Ep. 184 - The Food System Isn’t Broken—And Here’s How to Make It Better
Show Notes
On this episode I’m joined by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, the authors of Feed the People, a new book challenging some of the most comfortable assumptions in the debates around food sustainability. Their core argument is provocative: the global food system isn’t “broken” in the way it’s often portrayed by its most well-known critics, and pretending it is can actually make things worse.
Rather than romanticizing a return to small, local, pre-industrial agriculture, Jan and Gabriel argue that industrial food systems have delivered something historically extraordinary: abundance. For the first time in human history, billions of people can access diverse, affordable food, largely because of scale, trade, processing, and technology. That doesn’t mean the system is without serious problems. It means those problems should be addressed directly and surgically, not with nostalgia.
We dig into why slogans like “eat local” and “just go back to small farms” collapse under scrutiny, especially in a world of eight billion people. We explore their policy framework of “more food, less feed, no fuel”—prioritizing crops for humans rather than animals or biofuels—and why animal agriculture remains one of the most inefficient uses of land, calories, and protein on Earth. We also talk about the political choices that have made meat artificially cheap, why demand isn’t a law of nature, and how public policy can bend the curve.
If you care about feeding humanity sustainably, this conversation is for you.
Discussed in this episode
Policies like Denmark’s livestock tax and Amsterdam’s ban on meat advertising.
Both Jan and Gabriel urge reading Nature’s Metropolis, while Jan also recommends The Entrepreneurial State.
The Triple Helix/Rethink Food 2024 Climate Week dinner featuring a variety of biotech-derived sustainable foods. This brings to mind the 1911 DC banquet featuring foods that had all been previously refrigerated.
Jan is the co-author of a meta-analysis about plant-based that includes a detailed comparison of the environmental impacts of plant-based and animal sourced foods.
Our recent episode with Bruce Friedrich about reducing humanity’s reliance on animals as a food source.
Our past episode with Mike Grunwald about his book and his NY Times columns on eating less meat, industrial ag, and treating animal factory waste like any other factory waste.
Our past episode with Robert Paarlberg on food/ag sustainability.
Our past episode on fertilizer with Pivot Bio.
James McWilliams’ book Just Food on why locavores get it wrong.
Get to know Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg
Jan Dutkiewicz is an assistant professor at Pratt Institute. He is a contributing writer at Vox and a contributing editor at The New Republic. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Gabriel N. Rosenberg is an associate professor at Duke University and a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
TRANSCRIPT
Jan Dutkiewicz 0:00
We have one of the most abundant food systems that humanity has ever created.
Paul Shapiro 0:06
Welcome to the Business for good podcast where we spotlight people making money by solving some of the world's most pressing problems. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro, author of a nationally best selling book on food sustainability, and CEO of a company in the same space. On this show, I speak with founders, investors and thought leaders who prove that doing good and doing well can go hand in hand. The biggest challenges facing humanity are solvable and are often profitable too. My hope is that this podcast informs, inspires, and maybe even helps repel you to build a business that makes the world a better place. I'm glad you're here. Welcome friend to Episode 184 of the business for good podcast. This is a special one, because after 183 audio only episodes, business for Good is now officially stepping into a new era. We are also a video podcast. You can still listen exactly the way that you always have, but now you can also watch the show on YouTube. Just search for business for good podcast hit subscribe and enjoy seeing these conversations as well as hearing them. Okay, before we get into this conversation, here is your wild fact. Did you know that the advent of refrigeration caused stomach cancer rates to plummet in the US? If you're thinking it's because people were no longer eating spoiled food, think again, in an unintended public health win. Refrigeration reduced our dependence on salt as a preservative, which, in turn, has been credited with a dramatic reduction in rates of stomach cancer until the 1930s this was the deadliest cancer in the United States. It's now not even in the top 10, just one more way that food technology has made our lives much, much better. Now onto this episode, which is also about food technology and indeed, food policy. On this episode, I'm joined by Jan dukiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, the authors of feed the people, a new book challenging some of the most comfortable assumptions in the debates around food sustainability. Their core argument is a provocative one, that the global food system isn't broken in the way that it's often portrayed by its most well known critics, and pretending it is can actually make things worse, rather than romanticizing a return to small, local, pre industrial agriculture, Jan and Gabriel argue that the industrial food systems have delivered something totally incredible, abundance. For the first time in human history, billions of people can access diverse, affordable food, largely because of scale, trade, processing and technology. Now, of course, it doesn't mean that this system is without serious problems, but it does mean that those problems should be addressed directly and surgically, not with nostalgia. We dig into why slogans like eat local and just go back to small farms collapse under scrutiny, especially in a world of 8 billion people, we explore their policy framework of more food, less feed, no fuel, essentially prioritizing crops for humans rather than animals or biofuels, and why animal agriculture remains one of the most inefficient uses of land, calories and protein on Earth. We also talk about the political choices that have made meat artificially cheap, why demand isn't a law of nature and how public policy can help bend the curve if you care about feeding humanity sustainably, this conversation is for you. Jan Gabriel, welcome to the business for good podcast. Thanks for having us. Yeah, great. Great to be here. Yeah, really good to talk with you guys. I enjoyed the new book, feed the people. I appreciate that you guys are carrying on the tradition now of really questioning the some of the fallacies of the so called, like, local artisanal food movement. Talk about that, but I will tell you that I really enjoyed your description of how canned pumpkin comes to be because I consume, I believe that I consume more canned pumpkin than almost anybody else on Earth. I would bet I generally eat maybe, like half a can a day. Literally, half a can a day. I have to buy them from Walmart, like my wife buys them on like 1212, can trays from Walmart, just to satiate this demand. So that was fun. What led you to pick canned pumpkin as a description in there?
