The hidden forces shaping your choices

0:00This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Save on tropical flavors during the Savor the Tropics event with yellow sales signs throughout the store. Stock up on juicy pineapples and mangoes, grab Hooli Hooli Chicken, and finish with mango Yuzi Chantilly cake at Whole Foods Market. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find.

0:39Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, Hidden Forces. My grandma Toots was a big meat eater. She was a classic 1950s-style housewife in the U.S. and grew up in a time when meat was everywhere. 80 or so years ago, when Sarah Lake's grandma was running her household and feeding her family, meat was served at pretty much every meal. You would have breakfast with maybe perhaps sausage offered.

1:29You'd have lunch where it would be deli meat sandwiches. And you'd have dinner that would center over a large cut of meat. And so my grandma was a product of her time. Time now to tell you ladies how to keep father happy. Sarah says it wasn't like Grandma Toots was a meat-obsessed carnivore. Real man-type steak sandwich. In mid-century America, there was a strategy to make meat the norm, starting after the Second World War. As savory beef stew when it's armored. It was impossible to avoid, and it was advertised heavily and pushed on consumers. Or malbacon stays fresh longer when saran wraps. This is when they first started creating national ad campaigns.

2:08And when you see these ads that meat is essential for your amino acids, it's essential for a well-balanced diet. Found that man must have food which furnishes energy, food to build muscle and other tissues. And this is where we started getting this idea that meat was normal to eat every day in multiple meals, when in reality, even 10 years prior to that, it was an exception to have meat at a meal rather than the norm. But three factors completely flipped what was for dinner. First, the U.S. government increased its meat subsidies. Second, new technology led to larger farms that could raise and slaughter more animals faster.

2:45Plus, people could refrigerate and store more meat. Finally, the National School Lunch Program launched. Lunches are designed to be nutritious. With a mandate to serve protein. Meats and other foods rich in protein. We saw the fastest and largest shift in our diets that has ever really happened. I mean, I guess that's when it became like the American thing to do. You have meat and potatoes at dinner. You grill a hamburger in the summertime. For me, I just remember when I was growing up. It's what's for dinner. The ad that like is branded in my brain. And I guess that's the power of marketing. Absolutely.

3:27It's a huge power of marketing. And when we say meat is so American, it has been created to be American by the meat industry. And there's industry associations, not just for beef, but for pork and for chicken. We had, you know, pork, the other white meat as an infamous campaign. And all of these are industry-funded. We don't see this, right? This is one of the many invisible forces that's shaping us is the way in which these companies are influencing our choices. Every day, we make choices. But who and what exactly are behind them? When are our decisions guided by desires? And when are they guided by design?

4:08Well, today on the show, hidden forces, from the food we eat to how we power our homes and even communicate with each other, an exploration of some of the systems that guide our everyday behavior. For Sarah Lake, a very personal health crisis made her consider how the American food system needed to be transformed to lead people to eat differently. It happened back when she was a kid and her dad had a heart attack. He had really high cholesterol. He had several blocked arteries that required a six-way bypass surgery. And yeah, it was apparent that so much of this was linked to his eating. And while he was having surgery, my mom had me and my brother and my sister, and she took us to get dinner.

4:58At that point, it was late at night, and the only place in the hospital lobby that was open was a McDonald's. And we sat there eating this greasy food in the hospital while the floor above me, my dad was having heart surgery that I had just learned was caused by him having a really unhealthy diet. Today, Sarah is a food system and climate expert. She heads up the group, the Tilt Collective. Their goal is to make it easier for people to eat less meat and more plants without even realizing it. And the way in which we go about this is asking the question of how we can offer and incentivize more plant-rich foods.

5:37We recognize that many consumers are quite limited in their choices, limited by how much food costs or where it's available, if they can access it. So our approach is to say, how do we get companies and governments, whether that's schools and hospitals or it's grocery stores and fast food restaurants, to offer and incentivize plant-rich foods? What we eat is less about what we choose and more about what's offered to us. Sarah Lake continues from the TED stage. And companies and governments today still make it really hard for us to choose anything other than me. I mean, it's offered everywhere, and it's cheaper than other options.

6:16What we need now is the same fundamental shift in what we eat, but in the opposite direction, back towards plants. We need to grow more food on less land by 2050. And to do that, we need to shift from land-intensive animal protein to land-efficient vegetable protein. The story that I've been hearing from people is like, oh yeah, you know, fake meat and burgers and hot dogs and things like that had a moment, but people just didn't want them. Is that what happened? It is partially what happened. And part of the challenge is we're actually talking about a dozen different products with a dozen different technologies behind them.

