Former White House Chef Sam Kass: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis

26:13And I'm very worried about what it's going to do. Because of China? Yeah, because they lost their biggest market. 25 % of our soybeans go to China. And really, it's the tariffs that are driving this short-term issue. But they're not buying our soybeans. So I think rural America is going to get hit really hard in these coming years. So we have to fight. So anyway, I digress. We have to figure out who's going to pay for this. And the question is going to be, is it going to be taxpayers? Because right now, or is it going to be big admitters or consumers? And depending on, you can debate why it should be one or the other.

26:54Right now, people have been struggling with inflation. Consumers don't seem to have any willingness to pay another penny for anything that they're buying. And frankly, part of the harsh truth is that consumers right now don't know what a regenerative agriculture is, don't care about it, aren't asking for it, aren't demanding it. So then we asked the CPG companies, like, we need you to buy more regen, whatever. and they're like that's great but i can't sell it so you're asking me to take on a big cost uh in this transition but i can't you know nobody's nobody wants to buy it so they're like i can't so the people there's people in these bigger companies who are advocating for you know supply you know procuring much more regenerative ingredients it's dying at the cmo office because the cmo is like you want to you want to spend how much money 100 million dollars or whatever it may be, to help transition these set of ingredients, but nobody cares about it.

27:50So internally, there are these fights where it's just not going anywhere. You know, I think one of the things that's come up is how do we price things? And what's the true cost of food? Rockefeller Foundation produced a report a few years ago talking about the true cost of food. And it's basically$3 for every dollar we spend on food in collateral damage. And, and, uh, we talked about externalities, but you know, I think the, uh, the speech called the future of food that was given by then Prince Charles, now King Charles in, in 2011, talking about this concept of the true, true cost accounting.

28:23How do you build in the true cost of what we're doing and who's accountable for that? Um, like Bobby Kennedy, when he was an environmental lawyer, got GE to pay over a billion dollars to clean up the Hudson River from the PCBs because he held them accountable for the harm they're causing. How do we do that in the food system? I think the true cost of accounting is absolutely right. But essentially what we're saying is we need to embed the cost of that food into society, which is going to mean just a dramatic increase in the cost of food to people. And I don't think that's a winner. I don't see companies, politicians are advocating for that.

29:04So for me, I think there's different mechanisms to go about re-embedding that cost. One is like a robust carbon market system. Essentially what you're saying is, I think the only way this really works is just to get to my brass tacks after exploring every option I could think of. There's a certain set of companies out in the world who have driven most of our emissions and they have the most responsibility of our current situation and the most money to pay for it, whereas the food and agricultural system is a really low margin system. So there's just not a lot of extra cash floating around to pay for all this stuff.

29:41I think we need a robust market that starts to pay for farmers initially to sequester carbon, and then to get into much broader ecosystem services like around water and biodiversity, and have the big emitters pay. Big emitters should be paying our growers to solve these problems and incentivizing the proper practices and ultimately improving the nutritional quality of our food, but through the lens of climate. I think that's the only way you have enough resources coming into the system to really pay farmers to make it worth their while to take on the risk associated with this transition. I think there's government policy around insurance, especially to help ensure that transition very specifically, which right now we don't really do.

30:27so there's government policies at play but the we just need to make the numbers work and right now the numbers don't work aren't the farmer aren't the aren't these big companies who are causing the problems the big ag and food chem companies the seed companies aren't aren't they going to resist this they're not going to want to pay for ecosystem services and i want you to explain what are ecosystem services because there are countries that are literally paying farmers for the good they're doing to restore biodiversity and soil and water resources. So kind of unpack that a little bit and explain why would they be incented to do this?

30:59Because I agree with you, they should be paying for it, but how would we make them pay for it? It seems like the government's going to have to put some type of policy or regulation in place that forces them to do that. I'm actually, when I refer to the big emitters, I'm actually talking about like oil and gas, big tech companies. They're the ones who have profited and driven most of the climate footprint. It's growing in food and ag, but historically, it is oil and gas that is definitely on the hook for the vast majority of emissions globally. And so if you set up a different mechanism, carbon is established.

31:34It's not exploding right now like we all hoped it would. But if you have a robust system of carbon markets. Basically, a farmer starts doing regenerative practices, they measure their soil and see, okay, I've built one ton per acre of additional carbon per year. That gets measured and underwritten by a third party to say, yes, we verify this. And then that farmer can sell that credit for$30,$40,$50 to Exxon, say. And if you think about there's 95 million acres of soy, 93 million acres of corn. We can talk about all the negative issues there, but those are huge. Just those two crops alone, you're talking about massive amounts of sequestration and then the money in there to help those farmers transition.

32:25That's what I think is going to have to happen because so far, we've been talking about this for a long time, and And farmers aren't transitioning at scale. It's happening little by little. We have to ask ourselves the honest question. Farmers are super smart. They're managing all this complexity. And they're not making this leap broadly. And I think it's basically because the numbers aren't working right now for them. And that's the kind of thing that has to happen to make them work. I think you can set up similar markets around water use, like how do we reduce our water? And then how do we measure and improve biodiversity?

32:59Those are also things that could be turned into credits that people are then funding farmers to do. But that's what I think is needed. And we were making a lot of progress on that. The current administration has unwound all of that and sort of gone in the decidedly opposite direction, undoing all the ag climate policy work that had been done in the previous administration. I find that to be unconscionable and very scary given, you know, how much worse things are getting. But it's going to take action like that if we're going to be able to, at scale, start making real progress here. Yeah, I know it's true.

33:31I mean, I live in Austin, Texas now, and there's a farm nearby, a ranch, where I went to visit called Rome Ranch. And it was, you know, kind of a cattle grazing area. and basically had been completely denuded and damaged. And this young couple bought 1 ,000 acres and they reintroduced bison, which was the keystone species in this area of the world. I'm going to call it Cross America. And they rotate them around 1 ,000 acres, different fields. They don't let them stay on any one spot a long time. And then they basically don't till the soil. They plant a whole diversity of wild plants and nitrogen-fixing plants, so they don't need fertilizer.

