Transcripts - Forever Dreaming

Food.

It's a set of relationships.

It connects you to

the farmer who grew it.

It connects you to

the animals or the plants.

It connects you to the soil.

It connects you to the workers

who prepared it.

So there's a lot at stake

when you sit down to eat.

Over the last two decades,

thanks to some books

and movies,

like the first "Food Inc.,"

something called

the Food Movement got started.

People became keenly interested

in where their food comes from,

how is it produced.

Today, farmers markets

are everywhere.

And even in the supermarket

you can buy organic food,

grass-fed, GMO-free.

So, we thought we could

create a food system

aligned with our values.

But the food industry

is dominated by a small handful

of very large

and very powerful companies.

In normal times,

the power of the food industry,

of the monopolies

that dominate it,

is invisible to most of us.

But when the pandemic hit,

the curtain was peeled back...

...and you began to see that

this highly efficient,

consolidated food system

is a very brittle system.

There were whole crops

being buried,

hogs being euthanized 'cause

they couldn't be processed.

Farmers disposing

a flood of milk.

At the same time there were

shortages in the supermarket

and then people were lining up

for miles

because they were hungry.

So this consolidated

food system

could not adapt to

the changes coming so fast.

We have built a system

that depends on predictability

and the one thing

we can't count on,

is predictability anymore.

We need a system

that is more resilient

than the one we have.

You know, we really thought

we could change the food system

one bite at a time.

And as important as that is,

it's not enough,

there's more we have to do.

I have been

working in the fields

since I was a kid

harvesting different crops.

I heard about Immokalee

back in Mexico.

People were talking about

if you go to Immokalee

you are going

to earn $70 a day.

And that was just

a flat-out lie

of recruiters trying to,

uh, just bring people,

uh, with those,

uh, false pretenses.

Working in the fields,

it's mainly Latino workers

and Haitian workers.

The industry wants

immigrant workers

because they feel that

they can take advantage of us.

If you eat fresh fruits

and vegetables,

you're connected to immigrants

who are being paid poor wages

and being mistreated.

My whole entry into the world

of food and food systems

was in trying to understand how

in the 20th

and the 21st century,

we could be abusing

and exploiting

the poorest workers

in the United States

who are responsible for the

healthiest foods that we eat.

In Immokalee, at the height

of the pandemic,

state government

did absolutely nothing

to protect these workers.

In fact,

the state government in Florida

even prevented contact tracing

because if they found people

who had COVID,

they'd have to remove them

from the workforce.

The idea was,

let's not know who's sick

and get as much harvested

as possible.

You know we're feeding

the country,

so our work is essential

but we as people,

we're treated as disposable.

Iowa's always recognized

as a flyover state.

Those of us that live here

understand that

there's security in that.

Good morning.

I can take that country omelet

on for you.

How are you guys?

It's my job

to protect 135,000 citizens

in Black Hawk County.

We very much appreciate your

support for the college...

You bet.

There's

hardworking, blue-collar,

good, honest,

salt-of-the-earth-type

people here.

Here we go,

ham and cheese omelet.

-Thank you.

-Any hot sauce for you?

-No, this is great.

-All right.

-Appreciate it, thank you.

-Enjoy.

At the beginning

of the pandemic,

we were fearful

what we were gonna face.

And all of a sudden,

we had people

testing positive

in our clinics here.

Almost all of our

contact tracing pointed back

to the Tyson meatpacking plant.

So this is the Tyson plant.

Tyson's is one of

the larger employers here.

They bring income

and they provide jobs.

You don't want

to alienate them.

But our disease

surveillance officer,

public health director

and myself went into

that plant.

We saw people working

elbow to elbow,

and reaching over the top

of each other.

And no masks, no regulation,

no... no real concerted policy

on how to protect each other.

And then we're hearing

from people that, you know,

they're-they're stepping back

off the line,

puking on the floor,

going right back to work.

We walked out of there,

all of us, just going,

"Oh, my God, this is horrible.

We are, we are in

so much trouble."

By the end of the month,

they had 1,300 positives

out of 2,500 employees.

And then it started to seep

out of the plant

into our community.

You know, we had

exponential increases

in the numbers of deaths,

um, by day.

Not by week, not by month,

but by day.

We wanted the ten-to-14-day

shutdown of the plant,

but Tyson made it

very clear to us

that it just wasn't

going to happen.

The meatpacking industry

was worried

that local public authorities

were going to shut down

their slaughterhouses.

So John Tyson wrote a letter

that was published

in newspapers across

the United States

raising a fear that we might

start running out of meat.

And then the meatpacking

companies went to the president

to keep their

slaughterhouses open.

-We're working with Tyson...

-Should we

-ban exports?

-We are.

We're gonna sign an executive

order today I believe.

Two days

after the Tyson letter,

the Trump administration

issued an order

under

the Defense Production Act

to ensure that the plants

would keep running.

So the industry got the

president of the United States

to do exactly what it wanted.

It even helped write the

executive order that he issued.

It's a total perversion of

the Defense Production Act

to use it to allow a company

to do what it wants to do.

The whole point of the act is

to force companies to do things

they might not want to do,

to serve the American public.

Tyson says

that they were doing this

to feed America, but we know

that a lot of their meat

goes to China and overseas.

We also know that Tyson

had a banner year.

That's blood money.

They didn't care

about our citizens

and way too many people

paid the price for that.

I am Agriculture USA,

born in freedom.

I have become the greatest

provider in all history.

I'm the spirit of progress.

I'm a way of life,

the American way.

During the Cold w*r,

we talked about why our system

was so much superior

to that of the Soviet Union.

And it was the free market

that was supposedly responsible

for the greatness

of this country.

The 1950s into the early 1960s

was a period of rising wages

for American workers.

It's the greatest period of

the growth of the middle class

in American history.

And those things are connected

to having real competition

and strict antitrust

enforcement.

The basic idea behind

antitrust policy

is that no one company,

that no two companies

should dominate an entire

sector of our economy.

There was strict antitrust

enforcement for decades

under both Democratic

and Republican administrations.

In the 1940s, there was

an antitrust suit against A&P.

Their 14% of the market

for groceries

was considered

a threat to competition.

But one of the big monopolies

that endured was AT&T.

It was argued

that we couldn't break it up

because we needed

one company to control

all the phone lines.

Uh, the country,

in the long run, will be sorry,

and I find it difficult

to believe that things

will work as well, uh,

in the, in the future

as they have worked

in the past.

But then AT&T was broken up,

and pretty soon,

there were huge reductions

in the cost of making

a long-distance call.

That opened the way

for cellular phones,

modems, and the whole

Internet economy we have today.

So, breaking up monopolies

is directly linked

to creating innovation.

Around 1980,

antitrust enforcement

was greatly reduced.

It was argued

that if prices were low,

then it didn't matter

how much control

over a market one company had.

Those views came to be

government policy.

Corporations began to buy up

their competitors.

And they got bigger

and bigger and bigger.

Back then, the four largest

beef companies

controlled only 25%

of the market.

Today, the four largest

beef companies

control 85% of the market.