6:59Things like black bean burgers. And you have others that are things like lab-grown meat, which couldn't be farther apart in terms of what they're made of and what the experience is eating them. The other part is just simply figuring out how to market these to consumers. One of my favorite opportunities is around what we would call sort of plant-rich meats or blended meats, where you have a burger and instead of it being 100 % beef, you actually make it 50 % beef and 50 % mushrooms or beans. And these products are available today, but we don't yet know how to present this. If you advertise a blended burger or a plant-rich burger, consumers don't know what that is.

7:38And quite frankly, a blended burger sounds disgusting. That's not really a product that we see as tasty and desirable. So a lot of this is a marketing challenge. Some of it's an investment challenge. And part of it is just the time it takes to get consumers familiar with these products and start building up the demand where people can have healthier, more plant-rich options without having to give up meat. Because ultimately, this isn't about no meat. This is about less meat. What we need is for companies and governments to offer and incentivize plant-rich diets the same way they did for meat decades ago.

8:14I need to walk into a McDonald's and see a menu full of plant-rich options and have them be just as cheap or cheaper than the Big Mac. And we need our schools and hospitals to offer plant-based foods as the default, where you can get meat, but you have to ask for it as the exception. And we need just as much money to flow into the plant-based industry as currently makes meat wildly and artificially cheap. We know that this can work because it has before. Take Lidl. It's one of the largest supermarkets in Europe, they decided to put their plant-based meat next to the conventional meat in the meat section and make it the same price.

8:53So when you went to grab a package of ground beef, you had a healthier, sustainable plant-based option right next to it that cost the same. Within six months of making this change, the sale of their plant-based products went up by 30 % and shows no sign of flagging. Companies and governments have been telling us for decades what to eat. They have the power to help us choose differently. There's always something a little disturbing when you realize you've been making choices, not because you were conscious of them, but because the system was set up to push you a certain way. So I guess I'm wondering the next time someone listening goes to the grocery store, what do you want them to be aware of?

9:33It's always hard to realize that we might not be making choices out of free will. And it's not just about meat or just about a grocery store. This happens all the time where certain products trend and we learn about new things. So when you walk in a grocery store and you want to be aware of what's shaping your forces, one of the things is understanding how grocery stores are designed. So there is a strategy that is if you put products in well-lit displays with good signage and at eye level, it's easier to want those products. And that is how a meat display is set up. It takes up a large portion of the store.

10:11It's very well lit. You have signs for each type of product. You also have a butcher counter, right? We have a dedicated space to getting your customized choice of meat. If you think about that compared to say beans, beans are often bottom shelf in a small, ugly metal can. And so it makes certain products quite hard to find. And we're seeing the same challenge with many plant-based options, that there's no standard place to put plant-based options. Sometimes they're in the freezer section. Sometimes they're in a vegan section. Sometimes they're next to the meat. Sometimes they're not next to the meat.

10:47And so this is one of the main ways in which we can help people choose these products is by figuring out where exactly they should be in a store and having a standard display. And ultimately, I think this is the heart of the issue. We should have consumer freedom of choice. But what we have now is actually the opposite. Consumers, when you poll them and ask them what they want, they want healthy and sustainable foods. They will largely say they want to be buying more plant-based products, but the challenge is they're not offered and they're not affordable. And many of the products aren't quite there in terms of taste parity, but consumers want this.

11:23I mean, on the plus side, when did we start saying plant-based? I just remember vegan and vegan always had this connotation of, you know, you were missing out on something. There was a scarcity to it. Whereas, I don't know, when did this happen? Plant-based sounds kind of bountiful in its own way, much more positive. Yeah, it's been an intentional decision to use the word plant-based. And I think to move away from this vegan mentality, I think it's all or nothing. Often we hear, well, it's so difficult to make this change. It's so difficult to go from a food system that relies on meat to one that relies on plants.

12:00And what I always say back is it's going to happen anyways. Our food system is going to be wildly disrupted, whether that's from the impacts of climate change or zoonotic disease or even tariffs and trade wars. And we can instead proactively plan and we can start transitioning towards a more plant-rich food system that is better for farmers and ranchers, better for consumers, and all around better for the planet. Sarah Lake is a global food system and climate expert. She's also CEO of the Tilt Collective, a philanthropy working to shift consumer eating habits. You can see her talk at TED.com. Sarah and I talked in April 2025.