Gabriel Rosenberg 3:54
The primary reason, I suppose, was that most people just eat pumpkin pies with without any sort of recognition of the fact that it is a quintessential industrial treat. You don't make your canned pumpkin from scratch. You don't chop up and roast the pumpkin on your own, because if you did that, you would wind up with something that doesn't taste very good in a pie. And, yeah, I mean, we just thought about is this, you know, it's like people love to make pies from scratch, and they love to make pumpkin pies from scratch. But that doesn't, that doesn't change the fact that the pumpkin in your pumpkin pie is still provided to you by the industrial food system, and it's really good.
Paul Shapiro 4:39
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the famous Carl Sagan quote where he says, you know, if you want to make an apple pie, first, you have to start with the cosmos, which goes back even before. But I was surprised when you mentioned that the pumpkins, that it's not really like one pumpkin variety, it's like a whole bunch of squashes that are in there, and that it's coming from China. And so I looked at my own, which is, I buy the Walmart brand. And which is called great value, and it says product of China and so. And behold, you are writing about something that's a very daily part of my diet. But I'd imagine that most people reading your book are not interested in how canned pumpkin comes to be, although I certainly found it quite riveting. But let's get more to the meat, or maybe the alternative meat of the matter, depending on your perspective of the book feed the people, because it is an article of faith among sustainable food advocates that the food system is broken, right? I mean, I've spent decades now in the sustainable food advocacy world, and it's just it's so rote to hear people say the food system is broken. You argue, though, that the food system isn't broken, that it's actually working well in many respects. Why? Why isn't it broken? Why is everybody else wrong?
Jan Dutkiewicz 5:45
First of all, it's really a conceptual question, right? The food system isn't one thing that can break. The food system is the intersection of a whole lot of different subsystems. It depends on environmental factors that determine how and where you can grow crops, it depends on political factors like policies and regulations. It depends on the political economy of labor. It depends on a social system that determines what people want to eat, what they can and can't eat for ethical, cultural, dietary reasons. So to say that this amazingly complex intersection of things is broken is kind of a nonsensical term. And indeed, if you just look out at the food system, we have one of the most abundant food systems that humanity has ever created. You can go into your basic grocery store and for, relatively speaking, not a lot of money. You know, recent inflationary run ups, notwithstanding, you have access to an extremely varied, potentially very fresh, potentially very healthy diet, all because of the industrial food system and global trade. Now, this food system has a lot of problems, and we address those in the book, problems regarding environmental externalities, problems regarding the treatment of labor, problems regarding health outcomes. But what we want to argue in the book is that you have to approach these problems very much one by one, and recognize that in solving some of them, there may be some trade offs, but that what you really need to do is sort of tweak the dial to change the incentives and disincentives within our existing food system, because it's not broken. First of all, and second of all, wherever we go from here, we have to start where we are. We can't just scrap the food system we have. And go back to some, you know, Edenic world of small, tiny farms that probably never existed, because it's just not a way you can produce food at scale for our current society. Also, it's
Paul Shapiro 7:46
funny, you call it Eden. It because they certainly didn't have farming in Eden. Thing, you know, they were, they were they were gathered they were gatherers. They weren't farmers in Eden. But yeah, I would doubt that that there ever was such a good old days where farming was done in concert with nature. It seems more likely that farming is really like a war with nature, right, trying to get it to do something that it wouldn't otherwise do. The natural state of things is not farming. The natural state of things is wilderness, obviously. But you know, you mentioned inflation, Jan, and you know, I read a piece recently which made a really excellent point that even today, with food prices appearing to be inflated in the US, like, it's still a tiny fraction of our total consumptive budget, right? Like, if you look at historically or even in many other places in the world, Americans spend less as a percentage of their income on food than almost any other time in history. I don't know if you guys want to address this or not. Gabriel, you're nodding your nodding your head. So what do you think?
Gabriel Rosenberg 8:45
I think it's a it's it credit exactly to the productivity and abundance that the industrial food system is able to supply us with. That Americans currently, I'm trying to remember what the specific number is the last time I checked, I believe it's 13% somebody should fact check me on that, but I believe it's currently 13% of household budgets. And the interesting thing, specifically around recent like recent increases in food prices, is that it's primarily appeared in how people are spending outside of the home, right? So I find that to be kind of like, like a fascinating element of it, even with, even with major increases in food prices in the last couple of years, it actually hasn't changed that much in terms of the percentage of your paycheck that you're spending at grocery stores. It's it's mostly been in terms of restaurants. And that's also kind of like a really interesting facet of it that people sort of would neglect. Like Americans love to eat out. They love eating. Restaurants, right? I don't know if it's just America's. I think people, not just in the United States, love to do that.
