Megan thinks that I tend to go for the
joke rather than the truth when I'm in a conversation. And that's because I'm afraid of her. Not true. My name is Craig Ferguson. I'm a stand-up comedian, an actor,
a writer and a talk-show host. Darling... I'm also the husband of a very beautiful
and clever woman called Megan Ferguson. Megs? She is my best friend
and the love of my life. But that doesn't mean
we agree on everything. I sometimes wonder
if we agree on anything. -You don't say: "That guy's a psycho--"
-Psychopath-y? -You can't say: "It's psychopathy."
-You don't say: "He's a psycho-path." Thirteen years ago we start a conversation
and it's never stopped. Still going. Yeah, I just think you're wrong. -No.
-Yes. Sometimes it stops for a bit, you know,
for sleeping. In this programme we try really hard to
get new perspectives on our discussions. Food is the new internet.
You'll make plenty of money. The universe is alive within us. -Wow.
-This is magical. We reach our conclusions by getting
the facts straight from the horse's mouth. And by horse's mouth I mean experts and
not an actual horse... obviously. -Who will buy my sausages.
-Hi. -See. I used to be a waiter.
-But they're sausages. Yes, they are sausages.
Congratulations. Cheers. Well, yeah. Okay. Well, sláinte. But, look at this salad plate here. That's lovely.
That's a salad, this is a sausage. -Look at what's in it.
-Both are good. There's no meat in it, so it's also good. Yeah, but that doesn't always mean that
it's better for you, that it's healthier. This is processed. What does it mean
when they say 'processed food'? Well, it would be, like,
industrialized food. That's packed with sodium. Sometimes, they have like whey protein
which is actually from cattle... Megan has always been a healthy eater. She comes from a farm where,
when she was a little girl bluebirds would help her get out of bed
in the morning. And little creatures of the forest
follow her around and help her, you know,
teach the dwarves how to dance. Do you think that if people had better
knowledge about what their food is they would make better choices? Do you think that we could maybe feed the
world with maybe more real food like this. Instead of processed food like this? -Maybe.
-Yeah. You know, what we should do is
find somebody who knows about it. I love this idea! I have just the person.
Okay, his name is Kimbal Musk. He's doing something called
a 'learning garden' in Watts. Watts?! Kimbal Musk, he knows his onions.
Literally! Knows his onions, literally. -And his fruits.
-His fruits and his vegetables. -Yeah, revolutionary.
-Yes, exactly. -Revolutionary food.
-Staying ahead of the curve. -All right, there he is.
-Oh. There. -See his cowboy hat?
-I do. Kimbal Musk. -We have a very important question.
-Okay Can real food feed the world? Yes. Real food can feed the world. This is Kimbal Musk. He's an entrepreneur and environmentalist
promoting the concept of real food. Something that I find very intriguing. Like his brother, Elon,
the man behind SpaceX and Tesla, Kimbal has a background in tech. But soon his love of food
brought him into starting restaurants And, through, what is called,
The Kitchen Community, he's building learning gardens in schools
all over America. And when a Musk is into something,
you can bet he's onto something big. The world learned that by now. So can real food feed the world? Why are you here in Watts, which is,
no disrespect to the neighborhood, it's a, kind of, sketchy part of L.A. -Why would you be growing food here?
-Yeah Watts is one of the communities
we work in. We work in 400 schools across the country
and we work where kids need it. This is a community that has hard soil. If you try and put a regular school garden
in this school nothing grows. What we do is we come and we build
these beautiful learning gardens. Modular, they'll fit on any school yard. And we create this oasis
in a tough neighborhood like Watts. And these beautiful raised beds
can fit anywhere. They can fit anywhere. The kids design them,
they're like lego blocks. They're made out of recycled poly-ethlene,
so they'll last forever. The kids are involved from the beginning
all the way through to deciding what they grow every day. Oh. That's nice. So, do the kids grow these vegetables
and then actually eat them? They do take them home and eat them. And, one of the most powerful things is, these kids will go home
and say to their parents, "We love kale." And, the parents will send us an email
saying, "What is kale?" So, you're really starting
at a zero baseline. If you expect them to go into a grocery
store and pick carrots out of an aisle. They're simply not gonna do that. With our learning gardens,
we're teaching kids from a young age to know what it is, to enjoy the flavor,
to understand that it nourishes them. Then they teach their parents, they grow
up and then they'll create demand, so that grocery stores can start bringing
fresh food back in to the grocery store. Do you meet resistance from, like,
even with our kids, if I was to say, "Look, it's lovely. It's a lovely shrub." They'll be like,
"No, I don't wanna eat that." It's a little difficult. Is that part of
getting the kids to grow it themselves? -Is that part of what does it?