34:15and it was amazing because you could see the next ranch over it was a drought when i was there and the it was just there were no cattle because the farmers had to get rid of them because they couldn't sustain them on the land and yet here they had this thriving ecosystem where the soil had increased carbon by six percent which may not sound like a lot but for every percent of carbon that you put in the soil you sequester and i mean carbon and you also retain 25 000 gallons per acre of water. And so these creeks that had been the navigational creeks for the settlers coming across America that had dried up in Texas were now coming back.

34:49Bald eagles were coming back to land. Wild animals were coming back. Wild turkeys were coming back. And there were plants that had been not germinated for 150 years that had, maybe there's some special properties of manure from bison. I don't know. But there were these plants that germinated that hadn't germinated in 150 50 years, it was really amazing to see this kind of life come back just by following nature. And I think the best way I think about regenerative practices, it's mimicking nature and complex ecosystems, which are far more resilient. You know, if one plant dies in a rainforest, big deal.

35:25If one plant dies on a monocrop corn or soy, and if it's corn or soy, it's a disaster. And I think from a national security perspective, from an economic perspective, from a climate perspective, from an environmental degradation perspective. It just makes so much sense. And I think, you know, one of the things that I noticed you mentioned in your book was that we should be eating less meat. And I agree that the current way of growing animals or raising animals is a disaster through the confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs, which are basically factory farms. They're a disaster for many reasons, and we can unpack that.

35:59But I love your perspective on on using regenerative practices that integrate animals and actually be able to scale up animal production. Alan Williams talks about how we could actually produce more cows than we now slaughter in America through conventional methods by actually using Bureau of Land Management land, by taking the corn and soy fields, turning them back into grazing land and actually rejiggering the whole system that actually will produce even more animal protein while restoring ecosystems and creating what you call ecosystem services. So can you speak to that? Because I think, you know, we've got the Lancet Commission, which has basically said we should all be mostly vegan.

36:40And there's a whole narrative out there that you want to save the planet, be a vegan. But I think, you know, Bill Nye-Mann's wife talked about how it's not the cow, it's the how. Or maybe it was somebody else. I forget who it was. But it's basically, it's like not the cow that's the problem. It's how we raise the cows. Can you speak to that? Yeah, so I think there's a, this is obviously a raging debate. uh, and we're in a, we're in a, we're in a protein explosion right now, uh, in terms of, you know, narrative around how much protein we should be eating. Uh, and you know, so I think this is obviously, and I think there's inherent contradictions here that we have to sort of grapple with all the life cycle assessments I've seen, um, uh, comparing grass fed to can, you know, conventional, I just hate that that's our word for it, current state of how we produce beef.

37:34From an actual pure admission standpoint, they're actually not that much different because the grass-fed animal tends to live longer for them to get to a slaughter weight. It is way healthier for the overall environment, but not from an admission standpoint. So I think we just have to try to call this how I see it. I'm a grass-fed, first of all, let me just be very clear, I am definitely not a vegan. I love a good steak. I had some delicious redemptive pork for dinner last night. So I am far from a vegan. Kosher pork? Was it kosher pork? Are you getting ready for Yom Kippur? That pig lived a better life than me.

38:13Well, you have something to ask for forgiveness for tomorrow on Yom Kippur. Exactly right. we're recording this by the way on the eve of yom kippur which is the holiest day in the jewish calendar so i'm just teasing sam i think there's um much there's real benefit to the grass-fed systems and regenerative beef systems to the broader environment from a pure mission standpoint i think it's not that clear that is how much better or worse it is uh one system or another But from an overall degradation standpoint, I think it is quite clear. And look, I think the question comes down to what are, from an environmental standpoint, what's the most efficient ways to get us the most nutrient density?

38:59The problem with the cows is it's just not that good at converting energy from the sun into animal protein. Like a chicken is a far more efficient animal in converting feed into animal protein. So I think if you just look at the data and take all the agendas out of it, my advice to the world is to, yes, put everything we can on pasture. But I think ultimately that means the price is largely going to go up. We're going to have to eat less of the larger animals. Something like chicken should take on a much greater role in our diets from a climate standpoint. If we're trying to balance both the impact to our climate and the benefits of human health, the smaller animals tend to be much more efficient from a feed conversion ratio, which means they take less resources to get us a pound of animal protein.

39:53And the cow is just not that good. As delicious as it is, it's just not that great at it. So I think we must transition to a quality versus quantity system where these animals are much more integrated into these biological systems and help build soil because they are very important in building soil. All of our soil comes from animal grazing, you know, migratory pathways over tens and tens and millions of years, tens of thousands, not millions of years. but our overall amount of consumption, I think, at least right now, does not help us mitigate the worst of climate. And that's just what the data says.

40:34I can imagine it. But it's interesting. There were like 160 million ruminants roaming around before the white guys got here and they were building soil like crazy and they were eight to 50 feet of topsoil in the Midwest and they weren't contributing to climate change. They were actually. Well, you had a much, I think the difference is you had a much more balanced system where most of the country was covered by forests and most of the world was covered by forests. The oceans were not over inundated with carbon that it absorbed. The biosphere had the ability to sequester a lot more carbon because we've cut down most of those forests.

41:08We've turned over most of that soil. That balance has been thrown way off. And I think that's what we're grappling with. So the question for us is like, what can we do in our daily lives to try to make an impact? So I don't advocate for eating less, you know, no meat at all. It's like when you are going to try to find pasture-raised sources and eat smaller animals, I think is the best balance. But there's no perfect answer here. I mean, I think the debate will rage on and, you know, we're going to all have to sort of navigate this one. I mean, we're talking about solutions coming from industry that's the culprit, oil and gas tech, actually helping fund carbon credits that can be used to incentivize farmers to convert from the sort of extractive agricultural system to a regenerative system, which seems to make sense.