Paul Shapiro 10:06
People like, I think most humans like convenience. Yeah,
Gabriel Rosenberg 10:09
yeah. They do well and and, you know, we can go into the differences between food that's cooked in restaurants and foods that are cooked in in homes. But one of the things that's like most striking is how much more affordable eating outside of the home is now than it was, certainly 3040, or 50 years ago, let alone a century ago, when when there there wasn't a robust network of of restaurants for you to choose from. You know, obviously, like eating outside of the home for a lot of your meals can drive some bad outcomes. So we don't necessarily want to, like, give a free pass to people, you know, going to Burger King or McDonald's or something for all of their meals, and that's a big part of the story there. But to go back to your prior question about whether or not the food system is broken, you know, our general perspective on this is, how can we improve the average meal that's served to Americans in restaurants or on their around their their table at home. How can we do that? Seems to us to be a much more sensible way of dealing with the downsides this system than trying to invent something new from scratch that wouldn't work and that would be much, much more costly. So to get back to that notion of like the broken people are interested in reinventing the wheel here, and it's quite fruitless. The real task is, how do we improve that average meal at McDonald's? How do we improve it at Waffle House? How do we improve it at your at your table at home?
Paul Shapiro 11:55
And in fairness, I mean, I don't subscribe to the view that we need to reinvent it. But I think that the folks who, like the Michael pollans and so on of the world, are not necessarily saying reinvent it. They're saying go back to a time when agriculture was great, right? They want to basically return to an agrarian type society, where people know their local farmer and they are involved in farming in some way themselves. Of course, I think that is not only worse for the environment, but also really fantastical, considering there's more than 8 billion humans now on the planet, and you all make a good point, which is that if we actually desire to feed the 8 billion people on the planet, we're going to need 21st Century technology, not 19th century agricultural practices, right? We feed way more people with way fewer resources today than ever before, and it doesn't mean we can't do better, as you pointed out just a moment ago, but it does suggest that maybe improving upon the current system is better than radically reimagining it to something totally different. If you look at some of those people, though, let's take Michael Pollan as an example who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma. You know, he became his mantra, became very famous, right? Which was, eat food, mostly plants, not too much, right? That was like for your personal eater manifesto. You guys are not so much focused on doing a personal eater manifesto as what I would call like a food policy manifesto in your book, and your food policy manifesto seems to be more food, less feed, no biofuel, right? More food, so more actual food for humans, less feed, meaning less animal farming and no biofuel, so no growing crops for ethanol and so on. Expand upon that. That is, am I right that that's your mantra for the book. If somebody's reading that's the main takeaway, the main policy proposals.
Jan Dutkiewicz 13:41
Well, I think, I think that's broadly, broadly correct. I think a slightly different way of putting it is, I think, as we write in the book, that eat food, not too much, mostly plants, we can more or less get behind as the organizing principle behind this better version of the food system with a few asterisks right, such as, What does eat food mean for pollen? It means nothing processed. It means things produced on these sorts of, you know, regenerative or agroecological farms, or what have you. Whereas we think we should lean into fortified foods, processed foods, healthy, ultra processed food, genetically modified foods, where those deliver either environmental or efficiency or health outcomes, right? And so we actually, in one of our chapters, we sort of deconstruct and then reconstruct that mantra from Michael Pollan. But otherwise, yeah, look, the food system is, as we have it, an industrialized system predicated on economies of scale. Production is really good at doing economies of scale production, but we should change the incentives, or perhaps increase the disincentives for producing efficiently and at economies of scale, things that are inherently inefficient. Efficient. And what I mean by that is, if you're producing a whole lot of corn, but you're producing corn that is going to be burned as biofuel, which, as recent recent shows, doesn't even give us a big reduction in emissions across the value chain compared to conventional fuel, then that's a very inefficient use of land.
Paul Shapiro 15:18
Or, as Mike Greenwald in his book we are eating the planet. Argues it's not just not a big reduction in emissions, it's an increase in emissions, as he argues,
Jan Dutkiewicz 15:26
depending on the literature, right, it's potentially even an increase in emissions. And similarly with similarly with animal feed, right? You can produce a whole lot of animals in a factory farming system, but you have to feed them something. And the feed conversion loss in terms of calories and protein, is extremely high across animals, even animals and factory farms. So the average animal will consume far more calories and far more protein and feed than you get from animal meat. So again, that's a massive inefficiency in land use and all the externalities that come along with it. And so we think basically, we should use the industrial systems and the economy to scale production, the efficiency of the food system to produce good food for humans, and not food that is wasted.
Paul Shapiro 16:10
Okay, so actually, speaking of Mike Gruenwald, so he was a previous guest on this show when his book we're eating the earth came out, and you guys have been pretty critical of him. You don't actually Name Check him in the book, but you reference an op ed of his. It's a very vitriolic reference toward really discounting it, but you don't name check him. And I asked him about your book. He hasn't read it yet, but I asked him about the general principles of the message of your book, and he said he was in total agreement with all of it. The only place where he thought he might be in a little bit of difference was that he thought that it's going to be very difficult to switch a lot of people over from animal based meat to plant based or other non animal based meats. But his idea, obviously, for no you know, not growing crops for energy and etc, you know, an embrace of higher yields genetically modified foods and so on. He's all for that. Where do you see your difference with him? So, you know, his book came out. It got a lot of attention. Hopefully your book will get a lot of attention to if somebody was saying, what's, what's the daylight between you guys and Mike Grunewald, where do you see it? Is it on this issue of how quickly we can reduce our reliance on animals as a food source?