-Absolutely. We actually don't get resistance because
these kids will start from the seed and they will watch a carrot grow. And, you know, from the outside a carrot
is just a little green stalk. And when they pull that stalk out and they
see a carrot, it is like a magic trick. I mean, these kids just get so excited. They'll eat it with the dirt still on it. Right, because they've seen it
from the seed-- -From seed to all the way through.
-...through being ready to eat. They get excited, I mean,
they'll pull out the Swiss chard, which they've never experienced before
and they'll make a salad out of it. -It blows their mind.
-That's wonderful. I think the fact that you can make anyone
on earth excited about Swiss chard, right there, there's a miracle. I don't think kids really care about
whether food is healthy or not. I think what kids care about is
is it delicious and is it fun? So, I trick them into thinking
healthy food is just, like, fun. If you get an apple,
cut it into the shape of French fries and then say, "Oh, look! Kid fries!" And they're, like, "Oh, yeah!" It's a little trickier with teenagers.
They're, like, "What the ### are you doing, Dad?" That's a cauliflower.
I recognize it from the supermarket. Are you sure? -Maybe not.
-I don't think so. -What is it?
-That's a cabbage. All right, well what are these? -These are onions.
-Lovely onions. -That's an onion?
-Yeah. -I know nothing about vegetables.
-I know, Darling. When I met Craig,
he was literally eating soup out of a can. Which he was, for some reason,
okay doing in front of me. -I didn't think it was a bad thing.
-Horrendous. So, I made him take me
to the grocery store and I stocked his refrigerator. -And made it all lovely.
-And moved in. Pretty much. Look. See what I'm seeing in here.
Everything in here, right... Everything has sugar in it, is my guess. Okay, fine. There were some things that
didn't tick all the boxes of sugar-free, or less sugar and organic,
because every fridge has them. Even though I'm pretty good at this, I go shopping, expensive,
nice places that have options, Not a lot of places do. Okay. Here's your challenge, then: Go to the supermarket,
buy only organic food and make a meal simply and quickly
that anybody could do, using only, like, vegetables and stuff. Everything you just said, I do every day. So, how about you go to the grocery store,
you get the whole thing. It'll be like a test. -I can do it. It's easy.
-I'd like to see that. -I do it all the time
-Okay. I cook all the time. Seven years ago, you made me a sandwich. -Was that a good sandwich?
-Probably not. -Anyway, look, I will go.
-Do it today. I expect tasty food. -Well, you'll get tasty food.
-Bye. Am I a good cook? I don't know if I am, I've never done it. Your family are quite well-known for... -causing a lot of trouble.
-Sure. Were you guys brought up with this stuff?
Were you brought up in this environment? Yeah, we grew up with farms and I think
a lot of people, even my age, did. I think the younger kids have not. We, kind of, left the farm as a society
maybe in the eighties. -But, you grew up on a farm, right?
-I did. A lot of us did actually grow up on farms. A lot of this community,
if they're in their forties or fifties, did grow up in a farming community. It's just that we've totally lost it
over the past twenty to thirty years. I do like the idea of living in
a rural community and wearing plaid shirts
and maybe no pants at all. And just walking down to the end of my
field and pulling my carrot out of the soil and washing it and boiling it up and putting it in some soup. So, in a neighborhood like this, right,
you've got plenty of hamburgers that are being sold by clown outlets,
right. So, isn't it easier to get fast food here
than it is to get real food? It's much easier to get industrial food
than it is to get real food. The reason is, fifty years of us
optimizing for corn syrup and growing soy bean and cattle feed has made our beef system quite inexpensive
to the consumer. And, it's not healthy, it's not good for
the planet, it's not good for the farmer. The most miserable farmers
are the farmers growing these products. What we need to do with real food is just
apply the same American innovation and bring the kind of ideas
that my brother did with Tesla. You actually create
something that's better. Better. Got it. So, that's the idea. Make people excited about eating real food
at a price they can afford. I remember when I test drove the Tesla,
and I came home and I said, "It seems absurd now,
to drive internal combustion engine. It would be like taking a steam train,
now." -Right.