42:00I don't know how you're going to force them to do it unless you have policy. Then there's policy change that has to happen. And then there's what people can do. And what it seems to me is that when we look at any big change, whether it's ending slavery and abolition or civil rights or women's rights or gay marriage, whatever, even the reversing of Roe v. Wade, all that came not from Congress. It came from cultural movements that were consumer-driven or driven by individuals with certain belief systems that then drove the policy change in state and federal legislatures. And so I'm very curious from your perspective, for people listening who are saying, well, what the heck am I going to do?

42:45Like, how do I help this problem? I don't want to be having my children or grandchildren not being able to eat peaches or nuts or chocolate or whatever, or worse, not even having food to eat or being at risk for having massive migration from the global south to the north because of climate change. You know, what do you say to people that empowers them around this issue? What can they do who are listening to actually change the system from the outside in? Yeah. So after spending six years like in the White House trying to drive all these policy changes, and we should talk policy at some point. We should talk a little more about government policy.

43:23Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. I'm in with you. I will say that, you know, we're often given this narrative, you know, there's like the government colluding with these big companies and they're destroying everything. And there's definitely some truth to that. But what I learned my time in the White House is that policy is actually pretty constrained in its ability to change what ultimately actually ends up on people's plates. And the reality is, is that fundamentally our culture underpins all of these decisions, both from the private sector, like a business is what they're making, how they're making it, as well as our politicians, what they care about or what they don't care about, how they act or don't act.

44:05And then the choices we're making in our daily lives is so deeply rooted in our cultural values and our cultural norms. Food is one of those things, very different than a lot of things we analyze it to, like smoking. It's not really smoking because that was just one thing that nobody really needed that was clearly bad and easy to demonize. Food is our identity. It's who we are. It's how we show love. It's how we decide who we're not. And we're all experts in it because we all eat at three, four, sometimes five times a day, depending, maybe more, depending who you are. And our culture really underpins the decisions that we are as a society making.

44:46And I think if we don't do the hard, messy, slow, difficult work of shifting our culture, policy is always going to let us down. Businesses are going to continue to act as they do. And we're not going to see anywhere near the amount of change that we need. And cultural work is hard because you don't get much credit for it. It's hard to kind of track exactly. But I think how you led into this question is exactly right. these big breakthroughs and big transitions are really fundamentally cultural shifts that then get the manifestation in a policy form or in a business start to follow with their policies.

45:24That's what has to happen. And I think we've seen a real evolution over the last 30 years in culture around food here, but it's still nascent. And we haven't turned it into a true movement. Now, But Maha has definitely made some real progress in some ways there. But it hasn't really translated into like, this is the norms of what dinner looks like in America. These are what we expect from our community, our state, our local leaders, and our federal leaders. And I think it really does start with us at home and what we think of as normal. I told this little story in the book. I didn't think I would even mention this today.

46:06But could you bring it up? Like the last time I drank a soda, I was like 19 trying to be a professional baseball player. And my good friend, Caron Walker, who was a couple of years older than me and just had gotten drafted. I got a Mountain Dew late one night on a Saturday. Like we were out hanging out, going out and we stopped at a gas station. I got him on and do it. He was like, why would you drink that garbage? It is pure poison for you. And he's like, look at the ingredients. And I looked at it and he was like, you're right. And I never touched a soda since then. It was because he set a new cultural norm.

46:38Like if you're an athlete and this is how you want to be, you want to make it, you don't drink garbage. And I think for all of us, how we impact each other matters. So just in our homes saying, you know what? We care about what we put in our body. We're going to start paying attention. That sets a new norm for your family. And then when you go into your work to say, hey, this food environment is making it hard for me to make a good choice and it's impacting me. Can we try to improve the offerings here? that all of a sudden starts to change the culture of wherever it is you work. I don't care where it is.

47:08It could be a daycare center. It could be a big corporate job or anything in between. That starts to impact the culture of that place. Wherever you are, your church, your synagogue, your temple, it doesn't matter. Just raising the question, advocating, organizing some people around it, saying we expect the food that we're eating here to improve our health and to be done in a way that preserves our farmers' ability to continue to produce food for generations to come, those values can start to really shift and underpin all kinds of things that are even hard to imagine from now. And all of us have that voice.

47:49And it may feel small, but that is the change. That is fundamentally what underpins our ability to make change. When we were in the White House, and this is now quite a long time ago, 15 years ago, Like we were doing that work not because people were demanding it of us. We were doing that work because, you know, the first lady cared about it as a mom and experienced it as a mom and decided to just take on this set of issues in a way that hadn't been taken on before. But what needed to be, what needs to happen is whoever comes to the White House next is so overwhelmed by people saying this matters to us.

48:27we expect you to have aggressive policies both on the sustainability and climate regenerative side as well as on the health side and we will hold you accountable and if you don't do it you're out like that's how policy is going to start to really change and if you don't have that you're only going to get so far so i i culture is so overlooked because it's hard but it is fundamental to every i agree and i think you know uh i spent the last five years in washington in and out meeting with over 100 plus 50 congressmen, senators, people in the administrations, both the Biden and the Trump administration.

49:01And what was really striking to me is that they said, what people say matters. If our constituents are calling our office, asking for X, Y, Z, we're listening. It's probably more impactful than anything else. And it can override what's happening from industry. You see that now with the Maha movement. I actually have become friends with Roger Marshall, who's the head of the Maha caucus in the Senate. And I wrote about him in my book, Food Fix, and how he basically, in a hearing in the Congress, when he was a congressman, was belittling the testimony of somebody who was saying that the food we're eating is a contributor to our chronic disease epidemic and obesity.

49:40And he's a doctor himself. He's an OB-GYN. And he completely dismissed it. And he said, it's all about exercise. And when you looked at who he was funded by, it was the corn lobby and the sugar lobby. And I'm like, and I kind of gave him a hard time about it. He says, don't worry, worse has happened to me. But now he's kind of flipped because he sees what's happening in the culture.