Gabriel Rosenberg 17:20
I mean, if I'm thinking specifically to the op ed that we did, that we did name check our disagreement there is, is quite clear. The fundamental premise of the op ed is that demand for animal based meat cannot be reduced, that it will only increase. That is historically, like, just not supportable. Like, like, that's not that. That claim, which I understand why people may think that is the case, is just very, very limited. It's very, very narrow, and it projects on into the future, things that that we just don't know and we ought not assume. So that was the fundamental premise of the op ed. I think that's, I think that's a real problem, you know, if Mike wants to texture it elsewhere, I think that's, that's fine. We can, we can argue on, you know, like that, but, but that we fundamentally want to make the argument that, in fact, you can affect the demand curve for meat, and we ought to be investing resources in doing so.
Paul Shapiro 18:30
I don't want to focus on, you know, what people will call like, the narcissism of small differences, since I think you guys are very aligned anyway, on most of the stuff. And I am certainly of the opinion that we can, we can bend that cost curve or that demand curve? I'm a vegan. I've been a vegan for over three decades, and I'm devoting my life to that very principle. And so if I, if I thought that we couldn't, I would go do something else with my life. I think his argument, though, and I'd love to hear your response is like, look, meat demand has gone up every single year, basically for decades on end, like as long as the three of us have been alive, per capita meat consumption has been going up. So you're saying it's not supportable to say that it's going to continue going up. That's not what the UN or the FAO say, right? They say meat demand is going to keep on going up. Why are they all wrong? It's gone up every year of our lives. You know, I don't want it to go up any more than you do. I want it to go down. But why do you think it's not supportable to argue that it's not going to keep on going up?
Gabriel Rosenberg 19:24
I mean, just sort of like straightforwardly, it ignores the question of why it has gone up, right? And so the why, of the why here is the investment of collective resources in making meat cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and allowing it to continue to externalize rather than internalize, those costs of production. As long as that's the case, I suppose you know you are going to artificially, like, continue to increase demand for it, right? That that much makes sense. You are you are reduced. Seeing the cost of meat in that in that fashion, but this isn't like some sort of hard coded or hard wired fundamental desire that everybody on earth has. It's because we have invested collective resources and and policy in making this commodity much cheaper than it would be if we treated it like virtually any other commodity, that that's the reason why there is elevated demand for it. So you know the predictions about continued growth in meat consumption and continued demand, they naturalize all of those political decisions that we've made. And an op ed in the New York Times that says, hey, the future is factory farms, but doesn't then, like, look at the question of, why are we allowed to build these things? Why are these political decisions that we've made? Why are we not questioning them? And that's what we're trying to do in the book. And I and, you know, I don't want to, I definitely don't want to, like I don't, I don't want to put us in a position of saying we disagree more with Mike than maybe we do. But I thought that that op ed in particular was very, was was, frankly, like, pretty irresponsible. I just, I think it naturalized a whole number of things that we ought not naturalize.
Jan Dutkiewicz 21:32
And to give Mike his kudos, I was just on a panel with Mike at an event at Tufts a few weeks ago, and he just had an op ed come out also in the New York Times about regulating effluent on factory farms. And in a sense, that part is what was missing, as Gabriel just identified from that you know, let's embrace factory farms argument, because he clearly acknowledges that basic things like under regulation of things like effluent on factory farms, the under regulation of one single thing really undergirds the cheapness of the business model. And you have these kinds of things everywhere, right from incentives for crop insurance, for animal feed like soy, which slightly diminishes the potential costs of meat, but also provides a ready source of feed for animals. That right there is just one of the pathways through which there's a systemic incentive for meat production, and that's in the United States, which it has, you know, there's sort of like a managerial state aspect to agriculture, but a slightly softer handed one than places like China. China has experienced huge growth in meat production, but it's almost entirely predicated on state policy that basically offshores land use by buying tremendous amount of soy that China simply does not have the arable land for bringing it into China, milling it into feed and feeding it to pigs for the Chinese market. That's not the result of some inherent demand among Chinese people for a tremendous amount of meat, or the invisible hand of the market putting more pork on their plates. This is decades of government policy, both domestic investment and production and foreign trade policy.
