TED Explores: Food for the Future | TED Countdown
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What is the focus of TED Explores: Food for the Future?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. When it comes to food, we often ask, is this healthy for me? But it's also worth asking, is this healthy for the planet? Today, we're featuring a special audio version of our short film, TED Explores, Food for the Future. Hosted by TED Radio Hour's Manoush Zomorodi, the film explores how to turn the world's food system, currently one of the major causes of global warming, into a part of the climate solution.
Food is very important because it's part of our daily life.
Food is culture. Food is life. It's part of who we are. You remember the moments that you share over food. It's magic. This is what binds people together.
What we eat really shapes our world.
How does our food system contribute to climate change?
When we think about the environment and climate change and things like that, we usually think about smokestacks and tailpipes and burning fossil fuels, and that's fair. But it turns out agriculture and our food system are actually one of the biggest things we've ever done to the planet. And it's only number two to fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Every day, we make hundreds of decisions about food. What should I eat for dinner? Will it taste good? Is it healthy? But we also need to ask, what's it doing to the planet? I'm Manoush Zomorodi, a longtime journalist, a TED speaker, and a mom. I care about the planet. I'm well-informed. But I didn't know until recently that as much as a third of emissions that are warming the globe come from food. A third. The way we grow, process, package, transport, all we eat and throw away is a problem for the climate. But changing what we eat can go a long way. Food can also be a solution.
On this show, we are talking to chefs, climate experts and scientists, all kinds of people who are finding ways to help us eat sustainably and make sure it's still delicious. And to understand exactly what that means, we need to start with why things have to change.
Why do we need a second agricultural revolution?
About 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm. This agricultural revolution was a turning point in our history that enabled people to settle, build, and create. In short, agriculture enabled the existence of civilization. Today, approximately 40% of our planet is farmland. In the future, how can we feed every member of a growing population a healthy diet? Meeting this goal will require nothing short of a second agricultural revolution. The first agricultural revolution was characterized by expansion and exploitation, feeding people at the expense of forests, wildlife and water, and destabilizing the climate in the process. That's not an option the next time around. Agriculture depends on a stable climate with predictable seasons and weather patterns. This means we can't keep expanding our agricultural lands because doing so will undermine the environmental conditions that make agriculture possible in the first place. We can feed humanity within the environmental limits of the Earth, but there's a very small margin of error.
So we know food contributes a lot to climate change. But a third of all emissions? How did we get to such a huge number? Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist from Project Drawdown, breaks it down by the numbers.
What are the main sources of food-related emissions?
We find that agriculture, land use, and the food system as a whole contribute about 22% of global emissions. Let's look under the hood and see what's involved in this. The first is deforestation. That's about half of all those food emissions at 11% of global emissions. To put that in perspective, the entire U.S. economy emits 10 to 11%. Deforestation is even bigger. Second is methane from livestock. Now, we hear a lot of jokes about what cows do and all that kind of thing, but the science is actually really clear. Livestock are a huge emitter of methane, and methane is a very big driver of climate change, and we have to make that connection. Third is basically industrial farming methods, especially overusing chemicals like fertilizers and treating soil really badly. We have to think about that too. And then finally, we have rice production, another methane producer at around 2%. But that's not all. Beyond these direct emissions of food, that 22%, there are some indirect ways the food system emits greenhouse gas as well.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the focus of TED Explores: Food for the Future?
0:07–1:00
2
How does our food system contribute to climate change?
1:00–2:24
3
Why do we need a second agricultural revolution?
2:24–4:00
4
What are the main sources of food-related emissions?
4:00–6:49
5
How is climate change affecting our food supply?
6:49–10:10
6
What role does diet play in reducing climate impact?
10:10–11:18
7
How can plant-based diets be made more appealing?
11:18–24:26
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from TED Talks Daily
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