Future of Food: A Food Podcast About What's Next

Season Three of The Future of Food examined how restaurants can survive during pandemic times. We looked for answers in many ways. Lee Schneider interviewed Sean Lynch, who set up a listing service for restaurants that were doing takeout and deliver. He spoke with Grace Guber about her experiences as a server and with Lex Gopnix-Lewinski about what it was like to own a restaurant in the last year. Creg Fielding, CEO of Fusionware, threw some light on how the supply chain works and how it failed during the pandemic.  Brian Wang brought his perspective as a science writer and Atul Sood discussed how ghost kitchens may be the future of some restaurant experiences. 

Ghost kitchens have been helping out many a restaurant during the pandemic. These are kitchens — often without a storefront or public face — that make the food you're taking out from your favorite restaurant.  Atul Sood is the Chief Business Officer at Kitchen United, a venture-backed startup that is deploying “ghost kitchens” to help restaurant brands serve their customers without necessarily having a storefront or physical restaurant. He knows his way around food delivery partnerships: He was the Director of Business Development for McDonald's Global Digital organization.Some ghost kitchens have names you know — they're the outsourced takeout division of your neighborhood place. Others exist only as ghost kitchens — they are not attached to a physical restaurant at all.Ghost kitchens were around before the pandemic and they will be around afterward. Just as chefs used to try out their ideas in food trucks that went from neighborhood to neighborhood, restauranteurs with experience and those new to the game are using ghost kitchens to test their culinary ideas on the public.  It could be that your favorite restaurant of the future may not have a physical location that you can visit. It will be an entirely take-out experience. 

Brian Wang joins Lee Schneider on the show today. Brian is a Co-Founder, futurist thought leader and a popular science blogger with one million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology. 

How old is that potato? It's a question every restaurant has to answer. And when you shop for groceries, have you ever wondered if what you put in your cart is really fresh? These are supply chain questions that Creg Fielding can answer. He's the founder and owner of Fusionware, a platform designed manage supply chains for food growers, packers, and shippers. 

For the next few episodes, we're going to get into  tech solutions for the crisis facing restaurants during pandemic times. Restaurants are more than a place to eat. They become cultural institutions, enhancing the value of the neighborhood. They will have to adapt to the changes the pandemic brings.  Today's guests are a deli owner and a tech guy who loves restaurants. Augie's Authentic Montreal DeliNuma 

Restaurants are the soul of a neighborhood.  That makes the news hard to hear that this week we've had another order to close restaurants here in Los Angeles.  Some owners decided that it's just not worth it. They shut their doors. Maybe for good. Our guest for this episode is Grace Guber, host and producer of The Family Meal podcast, She shares per perspective about working in the restaurant business during the pandemic and suggests some ideas about what the future of restaurants might be.   

Sean Lynch is a co-creator of Dining at a Distance, a platform that helps you find a restaurant you can order out from or contact online for pickup. It started in Chicago and spread quickly worldwide in response to the need for a simple, integrated hub listing restaurants that can feed you during the pandemic crisis. Future of Food Season 3 is looking at the challenges faced by restaurants in pandemic times. We'll be speaking with chefs, entrepreneurs, and foodies who are seeking the way forward in the restaurant business. Hosted and produced by Lee Schneider. Future of Food is part of the FutureX Network.Show notes and more at futurex.fm.  Visit our website at futurefood.fm. Learn more about Dining at a Distance at diningatadistance.com.   

Rebecca Webster is a member of the Oneida Nation. Along with her husband and two teenaged daughters, she farms 10 acres of land and has helped members of her tribal community reconnect with their past. The philosophy behind her work is that every time an indigenous person plants a seed, it is an act of resistance and an assertion of sovereignty.

Ivy Joeva interviews Scott Jurek, an elite ultramarathoner who eats for the win with a plant-based diet. Scott has won nearly all of ultrarunning's top trail and road events. He won the Western States 100-mile Endurance Run a record seven straight times. In 2015, he set the Appalachian Trail speed record, averaging nearly 50 miles a day over 46 days.He credits being a vegan with giving him these seemingly super-human powers of strength and endurance. Scott is the author of two books, Eat and Run and North.