Paul Shapiro 23:18
So what do you think it'll take? You know, this is it seems like a Gordian knot to me. Right? Every single culture, as soon as they start having more and more people escaping poverty, right, in India, in China, Brazil, meet, demand starts soaring. Right in all of these countries, every single time any country has ever had lots of people escape poverty and join the middle class. Obviously, something that's good and that we want, but the side effect is a much heavier footprint on the environment, including increased per capita of meat demand. You're talking about one potential policy proposal, which Mike Greenwell mentioned, which is starting to regulate the animal factories as if they were regular industrial factories, and making them treat their waste. That would certainly internalize huge costs and probably do way more than the effect of the subsidies, which, as you pointed out, is modest, and there's other policies too that you could do that, I guess, to try to increase demand for meat. But if you look at just the uproar all over the world when meat prices have gone up, it doesn't seem like there's that many governments that are going to be too eager to implement policies that are going to make meat prices go up. So what do you think? And keep in mind, you know, I am, I couldn't agree more. Could not be possibly more aligned with the policy proposal that you're espousing, of seeking to use public policy as a way to create a better food system. The question is, what is it like? What do you think will be politically tolerable for people that could actually result in a system that raised far fewer animals for food? I mean,
Jan Dutkiewicz 24:46
I think it's a contextual question, right? I don't think that there's an approach or a set of approaches that work the same across context, right? Like so, for instance, Denmark just put, just implemented an emissions tax all. On its agricultural sector in a process that involved farmers. Farmers were at the table. They accepted the tax. The tax will most strongly hit dairy and livestock farmers. So there is a potential to do that. There are, you know, there are places in the Netherlands that are banning meat advertising, so sort of removing meat from ubiquity. There are ways of there are all kinds of efforts to change government nutritional guidelines around the world, less so in the United States, where a big step back has been taken, but to change nutritional guidelines in line with the latest science, and of course, that changes how people eat at schools, in armies, potentially in hospitals. In other places, there are all kinds of policy tools. And so I think, again, much like what Gabriel said about the sort of naturalizing the demand for meat, I think naturalizing opposition to policies that restrict meat is also a little bit of an own goal, because we've, you know, we've seen that there are places, for instance, in Holland with the farmers protests where, yes, attempts to make meat production more expensive led to widespread protests. But we also have other constituencies in Holland that are banning meat advertising. We've got these sort of meat taxes in Denmark. We've got Germany, which is a highly advanced capitalist economy and a liberal democracy where meat demand has dropped as a result of changing social norms, changes in things like nutritional guidelines. And so I think what will it take? Well, it depends, but I think the first thing it'll take is politicians and policymakers listening to the science and having the courage to actually fight these fights, rather than sort of giving up before the fact and saying, Oh, well, this is going to be a very difficult or politically unpopular fight, so I'm not
Paul Shapiro 26:46
willing to have it. Yeah, it's a good point. And I would also augment like, if you look at places like Germany, they're also seeing like, major upticks in the use of animal free meats, right? It's not like everybody's switching to lentil soup and hummus wraps. A lot of them are eating plant based meat. And it's a good reminder that oftentimes people have far less concern about switching away from a long standing habit or tradition if there is a suitable alternative that they think is suitable and convenient for them, right? Like, you know, for 1000s of years, we were whipping horses, and we didn't stop because of any policy or concern about the cruelty to horses. We stopped because cars were invented and it was just a better way to get ourselves around. And the list of those types of animal displacements goes on and on right, like we used to harpoon whales for whale oil, we only stopped, not really because of state policy, but we stopped because kerosene was invented and it was a cheaper way to light our homes. We used to write with goose quill pens, live plucking geese in a very cruel manner, and nobody stopped because they cared about geese. They stopped because metal fountain pens were invented, and it was just a far more efficient way to write. And so I suspect that the best way to advance the type of a future that you're seeking, as you point out in the book, and you visit some of these alternative protein companies, but the resistance to these types of policies that you're espousing will be far less if it isn't viewed as people having to give up foods that they love because there's other foods that they will love equally. Am I? Am I underscoring what you're already putting down? Okay, cool, and for those listening, but both of these guys are nodding their heads now.
Jan Dutkiewicz 28:15
I mean, I'm happy. I'm happy to talk more about all protein, but I just think given, given this podcast, given your audience. I'm not sure if, I'm not sure if people need the, yeah, need the sales pitch, which you've just given, but I think, broadly speaking, in our book, we think, I mean, we know that all proteins are like to like. They're an environmental win almost across the board. I've, I've also, I'm the co author on peer reviewed meta study that shows this, that I can sort of share with your audience if you're interested. And so we know that, and we also believe in this sort of theory of change, where at least some people will be will be tempted or nudged to change if they're given something that is a really close analog for what they already love, rather than being, yeah, scolded, scolded into eating, into eating lentils. Not there's anything wrong with lentils, but yeah. I mean, so, yeah, so. But in a sense, I'm just sure your audience is already familiar with this argument, and we we sign off on that argument quite wholeheartedly in the
Paul Shapiro 29:13
book, there's nobody who is more enthusiastic about all meat than I am, and even I am currently as we speak, soaking two cups of dry lentils as we speak. So I can assure you, I hope that many people will go back to lentils. But this brings up this question of what you guys call. You introduce this new term, at least new to me, democratic hedonism, and I'm eager to hear your definition of democratic hedonism, like you guys are you take to task many of the, what I would perceive as like the titans of like the good food or the slow food movement, right? The Wendell berries and that Alice Waters is, and the Michael Pollan's people who have almost been like, you know, deified, in a sense, among a group of people. And you're saying that you have a different vision. Decision, right, that instead of going to these very high end restaurants that are offering very expensive food and a whole experience, you're saying democratic hedonism is a preferred alternative for sustainable food system. What is it?