Three companies control

83% of the cold cereal market.

Two companies control 70%

of the carbonated

soft drink market.

Two companies control 80%

of the baby formula market.

Why do companies buy up

their competitors?

It's because they don't

want to compete.

And when they don't

have to compete,

consumers have to pay more,

farmers and ranchers

get paid less,

and the difference goes

to those corporations

as higher profits.

But that's not

the only problem.

A highly consolidated market

becomes a fragile market.

In 2022,

when Abbott had to shut down

a single factory,

43% of the nation's

baby formula

was suddenly off the shelves,

and mothers had

to start scrambling

to find food for infants.

There is no formula

within, like,

three hours of where we live.

I haven't been able to find

formula for, like, a month.

I've been going

to stores, like,

almost every day,

every other day.

What are our options here?

What do y'all want

people to do,

'cause I don't know

about y'all...

...but this is scary.

When you have monopoly power

over baby formula,

and one company has a problem

at one factory,

suddenly, some infants

don't get to eat.

Wisconsin is the dairy state.

It's not an accident.

It makes sense that we're

producing dairy here.

We have good access to water.

We have good growing seasons.

So, this is

a really great place

to have animals

and produce milk.

Hello, there, ladies.

Dairy is really in the blood

of Wisconsin farmers,

but it's crushing us right now.

We've just had

continually low prices

paid to us for our milk.

We are considered

a medium-sized farm

by Wisconsin standards.

When I married my husband

in 2007,

we were only milking 250 cows,

and now we're at 450.

And that's because we're just

trying to run faster

to keep our head above water.

Farmers are overproducing,

which is leading

to a lower price.

And what people do,

and what the bank

tells me to do,

is to just keep trying

to produce more.

We kind of create

a vicious cycle,

because then we're producing

more and more

and then the price

is going down

and then we're producing

more to try to stay afloat.

It's really a disaster.

Well, I think that we're huge,

at 450 cows,

and then we're

trying to compete

with these

thousand-cow dairies.

And they're looking at

the 5,000 cow dairies

and then the 5,000-cow dairy

is trying to compete

with the 10,000.

And now you hear about

20,000-cow dairies,

30,000-cow dairies.

Where does it stop?

Now there are fewer

and fewer processers

because they've all merged

with each other.

So it used to be that

if I didn't like the price,

I could find other processers

to buy my milk.

But now,

because of consolidation,

I can't move my milk to another

place with a better price.

We've lost half of our dairy

farms in Wisconsin since 2007.

Lots of people going bankrupt.

The corporate control

pushing folks like us

to just throw up their hands

and say, "I'm done."

The food system is often at w*r

with nature.

And one of the great examples

is when you watch

the dairy industry

move from wet, grassy places

like Wisconsin and Vermont

to deserts like

California and Arizona.

How could this

possibly make sense?

Well, as dairies get bigger,

they move to places where

there are very few regulations,

where land is cheap

and you can grow crops

to feed your cattle

all year round.

But the environmental cost

to this is insane.

The rain will oblige you

in Wisconsin

and grow the grass for you.

But in the desert,

this is water that must be

pumped deep out of the aquifers

to irrigate the crops

and hydrate the cattle.

These mega-dairies are rapidly

draining the water table

in the Colorado River

and leaving

neighboring communities

without drinking water.

So the logic of capitalism

and the logic of nature

are at w*r.

It's a classic example

of profits over sustainability.

My great-great-grandfather,

he settled here in 1894.

My dad came in 1975 and farmed

for the next 40 years.

And then, uh,

I took over the operation.

Things have really changed,

just from my father's time

to mine.

In Iowa, we used to grow

a multitude of crops.

You know, 100 years ago,

we used to have apple orchards,

and every farm had livestock.

But when you drive

across Iowa now,

you see nothing

but commodity crops:

corn and soybeans,

because those are the crops

the government subsidizes.

And that's why, that's why

farmers do what they do,

is they follow the policy,

because they're in business

to make money

just like everyone else.

But the thing that

is not factored into that

is what is the result

to the land?

Our best resource here in Iowa

is the richest soil

in the world.

But because of the intensive

farming that we've done,

half of our topsoil

is already gone.

We're losing soil faster

than we're making it.

And I get reminded of this

every year

as I'm farming next

to the fence lines.

And you can see a drop-off

between the fence line

and your field level,

and that tells you exactly

how much soil you've lost.

I-I think any Iowa farm boy

growing up

wants to farm full-time.

But I farm about 300 acres,

and 300 acres is not enough

to feed a family comfortably.

So I work off the farm,

as do a lot of folks.

How's, uh, a load of seeds

sound here,

uh, later this morning?

Stop by and, uh,

drop that off...

I sell seed

and I sell farm inputs,

chemicals to help

eliminate pests and weeds.

So let's look

at this field here.

You got a lot

of potential value...

I make recommendations

to use synthetic fertilizers

to get the highest return

off of their land.

So, I make my living

from what a lot of people

would call the industrialized

food system.

However, I have big concerns

about the future.

-That's 40 bags.

-Okay.

If we stay on this path

where we continue

to subsidize commodity crops,

that's not good

for the long-term

of our farming communities,

our soils, our water quality.

So, I'm trying to come up with

a whole new system

so farmers like myself

can grow things in a way

that changes

the rules of the game.

-Hi.

-Senator, how are you?

-I'm very good.

-Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you as well.

Farmer Steve, I'm farming.

Uh, all right. All right.

-Cory.

-We're thrilled

to be able to have

Senator Cory Booker,

appointed earlier this year

to the Senate

Agriculture Committee.

You have no idea

how exciting it is for me

to be standing here

in a field in my own state.

It was 15 years ago this month

that I was elected

to be mayor of New Jersey's

largest city.

If you would have told me

15 years ago

that I would use every point

of leverage I had in the Senate

to become, uh,

a member of the Ag Committee,

I would have not believed you.

I want you to know

I am so excited to have

the top of my agenda right now,

uh, dealing with, uh,

America's food system,

which is savagely broken.

I-I come at this

through lived experience.

I watched what our food systems

were doing to my family members

and to my community.

Being on the ground

as a local leader,

I started seeing

that the systems within Newark

were really failing kids,

families

where they didn't have access

to healthy foods.

These foods were

being pushed in a way

that seemed, to me,

to prey upon low-income people.

They need the cheapest

food possible,

but they're living

in the middle of a food desert,

where a Twinkie product

is cheaper than an apple.

African American kids,

in the last decade alone,

have seen

their diabetes rates double.

So it just made me want

to drastically change

the food systems for, then,

my community,

but now, of fixing

the broken food systems

in the United States

and globally.

This part of Montana

is a place where buffalo

had a hard time surviving.

But you can actually raise

a hell of a crop here.

In fact, I was supposed to

finish seeding my peas today,

but as you can tell,

best-laid plans.

Things don't tend to work

when it gets cold,

including me.

I never felt

appreciated as a farmer.

I raise food, but food

is treated like a commodity,

it wasn't treated

like something you'd eat.