When Molly and Melissa opened their restaurant Palette Food and Juice in Los Angeles, they knew they would source all their ingredients locally and offer a plant-based menu. Everything would be organic. They made the kind of food they wanted to eat, and found that locals liked it too. They took action on those words we hear so often: Buy local and eat a plant-based diet.During the pandemic, Palette Foods is offering online ordering and curbside pickup and delivery.Ivy Joeva interviewed Molly and Melissa outdoors at the restaurant, before the first lockdown in Los Angeles.Links: http://palettefoodandjuice.com http://futurefood.fmhttps://www.futurex.fm/future-of-food

Scientists have established that large-scale farming is one of the causes of climate change. Do you think that some of the forces behind big ag would want to hide the truth about their damage to the environment?As a matter of fact, that's just what they're doing.In this episode, Georgina Gustin a Washington-based reporter for Inside Climate News who has covered food policy, farming, and the environment for more than a decade, discusses who is behind this spread of misinformation, where you can find trusted sources of information about food and the climate crisis, and how you can create change for the better.Listen to The Future of Food on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, at FutureX, or the Future of Food website. 

Tim is also a senior researcher fellow at Tufts University's Global Development and Environmental Institute and an advisor at the Small Planet Institute, where he previously directed its Land and Food Rights Program.We’ve long wanted to do an episode at Future of Food about where to get good information about food and the climate crisis. We’ve wanted to identify which organizations might be giving us misleading information about food and climate. My interview with Tim is a first step toward understanding who controls what you know about the food you eat.  Buy his book Eating Tomorrow. 

In an interview recorded in a studio before the pandemic, Kaitlin Mogentale tells host Ivy Joeva of the journey that led to create a food company  that transforms upcycled ingredients — the overlooked, nutritional byproducts of fruit and vegetable processing — into wholesome, better for people and better for the planet, pantry staples: Pulp chips. Waste Less, Thrive More, is the company motto, because Pulp Pantry believes that a thriving humanity depends on a thriving, healthy planet.  Learn more at http://pulppantry.com

How can we support our immune health despite toxicity in our environment, especially in the context of a global pandemic? How are our systems of food production contributing to the destruction of ecosystems worldwide, and giving rise to disease outbreaks like the one we’ve seen with Covid-19?We had the privilege to "sit down" online with Zach Bush MD, to ask these questions, and get his insights on everything from the top anti-inflammatory foods, to how the air you breathe affects your microbiome.Zach Bush MD is a renowned, multi-disciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care and internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to human health. www.zachbushmd.com  

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned scholar and tireless crusader for economic, food, and gender justice. Dr. Shiva was trained as a physicist, and later shifted her focus to interdisciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy. In 1982, she founded an independent institute, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology which was dedicated to high quality and independent research to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times in close partnership with local communities and social movements. In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, and to promote organic farming and fair trade. In 2004, in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K., she started Bija Vidyapeeth (Earth University), an international college for sustainable living in the Doon Valley in Northern India. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental “hero” in 2003 and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia. Forbes magazine in November 2010 identified Dr. Vandana Shiva as one of the top Seven most Powerful Women on the Globe. Among her many awards are the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award, 1993), Order of the Golden Ark, the UN’s Global 500 Roll of Honour, and The MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity in 2016.Navdanya promotes a new agricultural and economic paradigm, a culture of food for health where ecological responsibility and economic justice take precedence over today’s consumer and profit based extractive food production systems.  The promotion of biodiversity-based agroecology for economic security and the mitigation of climate change, together with seed and food sovereignty are central to Navdanya’s vision of an Earth Democracy.

 LINKS AND RESOURCES Loretta Allisonhttps://www.lorettaallison.com/Loretta Allison on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/spadeandseeds/Fig Earth Supplyhttps://www.figearthsupply.com/

Future of Food is part of the FutureX Podcast Network. Show transcripts, articles, and more at the Future of Food website.On the Kiss the Ground website you’ll find a resource called Find Your Path. It will help you see a path forward to activism. Try it!Resources Mentioned in this EpiodeRyland Englehart on Instagram @lovebeingryland@cafegratitudeMake SoilSpy Community GardenKiss the Ground Purchasing GuideHere is an intro to regenerative agriculture and ways to make your garden regenerative .

What if you had an opportunity for meaningful change each time you sit down to eat?In the ten new episodes for Season 2 of Future of Food, Ivy Joeva interviews activists and innovators who show us that at every meal we have the opportunity to wake up to the impact our diet has on the environment, as well as understand how our environment affects our physical health and well being. Why? The same foods that support healing the planet are also the supportive of our health, vitality and fertility. And the foods that are most costly to the environment, and contribute most to climate change, are also most taxing on our health.It's a cycle of food and life.But there's so much disinformation out there about climate change it's hard to know what to believe. This podcast is here to help -- answering your questions about the climate crisis and food.Find us wherever you get your podcasts and put the power to save the planet on your playlist.