-Just in one go. And I love cars. And I'm, like, "This is a better car." So, is that the whole idea?
It's, like, this food tastes better? It feels better, it tastes better. But, just like Tesla,
we have to get the price down. So, we're bring the model three out soon,
so that it's affordable for people. What I believe will happen
with real food is, more and more people are getting on board
to innovate and create real food at prices that are affordable. We're facing a five trillion dollar
industry, where our young entrepreneurs can come in
and be a small scale farmer and make more money in a hundred acres
in Colorado than they would make if they had ten thousand acres
growing industrial corn and soy beans. -I'm excited. I want to be a farmer, now.
-It's fenomenal. And the lifestyle's incredible.
Especially with the millennial generation. Hands have been washed,
vegetables bought, water is boiling,
sort of simmering, getting going. Unpack your groceries carefully, making
sure not to create too much of a mess. Get it all in there. Clean it all up. You know, I would feel like
vegetables are saving the planet, but the plastic that they come in, is not. This is gonna be the most delicious,
improvized dish ever. The only time I've ever cooked anything
was in comedy cooking segments on television shows. The chef is, like, "Craig, don't."
And I'm, like, "Ah ha ha." And then they take care of it. So, that would be my inclination
in the kitchen. But then I look around, there's no one to
take care of it so I have to do it. There you go. It's kosher now. What the ### is that? But it's not that hard
to chop up a vegetable and boil it. That doesn't require, you know,
three Michelin stars. Yes! All right. I am not an animal. Oh my God. When I was looking at Craig
mutilating, not only vegetables, but my good knives and chopping board, I was, like, flinching with every hack of
the serated knife into the potatoes, so um... I dunno. And then just simmer until ready. In classrooms like this, all across the
country, children are learning about food. They learn about food in the learning
gardens but they also go to the school cafeteria, where, when I went to school,
it was garbage in the cafeteria and a lot of crappy food. I imagine that still goes on a little bit,
too. The food's pretty bad. Unfortunately, the way it works is, the real profitability is
in janitorial services. So, the folks that do janitorial services
will do the school food so they can get
the janitorial services contract. -That's who's making our food in schools.
-Wow. Food?! You'd never accept food
from a school janitor. -I know.
-I learned that the hard way! Well, how do you hope to reflect
in their school lunches, certainly, what they're learning
in the learning garden? Our learning gardens, while they can't
feed the school, can be added to the salad bar. And these kids can be very proud that they
grew it, share with their friends. And it adds to the other salad bars
that are in there. And I suppose the idea would be, as well,
that eventually there will be a point where the kids in the school will start
putting pressure on the school to say, "We don't eat this,
why are you giving us this." Yeah, that's the whole thing. If you can create demand
and you get these kids asking for it and eventually their parents,
and then these kids grow up a little bit and have a better understanding
of real food. -They're gonna start asking for real food.
-They can make changes themselves. So, what makes industrial food different
from real food? How does it affect everything? Industrial food is essentially food that
is optimized for scale and calories,
using fossil fuels. So, the past fifty years, we've been
getting better and better at it. And about in the seventies we figured out how to provide enough calories
to everyone on the planet. Industrial food figured that out. But then we got stuck on this path of more
calories, more calories, more calories and we became high-calorie machines, sending the low nutrition,
high-calorie foods to our communities. And the result is obesity and diabetes
and malnourishment. And it is a disaster for our country. But also at a community level,
it's just awful. Today, we grow twenty per cent more
calories than the human population needs. So, we have more food on Earth than
we need and that's in the future, too? Way more food than we need.
We just have the wrong food. -Right.
-Okay, so, it's not the real food. Real food really thinks about the planet and making sure that
what we're doing is sustainable. So, you're not thinking in terms of
massive quanitities of beef. You're thinking in terms of less
and better quality beef. Beef that is better for you.