And I said to my wife,

"If we don't do something

to improve our profit margin,

w-we're gonna be selling out

just like everybody else."

I would say there's about

150 bushel in the truck.

In the late '80s,

we converted to organics...

...and we raised durum

for organic noodles.

It was the first time

since we'd been farming

that I actually felt like

I was doing something

that people appreciated,

that people wanted.

But now, we're seeing

an all-out attack

on family farm agriculture.

The corporate business model

is k*lling rural America,

it's k*lling it.

And that's not the way

it should be.

There needs to be people

living out here producing food.

But as far as changing things,

there's really only one place

you can do that,

and that's Washington, D.C.

We've seen a mass exodus

off the land.

In my small town,

as an example,

when I graduated

from high school,

there was a thousand people

in that town,

now there's about 600.

There were two hardware stores,

now there are none.

There were three grocery

stores, now there's one.

And maybe the most distressing

is there were five bars,

and now there's only two.

I'm the Senate's

only working farmer,

and I want rural America

to be vibrant again.

That's my motivation here.

Testa.

Booka.

How you doing, man?

Good to see you.

Jon Tester is,

he's been a mentor to me

in the Senate.

He, early on, talked to me

about the absurdities

-in the Ag world.

-And you could make...

It's this odd combination

of a guy from Montana

and a guy from New Jersey,

and yet,

we have so much common ground.

If you want to reestablish

rural America again,

if you want to have people

that are able to live there,

-y-you got to have opportunity.

-Yeah.

And if you're gonna

have opportunity,

then you got to have

fair prices.

But when you have

consolidation,

now you, now you've got people

setting prices.

They go out on a golf course

and play a round of golf

and determine what you're gonna

get for a-a bushel of wheat

or, o-or whatever-whatever

you're talking about.

But as long as we're,

uh, doing nothing,

you're gonna continue

to see more consolidation

and you're gonna

continue to see

the demise of the family farm.

So, in many ways, they're

picking winners and losers.

The winners are the handful

of multinational corporations,

the losers are

all the rest of us.

We are so connected.

The challenges in my community

are directly connected

to a system

that's driving farmers

out of business,

hurting our soil

and our rivers,

hurting the food workers,

hurting the end consumers.

And as a nation,

we are dramatically

subsidizing,

with our tax dollars, the foods

that are making us sick.

And only a small fraction

of our subsidies

go to the healthy fresh foods

that we should be eating

as a majority of our diet.

I don't want the government to

be telling someone what to eat,

but I sure as heck

don't want my tax dollars

subsidizing the things

that are making people sick,

and now we have to pay

for the health care costs

of-of the chronic disease

that we're fueling

with our food system.

So, this is a conundrum to me.

We have here

the world's largest potato.

I'll say that's a large potato.

And here's what's in it.

I've had a long career

about looking

at food and nutrition

as ways to examine really

important problems in society.

Food connects to everything.

By the 1980s,

agricultural production

had increased so much

in the United States

that the number of calories

in the food supply

increased to about 4,000

calories a day per person.

And that's twice as many

calories available

in the food supply

as anybody needs.

This puts enormous pressure

on food companies.

How are they gonna sell?

Food companies are businesses

with stockholders to please.

The profits have to get

bigger and bigger,

sales have to increase

and increase.

And food companies figured out

lots of ways to do that.

Wendy's Baconator is

the ultimate

bacon cheeseburger.

They opened up fast-food places

all over the world.

They made foods

in larger portions.

One enormous sandwich.

If you are presented

with a very large amount

of food...

Our biggest entrees ever.

...all of the research shows

that you're gonna eat more

from that portion

than you would if you were

given a small portion.

And then,

food companies made foods

available any place

that you could think of.

You go into a clothing store,

and there's candy bars

at the checkout counter.

Hot donuts

With Kentucky

Fried Chicken.

So, food companies

are doing everything they can

to get people to eat

anytime, anyplace, day

or night, in large portions.

What better way to sell foods,

whether people need it or not?

It's time for Fourthmeal.

It's a late-night meal,

between dinner and breakfast.

So,

I think it's just very hard

to resist a food environment

that is just yelling at us

all the time,

"Eat more! Eat more! Eat more!"

In the 1980s,

I worked as a pediatrician

in the outskirts of So Paulo.

Since then, we have observed

a decline

in child malnutrition,

and an increase in obesity.

We had, in Brazil, each year,

one million new cases

of obesity.

Our research found a decline

in the purchase of salt,

cooking oils, table sugar,

and-and then I say,

"Whoa, these are supposed to be

"the determinants

of obesity, right?

"If they are declining,

that's...

this doesn't make sense."

But then we realized

that that traditional,

whole foods

like rice and beans,

were being replaced

by soft drinks,

packaged snacks, sausages,

instant noodles.

All these products

are formulations

of nutrients and additives.

Colors and flavors,

emulsifiers,

artificial sweeteners.

These are chemical compounds

totally unknown

to our metabolism.

And these foods are submitted

to intensive processing.

So we decided

to call this food group

"ultra-processed foods."

We raised the hypothesis

that the consumption

of ultra-processed food

could be the main driver

of diabetes

and other chronic diseases.

In 2019, one researcher,

Kevin Hall,

decided to test our hypothesis.

I was first

pretty skeptical of this idea.

And I would ask, "What is it

about ultra-processed foods

that causes people of overeat?"

Is it the nutrients

that's driving this,

or perhaps it's something about

the processing of these foods?

So I decided

to design two diets.

In the ultra-processed diet,

we had 80% of calories

coming from

ultra-processed foods,

whereas in the minimally

processed diet,

we had zero percent of calories

from ultra-processed foods.

But the meals were matched

for the calories,

matched for salt, sugar,

fat, fiber and protein.

We told people to eat as much

or as little as desired.

When people were exposed

to this ultra-processed diet,

they ended up eating about

500 calories per day more

compared to the mostly

unprocessed diet.

Usually,

in studies of this type,

you find a difference

of 30 to 50 calories a day.

But 500?

I mean,

that's an unbelievable result.

On the ultra-processed diet,

people gained weight

and gained body fat.

And when we switched them

to the unprocessed diet,

those people spontaneously lost

weight and lost fat.

And so, this study suggests

that there's something else

about ultra-processed foods,

independent of the salt,

the sugar and the fat

and the fiber,

that's driving people

to overeat.

The easiest way to explain

the different categories

of processing is corn.

Corn on the cob, unprocessed,

it's been peeled and washed.

Canned corn, minimally

processed, salt has been added.

But Dorito chips

have color, texture

and flavoring additives.

Ultra-processed.

Processed food,

you can make at home.

Ultra-processed foods,

you don't have the ingredients,

you don't have the additives,

and you don't have

the machines.

The reason you process food

is not that there's

anything wrong with it

in its natural state,

it's that you make

a lot more money.

You know, the money in the

system is not at the farm end.

The farmer's getting less

than 15% of your food dollars.

No, the money is going

to the processor

who's benefiting from the fact

that we're overproducing

and driving down

the cost of raw materials.