12:45And at the time, we also contacted the Beef, Poultry and Pork Associations for comment. A spokesperson for the National Pork Board told us that the USDA agrees pork can be part of a balanced diet. Since then, the USDA has released new dietary guidelines recommending that Americans double their protein intake, emphasizing red meat and animal-based proteins. Nutrition experts are skeptical about this new advice. Today on the show, Hidden Forces. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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15:00Learn more at fisherinvestments.com. Investing in securities involves the risk of loss. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the hidden forces behind our everyday habits. So think about your typical morning routine. Maybe you start your day with a nice hot shower. Then you head to the kitchen where you flip on the lights, grind up some coffee beans, turn on the stove to make breakfast. Oh, and it's a little hot out today, so you turn on the fan or crank up the AC while you listen to the day's headlines. Live from NPR News in Washington. Whatever your routine, every single morning, pretty much everything we do relies on a vast network of hidden infrastructure.

15:52So things like water, it could be things like electricity, sewage, gas distribution, telecommunications, all kind of collectively in the space of what we think about as infrastructural systems. And we take these systems for granted and we just work on top of them. This is Deb Chatra. She is a professor of engineering at Olin College and the author of the book How Infrastructure Works Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. There's kind of a truism that our infrastructural systems are invisible until they break. And when they break, they're sort of at the forefront of our attention, right? If you don't have clean water coming out of your tap or if you have an electricity outage or even if the Internet goes down, right, which is not a survival need, right?

16:38It's not a life-threatening thing in most cases, right? And it still really upends your day when that happens because we have learned to rely on these systems as our infrastructure. Buckled roadways, melted electrical cables, public transit shutdowns. But these systems that we rely on are being pushed to their breaking point. The extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest this past weekend was brutal for the region's infrastructure. In Texas, millions of people are enduring their third day without electricity in freezing cold temperatures. Many families are being advised to boil what little tap water they have.

17:14Others just have no water at all. As the climate changes and severe weather events become more common, Deb says our infrastructure is struggling to keep up. So one of the things which we can't kind of lose sight of is that we want these systems to remain functioning and resilient because they underpin what we can do with our days and how we do it, rather than spending our days thinking about, well, where am I going to get clean water from or how am I going to function without electricity? And I think for many of us laypeople that we've taken for granted that, you know, we turn on the tap and clean water comes out or that we always have electricity.

17:54This is quite a wake up call. How much has a realization set in that the way we've set up our infrastructure has to change? Well, I would say there's two pieces to that story. So the first one is that almost all of the systems that I describe require energy to work. And most of the energy that we use comes from fossil fuels. So that's the first thing, that if they're powered by energy and that energy is coming from fossil fuels, it produces greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide. The second thing, though, is that we now know that that landscape is changing, right? That climate change is being felt as climate impacts or climate disruptions.

18:37that's really meaning that things that we kind of took for granted about how the landscape works, what weather would be like, what 100-year storms are, are changing. And what that means is that the infrastructural systems, the networks that we build, thinking that they're in a stable landscape, well, that landscape may not be stable. In fact, most likely is not stable. So they're just not going to work very well anymore. And whether we like it or not, we need to rethink our infrastructural networks. But these are physical systems that are embedded in the landscape. And that means that we need to think about these sort of landscapes as a whole.

19:19Here's Deb Chatra on the TED stage. Our landscapes, of course, have been stable. And we know that that's not the case anymore, right? Climate change, that's what climate change is. It's making our landscapes less stable. And that means, you know, this is longer heat waves, this is stronger hurricanes, this is fires, this is flooding. Everything that we think about as extreme weather events, you know, this idea of a natural disaster, right? The thing that makes it a disaster is precisely that it's not natural, right? It's that it affects humans and human communities. And because our landscapes are becoming less stable, sooner or later, the who's affected will be all of us.

20:01but we can flip this around because as we decarbonize these systems as we transform them we have the opportunity to make them resilient to make them responsive to make them more equitable I mean our infrastructure systems they are the most powerful tool that we have for how we can respond to climate change and we know that we can do this right because after decades of policy commitments we've done the research we have the renewable energy technology to transform this. We know that there's at least a pathway. And once we know that a pathway exists, we know that many pathways exist. But we can only choose to walk those pathways together, right?

20:42This is no longer an engineering problem to be solved. So in light of changing climate, unstable weather, unstable landscapes, we need to decarbonize our infrastructure systems. and you say that this actually presents a lot of opportunity. Yeah. We now know how to use renewable energy at scale in a way we didn't 20 or 30 or so years ago. And it's hard to pin a date on it because there's two main things. One is the Danish wind turbine, the standard wind turbine that I'm sure you and almost everyone who's listening has seen. And the other is the ability to produce solar panels relatively inexpensively and at scale.