We don't use growth hormones. We don't use antibiotics
in ways that are awful. Real food is food that we trust
to nourish our bodies, that we trust to nourish our farmers,
and we trust to nourish the planet. Trust is a good word because I think that a lot of people who are eating food which
we would consider not real food, they're trusting that it is. They really are. There's another thing: The fact that we now get access to
information about our food in ways that we never could have
ten years ago. Now with the internet coming along,
we can actually read up about our food, we realize we've been taken for a ride. So, the big agriculture
can't keep it a secret any more. They can't market their way out of this
anymore. So, we now have all this information and it's totally broken the trust
in our food system. So, we don't trust our food. Are you getting any push-back. I mean, obviously, this is a business
which represents an enormous investment and revenue stream for a lot of people. Some of them may be quite angry at
the idea that you've come along and said, "No, we've gotta change this now." Are you getting push-back
from big agriculture? I actually don't get push-back. -They know.
-Oh, really? Yeah.
They know this is a really big problem. They have to change their business.
They're suffering. They understand they've gone way too far. I think America is a capitalist country and I don't ever like to blame
a capitalist, because, I'm a capitalist. I think we've taken it to a fault, where now we have fifty years of running
on the same treadmill and we've gone off course. We have to now figure out an new path. And that path is real food. I don't like the idea of big corporations
selling processed food. I don't like being force-fed anything; I don't like being force-fed music,
you know, I don't want bands
that have been put together by some #### engineer
in a sound studio, I don't want movies
that are made by executives, I don't want food
that is put together by focus groups and twenty pounds of sugar
in everything that I eat. I came of age during punk rock and maybe this is the time where the most
punk rock thing I can do is eat an organic salad. Megan? -Yes.
-Come here. -All right.
-Are you done? Yeah. Look, I did that thing. I chopped it up finely, and mixed it all
together. Actually, I think it tastes really good. -That's fantastic!
-Really good, right? -Really good!
-I know. Well done, you. -Thanks.
-I love it. I know. I'm kind of quite surprised. -It's easy, right.
-It's pretty easy, yeah. The food that Craig made was great.
I mean, really it was. It was great. It is as simple as that. That even a washed-up, old comic
could make a delicious soup. In fact it was really easy. If you don't
do a comedy cooking segment from TV. -What, if you don't trash our kitchen?
-Well, I was just excited. I didn't use any of this.
I figured it's... This one has my attention
as being particularly pervy. But... Whatever. This is fantastic. You know, the truth is,
when I actually applied common sense, and I actually just made the soup, like,
vegetable soup, it was really good. It was really good. Like, really good. Like, "Oh, this wasn't made by
an imbecile!" good. And it didn't taste like it had been
spit out of a factory chimney, either. So, if you have food
that's killing your customer, you have to create a food
that's not killing you. But, is anyone in big agriculture
interested in this? Enormous interest. Amazing, amazing
interest. You talk to the largest grocery store
chains out there, that have traditionally sold just
processed food, their processed food sales are plummeting, frozen food sales have fallen
through the floor, microwave oven sales have plateaued. There isn't much opportunity
in industrial food any more. And so, now they're trying to figure out
where do they get fresh food from. You know, this isn't expensive,
organic food. It's just basic fresh food. It is the problem and the opportunity of
our generation to find sources of fresh food. The demand is there. Every large grocery store is expanding
their fresh food section. Every large grocery store is expanding
their organic section. The problem is, America doesn't grow fresh
or organic food. So, we have to import it from around the
world. Which is just a totally broken system. I sat with one seventy-five year-old
farmer and his thirty-five year-old son. And, the son wanted to take the land
and reuse it for another purpose. He basically said, "Dad, I've been trying
to do this with you for ten years and you won't let me do it." It's, like, when you're an older person
you don't understand that the opportunity is different
for your kids. If you make your kids do the same thing,
they're just not gonna do it. Right. The world has changed
and the world has moved on. Right. They did a great job in those days.
Now we have a new problem. We have to grow real food,
that's actually nourishing. So, is that what you're trying to do?
Tap into that next generation of farmers and show them or agree with them, really,
and give them support that real food and the production and not
just ten thousand acres of useless corn. We have our new company called Square
Roots, which is a wonderful entrepreneur training
program, where kids will actually, 18 to 22 year-olds will get access to a
storage container in a parking lot in Brooklyn. Inside that storage container is an indoor
vertical farm, the equivalent of
two acres of outdoor farming. Oh my gosh. These kids are gonna learn how to farm
and sell direct to consumer and learn a business. And, if you're 19 years old you can't
wrap your head a round a giant farm, but you can give them a business in a box. And you can make it really easy for them. Because, it is relatively simple
to grow these things. Super simple to grow. We have a master farmer that looks after
the quality and safety of the food. But these kids will be growing it.