The food processors

buy those cheap

agricultural commodities

and then turn it

into the panoply

of ultra-processed food

products in your supermarket.

If you complicate that food

in the form of flavor

or novelty,

that's where the money is.

Ultra-processed food ensures

that a consumer will buy

more and more and more,

because these products

are made

to be consumed in excess.

Eating worked pretty well

for humans for an awfully

long time.

We ate what we needed,

our needs were in balance

with our appetite.

And it's really only recently

that something about our

relationship with food

got disturbed, distorted.

Now we find ourselves literally

eating ourselves to death.

Animals have similar

nutritional needs

to ourselves,

so what do they do?

They, on some intuitive level,

know what to eat.

It's called nutritional wisdom.

These mama cows are over

in this field eating alfalfa

because that's rich in protein

and they're supporting a fetus,

so they need the protein.

But these steers,

they're over here in this field

and they're eating rye grass

which has got sugar

and carbohydrates in it

because they're laying on fat.

And they do this on their own.

They're somehow attracted

to the food they need.

And humans are no different.

Millions of years ago,

our ancestors, walking around

the jungles of Africa,

there was no label

on the fruit that they ate,

they didn't know

about the calories.

But this experience

of just looking

for the food

that tasted the best

is what nourished them.

It's how they had

a nutritious diet.

You think of something like

a delicious peach,

that flavor that we experience

is the brain's system

of analyzing the nutrition

that's within a food.

Flavor is nature's language

of nutrition.

For decades now,

we've been manipulating

the sensory characteristics

of food.

Thanks to flavor technology,

we can make anything we want

taste like whatever we want it

to taste like.

Fake flavors but, also,

artificial sweeteners.

We haven't really questioned

what the consequences of this

has been, we just assumed

it's a good idea.

Well, now we have new research

that is showing

that this is actually

a terrible idea.

That we're actually interfering

with the brain's

and the body's ability

to metabolize food.

My interest is in how

the brain processes

food reward.

I did the first

neural imaging study,

um, of feeding in humans.

We were measuring

brain response

as they were eating

little pieces of chocolate.

I really wanted to understand

areas of the brain

that represent

the pleasure

of the, of the food.

Pepsi was interested

in our research.

I think they wanted

to try to understand

how to make healthier foods.

And so, they came to me

with a question,

"Is it possible to decrease

the amount of calories

"in a typical

sugar-sweetened beverage

without compromising reward?"

So, in the lab, we created

a series of beverages

where we manipulated

the sweetness,

independent of calories.

So that way,

we have equally sweet drinks

but drinks

of different calorie amounts.

You're gonna be

receiving liquids

through the mouthpiece, okay?

We looked at the brain's areas

that are responsible

for reward.

What we thought was that

the highest-calorie beverage

would become

the most-liked beverage,

but that's not what we found.

Instead, it was actually

the middle doses,

where sweetness and calories

are matched,

that was eliciting

the greatest brain response.

In nature, the relationship

between sweetness

and energy is-is pretty stable.

So, when you manipulate

sensory information

without regard

for the nutritional content,

you're essentially

creating mismatches.

And so, we conducted

follow-up studies

to see what was going on.

-Comfortable under there?

-Yep.

And what we found

was that when sweetness

matches the calories,

then the body

metabolizes that energy.

But when something

was too sweet for the amount

of calories or not sweet enough

for the amount of calories,

the body's ability

to metabolize those calories

was-was blunted.

Those calories are not

being used as a fuel.

Instead, they might be

converted into fat.

So, if you reduce calories

by adding artificial sweetener,

you could actually be doing

more harm than good.

When I saw the findings,

I shared it

with our collaborators at Pepsi

right away.

But this result, that I thought

was super exciting,

because we're gonna

learn something new--

"This is really cool"-- um,

had the opposite effect that

I thought it was gonna have.

I received a bunch of emails

from Pepsi

saying that the data

made no sense,

really saying

that they didn't believe

what we were reporting.

Uh, they-they pulled

our funding.

And it wasn't until much later

that I realized the problem

was not that they didn't

believe me,

but in fact,

that they did believe me.

And that's what

made them worried.

The moment you know that

something is bad for health,

ethically,

you have to correct it.

I think they wanted

deniability,

because what our research

suggested

is that their products could

negatively impact health

in unanticipated ways.

When

you walk into a supermarket,

it's not just

artificial sweeteners.

There is a whole arsenal

of additives

designed to mislead the brain.

There's fat replacers,

artificial flavors,

so-called natural flavors.

So how does your brain react

when it keeps getting fooled

by the food it eats?

The best way to think about it

is the fuel gauge on your car.

Imagine if you looked at it

and it said it was full,

but it might be empty,

it might be half full.

Imagine it was uncertain

in the way

that modern food

has become uncertain.

What would you do?

Well, you-you'd fill your car

up a whole lot more often.

Well, that's what

your brain does.

When it keeps getting fooled,

when one day

sweetness means calories

and the next day

it means no calories

or just some calories, it goes,

"I better eat more food

to make sure

I don't get ripped off."

We're short-circuiting

an evolutionary process

that's hundreds of thousands

of years old.

And we've learned through

the i-ingenuity of food science

to fool the human body.

Um, but you pay

a price for that,

in losing your taste

for real food.

And as we lose our taste

for eating plants,

we lose all those antioxidants,

we lose all

those protective factors.

When you have

that premade meal,

it's hard to know

that it's unhealthy,

but it's all been designed

to manipulate you.

The eye, the taste buds,

and get you to eat

as much as possible,

ideally, to addict you to it.

In the United States,

the average consumption

of ultra-processed foods

is about 58%

of total energy intake.

But in most of the world,

consumption of ultra-processed

food is much lower.

And most calories

still come from real foods.

Today,

these big food companies,

they are targeting markets

in many countries

with aggressive campaigns.

That could be you

right now.

These countries

are not prepared

to defend themselves

from the health problems

created by

ultra-processed foods.

Breakfast time

is Kellogg's time

Breakfast is Kellogg's.

I have worked in fast food

for over 20 years.

I have worked at McDonald's,

I have worked at Popeyes.

I'm currently at Taco Bell.

I have two children.

My kids are my world.

But it's been hard.

There have been times I can't

afford the heating bill,

there have been times where

I can't afford to pay my rent.

There's been times

where I couldn't afford

to put food on the table.

I have a gas bill.

A light bill. Internet bill.

Rent, $715.

If I miss a day,

one of these becomes

a shutoff notice,

a disconnect notice.

My biggest fear is winding

back up in a position

that I had to crawl out of,

and living out of my car

and living away

from my children.

This is everything we own.

Our clothes, shoes.

This is me and my family's

prized possessions.

It's all we own.

I don't ever want my family

to have to experience that

again,

but it-it's hard, on the wages

we make, and you almost...

it's almost impossible for us

just to survive.

Most people

will say that these jobs

are for people that are

just starting out.

But the average fast-food

worker's a 30-year-old woman.

Not-not a kid.

This-this is someone's mother,

someone's sister,

trying to make it

to feed their family.

I have a cheesy sausage

toasted burrito

and a regular coffee,

$4.10 today.