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50:51I also want to challenge something you said, because you said, you know, it's not like cigarettes because we have to eat and you're right. But the difference is what we're eating is not definitionally food. And if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of food is any nutritious substance, nutritious is a keyword here, that people or animals eat or drink, or that plants absorb in order to maintain life and growth. So what we're eating, ultra processed food by definition is not food. We don't actually need it. It's not necessary for survival and it's actually making us sick and killing us.

51:28So I think, you know, one of the initiatives, and I'd be curious to hear what you think about this, that we're working on in Washington now is with David Kessler, who is the former FDA commissioner under Bush. And then, I think Clinton also, he's a lawyer and a doctor and he's on the podcast. He just released, at least I think a couple of weeks ago. And he was sharing about this petition he did to the FDA when they were requesting, how do we define ultra-processed food as a way of creating some framework for regulation? And as a lawyer, he went back to the Food Act in the 50s and looked at the laws that govern what we call grass, generally recognized as safe.

52:06And if you're using baking soda and it was used for 100 years, it just kind of got grandfathered in as a safe food and ingredient. But all these other things that the food industry has started putting in our foods, he's deconstructed industrial food ingredients from soy and corn, primarily wheat, that are not molecularly the same as food. They have different properties. They do different things in the body. They were beginning to understand, and the science is overwhelming now that they're harmful. He's saying, well, technically, the starches and sugars and the forms of them in, not like sugar that you put in your coffee, but actually these things are definitely a problem, and they no longer meet the standard for generally recognized as safe.

52:43and he says we can put the onus back on the food industry to prove they're safe. And that's sort of an interesting way to kind of go around this issue because to try to kind of force the industry to change or do something that's hard. But I thought it was kind of a brilliant sleight of hand. I'd love to hear what you think about that. Well, first of all, I think the only difference, just to go back on the cigarette real briefly, is the only difference is everybody eats, everybody eats unlike smoking, where it's still a relatively small percentage of the population. Yeah, fair enough. And everybody who eats tends to like the food that they're eating.

53:20Even if it's like a double cheeseburger and they probably shouldn't be eating that every day. People who eat that tend to love their cheeseburger. And so taking that away or trying to change that in any fundamental way is much more fraught and difficult. That's, I think, the main point. So from a strategy standpoint, there's parts, there's some to learn about tobacco. Obviously, it's a huge win. And it was a cultural shift that led to major policy changes. But it's not as simple and straightforward as that. I guess that's where I caution. First of all, let me just say, I love David Kessler. I've known him for a long time.

53:54He was one of the first people to reach out when I got to the White House. He's brilliant and thoughtful. and I couldn't say more positive things about the man. I think his petition is creative and smart. I think it would theoretically be transformational, of course. I don't see any path where legally that could work because you have to show harm. The problem is a piece of bread or a cupcake on an individual basis is not harmful. There's no evidence to show that if that's all you're eating, that somehow it's not safe. It's the aggregate dosage among the population that is leading to these big declines.

54:49And regulating that, I think, would not stand up in court is my read on it. And from some folks that are harder on the law side of this, their read on it. I think it's like a, uh, because you, it's hard to prove harm on any one of these products. It's very hard to prove like wheat is killing us. Right. Like, um, and so I don't see it going anywhere, but theoretically I think it's really smart. And I do think cuts to the heart of the challenges we face, which I liked, I do have concerns that we're paying attention to the wrong things right now. That is the core of it. Those empty calories are driving the metabolic disease that we're facing.

55:35And it is a policy proposal that gets to the thing that would make a big difference. Now, whether it's in that form or we should try to figure out other ways to curtail the amount of empty calories, particularly of sugar that are being pumped into our diets, I'm all for and here to go to war over that. And I support it theoretically. I just don't think it will go anywhere. And I also think, by the way, it's not going to fly. I also think that what hasn't happened yet, there's been no policy changes that are threatening really like how people are eating. And there's been no backlash because of it.

56:12And I don't think, but just wait till the country freaks out because you're going to make sodas more expensive or you're going to, we haven't seen any of that yet. That's where it gets started to get politically way more dicey than anything that we've seen recently. and you also have to have policies that are smart enough to withstand that because that, whether you like it or not, that's just the reality. You got to bet that the industry is going to pay a lot of money to fight back and I got plenty of scars to prove how hardcore will play and you got to be ready to fight that with a strategy that can overcome that and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

56:43I think if your policy is so overreaching is maybe the wrong word, but so expansive in your reach, you're going to take on so much said, I don't see how that could move forward, even if it legally had a path. But worth the try. I mean, it's bad. The situation is bad. So we got to try everything we can. Well, it's sort of interesting how pernicious and deliberate the industry is. And I was involved testifying for Senate Bill 25 in the Texas legislature. And it was basically to really improve the health. And what they were doing was food labeling and ingredient warnings about specific ingredients, their additives.

57:20They were talking about how we change things in school and have funding for nutrition education in medical school and creating a nutrition advisory committee and empowering the committee to look at scientific studies on ultra-processed foods and colors and additives. And it passed, but at the 11th hour, the food industry got involved and they put in an amendment that basically decapitated the fundamental provision of the bill, which was to properly label the foods that were harmful. We're not talking about taking the ingredients out. We're just talking about like highlighting the harm that we know of these ingredients on the label.

57:59And I was so excited this bill kind of finally got passed, but it was the deliberate and sneaky kind of legal maneuvering and lobbying that happened behind the scenes. And I saw this happen with Governor Morrissey where he was trying to do the same thing in West Virginia. And I know him personally and his wife. And they said, yeah, the food industry came in and said, oh, you're going to get rid of these dyes and these chemicals. But that means grandma puts a red dye and a cupcake and sells it at a bake sale at school. She's going to go to jail. I'm like, you don't want that. And so they're doing all these crazy messaging.