They'll decide what to grow. Then they'll go sell it door-to-door,
and they'll build a little business. What Kimbal is doing with Square Roots
is fascinating and fantastic really. The idea that you can grow real food
in a strictly urban environment, using something the size of
a shipping container, not only gets healthy, nutritional food,
it also is supporting the whole system with the opportunity for entrepreneurship
with young people. It's fantastic. How do you compete with the volume,
though? They are churning out
enormous amounts of beef. How do you compete with that? Well, I think we have to move to a world where we think about real food
as nourishing to our body. And that means less,
and better quality, meat. -It does mean that.
-Right. It doesn't mean no meat.
Doesn't mean you have to be vegan. It just means less,
and better quality, meat. If you were to eat a burger that is less,
and better quality, it may not be as big, but it's way tastier
and it's way better for you. And your body will only use
that one burger, versus wanting three of the, sort of,
hollow one that has so many ingredients. There's so much calories in these burgers
that are extraordinary. It's not just from the beef,
it's from corn syrup put into the bun. -Why do they do that? What's the point?
-Right. We've had a government welfare system
that has subsidized corn syrup and ethanol to such an abnormal degree
to support our farmers. I do agree with supporting our farmers,
but, to such an abnormal degree, that now
we're feeding that to our community-- You know, I think big oil must hate
the Musk family a great deal. That's right. I think there must be
something about those Musks. They're always changing things:
A car's no longer a car, a vegetable's no longer grown there,
it's grown there. I think, perhaps,
the Musks themselves were grown in some kind of hydroponic super-lab. And they are destined to change the world
with their ideas, thinking outside the box. So, what are the necessary steps
for both big agriculture, industrialism, as food is concerned,
and entrepreneurs? How can they move forward together? Should government do stuff? Is it a goverment problem? I think we certainly don't want
to let the government off the hook. I'm not a huge government guy. So, for me,
I mostly want them to get out of the way. Right now, they are making it really hard
if you wanna be a real food farmer. They literally punish you. They provide crop insurance to commodities
but not to real food. They need to stop doing things like that. But for the most part,
I actually love the opportunity. I mean, this is such an exciting time for
young entrepreneurs, to be a farmer, to work in food. In the nineties, I saw the internet coming and was able to take advantage of
some amazing opportunities as a young entrepreneur.
And, food is the new internet. -Go build your business.
-Endless opportunity. Go do your thing. You'll make plenty of money.
That's not the problem. It's about what lifestyle you want. You not only get to live
in downtown Brooklyn doing urban farming, you could also choose to live up in
Vermont or in the countryside of Colorado. You get to choose your lifestyle. You can choose your purpose
to match your passion. Because food is so big,
the opportunity is so amazing. It's a broken system that needs to change,
right? It's a broken system that
young entrepreneurs are going to change. -This is America, we can do it!
-I absolutely agree. I'm hungry.
We should go and get something to eat. Let's see if we can find
a healthfood restaurant in Watts. If not, maybe we go back to the garden
and steal some of those ### carrots. There we go. So, do you wanna go and live on a farm? I could do it. Would I have to learn
how to play the banjo? Oh, you'd be rather cute. We could get you a hat, too. But, real food is a real thing. And, Kimbal's very clever. If he is so inspired that
a change can be made, then yes, it absolutely can. And he's about making money, that guy. And he's the first to say it. This is a wonderful,
capitalist opportunity. Right. All right. You grow vegetables.
I'll continue to play the banjo. -And we'll be okay?
-Yeah. We'll be all right. Maybe a bit chuffier. You know the banjo. We could start a band. -Yeah.
-I can't sing, but I can cook. -Guns and tomatoes.
-Guns and tomatoes. Subtitle translation by:
Firstname Lastname
I didn't even knoe this existed.
His show on Sirius has been gold though.
Oh no Craig. Say it ain't so. I'm glad he's happy though.
Maybe he'll fix it over time. Make it seem more natural.