The cost

of living is steadily going up,

but our wages aren't.

How can I go to work for these

billion-dollar companies

and feed all these people,

all to come home to hear

my son's stomach growl?

For-for the ones that have

all the sauce on it,

they're cheaper.

Four dollars.

Right now we have

$13.97. All right.

I do not get sick leave.

I do not get health care.

As an adult,

I've never been able

to afford to see a doctor.

I got it. 20, 40...

I'm tired.

And nobody knows how tired I am

except for those people that

go through it just like me.

Today, the federal minimum wage

is seven dollars

and 25 cents an hour.

It's been at that level

since 2009.

Adjusted for inflation,

it's almost 50% lower

than it was in the late 1960s.

So the poorest workers have

seen their pay cut in half.

The CEO of Yum! Brands,

which owns Taco Bell,

earns more in an hour than

the typical Taco Bell worker

earns in a year.

And we're paying so that

they can have cheap labor.

Walmart and McDonald's

are two of the largest

employers of workers

who are dependent

on food stamps and on Medicaid.

So it's taxpayers who are

supporting these companies,

as opposed to these companies

supporting their workers.

It's not only fast-food

and supermarket workers,

it's millions of other workers

in the food system

who are being exploited in ways

that are hidden from view.

The agricultural industry

depends on more

than three million workers.

Agriculture has always

been a place

where exploitation

has happened.

Because it emerged

out of sl*very.

70 cents a day.

70... 70 cents all day job.

When sl*very was abolished,

it didn't disappear,

it just changed form.

One farmer looked at this

and said,

"We used to own our slaves.

Now we just rent them."

The whole industry was still

just refusing to recognize

that the workers deserve

to be treated

as-as human beings.

Today, sl*very

continues to happen,

even though it's a crime.

One case of modern-day sl*very

happened in our community.

Workers escaped

from a U-Haul truck

where they were tied

with chains.

The defendants

have been accused

of threatening,

slapping and kicking

farm workers.

Chaining them to a pole,

beating them,

locking them

inside U-Haul trailers,

keeping them in debt and

forcing them to work for free.

So, as workers,

we organized to fight back.

When I got involved

with the Coalition

of Immokalee Workers,

we were focusing

on the big tomato growers,

thinking that they will have

to listen to us.

There were articles

about sl*very.

Our company's name was listed

because we're one of

the largest growers

here in Florida.

We've always

heard about wage theft,

of sexual harassment,

of bad operators.

But you never think

it's going on in your house.

When you've got

labor contractors

providing workers to a farmer,

it creates an environment

where there's a step back

from any responsibility about

how they're being treated,

how they're being paid.

The growers

just closed the door

on our nose.

They didn't care

about our demands

or about anything

that we had to say.

So we need to widen

o-our understanding

on what can influence

this industry.

And then we realized

that the market power

was with the corporations

that buy millions of dollars

of tomatoes.

These companies want

to create a friendly image

towards the consumer

that buries behind

all the abuses

that are part of our lives.

And we knew that if we bring

this message that injustices

are going on behind the food

that everybody's eating,

companies would have

to respond.

The Coalition

of Immokalee Workers started

what we call the Campaign

for Fair Food.

We created alliances

all over the country.

Students were organizing

in support of the workers.

So we were able to bring

the power of consumers

to be part of this fight

for our rights.

One of the

most encouraging developments

has been the emergence

of consumers

who want to reform the system,

who want a more humane system,

a more sustainable system.

But it doesn't always work.

Because they're up against

such powerful corporations

that they can be thwarted

at every turn.

For example, one of the most

brutal conditions

under which our food animals

live are female pigs,

who spend their lives in a

"gestation crate," it's called,

that is barely bigger

than they are.

The voters of California

voted by a significant margin

to outlaw the sale of pork

from animals that were living

in gestation crates.

And the industry would not

let that stand.

So they took it

to the Supreme Court,

where they nearly succeeded

in getting this law tossed out.

So we have allowed these giant,

consolidated food companies

to accumulate so much power

that they exercise a veto

over the consumer

and over the voter.

They have also perfected

the art of obfuscating

the role of the meat industry

in climate change.

No single food

contributes as much

to global warming as cattle.

And in fact, one third

of greenhouse gasses

are produced by

the food system alone.

That's second only

to transportation.

But we're up against

a very powerful industry.

The food industry

spends more on lobbying

than the defense industry.

That has bought them

an incredible measure of power

in Congress.

But there are corporations

out there that fully recognize

that the consumer wants to see

a different kind

of meat industry.

The question is,

what are these corporations

gonna do with this?

Is this gonna drive real change

or the appearance of change?

I was a professor at Stanford.

My job was

basic biomedical research,

just trying to understand

how cells work, how genes work.

I had a sabbatical,

and I decided

to use it to try

to figure out what would be

the, uh, most impactful thing

I could do, uh, next.

And, uh, very quickly,

I came to the conclusion

that it's to completely replace

animals in the food system.

Even if we just replaced cows,

we could give ourselves

a 30-year pause

in the rise

of greenhouse gasses.

And possibly more important

is that

the total number

of living mammals,

birds, reptiles,

amphibians and fish on Earth

is less than a third

what it was 50 years ago.

The collapse

in global biodiversity

is overwhelmingly caused

by habitat destruction

to graze livestock or raise

crops to feed them.

And you see it

happening in real time,

when you watch

the Amazon burning

to expand animal agriculture.

So, I quit my job at Stanford,

a job that I loved.

I felt like,

"Okay, well, I got to do this."

You're not gonna solve

the problem

by trying to persuade

people to change their diets.

That's never worked.

You just have to realize

that people aren't gonna stop

wanting meat, we're just

making it the wrong way.

My first challenge

was to understand

what makes meat

taste like meat.

The answer was that

animal tissues

contain very high levels

of a biomolecule called heme,

and it turns on the chemistry

of meat flavor and aroma.

We've genetically engineered

a yeast cell

to make the heme directly.

Pat Brown's not making

a big health claim

for his products.

It wasn't designed

to be a health food,

it was designed to fake

the meat experience.

So this is your

not-so-secret ingredient.

You can taste it if you like.

We've done a lot of work

thinking about

how to bind

the burger together,

and we needed to make it

something so robust

that you could stick it on

a grill and flip it without...

-And it wouldn't fall apart?

-Wouldn't fall apart,

and, you know, you can

make meatballs with it...

So, what was the breakthrough?

-Can you share that?

-Um, you know, methylcellulose

was a really big improvement

for us.

Sounds like

a tree product.

-It is a tree product.

Cellulose comes from trees.

Um, it's a really abundant

molecule in the world.

-POLLAN And where do you

get it?

-I think it's a byproduct

-from a lot

of the paper industry...

-Mm-hmm.

-Mm-hmm.

-And, uh...

wood pulp?

It's cleaned up enough that it

doesn't taste like w-wood pulp.

-I'm sure not.

-Yeah.

This is a facility

that has none of the horrors

of a slaughterhouse.