58:39And we had to combat that and say, no, this is actually not what's going on. And I think it's kind of, it's so, it's so, um, they're so well organized and they're so deliberate. And I laid out the, how they do that in my book, Food Fix, and it's coming out with a new version of Food Fix Uncensored in February. But it's, it's really about this, this, this sort of ways in which any progress is met with massive resistance from the food industry. And, and I wonder how you think that we can work around this. Is it, is it through business innovation? Is it through changing culture? Like where, where are the levers?

59:12And how do you see Maha as an overall movement, as a wedge in through to the right path? There's problems with it for sure, and I agree. But how do we create a wedge for that? I think to answer the first part of your question. And I ask three questions at once usually. And they're all big ones, man. They're all the ones I'm super eager to answer. I think we often talk about the food industry as this monolith. and what I experienced in DC is that they're not like there are some companies that are just horrible like fight against everything fight to make you know we were there they made pizza count as a vegetable uh because of the tomato sauce uh when we were trying to limit the amount of pizza or made french fries count uh as a vegetable so we had to change like how we regulate lunch to make sure there was an additional like green vegetables as a part of it some company And it's like the kind of aggro of the world.

1:00:15They are horrible, right, as you would see them. But there's others that are much more progressive and willing to do either what's right or feel like they're positioning themselves for a healthier kind of consumer and seed advantage there. And so they're willing to play. I think they're dividable, I guess, is my main point. So one thing is to find out. who's just going to fight you? and then can you get some industry support? And there's probably a bunch of industry who would have no problem with the label on the front of their pack because they got mostly decent stuff in there and they would love the advantage of having their competitors look terrible with like big X's or stop signs on the front of their pack.

1:00:57And I tried to do front of pack too. So we have a lot of war stories there. But it's the thing that moves the needle the most like in South America where the black warning stop signs on the front of packages of food that's harmful are the biggest lever that was seen in South America to create behavior change and stop people buying less foods. Well, I think the evidence that I've seen even more so is it drives a lot of reformulation because companies don't want to have to put - Right, reformulated, right. They start pulling out the excess sugar and fat because they're like, oh man, that looks terrible.

1:01:30And so let me get out in front of that. So it's actually an incredible driver of reformulation to the better. I think the thing that we don't focus on in terms of dealing with companies is Wall Street. Right now, I've experienced a bunch of CEOs who were not, you'd probably put them as sort of the enemy per se, but were trying to move their companies in a better direction and almost got fired for it because their sales may have taken a little dip or they seem like they're not focused on the most profitable products and Wall Street doesn't like that. And I don't focus on the role of finance that dictates the actions of these companies anywhere well enough.

1:02:14You know, I think you got to remember, they're also highly competitive with each other. They're fighting for pennies, like one extra pack a week in the, you know, makes a big difference and they're fighting against each other. So they're not just like friends. There's sometimes where there's a threat that brings them together, but otherwise they're competitors and they're fighting tooth and nail. for every dollar in our wallet. So I think there's opportunity to use that to our advantage in a way that we haven't always. But ultimately, the biggest thing we can do, ultimately, so we have to put policy pressure on them.

1:02:52There needs to be stronger regulation, and even the threat of regulation gets a lot of movement. We need to start dealing with finance and getting them to start supporting companies that are doing the right thing here and helping give those companies some space and CEOs some space to maneuver. Not just the next quarterly earnings report, which is the opposite of what China does, which is the next thousand years, not the next quarter. I had to blame all of this, all of our challenges on one thing. It's short-termism. In the end, only thinking quarter by quarter as a society or election to election is why we're in this situation.

1:03:27If we started thinking about longer-term horizons, the next generation, and how we're making our decisions, we'd be making very different decisions, both on our homes and on our planet. But you're not able to make long-term investments on these transitions or these changes if you're being accounted for every four months or every three months of your progress. Their hands are tied in some ways, in ways that I don't think a lot of advocates, and I'm speaking to some of my friends, really get that dynamic. I think there's a sense of like, they're intentionally trying to kill us. they know what's right they're just deciding not to do it to reap more profit that's actually not their experience some of them yes but that's generally not how they're how they experience it they're just have a very narrow path to walk to keep their jobs and to keep the business on track and they try to make changes and they're not good enough and a lot of them fail because consumers ultimately aren't buying the foods that we would hope they would and they are responsible for that because they're marketing this junk.

1:04:32But like, right. So it's a negative feedback loop in that regard. So ultimately we have to start supporting companies that are doing a better job. We have to show them that the products that are going to win in the marketplace are ones that are better for us and better for the planet. And if we can start to do that, you will see those companies race to, to, to those kinds of products because they don't want to lose market share. Everybody's just trying to keep their share. It's interesting though. It's tough. You know, I think, you know, the government has a convening power and I I've spoken to CEOs of many of these big companies like Nestle's and, and Mark Schneider, when he was a CEO and he was very progressive, they wanted to convert 70 % of their supply chain to regenerative agriculture.

1:05:12They wanted to reformulate, but he said, look, you know, if I do it independently, I'm going to lose market share to my competitors and we have to, we, we all have to do it together. And so you can't do collectively collude as an industry because there's antitrust laws. But the government could convene the CEOs and say, hey, guys, gigs up. Let's rethink our food system. Let's get creative. Let's reformulate. And it's happening globally. And I think one of the problems, as you mentioned, the quarterly earnings report pressure, there's a number of CEOs that have tried this. like Denise Morrison from Campbell's tried to improve the supply chain and improve the quality of the products and removing certain ingredients.

1:05:54Indra Nunea from Pepsi did the same thing. They both got canned. And their boards fired them because they were doing this. And that's very discouraging to me because you have CEOs from these big companies that are trying to do something right. And the financial earnings reports and the short-termism, as you describe it, really inhibits any progress. How do we kind of navigate around that? Yeah, I mean, I think we need to, and this is probably regulatory, start accounting for other fiduciary responsibilities besides only return to shareholder value. Because right now, that's Wall Street's sole responsibility is to maximize shareholder value.