Seaweed first made it on the menu as part of a macrobiotic diet, and was popularized by grocers like Erewhon. That was back in the 1960s, and since then, chefs have caught on, moving seaweed from a mere condiment to the center of the plate. Seaweed can be wild harvested, as they do at Maine Coast Sea Vegetables, farmed in the ocean, as they do at Sea Greens Farms and Greenwave, or farmecd in tanks on land, as they do at Monterey Bay Seaweeds. There are a lot or enviornmental and social positives about seaweed. It restores the ocean, and farming it can provide jobs.Get show notes and a show transcript at futurefood.fm. Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss an episode. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Making edible protein consumes resources. Not only is the world population growing — the United Nations predicts there will be nine billion people on Earth by 2050 — but rising income levels mean that more people can afford meat. When the demand for protein exceeds the plant's carrying capacity, there will be an environmental crash and people will go hungry. This reasoning is a driver of the "why eat crickets" argument. Our demands for protein cannot exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity. or we are done. You might say the pathway to survival involves choosing one of two human engineering projects.Crickets provide protein efficiently, and they also might provide health benefits by providing probiotic fiber. There's a massive shift in health and nutrition science going on, a deepening understanding how the gut biome enhances overall human health. there's evidence that diseases like Parkinsons and Alzheimers start in the gut biome. Will that convince you to eat crickets? Cricket protein might help fight diabetes by regulating glucose. Jarrod Goldin, a co-founder of Entomo Farms, cites evidence of the health benefits of cricket protein. He also cites a story from South Korea that suggests that hospital patients who ate food fortified with cricket protein got better, faster.Andrew Brentano, a co-founder of Tiny Farms, also interviewed in the podcast, talks about the market for cricket protein expanding from humans to dogs and cats.In engineering, water and energy savings are the easy calculations. It's the human engineering that is hard. What will it take for you to eat a cricket even if it is unrecognizable as a bug and supplied as a powder?Get a transcript and sign up for our mailing list at http://futurefood.fm

While Kimbal Musk’s brother Elon is tunneling under LA to reinvent high-speed transportation, sending rockets into orbit to reboot commercial space travel for our time, and mass-marketing electric cars, Kimbal Musk is working with food. Over the last six years he’s started restaurants, designed vertical gardens, and developed an ambitious plan to put a thousand gardens into schools so that kids can discover their connection to food by growing it themselves. The idea is simple: A pre-fab, modular raised-bed garden that goes in a schoolyard, with seating for thirty students who attend outdoor classes about gardening, science, nutrition, and cooking. The white polyethylene garden structure is designed to last longer than the schoolyard it occupies. The project is called Big Green, and it includes the garden itself plus a fifteen-part lesson plan for teachers. There are learning gardens in Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, and Pittsburgh, with plans for more. “When we enter a city, we enter not to built one garden, but to build a hundred gardens at a time,” Tighe Hutchins, the program director of Big Green, said on the podcast. She works closely with school administrations and communities to make the gardens part of student life Kyle Kuusisto, a teacher at a Memphis school, tells us what it’s like to teach physical education classes, and then transition to gardening, science, yoga and food prep classes.Get extended show notes, transcripts, and more at futurefood.fmSign up for our mailling list and never miss a new episode. 

As an instructor in sustainable food and agricultural systems at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Valerie Dantoin is helping create career paths for students who want to become farmers, or become closer to the land.If you close your eyes and you just imagine what you would think of as an organic farm, you probably get this image of a nice cow out on green grass. That happens on our farm. It doesn’t always happen on every organic farm and it certainly doesn’t happen anymore on farms that we call conventional farms.-- Valerie DantoinSubscribe to the podcast at futurefood.fm, and check our deep dive stories about the future of food. 

What is going on? Why all  that wasted food? One in six people in Los Angeles copes with food insecurity, the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. Why is the food they need tossed away?There are a lot of reasons. In this podcast episode, you'll meet two people are working on solutions.Luis Yepiz is the wholesale food recovery manager for an organization called Food Forward. Food Forward started by collecting unharvested fruit from backyard orchards and distributing it to community centers. The organization has since expanded to large-scale programs to recover food at farmers markets and wholesale markets. This is food that might be blemished or hard to sell and that might be thrown away. That’s where Luis steps in. Each year, the program he runs at the Los Angeles Wholesale Market collects food valued at $13 - 15 million and distributes the produce to neighborhood residents who don’t have ready access to fresh food.At the time of our interivew, Eva Goulbourne was the director of business and multi-stakeholder programs for ReFED, a nonprofit committed to reducing U.S. food waste. She was working on a roadmap toward behavior change — change needed from you and me, from restaurants, and food distributors.A large social engineering project is needed, a way to convince us to buy food more responsibly, use the food we have and don't throw away food that is perfectly good. Restaurants and distributors need a similar reframing of their supply chain.Eva comes at this problem from the policy side, Luis from the activist side. They tell their stories in the podcast, and you'll find out what simple things you can do every day to save food.Get show notes and more at futurefood.fm. Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a podcast. 