21:30And what those two changes mean is that we are now capable of using renewable energy at the same kind of scale that we use fossil fuels at. So 20 years ago, I would be saying, at some point in the future, we will be able to harness all of the abundant renewable energy that is arriving at the planet, and we will be able to rebuild our infrastructural systems to use that energy instead someday. And now I get to say, that day is here. And in some places, the work is being done. In the U.K., there's a massive effort underway to shift the electric grid to have 95 percent renewable energy by the end of this decade.

22:14Countries like Costa Rica, Brazil and Norway are already there, all relying heavily on hydropower for their electricity. And in the U.S., tech companies are leading the charge for transitioning to renewables to meet the future demands of the artificial intelligence industry. The fundamental idea behind a lot of infrastructural systems is that you invest in these systems because you're investing in the well-being of the people who are going to use them. You know, we understand that building out infrastructural systems is widely understood to be something that pays for itself, even in terms of return on investment.

22:54A lot of hard-headed economists and financial analysts have showed that the cost of actually building out the infrastructure that mitigates the impacts of climate change is much, much cheaper than dealing with the effects of climate change. I was actually recently just outside of L.A. where there are these massive wind turbines that you've mentioned. And I couldn't help but think about electricity the whole time I was there because they were so in your face. They're huge. You can't avoid them. And I asked someone, I was like, what do you think of them? And they said, oh, you know, you get used to it.

23:29They become part of the landscape. Did you ever look at certain parts of California where they have heavy windmills? But the president has said he is not a fan, like on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2024. It is the ugliest thing. It looks like a graveyard, almost a graveyard of windmills. It's pollution. It's so bad. And the federal government will not be supporting these projects. So where will the revamp of our infrastructure stand without federal funding? So I think that places that have the resources and have the kind of political will to start addressing this kind of transformative change and mitigating climate impacts, they will keep doing it whether or not they have federal resources to do it.

24:14So places that have the resources can move farther ahead and make more resilient, sustainable communities. Places that don't are not going to be able to do that. There'll be a bigger division between those two. And that's not just in the United States. That's going to be true globally. And a lot of that work will continue regardless of what is happening at any kind of higher levels in the hierarchy. And, you know, I teach teenage, like I teach undergraduate engineering students. And so I really want them to understand that their lives are not about fixing the problems that their grownups left them.

24:50No, your job is to build out this world. Right. And you will, on the way there, you can address all the problems that you've been left. I mean, when you put it that way, wow, what a time to be an engineering student. This is like there is a chapter here where you can really make a huge change where a generation from now, if people just think what you've done is normal, you will have succeeded. Right. That like almost like when the railroad tracks were laid in the United States. I think it's very much like that because we remember, I mean, I think few of us remember directly, but certainly we understand the role of the New Deal as making that big investment into our lives collectively by building out infrastructure.

25:38And I think it's the moment where we have the opportunity to do that again. And this time, you know, we get to go sort of much farther and to do it in a way that is much more responsive to our needs. And it'll be, you know, there might not be another Hoover Dam to point at, right? But I think the evidence of that work could and will be everywhere. And it'll be just a part of the fabric of our lives. I think that will be true after this transformation. And some of it might be big fields, but a lot of it might be just embedded, you know, into our daily lives or into our communities. So in the 20th century, we built out these kind of massive monolithic systems.

26:18And I have to say, like, I am a fan of our charismatic megastructures. So in the U.S., that's the Golden Gate Bridge. It's the Hoover Dam, right? These were built as monuments, and they were built to endure. But in the 21st century, our infrastructural systems will need to endure not like monuments, but like forests. So if you think about a forest ecosystem, it's powered by the sun. It's rooted in the earth. There's no waste. Everything is basically used to grow new things. it endures, but it actually evolves and changes with time. And of course, it provides a place where all who live there can thrive.

26:57Our infrastructural systems are how we take care of each other at scale, so that we can take care of each other as individuals. They underpin our agency, and they really foster and allow us to develop our social relationships with each other. All of these are about what it means to be human. And that means that a commitment to a shared infrastructural future is a commitment to our shared humanity. So this is the world that we can create together. Thank you. That's engineering professor Deb Chatra. She's the author of the book, How Infrastructure Works Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. You can see her full talk at TED.com.