Gabriel Rosenberg 30:14
Gabriel, so democratic hedonism is the idea that pleasure has like a moral value, and that we, as a result, should be invested in creating a world that furnishes other people with abundant access to pleasure. And we can, we can, kind of like tease it out a little bit to see why our vision winds up like taking us to a very, very different place than the Alice Waters or Wendell Berry vision. And I'm happy to talk more about Wendell Berry's take on pleasure, but it may be a little bit too technical, or at least boring. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know that people want to hear me waxing on and on about Wendell Berry and pleasure. But, you know, we talk about it in the book a little bit in greater depth. The main thing that I would say is our vision of of a of a more accessible and abundant world of pleasure for everyone kind of requires us to ask a basic empirical question, which is like, what, what actually do people want? What do they find pleasurable? So it's a, it's a call for a kind of pluralism around it. It's a, it's allowing people to define on their own terms what is the pleasure that they want. And then kind of ask a bigger question, which is like, so, okay, so how can we give people the pleasures that they want while also attending to and reducing the harms that may go along with them? So it's because it's obvious. It almost doesn't need to be said, but, but I suppose is analytically quite important. Some pleasures are bad for you, some are harmful, not just to you, but also to the world around you. So democratic hedonism is kind of an argument here that we should be trying to make pleasure as a general matter, more accessible and more widely shared. That's a good thing, and we have the ability to do it in a way that reduces the harm that would go along with it. So, so that's, that's our definition, and it's one of the core and kind of animating objectives of, I think, of all the policies that we argue for in the book,
Jan Dutkiewicz 32:35
yeah, and I think look like where the rubber hits the road on that is basically this question of, What if someone just really likes burgers, right? You know, you may get, like an Alice water or a Wendell Berry saying, Well, you know, you've got this, like, food false consciousness. You don't actually enjoy that burger. You're eating junk. Throw that junk away and eat this sort of, like fricassee chicken at Chez Panisse. Well, that a suggests that the person has the means to do that if they wanted to, and B, that they actually want to. Whereas we'd say, look, there are a bunch of harms to that burger. Some of them are to your health. That's sort of your choice. But look, what if you could swap that in with an Impossible Burger, potentially down the line, a product made with cellular agriculture, what if we could meet people more where they are, and try to give them those gustatory pleasures in the spaces and places and forms that they already enjoy, but reduce the environmental harm? Right? And we think. And then we think in the book, we work through different different iterations of this, but basically we think that, be it school lunches for kids or access to food for SNAP recipients or whatever, we should just maximize people's access to good stuff and meet them where they are, and also, because that might actually work right Omnivore's Dilemma and Alice Waters And Wendell Berry, even though they've basically set the standard, they've set the zeitgeist for Homeric, how American food writing works, their desired Food Revolution hasn't happened. The United States does not eat the way Michael Pollan wants it to eat. And I just, and I think that that tells us something about that, that theory of
Paul Shapiro 34:17
change, right? Yeah, so you're right that I think, I think that you're right. I would go a little bit further and say, like, You guys seem to be embracing more of like, what I would consider like the Robert Paul Berg message. I know you cite him in the book, and he blurbs the book. He's been a guest on the show before, but he wrote the book resetting the table, which is an excellent look at agriculture and agricultural policy in the US. Or even James McWilliams, who wrote the book just food many years ago, questioning this. And you know, there's a lot of people who think, Oh, well, you know, the Alice Waters vision is a really nice vision, but it's too expensive and not practical. But wouldn't it be great? And I think the argument is, would it be great? It's literally worse for the environment. Trying to give us way more deforestation, it's way more land intensive, and so I don't think it's so much like, well, you know, it's a nice vision, but it's unrealistic in this world. I'm not so sure that it's really that nice of a vision. Honestly, like the idea that we should DeForest more land in order to grow food for people doesn't seem that nice to me. So I think I might, I might espouse the more aggressive version of the argument that you're making, which is that the industrial food system, on a per person basis, is actually better for the planet. It's not just like a necessary evil, that it's actually better. Now there is a lot of evil associated with it, as you point out, it needs to be made dramatically better. And the biggest thing we could do for their for that, I think, would be using far fewer animals. That would be like number one on at least my own list. But I'll tell you from just the democratic hedonism aspect, I wanted to mention to you all a rule of thumb that I utilize for myself, which is, I call it my Chipotle rule. And so I think about food in the way that I think about Chipotle, which is, it's approximately $10 to get my order there. And I think about the pleasure that that brings me, that that $10 brings me. And frankly, it's a lot of pleasure, like it's very pleasurable for me to eat that. And so then I think about, if I eat at a restaurant where I pay $20 Am I getting twice as much pleasure as that Chipotle burrito? And almost invariably, the answer is no. Like, almost invariably, and certainly a $50 meal at a restaurant, it's no way that it's 500% more pleasure. And so, like, my own hedonism is just basically, like, I have this, like, $10 I met. That's my that's my measurement stick. Is it as much pleasure as Chipotle? And if it's not, I generally am not enthusiastic about going. Sometimes I do it for social purposes, but I would never choose to do it. Is that too is that too stringent for you guys?