1:06:33And they should be responsible for other implications of those investments on society. And if they had it in their legal mandate to also take into account the impact of their investments on the health, well-being, or the planet, as an example, they would then have to start measuring that. And there's examples of that in Europe. And that changes how investors have to operate legally, and that changes how then CEOs and their boards have to manage these companies. That's the kind of thing that has to happen. And I think culturally, from a finance standpoint, we're very far away from that. But I think these companies are only going to get so far unless we make that kind of change, where they have an actual legal responsibility to take into account the impact of whatever product or service they're putting into the market.

1:07:24If we had that, then we'd have a framework and opportunity to start moving these folks in a fundamentally different direction. But right now they can say, listen, I'm on Wall Street. I'm just looking at, do I think this company is going to make more or less money in the short term and or midterm? And that's all that they're calculating. And if they think it's going to go down, they think they're not going to have a good next couple of quarters and they pull their money out and stock goes down. Yeah. I knew both those women and they were amazing and trying to do better, you know, flawed in many ways as it was, but really genuinely trying to make a difference.

1:08:01and yeah they they were they they did not last that effort um i agree i i write a little bit about entering the book as that example it's a it was a tough lesson for me to understand that it's not they're not sole actors in this well sam you know you you you have a lot of insight not just as a chef not someone who's just you know help with uh let's move efforts and not just as an investor who's looking at companies that are creating innovation in the sector trying to solve these problems through tech solutions, which I think is amazing. Um, but you were, you were the senior policy advisor for healthy food initiatives in the white house.

1:08:39And if you were now in the white house or at HHS or USDA, or maybe you were the food czar, if there was one, I was labeled that, uh, how would you be, how would you be kind of harnessing the, at least the cultural awareness around make America healthy again and, and, and help the centers and congressmen and the people at the USDA and the FDA and HHS who want to do the right thing. And I know these people, they want to do the right thing. They're trying to figure it out. You know, they're, they're trying to navigate how to, how to change the thinking and change the policies, but it's kind of messy.

1:09:19So how would you kind of coalesce this and harness this incredible movement that's now sort of emerged. And there's parts of it that I think are really problematic. As I said, we can leave this alone for now, but there's a lot of good stuff around food and around a chronic disease that is being spoken about for the first time. What would you be advising Congress and the White House and the agencies to do? And how would you create a roadmapper starting to change some of the things that need to get changed? Yeah. Big question. You said you want to talk about Maha. Yeah, it's a big question. I think it is important to talk about what I think is really positive in this moment and then some of the concerns.

1:09:59I do think some of the concerns are undermining our ability to move things in the right direction. you know i think um i give rfk a lot of credit uh for you know bringing this these issues back on the national stage i i i a lot in that world say it's for the first time i obviously since we were saying many of the same things i fundamentally disagree with that but that's okay it's not Not about that. And I think his critique, as harsh as it is, I think holds a lot of truth. And I think it's for all of us who've been working on these issues for a very long time, a breath of fresh air and invocative to hear somebody who now leads HHS, the biggest department of the federal government,

1:10:54saying those things in a very forceful way. And doing it with backing in the broad public that I could only have dreamed of having when we were in there. And I think the one thing that is starting, and I got to say, let me just take a moment to credit you because what's happening now, and you've played a real role in this, is this is becoming a bipartisan issue, at least for now. in a way that like leaves me feeling like i'm living in the upside down because so many of these people i could just play you clip after clip nailed against us as the nanny state and fought us tooth and nail on everything um yeah and if i had any support in congress at all like the twilight zone i really feel like I'm living in the twilight zone.

1:11:44I mean, it's good, but it's like, and this should be a bipartisan issue. We worked really hard to make it not a threatening in its face so we could try to bring as many people into the tent as we could. It was much more aggressive in terms of our strategy, but what we tried to show to the outside world was like, let's all join hands. We'll work all together and let's see what we can do. So it should be like that. And that's right. I do fear... that the bipartisanship won't last after this administration, but I'm hopeful that some parts of it can last. I think the problem right now, and this maybe can lead us into what we should be doing, is a lot of the narrative then around what is actually the problem and what are the solutions I just find to be totally off base.

1:12:42and we're not focusing on the things that matter. And it's leading to confusion and concern. And I can't, you know, and, you know, we can just take the two ones that are the loudest so far, at least from what I can, you know, ascertain. You know, I am not a fan of food dyes. I'm happy to see them go. So the Froot Loops with food dye is, without food dye is still Froot Loops and nobody should be eating that. It's not good for you. And the reason why all these foods have lined up - Sipping Coke with sugar or hyper-grossed currency, right? It's still a hyper-processed, terrible food. The reason why a lot of food companies lined up is because it actually doesn't really matter that much.

1:13:25And there's really very little evidence. There's really no real evidence that the food dye itself is causing any of this metabolic problems. It can cause other things, right? It can cause ADD and allergy. There are problems with them, but you're right. They're not causing you to gain weight, right? And if the science was there to prove that they were harmful, then this director of HHS would ban it. The problem is you can't really prove that. To revoke an approval, you have to prove harm. And that evidence just really isn't there, which is why I think he's gone the voluntary route. even though that was not sort of the initial framing of that announcement.

1:14:08I also, you and I will probably disagree a little bit on this. I think the seed oil piece is just so off base. I agree with you, Sam. Oh, you do? Okay, great. I did a whole podcast. I think it's a distraction. Oh, thank you. I was ready to like go back and forth. No, no, no. It is like - I had to say sugar and starch. That's like the boogeyman. Sugar and starch. It is wrong. But here's the problem and the reason why we have to talk about this is like, there's a bit of a, there's a conspiracy approach to this policymaking right now that actually isn't rooted in the evidence. And it adds to confusion.