I think we have

a plant-based food,

with a fraction

of the environmental footprint

of covering

the planet with cows.

You can make a case

that the Impossible Burger

represents a good alternative

to meat as we now produce it.

It doesn't have hormones in it,

no antibiotics in it.

But make no mistake,

this is built

on commodity agriculture,

and it's

an ultra-processed food.

So there are trade-offs.

I like a burger experience

as much as the next guy,

and if I can have it

without implicating a cow

and all the problems

that come with cows,

maybe that's a good thing.

We are at

a very interesting moment.

Food science is being dedicated

to a nobler goal

than it has in the past:

to move us off

of a heavy meat diet,

onto a more plant-based diet.

The Impossible Burger is now

in every Burger King

in the country.

There's a willingness

on the part of the consumer

to experiment

with these products.

But they're... questionable.

Um, they may solve one problem

and create another.

I think the thing

that troubles me most

is the implication

that this is health food.

Because the phrase

"plant-based"

has a, has this aura

of greenness,

of health,

and that is deceptive.

My relationship with food

is complicated.

Very complicated.

Because I have type 1 diabetes.

You know, I think

most of us love food,

but we don't have to think

about it every day, every hour.

I measure my blood sugar

before and after every meal,

and the simpler I eat,

the more level

my blood sugar is.

As a journalist,

I am very much interested

in new foods.

...been able to extract

proteins from it.

I needed to find out

how they were made,

find out what it might mean

for my own body.

Is it clean label?

Like what does it...

-As clean as it gets.

-Yeah.

Our products are

95% mushroom roots,

with some flavoring.

We've got

this super salmon filet

made entirely out of plants,

without hurting a single fish.

I worry that

these new food companies,

um, are following

the footsteps of Big Food

with foods that

are empty calories,

high-impact on my blood sugar.

Now, what are the proteins

that you're producing?

That's something we can't talk

about it, kind of right now.

These founders of start-ups

have compelling ideas that

they're so passionate about.

So, at Sundial Foods,

we're making

plant-based chicken wings

with only eight ingredients.

And you are

the founders of the company?

We're both cofounders.

We actually met in a class

in UC Berkeley,

so all of this started

as a school project.

The new food has become

the cause

for every tech investor.

They want something

in their playbook

that speaks

to saving the world.

-We-we produce dairy

without a cow.

-Okay.

So, we've made

molecular coffee.

We're the first ones to make it

without coffee beans.

So, it's uh, world's first uh,

real honey made without bees.

Some

of these start-ups are raising

hundreds of millions

of dollars.

Tyson, JBS,

Hormel, they've all invested

in alternative meat companies.

But what happens down the road?

These big companies are only

thinking about their profit.

What's it going to be like

for the everyday consumer

walking through

the supermarket?

How will they navigate

the new landscape?

So now, food made by scientists

has led to cultured meat.

Meat that is the multiplication

of actual meat cells.

This really is meat.

So this is called EPIC.

When I was practicing

as a cardiologist,

the question was,

what if I practiced

for the next 35 years?

I would likely be,

you know, involved

in saving 3,000, 4,000 lives.

But what if we could start

saving trillions

of animal lives

and also, positively affecting

billions of human lives?

When I was working

at the Mayo Clinic,

we would have patients

that would come

with a very large heart attack.

So we would take stem cells

from that patient

and we would reinject them

into the heart,

to regrow the heart muscle.

That's where my idea came from,

of growing meat

directly from animal cells.

I always want to know,

"How does this product

connect to the farmland,

"to the earth?

What's its relation to nature?"

Here,

you're not on any kind of farm.

You're back in a lab

manufacturing a broth

out of amino acids.

So, any of these

cultivators here

-can grow chicken or beef...

-Yeah.

-...or pork or...

-The same cultivators...

-Essentially.

-...depending, and you can put

-different things in them.

-Any species.

Essentially, we've got

a couple of tanks here

that are holding

the-the feed for the cells.

And, uh, we have recipes

of nutrients

for each type of animal

that we're making.

-There's actually chicken

in there.

-Yeah, there's chicken.

Imagine that this is outside

of the--

this is the body of an animal.

-Right.

-Inside of it,

there's cells that are growing.

Those cells are doubling

every 24 hours,

and after a certain number

of doublings,

you have a lot

of cells in there.

In a, in-- for instance,

a cultivator like this,

every five days

you can have a batch of meat.

Meat of the future

could be local,

it could be regional.

Just like you go out

and see beer being made,

you can also go and see how

your meat's being made.

Mm-hmm.

This is all chicken.

I was gonna ask you about

the ingredient label.

It'll be "chicken cells."

So, when we started off,

that small piece would be

a couple of thousand dollars.

And the challenge is to make it

at a cost that is affordable.

Ultimately,

in five to ten years,

we'll be able to get the prices

that are very similar

to what people will be used

to paying for, let's say,

-an animal that is butchered.

-Right.

Could've fooled me.

In fact, we were fooled.

We subsequently learned that

the chicken breast I sampled

did not come from the tanks

we were shown

but from a more costly

and labor-intensive process.

The technology to produce

whole-cut chicken at scale

is not as close as the industry

would have us believe.

If alternative meat products

can help shrink

the industrial meat system,

that'd be great.

But I think there is

a place for animals

in American agriculture,

in any agriculture.

When it's done sustainably

and animals are used

in such a way

that they're feeding the soil,

feeding the plants.

Uh, that you have

this closed loop

of animals and plants,

recycling nutrients.

That's a sustainable farm

to me.

So I don't think the goal

needs to be eliminating meat,

but we sure need to shrink

the meat system.

There's no question about that.

Last Friday,

I resigned, uh,

from my position

as a, uh, Pioneer seed rep

so that I can put

a lot more focus

into, uh, this project that's

called The Stock Cropper.

I think a lot of people

will look at it and think,

"Zack,

you're completely insane."

It's probably a...

probably a well-placed,

uh, criticism.

With The Stock

Cropper, we've devised

a farming system

that is truly regenerative,

good for the soil,

good for the environment...

...in a more positive direction

for the future of agriculture

than the one

we're currently on.

This barn is mobile,

so that our animals

are always passing into

fresh ground, fresh pasture.

So we have our ruminant animals

out front,

-uh, like my friend

the sheep here,

and what their job is to do

is to be the lawn mowers

and mow down the pasture

and process that vegetation.

And then, following behind

the sheep and goats,

we have the pigs.

The pigs graze on what's left,

and their snouts

are essentially our tillers

to kind of move the soil around

and incorporate

some of the manures.

Our animals are our

manure spreaders

as we move through the field.

And then, the annual pasture

is allowed to regenerate.

What we're in right now

is only about

three weeks since it was grazed

and we already got regrowth.

So, the beauty of this system

is we're putting livestock

back on the land,

but we're doing it in a fashion

that holds nutrients in place

so they'll be available

to next year's crop.

You know, this system

is completely different

than the conventional system

I use on the rest of my farm,

where we have to replace

a lot of the things

that these animals

are doing naturally,

uh, with synthetic fertilizers

and pesticides.

And the end product

is a higher quality,

tastier meat animal.