Vertical Harvest is a farm that has transformed the growing season in Jackson – which is usually just four months long. They took a plot of land downtown — and went vertical. The site is only a tenth of an acre, but the goals are large. It has become a model project others seek to emulate, not only because it supplies food year-round, but also because it is employing people with special abilities.I believe that architects have the power to shape communities. Architecture can be more than just a box, or more than just four walls. We can ask, “What do we want it to do? What do we want this building to achieve?”--  Nona YehiaGo to futurefood.fm for show notes, transcripts and articles about this topic.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for our list and never miss a podcast.

What does a food activist do? To answer the question, you need to look no further than Anna Lappé. She is the founder and director of Real Food Media, a collaborative initiative that catalyzes creative storytelling and media about food, farming, and sustainability. “We work with partners across the country to really elevate the solutions that we find out there that are really transforming the food system toward greater sustainability and equity, and then we help people understand what are the real impacts that we have to worry about it, about our current foods just don't why we need such transformation” she says.In this episode, she discusses why the food choices that are good for your body are also good for the planet, why consumer demand for meat is constructed, and why cooking a good meal at home is a good idea.I’m not so sure that food activism in the digital age is that much different than food activism at any other time. You know, I think we know how to make transformative change. And one of the best ways to do that is through organizing and through working in one’s own community and scaling that up. So that doesn’t really change that much in the digital age. I would say one of the ways in which activism is influenced by the digital age is unfortunately how this new era has really unleashed a phenomenon of evermore fake news of the proliferation of misinformation, and of the challenges of getting our story out. -- Anna Lappe´Some of the food activists we are interviewing on this podcast are looking to tech and apps for solutions to hunger and food insecurity. Anna is looking to education and policy changes - but in ways that may surprise you. Extended show notes at http://futurefood.fm. Follow our journey on Instagram.

Planting heirloom seeds — the kind of seeds you order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds  —  seems like a quaint pastime. You picture baby food jars lined on a sunny kitchen windowsill, each one filled with a different kind of seed, or neighbors trading seeds over the backyard fence.  The world of heirloom seeds is all that, and a lot more.  Seeds carry culture and history. Civilizations live or starve depending on whether they have access to seeds. If the world were to end, rebooting it would begin with planting seeds.Heirloom seeds do something really weird.  Plant them and they grow. Harvest the seeds and plant them again. They grow all over again.  If you are an urbanist who gets most of their food out of plastic packages, the idea of self-replicating food is something out of science fiction.Here’s something else out of science fiction. Just before the year 2000, there was something called the Y2K Scare. People believed that their personal computers would freeze up and go black.  The banking system would collapse as well as the power grid. Planes would crash. Balanced unsteadily upon a binary code of ones and zeroes, the world would stop when all the computers failed. It looked like the end for people, so people started saving seeds in case they needed to grow their own food.Y2K didn’t happen. But the seed habit caught on for some. A new generation of backyard gardeners realized that growing your own food was good. Y2K was when Jere Gette’s business really took off.  You can get to know his business from the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Catalogue.  The same one that I ordered my seeds from to plant in my tiny garden. He printed his first catalog when he was seventeen. When I discovered the catalog in LA he had already been at it a while. Now, more than two decades later, he offers about 2000 varieties of vegetables and herbs, the largest selection in the U.S.Jere joins the podcast to tell us why seeds matter, why GMO seeds are damaging  the integrity of our food supply, and why beet seeds are his favorite. The problem is as we lose more and more of these traditional varieties, it reduces the gene pool for breeders to work with. And that's why it's so important for home gardeners and farmers, everybody, to conserve these old varieties because even if you're developing modern hybrids, you still have to start with some base stock. You still have to have the genes of these old insect-resistant varieties or these old heat-tolerant varieties to develop the modern varieties.  - Jere GettleGet show notes and more at futurefood.fm. We post transcripts of all shows, articles that build on what we talk about in the show, and you can subscribe to the mailing list and never miss a podcast.  The podcast is hosted by Lee Schneider and produced by Red Cup Agency.