1:14:47And we have the secretary of HHS at a fast food restaurant promoting horrible food for people because it's fried in beef tallow, which the evidence shows is definitely not healthier for you. And it's still a cheeseburger and French fries. Well, it's probably healthier than doing it in trans fat, which is what they used to do. Yes, of course. That's true. And look, we worked to ban trans fat. So I agree with you on that. That was a big fight and we won that one. So I agree with you on that. But when we start to focus on this, what we're doing is distracting from the issues that matter most and creating a ton of confusion.

1:15:24And we can leave vaccines out of it, but vaccines play a huge role in this. And it's extremely concerning to me about what's happening there. And the, you know, the acetaminophen announcement lasts whenever this was recently. It's so bad, Mark. It's like so bad. And it needs to be called out because I can't tell you how many text messages I'm getting from friends like, should I vaccinate my kids? Like, can I take Tylenol? Is it going to kill me? And my kids, when you look at the evidence, there is no evidence for any of this. Well, there's correlation, but not causation. And that's the problem.

1:15:59You can't draw conclusions about causality from these studies. And that's the big issue. But this is the danger here. But when you, at the press conference, they said it was causal. And it just is not. You know, organic, we've seen a 3x increase in autism since 2000. We've seen a 5x increase in organic food consumption since 2000. Is it organic food that's driving our autism spike? Of course not. My joke is this. If you did a study, a 55-year-old woman had sex. You would conclude that pregnancy never results from having sex. But that doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't, it's not true. And so these things really matter.

1:16:39And they are undermining the public confidence and creating confusion, which then, you know, impedes our ability to make progress on the things that do matter. You're saying keep your eye on the ball. We have to keep your eye on the ball. This is just alarming. So I actually am now very worried that, this movement is going to actually undermine the public health in a way that we've never really seen in modern times. And, you know, with vaccine rates falling, outbreaks increasing, this is like life or death stuff. This is not stuff to mess around with. And we are. And so now, like, if we even, you know.

1:17:17Although just to be fair, Sam, the amount of people dying from vaccine-related illnesses is like a miniaturial fraction of the amount of people dying from metabolic disease that's caused by the food we're eating. It's like a rounding error. And not that we should not vaccinate, we should. I'm a pro-vaccine, but I'm just saying that when you look at the numbers, I agree that we're focusing on the wrong thing. And I think it'd be a missed opportunity if this administration and the people within it didn't actually double down on the food issues. And I think that that is something that is sort of happening under the scenes.

1:17:54Like there's a lot of work being done that isn't catching headlines. And I think the press unfortunately likes to grab these headlines around Tylenol, around vaccines, around the measles outbreaks. But what's happening, and I'm on the inside of some of these conversations, so I know there's a revision of dietary guidelines that I think are more attuned to what the science is saying. There's also efforts from, you know, the FDA to define ultra-processed food, to create a proper regulatory path. The NIH and the FDA have created a regulatory science initiative that actually will fund the understanding of how these things should be regulated.

1:18:23The NIH is wanting to fund more nutrition research. We're looking at actually revisions of licensing exams in medical schools to include nutrition that will mandate the curriculums to change. We're looking at front of package labeling change. We're looking at ending food marketing to kids. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things happening that aren't getting the headlines that people are working on with the administration that I think really are meaningful, that you and I both, I think, agree, are essential to sort of move this tanker ship in a different direction. So I don't deny that there are some good things starting to happen or bubbling under the surface.

1:18:55I just encourage all of us to be calling this how it is. I think we've had a lot, my world, my friends have had a lot of hope here. But when you step back, at least so far, and you look at kicking tens of millions of people off of healthcare, dramatically gutting SNAP benefits and WIC benefits for fruits and vegetables, nutrition education, decimating the agency itself, cutting 20 ,000 jobs out of the agency that you need to regulate these industries harder. And forget about climate, which is like now we're promoting coal, which is going to make our ability, forget about all the progress we could make.

1:19:37Like, you know, so right now when I step back and look at the whole of the administration of which RFK is legitimizing and saying like, look, we're doing this good stuff. Like, let's not pay attention to that. It's not even close right now in terms of undermining the public health versus the benefits that have happened. I deeply hope that that balance shifts dramatically. I'm skeptical, but I'm hopeful and will, you know, stand ready to be help in any way to try to get those things done. But nothing is going to, you know, overcome that kind of cuts to the people who are most vulnerable and need the help around just getting enough basic nutrition, you know, on their plate.

1:20:20So I, I think we got to call this how it is. Where would you double down? Like where, if you were, if you had Bobby Kenny's ear, you had Trump's ear or Rick Rollins' ear, where would you double down? Say, these are, one, two, three, four things that we we've got to focus on that are going to move the needle. Yeah. On, on the health side, uh, like from an HHS, strictly in HHS lens, I think the, the relooking at grass is one of the top priorities. Uh, there's a lot of work that could be accomplished by, uh, redoing how we decide what's safe and, and, and what's not. Um, I, I think the labeling is definitely a good thing.

1:20:55Like if they could get that done, I'm not opposed to that. You know, I think SNAP is a big lever. Having fought all those battles of SNAP. Food stamps. Yeah, sorry, food stamps, yeah. That's okay. For those who don't know what SNAP is, it's a joke. And the joke is it's called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but there's no N in it. There's no nutrition. It's 75 % junk food. I think we have to be very careful because if you actually look how the dollars are calculated, is basically like people have to eat mostly beans to make the numbers work to meet the dietary standards of nutrition on the amount of money offered.

1:21:34So right now what's happening under the guise of nutrition is just cutting these benefits dramatically for people who are not anywhere close to making it. What needs to happen and what I would support strongly is real nutrition restrictions, not dissimilar to WIC, which is I would say one of the government's, the Women, Infants, and Children's Program, which is one of the most effective programs that government has for under nutrition and its basis is probably the most effective. But you have to meaningfully increase the SNAP benefit so that people have enough money in their pockets to buy them more nutritious food.