Something that's

a premium product

to add value

to my farming operation.

Well, Zack,

until recently,

you were a Pioneer dealer.

That's correct, I was.

-But you gave it up?

-I did. I gave it up.

You gonna take a hit

on your income, then?

-Yeah, for sure.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Why would you do that?

'Cause I wanted

to wake up in the morning

and believe in

what I was doing.

I see the path that...

what the current

commodity game is on,

and it's a path that, uh,

it doesn't do a lot of good

for the things I'm passionate

about, which is the land

and water quality

and c-communities and...

Um, I could've kept on doing

that same stuff,

uh, or I could've said,

"I've got this alternative

system and maybe

this will provide

some opportunity,"

and I s-- you know, you only

live once, take a chance.

And so, what will the old boys

think when you, when you say,

"I'm gonna have goats

in a cage...

-"...and give up

my Pioneer dealership?"

I-I'm just happy that I can

provide entertainment

and something for them to talk

about in the coffee shop.

That's my contribution

to the community.

-Oh,

that's good. Yeah.

-Yeah.

It's my way to give back.

So this is what I mean

by "Iowa bullion."

You know, there's a lot of

places in the world

that would k*ll

to have dirt like this,

and that's why I want to keep

every inch of it here,

uh, on my family's land

where it belongs.

Not blowing in the wintertime,

into the ditch.

Or not, you know, washing off,

you know, through the low spot

into the crick.

This is, this is what,

this is--

-this is wealth right here.

-Right. Right.

Well, I mean, the corn

looks beautiful, really.

Yeah.

There's

definitely an excitement

about The Stock Cropper.

I've attracted

a lot of other people

that farm weird,

uh, like myself.

We're gonna walk down

through this path here,

if you follow me.

Okay, so this is

the-the original system.

We basically did sheep and

goats out front, pigs behind.

You can barely smell

these hogs.

Outside a typical hog

confinement building,

you'd be retching right now.

When you

explain that the animals

are feeding the plants

and the plants are feeding

the animals,

and it's all happening

in this one space,

you can see the looks

in their eyes.

They got what we were doing.

So now the moment, uh,

that we've all been

waiting for.

The new Clustercluck Nano here.

In order to really,

truly be scalable,

you have to have the ability

to have autonomous movement

without being here.

This is solar-powered,

electrically driven,

on a programmable basis.

This is a big deal.

And I've got folks

that are really interested,

but they're also skeptical

because they see the challenges

to scale this up.

1898, we had a tractor.

-Yeah.

-We could use it.

Took clear till

the '50s, 1950s,

-to get rid of the horses.

-Right.

So, I mean,

you're dealing with a crowd

-that does not like change.

-Yeah.

And that's okay,

but change comes eventually,

and we're hoping that we're...

betting on the right,

the right horse, so to speak.

The biggest issue right now

is that the big four

meat companies

have essentially

blocked the path

for independent producers

to process livestock.

And what we need is a shift

in policy that makes possible

smaller and regional

packing facilities.

That will open up

the floodgates

for farmers to get

their products to consumers.

My passion in this

is to create a system

where there's more farmers

out here like myself

being able to feed

their family with--

instead of thousands of acres,

maybe several hundred?

And produce

high-quality food products.

That's my dream.

All right.

Here we go.

I used to be a fisherman

chasing fish around the globe.

You name it I fished it:

tuna, herring,

lobster, cod.

It was great,

you know,

fishing day and night,

being in the belly of a boat

months at a time.

The problem was, I was fishing

at the height

of industrial, extractive

food production.

Huge trawlers

with half-mile nets

ripping up ecosystems.

And so, we got too good

at what we did.

The answer everybody told us

was fish farming.

I was gonna help

feed the planet

and I was still gonna be

able to work on the water.

The smell of fish was still

gonna come home with me.

So I went out to these pens,

and I'm pulling them out.

And it's neither fish nor food,

they got a grey color,

there's sea lice on them.

I swear to God, they're

stupider than regular fish.

And so, it's borrowing

all the bad practices

that are happening on land.

Heavy use of pesticides,

antibiotics.

This was industrial pig farming

out in the ocean.

So I ended up just really

trying to figure out

how do I be

a steward of the sea

and switch from pillaging

to regeneration?

I asked the ocean,

"What does it make sense

to grow?"

And it says,

"Why don't you grow things

"that don't swim away,

"that you don't have to feed

and that breathe life

back into the ocean?"

So I decided to grow kelp.

I mean this

is an embarrassing thing

for a fisherman to do, right,

growing plants underwater?

When I first came down,

I was getting l-laughed

off the docks.

I lied to people, told them

I was growing hemp underwater,

which seemed like

it was a little better.

You can see the white buoys

out there in the distance.

That's our ten-acre farm.

Below the surface,

we're able to pack

so many crops along

that vertical water column.

We have our kelp at one level,

then we've got our mussels

and our scallops

and our oysters and clams.

The power of the ocean is that

I don't need to fertilize

like a corn farmer.

You don't need tractors,

you don't need buildings,

you don't need to buy land.

Every one of our oysters,

all our kelp,

also is restoring

our ecosystem.

An oyster filters

50 gallons of water a day.

And our kelp soaks up

five times more carbon

than land-based plants.

I really believe that kelp

is gonna be the most

sustainable food on the planet.

As a chef, I'm always looking

for new ingredients,

new flavors.

Kelp is amazing

because not only can I use it

like an herb,

but also, I can saut it really

simply the way I would spinach.

Kelp dolmades.

Trying new things just needs

to become the normal

instead of something

that's outlandish or weird.

You know, sushi wasn't even

widely accepted

until relatively recently.

Kelp is affordable,

it's nutritious,

and it will absolutely be

a part of the future of food.

The question is what kind

of industry will we have

going forward?

Is this gonna be

about thousand-acre farms

owned by a couple

global companies?

Or is it gonna be about

thousands of ten-acre farms

dotting our coastline?

Replication,

that's what's powerful,

not consolidation.

There is another way here

that we can be proud of.

We got really good

at fishing, right?

Too good.

Maybe we'll really get good

at solutions this time around.

Here in Florida,

the Fair Food Program

has implemented agreements

with growers from

the agricultural industry.

Now, there is a code of conduct

that guarantees

that the abuses that happen

will not be tolerated.

Workers are protected

to speak free of retaliation,

and they receive a bonus

at the end of the week.

So it's an increase in wages.

When we

signed the Fair Food agreement,

I got some pretty nasty

phone calls

from our competitors/friends

in the industry.

"Does it impact

my bottom line?" Sure.

But doing the right thing,

running a clean business,

is always gonna cost more

than breaking the f*cking law.

Today, 90% of the tomatoes

being produced in Florida

are covered

by the Fair Food agreement.

And 14 corporations

that buy from these growers

have signed onto it.

But not everybody

has come on board.

Wendy's decided

to actually cut purchases

from growers for adhering

to the Fair Food Program.

Instead, they went to Mexico

to buy from mega-farms

that do not respect

the rights of the workers.