Gabriel Rosenberg 36:54
It actually articulates something very nice here, which is, like, you know, when we, when we think about why people go to five or $600 a meal restaurants, right? And like, what are they actually doing there? Is it? Is it that the meal that they would purchase is, you know, 50 times better in terms of the actual like pleasure of the food they would consume than your Chipotle, and almost certainly not like I've eaten at those restaurants. Maybe the food is somewhat better, but what you're actually doing is trying to have, like, a unique, curated experience, and then perhaps to accrue, frankly, some social capital from having said that you ate there, right, right?
Paul Shapiro 37:45
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that people, it's not that they enjoy the food more. I think that they enjoy the status, right, of being able to manage to be the type of people who go there, to tell other people they're the type of people who go there like that, is what you're paying for, really. And you make yourself think that, oh, the food is just that much better, that much more flavorful, and so on. But I think a lot of it is more based on that.
Gabriel Rosenberg 38:05
I will say I'm sure that Alice Waters can cook much better carrots than me, like much better. I'm sure, I'm sure those carrots are wonderful. Are they? Are they like, 20 times better than my carrots? I don't know about that. I think
Paul Shapiro 38:22
I've eaten at Chez Panisse, and I thought our carrots were delectable. So I'll say, you know, they were quite good, maybe not 20 times better than yours, for sure, but, but yes, they were quite good, but you're talking about the experience. And one of my favorite parts of the book was when you had the experience during climate week. And you know, a lot of the times I go to climate related events, I'm very saddened, because it's like they're they're adopting, they're serving food that is, frankly, not that great for the climate. It's either heavy and meat or they're proudly announcing that it's non GMO, which has, you know, probably a worse impact on climate, because oftentimes it means more land use and so on. But you guys went to a climate week or event where every single course had biotech originated foods, every single course, and one, I was very envious, but it reminded me of this really interesting event. I don't know if you ever heard of this in 1911 where at that time, there was a major fear of refrigerated foods, because industrial refrigeration was new, and there was this a phobia that was called frigourophobia, which is fear of refrigerated foods. And you had this very nascent artificial cooling industry, and they hosted, in 1911 in Washington, DC, the world's first banquet of foods that had all been previously refrigerated. And so every meal had something that had been refrigerated. And it was derided by newspapers as serving unfresh food. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, published an editorial condemning the banquet as having proved nothing and lamenting abuses in the artificial coin industry. And it just so reminded me of what you're talking about for this fear of technology and food. And it goes back. This is literally more than a. 100 years ago, people concerned about refrigeration, and now you guys are doing the same thing with biotech, saying, Actually, yes, food is pretty awesome to eat, but it just, it was a great reminder to me that like this is part of who many people are. They're just don't want innovation in food really, or they
Jan Dutkiewicz 40:16
just don't understand the purpose of innovation in a given context, right? So you've got this blanket term that people have been taught to be scared of, which is genetically modified organisms, which A is far too vast a term. But second of all, what does it mean? What if you genetically modify an organism, like, for instance, Rainbow papaya in Hawaii to resist a ring spot virus that would destroy the state's papaya crop, all you're doing is creating resistance to a virus, and you've got a wonderful papaya, right? Because that's scary. That's not scary at all. And so I think, and there are many more examples, and I hope people get the book and read it and read about this wonderful dinner that was put together. Shout out to triple helix, the Food Innovation, NGO, and rethink foods in NYC for putting it on. But I think that dinner was really demonstrative of the potential upsides of genetic engineering, genetic modification, precision, fermentation in achieving very particular food system ends, be they more climate robustness, resistance to viruses, reduction of food waste by expanding shelf life. And all of this can be achieved just by embracing right rather than shunning novel technologies when used to an environmentally or publicly beneficial end.
Paul Shapiro 41:34
Right? You know, my my question is, like, what is lighter on the planet? That's it like, like everything else is like secondary or tertiary to me, and clearly improving the food genetically often can mean far less footprint on the planet. Doesn't mean it always is. It just means, generally speaking, it can do that. I did recently eat the Arctic Apple too, which is kind of a fun novelty, which is the apple that's been edited to not brown when it's open, so you can, like, leave it cut open for a while. It's pretty cool. And I had the Norfolk produce tomatoes, if you guys have seen those purple tomato where it's purple all the way through, so it's, like, way more antioxidants than a normal potato. Yeah, it was pretty cool. And also, and also, longer shelf life. Oh, really, I didn't I was not aware of that. Shame on me, but that's pretty awesome, too. That's great. Okay, well, I share your desire, Jan, you said you have a lot of people read the book. I certainly share that desire. Let me ask you, are there other resources? So go first to Gabe, then to Jan, other resources that you would recommend that people check out that have been influential on you and your own thinking on these issues.
Gabriel Rosenberg 42:40
I mean, so I would start off by saying that Robert Paul burbs work, I think is, is has, has played a major role in my thinking about about agriculture and so just sort of like thinking about The relationship of policy to how we grow food is incredibly important. I think, just generally speaking, I would encourage people, if they want, to think about like these problems in really complex ways. I would just encourage them to, sort of like, explore histories of Food and Agriculture, that take political choices seriously and like seek to explore, where are the moments of kind of like contingency that where are the roads that were were not necessarily taken, and why did we take the roads that We did? I go back to the classic nature's Metropolis Bill Cronin. It's, it's, what, almost 30 years old now, and it's, it's a history of of Chicago in relationship to the development of the Midwest more broadly. It's an environmental history. And it is just such like even, even now, 30 years on, I don't know that anybody has done it better and and so it's one of these things where it's not necessarily like a narrow, a narrow account of facts and figures that you would need, but it's the kind of perspective on historical change that I think is really quite powerful in terms of illuminating, you know, options for the future.
