Sam Kass
Appearances
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
Let's start with the crab cakes. In the Pacific Northwest, two years ago, they closed the snow crab fishery for the first time in its history. That fishery had gone from 11.7 billion crabs to 1.9 billion last year. That's over an 80% collapse of that population in just five years. Let's turn to fruit. Last year, we lost 95%. of the Georgia peach crop.
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
In our lifetimes, I don't believe we'll be growing peaches in Georgia at all.
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
Oh, well, I wish I could stop there. So let's keep going. Let's talk about wheat and rice and chickpeas.
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
Staples. 60% of the world's calories comes from wheat, rice, and corn. 60% from those three crops. The models on wheat. So wheat will be around for our kids. It's just going to become more expensive. For one degree of warming, we'll see about a 7.5% decline in yields. That's also true in rice. They go up to 40% declines of yields for rice if we start to hit the two degrees warming.
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
Three and a half billion, with a B, people rely on rice for a daily part, if not the majority of their calories. It is impossible to comprehend, genuinely, the economic implications of declines of staples on that magnitude, the malnutrition and food insecurity implications of those commodities getting disrupted like that, and the political instability that that will bring.
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
I mean, in some ways it's already starting to happen, but you start to get into those numbers in the next 15 years? Like, that's not that far away.
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
And they're right. I'm annoyed too. This is the one place in our daily lives that we can collectively have a really big impact and exercise that feeling inside of like wanting to do right by the next generation, wanting to help play a positive role in this. And how we eat gives us a shot every single day to try to do a better job. And it doesn't have to be some big overhaul.
TED Talks Daily
TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
I'm not saying don't eat meat. I eat meat. Once a week, you know, making a shift to not do a steak and to do something else. Well, it adds up to be really big numbers.