If Wendy's were to join

the Fair Food Program

and pay an extra penny a pound

to farm workers, it would cost

maybe $500,000 a year.

It's a tiny portion

of their annual revenue

and might increase the cost

of a Wendy's hamburger

by 1/30th of a penny.

There are other corporations

that refuse to participate

on the Fair Food program.

But if they would

sign on to it,

then we would see an increase

in wages of almost double.

And now, the Fair Food Program

has become the blueprint

for labor relationships in many

other parts of the country.

In Latin America,

many countries

are making progress

to reduce consumption

of ultra-processed foods.

In Chile, they use

black warning labels

saying "too much sugar,"

"too much saturated fat,"

"too much calories."

And in Mexico,

for instance, they say,

if a product has

a warning label,

they cannot have

anything other thing

saying the product is good.

No health claims.

In Brazil,

every day,

we have 40 million meals

prepared in public schools.

The Brazilian dietary policy

is that real food is essential.

Cooking is essential.

And basically, avoiding

ultra-processed foods.

Children that

have access to this program,

really are acquiring

healthy eating habits.

This program promotes

the demand for healthy foods.

The municipalities,

they are obliged by law

to buy unprocessed

and minimally processed foods.

And they should buy 30% of food

from local family farmers.

Come on guys, get in line.

Normally, school districts

purchase food from

a distribution company.

But the Camden

city school district

is now providing food

direct from the farmers

to the table

right in our school cafeterias.

We have asparagus fries today

with Parmesan and...

It's so successful.

There are more students

selecting salads than ever.

There was a time where they're

gonna walk past it,

get a cheeseburger,

get tenders, get whatever.

To be able to serve fresh,

fresh, fresh produce,

straight from the farm,

it makes all the difference

in the world.

It makes them want

to come to school.

Yeah.

We're partnering with

The Common Market

to build relationships

with our local farmers.

So those were grown

on farms near here.

We saw

there needed to be a link

that connected communities

like ours with the abundance

of farmland and the abundance

of good food

that's grown in our region.

It's largely federal policy

that is supporting these large,

multinational companies

who are selling cheap

and processed food.

Programs like ours demonstrate

the kind of policy change

that we want to see.

Policy that's beneficial for

both farmers in rural places

and urban consumers.

Buenos das.

So, you feel

good about the hearing today?

Yeah.

The coalition around

these nutrition issues

has grown from family farmers

to civil rights activists

to environmental justice

people.

They see this

potential coalition

that could really

make real change.

-Good luck.

-Thank you very much.

I'm now the chairperson

of a powerful subcommittee

on nutrition.

And I want to be a part

of letting people know

a lot of these pressing

realities that moved me

to want to deal with

our food system.

So it's a tremendous privilege

and responsibility

to focus Washington on an issue

that I believe is at the center

of human life, American life.

Now, let's be clear,

the majority of our food system

is being now controlled

by just a handful

of big multinational

corporations.

These food companies carefully

forment-- uh, formulate

and market

nutrient-poor, addictive,

ultra-processed foods

which now comprise two-thirds

of the calories

in children and teens

in their diets

in the United States.

And these companies

want us to believe

that the resultant

diet-related diseases,

such as obesity and diabetes,

are somehow a moral failing.

That they represent

a lack of willpower,

or a failure

to get enough exercise.

That-that is just a lie.

It's a lie.

And so, I believe

we need to rethink

the way we approach food

and nutrition policy.

Our lives literally

depend upon it.

By fixing our food system,

we will create

health and well-being

in-in every aspect

of our lives.

But the forces of Washington

right now are really invested

in sustaining

these broken systems.

Because it's creating

big profit

for very powerful interests.

Tyson Foods,

in the last quarter of 2021,

their net income rose

from $469 million

to $1.2 billion,

that's one quarter, okay?

; I've got

a piece of legislation

right now to put

more transparency

on those big meatpacking

companies

and have a special investigator

with subpoena power.

Make sure these folks aren't

doing antitrust activities.

But make no mistake,

there's gonna be a lot

of money thrown against me.

They're gonna say,

"We're not gonna let

some bigmouth senator

from Montana stop us."

And so, bring it on, guys.

How'd the hearing go?

-Really well.

-Yeah.

Now we're being filmed

doing an illegal activity.

We're jaywalking here.

I think the light's

gonna change for us maybe?

You think so?

Sometimes the law has

to catch up to where you are.

That's right.

I really think that this is

a moment in history

where we can expand

the innovations going on

in the American food system

to show people that there's

a better way of doing this.

It's all doable,

it's all fixable.

If we tackle the big problem

of antitrust

and agricultural policy.

We need to change

the incentives,

so the government is

subsidizing healthy calories,

not unhealthy calories.

Just imagine

if the government decided

to step in on the side of

the consumer and the citizen,

rather than on the side

of the big food companies.

We had a pandemic

and saw how brittle

things were.

So let's create resiliency

by empowering the folks

that raise their food

in our local

and regional food systems.

The future doesn't have to be

cornfield after cornfield.

If we want to see

change happen,

we have to change

agricultural policy.

We get the right policy,

and we'll start taking care

of our soils,

which in turn makes

healthy food.

Like, it's not rocket science.

This is our chance

to chart a new course.

We can actually grow good food,

create good jobs,

while we're also healing

the planet.

And that's sort of the world

I-I'd love to live in.

-Fifteen!

-Stand up!

KC!

I want to see everybody

treated fairly.

We are the ones

that make this company

successful.

-Who runs this Taco Bell?

-We do!

I want to see life.

I want to see people

living life,

not just fighting to survive.

We can have a food system

that produces healthy food

for consumers,

that provides a safe workplace

and decent wages to workers,

that treats animals like

they're living beings

and not industrial commodities,

that treats the land

in a way that's sustainable

and not destructive.

We not only can do it,

we have to.

This land is your land

This land is my land

From California

Well,

to the New York island

From the redwood forest

To the Gulf Stream waters

I tell you

This land

Was made for you and me

As I went walking

Down that ribbon

of a highway

I saw above me

Oh, that endless skyway

Now, I saw below me

That golden valley

And I said

This land

Was made for you and me

As I was walking

Now, they tried to stop me

They put up a sign

that said

Oh, it said,

"Private property"

Well, on the back side

You know, it said nothing

So, it must be that side

Was made for you

and me, yeah

One bright, sunny morning

Well, in the shadow

of a steeple

Down by the welfare office

I... I saw my people

You know, now,

they stood hungry

I... I stood wondering

I was wondering

if this land

Was made for you and me

This land is your land

This land is my land

From Riverside, California

Oh, to Staten Island

Well, on down

to west of Georgia

Oh, don't forget

to say Philadelphia

Oh, we moving on down

to Mississippi

Oh, Houston, Texas

Ah, L.A.

Yeah

You know,

this land is your land

Ah, this land is my land

Oh, this land

is your land

You've got to believe

Oh, it's my land

Oh

Mm

Ooh, this land was made

for you and me, yeah

Oh, this land was made

for you and me

Oh, this land

This land is your land

Ah, this land

This land is my land.