Krystine McInnes was a developer passionate about sustainable building methods. She liked the idea of edible landscaping. She started to think about the best delivery systems for these ideas. An urban farm started looking like a good way to combine them in a package that had a low energy impact and which benefited the world.What if starting a micro-farm in an urban location were easier?  A lot easier? One day while thinking about this, Krystine went by a farm that was for sale just to have a look around. She instantly realized that it was the right place to be. She has pointed her future at farming.The journey has been incredibly hard. She discovered that there was no “farmer instruction manual.” Knowledge was passed down from generation to generation, and since she does not come from a farming family, she had to hunt for information on her own. Resources and data were hard to discover. Most small organic farmers, she learned, lost money in the first year. If they survived into their second year, it was because they had navigated a learning curve steep as a hockey stick.With Grown Here Farms she has resolved to create a business model and an example for other micro-farms. She is building a digital dashboard for farmers to track prices, reporting, and worker wages. She has a vision for a replicable business model that can lead to the success of the small farmer.In our conversation, we get into how a successful organic farm must turn away from being a mere commodity and toward a beloved brand. We discuss Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and what it means for the small farmer and you.Key TakeawaysThe number of small farms is shrinking while the farmer population is aging. Who will grow our food?We know amazingly little about the farm-to-table supply chain, and large food producers and distributors would like to keep us in the dark.Your fresh fruit and vegetables travel an average of 1500 miles to get to you.

Tinia Pina, the Founder and CEO of Re-Nuble, talks with us about how to all that waste in a way that won't kill the planet. How much waste are we talking about? 12,000 tons of food waste is produced annually in New York City. That much food waste would take 800 fully loaded garbage trucks to remove. And the city of New York is spending $180 million a year to get rid of it.The numbers sound crazy when you first hear them.  New York City is spending $180 million annually to deal with food waste.  For a while, it was being loaded on barges and shipped off to China. Today, capacity is still an issue as NYC food waste is shipped off to neighboring states. There are commercial storage facilities to help out, but there's still a lot of food waste with nowhere to go. Tinia Pina thought there had to be a better way. Her startup Renuble has joined the list of innovators who are recycling food waste into organic compost, as a soil amendment.When you think of food waste, you might think of the scraps you scrape from your plate or the food that restaurants throw away but there is also food waste created when food is processed, even before it makes it onto your plate. Wholesale food distributors buy directly from farms and re-package food to sell to schools or restaurants, they often throw out the stuff that's less than perfect. Food waste is 75% liquid. A company called Industrial Organic can go to your processing facility, draw out the liquid, digest and sterilize the food waste, leaving you with organic fertilizer. In another approach, Misfit Juicery, based in DC, is sourcing food waste all the way from New York City and turning it into a cold pressed drink. In LA, Pulp Pantry is using the post-juice pulp from your favorite juice bar and turning it into fiber-rich granola.Soil is lost at a rate of 10 to 40 times as fast as it can replenish itself. Conventional farming is stripping soil of carbon and nutrients and 70% of the earth's topsoil is vanishing, because of erosion. To feed the world that soil has to be replaced, that's where fertilizer comes in. Jonathan Bloom wrote in American Wasteland that about 40% of the food we produce ends up being thrown away. The annual cost of that, he says, is $100 billion.Key TakeawaysBuy groceries according to your needs. Supermarkets buy produce based on projections. If you find that you're buying more than what you actually need and wasting about 20% of it, then that waste also is translated upstream to the supermarkets.Plants like good dirt.  Crops need organic fertilizer to thrive, instead of the chemical "junk food" they often receive with industrial farming. Turning food waste into nutrient-rich organic fertilizer helps solve the waste problem and also helps the plants that feed us.Listen to my conversation with Tinia Pina about how she is changing what happens to food waste and building a better story for food and the supply chain that feeds us all.Click the podcast player in the header to hear the whole episode, or in the interactive transcript below, click on any play button to hear that part of the conversation.Jonathan Bloom wrote in American Wasteland that about 40% of the food we produce ends up being thrown away. The annual cost of that, he says, is $100 billion.What can you do about it? Tinia has some suggestions for you in the podcast.I feel like this is my purpose and in addition to the experiences that I've had, it has supported my dedication to it. So I'm a huge environmentalist and just, kind of, as hard as agriculture can be, I really feel like this has kind of been just something that I'm here for and that's why I kind of remain dedicated to it. - Tinia Pina