1:22:05Anything that doesn't do both is just a cover for cutting benefits to poor people, which has obviously been a priority for one party in Washington for as long as time. So we have to be very careful not to get caught in that trap. I agree. And I fought this fight. I started working on the first waiver 15 years ago. Yeah. That's incredible. I'm in it. I got. And now, isn't it weird that the Republican States are all submitting these waivers for SNAP so that their populations are restricted from buying soda or junk food on, on SNAP benefits, which is kind of crazy. It is crazy, but we got to make sure that they're also advocating for those families that have enough money to buy nutritious foods.

1:22:46And that's what's missing right now. Yeah. And if we don't, you're going to see people just finding other ways to, make those dollars stretch and it's not going to be any healthier. So that, that, that's a big lever and an important one. I think school nutrition has a big opportunity to, to, you know, to take another pass and level up those standards. I mean, when we got in there, there was no standards basically on anything being sold in schools. Um, we got, uh, a lot done, but you know, that was quite a long time ago now. The biggest fast food outlet in the country these days is schools. Yeah.

1:23:18I write about this in the book. The first time I went into the school Nutrition Association conference. I walked into this hall and all you can see, as far as you can see, just giant, was just, you know, every hyper-processed food being pushed on our kids, you know, through this thing. And I literally just started weeping. Like I just started, you know, it was really hard, hard to see. It's come quite a long way, but nowhere near what it should be. And I think there's some real intractable problems there that are very hard to solve. but a big opportunity. Look, I think in the end, this comes down to sugar, mainly as the first big culprit.

1:23:58I think there's very tough, but possibilities around how you use taxes around sugar. I think soda tax doesn't really make much sense to me, but sugar tax could be a very powerful tool, but politically fraught, like, you know. The corn thing. Yeah, well, it's also just like people, like their Coke and they don't want it to go up. And if you're going to make somebody's Coca-Cola be more expensive, people don't like that. And I think that's the thing that we have to really internalize that it's not just the companies, it's the people who eat these products. They like those products and they don't want to pay more for them.

1:24:38And so your levers to either force a regulatory change on the formulation, like try to figure out a way to limit the amount of sugar per serving of something, that's a hard, hard one to do. So those obvious giant levers are hard to find, which is why I think policy has a role to play. But really shaping what is on our tables is, we may not be as powerful as we think from a policy standpoint. I think the biggest thing needs to happen though is on the ag side, where the government is much better positioned to have a huge impact is on the agricultural side. And we need to be de-risking these transitions.

1:25:16So we should cover from an insurance standpoint, the transition. We should be helping with massive amounts of technical assistance about how to actually do it. Because farmers, a lot of farmers don't really actually know these new systems. They've been farming that way their whole lives. They need support. They need probably some premiums for those sort of outputs or new markets that'll pay for it. The government can play a huge role in enabling that transition and that has been completely wiped out. I think that has to get reinstated and triple, quadruple down on in a way that's not happening right now.

1:25:50But that's where I would spend a ton of time because I really do worry, as much as you and I know that the current status quo is completely unacceptable, it is unconscionable that this is how we're eating and all of the health consequence of that. But I actually really worry that it's going to get a lot worse, that these health problems are going to actually be exacerbated by climate. And we would be wishing for, you know, where we are today in five or 10 years. And that, that really scares me. So I would push very hard on that and to, to make a lot of progress there. I agree. We got to start at the source, you know, as a functional medicine doctor, it's always about root cause and it starts on the field and with the seeds and with the soil and, and what we're growing and how we're growing.

1:26:36And I a hundred percent agree. Uh, and I think your book, the last supper, how to overcome the coming food crisis is hopeful. And, uh, we've talked a lot about a little thing that are a bit depressing today, but I think there is a, there is a hopeful message in here. There is a way out. This is a solvable problem. I mean, Middle East peace is a hard freaking problem. This is not a hard problem. We have the technology, we have the science, we know what to do. We know how to do it. It's really about driving consumer and citizen action to drive from this outside to the center to push the government, but to push industry because they will respond.

1:27:13They will respond. And I think that's kind of the hopeful message in your book. Everybody should definitely get a copy of The Last Supper, How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis is available now everywhere you can get books. Thank you for writing it, Sam. It's an important contribution to the whole mess we're in right now to help us find our way out. And And hopefully one day soon I get to come to one of your last suffers. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, let's do it. And I just want to say again, thank you for all the work you've been doing. You've been tireless in your effort to bring people together around this issue to make it bipartisan.

1:27:43You know, I got to tell you, I will never forget sitting down with you many years ago, pre-COVID, with you and some of your team and thinking that like, I love that he's trying, but there's some naivete here. I just can't imagine anybody really taking this up, given my experience. man what a difference uh you have made and what a different place we're in and it does give us a chance to make a lot of progress that i could have only dreamed of so thank you on behalf of my kids and all of us like thank you i've been trying you work what i really mean that what what thank you sam that means a lot i'm mark what did margaret means is uh never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world in fact it's the only thing that ever has and you know I've known Bobby Kennedy for a couple of decades, and when I met him, he was eating hot dogs and drinking Coke.

1:28:32I started talking about this. So I planted those seeds, and he listened. And there's definitely things that I don't agree with him about, but I think there's such good intent behind it all. And I think there's a lot of obstacles he's facing. So everybody listening, don't feel like you can't do anything. You can. um i've written about how your book is about how uh and whether you're in business whether you're in philanthropy whether you're in policy whether you're just someone who eats food there there's something little things you can do every day that make a difference and uh you know i had a i had a vision once for something called an eat-in you know like we have to have sit-ins in the 60s imagine for one day if the entire country 330 million americans did not eat anything older processed and cooked on only fresh real food at home and didn't go to out to eat i mean it would be catastrophic for the food industry and it would be hopefully a catalyst of change.

1:29:24So maybe we can kind of get an eating somehow. I'm in. Let's figure that out. I'm in. All right. You can cook. I'll do the cooking. I'll do the cooking. All right. Thanks, Sam. Great to see you again. And I'll do this again soon. All right. Sounds good. Thanks for having me. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr.

1:29:54Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services.

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1:30:58Thanks so much again for listening.