate each other it's just it's not very conscious at all it's it's uh it's it's so the book in some ways is very timely i'm very proud of it it's it's really a sequel to conscious capitalism you can't create a conscious capitalist society and you can't create conscious businesses if you don't have conscious leaders you can't have conscious leaders unless people are willing to do the inner work to develop themselves into conscious leaders and so the book's full of practices and i'm very proud of it i hope some people will buy it and read it i think it'll probably change the way you think about things if you do very good john john you mind if i john you mind if i ask you a question um i haven't it's it's uh it's on my next book to to read list on my kindle um i so i i haven't i haven't read it yet but in terms of the you mentioned inner work a few times and how this is it's about work it doesn't just it's not just going to come to you are there one or two um examples of that kind of inner work that have been the most relevant for your life well they're all relevant because there are a lot of almost every practice that's in the book or practices that i've done or do but let's just take chapter two which is lead with love which i think is one of the most important chapters because love is something that is not common in our corporations because again they have this hyper competitive war it's all about winning competition type metaphors and so love is seen as weakness so we check it at the door we create work environments that are not very caring we don't bring our full whole selves to the workplace and i'm not talking about romantic love or sexual love i'm talking about the love that we have for our fellow human beings so yeah some of the way to understand love is to understand that it's a set of skills and we develop those skills in things like um generosity you can practice generosity you start small and what you find is that it feels good to be generous and so it feels good because that's a win-win you're helping others and they appreciate it and so you as you develop generosity you get more skilled at it or gratitude is another one that is easy to practice in fact if you want to be happy in life start with gratitude i first thing i do when i wake up in the morning is i do a gratitude practice it is amazing to be alive we we're not here that long life is short life is it the world is incredibly beautiful we get to move touch feel see hear love learn grow it's incredibly beautiful they're amazing people yeah gratitude practice that every day and watch out transforms your life i'll do one thing on appreciations this is something whole foods does we end every meeting we do at whole foods with appreciations they're voluntary nobody has to do them but when you're appreciating someone authentically you cannot do that without opening your heart so the action of appreciating actually releases love in your team and your group and of course if you've received an authentic appreciation for somebody it's really hard to stay kind of judgmental of that person angry you start to reevaluate them you know maybe i misjudged josh he's really quite a nice guy he's really uh thoughtful and kind and i think i want to be friends with them so appreciations can completely transform your organization if you practice them and we practice them in whole foods and it's part of our secret as an organization but there's also care and compassion and most importantly forgiveness we need to practice forgiveness because we nurture all these petty grievances in our hearts and all these little judgments that keep us from being able to forgive and so we we trap ourselves in our own sort of poisonous world of anger and pettiness and grievances and hey i see it right now we need forgiveness big time in america because there's so much anger it's just incredible angry people are and how they're yelling and screaming at everybody and righteous indignation that is you're not happy when you're doing that you will that's not love and forgiveness can release all that if we'll practice it and we have forgiveness practices so that's just one chapter but i promise you every chapter has got a number of practices that we can do and you will become more skilled if you'll do the practices another you know malcolm gladwell says that i think that's malcolm gladwell that said if you want to master something you have to give about ten thousand hours to it okay i'm saying that for conscious leadership if you want to be a constant leader you're gonna have to give about ten thousand hours to it because you're not going to read a book and it's not just ideas you have to change your inner being and you will do that if you will do the work and we need leaders that were willing to do that work we need conscious leaders in america it's how we're going to get to the other side gang we're going to have to find the higher ground that unites america if we don't do it we're going to tear ourselves apart we have to go back into love we have to find win-win-win solutions and we need people to stand up and do it we need conscious leaders who have the courage to do these things that's why we wrote the book very good well we're coming up on a hard stop uh but i i do want to say what an honor it is to have all you and especially uh secretary perdue to have you with us i i i'm happy to give you the last word if you'd like to uh finish us off with anything no i think john just gave us a great sermon and i uh [Laughter] and that's uh that's the way i do that but i talked about forgiveness and compassion and gratitude and all those things i think i read a book a long time ago about those things and it was written a long time ago so i love to hear that and i think we would be a better society if we all did that and practice it you can't read about it and not practice it and get it done so thank you john i look forward to reading your book thank you for secretary perdue i'd be a great honor if you read it well thank you all secretary perdue anastasia josh john uh to our audience we welcome your feedback on tonight's program by email at rtp readyproject.org a final note that the free link you receive to the film is good through this weekend so if you haven't watched it or think someone else should watch it please send it along you've just got a couple more days and again thanks to all have a great night you

Channel: The Federalist Society

Views: 200,007

Rating: 4.130435 out of 5

Keywords: #fedsoc, federalist society, conservative, libertarian, fedsoc, federalism, fed soc, food, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, innovation, regulation, end hunger, hunger, world hunger

Id: bVS9tgsPmqw

Length: 72min 2sec (4322 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020