Paul Shapiro 44:25
Okay, cool, nature's metropolis. Despite it being a classic, I'm sad to say, I haven't read it, so I'm putting on my own list. We'll include that in the show notes for this episode at business for good podcast.com Jan. What about you?
Jan Dutkiewicz 44:36
I was also going to say nature's metropolis, actually. I mean, I think if you if you care about the political ecology of food and about the United States, I think it's an absolute classic. I'd also say that we didn't talk much in this chat about sort of policies that can be used by this. State to promote good things rather than perhaps restrict bad things. But I think that Mariana mazzucato's entrepreneurial state is a book that really leans into how states can use policy, be it through state investment, things like national labs, be it through public private partnership to really, to really think big and achieve socially beneficial ends, like technological development. And I think for people specifically who care about food tech and ag tech, if you haven't read that book, you should read it, and you should think about how it applies, because she doesn't use food as her contact, but think about how it could apply in whatever country you're in, whatever field you're in, to really thinking what the potential role of the state, or synergy is between the private sector and the state in developing technology that's be it more environmentally sound or kinder to animals, or what have you.
Paul Shapiro 45:57
Okay, cool, great. Well, we'll include entrepreneurial state as well. When we're linking to resources here, Jan, sticking with you. Are there any companies you wish existed? Anybody who out there listening thinking, Oh, I really like the message of feed, the feed the people. Maybe I'll start my own company to advance some of the things that these guys are talking about. Is there something that you hope somebody listening might start themselves? Man, I
Jan Dutkiewicz 46:21
don't think this is an answer to the question directly, but I just want, I want cellular agriculture. Of all the technologies that I've encountered in food, I want cellular agriculture to work out. And I know that there are many companies, but I also know that there are national labs, or, sorry, there are university labs working on this. I would love to see the development of a national lab somewhere, be it in the United States or elsewhere, dedicated to synthetic biology for food applications. So yeah, that's not a company making a thing that doesn't exist. But I think that now is not the time. Now is not the time to give up on cellular agriculture. If anything, it's time to to lean in, especially into the into the research, right, the basic research of really, really making it work.
Paul Shapiro 47:06
Well, yeah, on the previous episode for this podcast, we went on Bruce Friedrich talking about his new book, which makes a similar argument. Of course, there's already been $3 billion $3 billion invested by private capital into the cellular agriculture companies. But as Bruce points out, 3 billion sounds like a large number, but compared to the need, it actually is pretty modest. So maybe the company somebody will start will be a lobbying firm to get the national lab that you're seeking into place young we'll see. Okay, Gabriel, take us home. Any companies that you wish existed you think somebody else should
Gabriel Rosenberg 47:40
start real quick two parter here one, I know these companies already do exist. I'd like to see more of them, and I'd like to see them more successful, and that would be companies working to decarbonize synthetic fertilizer, right? So to get it away from natural gas, as as the as the kind of like energy source, and to figure out how to plug it into renewables and cleaner sources of energy, that that's that I think would be a huge win, in part, because that would be one of the one of the most efficient ways to improve Plant Agriculture in the United States. But that's not the company I want. I want somebody to open a Berlin style donor kebab shop here in Durham, North Carolina that has my good zetan donor, because I can't get a decent donor. And I miss my Berlin place. I miss my guy. He calls me boss. He knows I want that zaytan donor. Every every good donor shop in Berlin has a Zam donor. So, like, can we get one, just one, maybe here in North Carolina for me, that would be really nice. Yeah, I'm
Paul Shapiro 48:47
embarrassed to say I didn't even really know what a donor was when I was reading your book and I had to go look it up with you're talking about this, and you're talking about the hypothetical situation in which somebody calls you boss down. I realize it was not hypothetical at all. I will also note that on this very show, we have had some other episodes on fertilizer, including pivot bio, which is doing some really cool things to reduce the footprint of fertilizer for crops. It's so important to reduce land usage to add fertilizer, but it really is horrible from a runoff perspective, and as a result, if we could somehow make fertilizer A lot greener, like what pivot bio is doing, what a world that would be. So we'll include a link to that. You can go listen to that episode if you want to check that out. But there's a lot more that can happen in the fertilizer space, so maybe somebody else would do something really cool on there. And now I need to go try a donor somewhere. We'll see. But listen. Jan Gabriel, I appreciate all you guys are doing to try to build a better food system. I appreciate system. I appreciate your new book, and I'm wishing you guys the best with its release. Thanks for listening to the business for good podcast to explore more conversations like this one, visit business for good podcast.com. And be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes of founders, investors, thought leaders and more, turning global problems into powerful opportunities. And if this episode. That resonated with you. Please share it with your network. You never know who you might inspire to be in the business of doing good.