TED is a non-profit devoted to broadcasting innovative ideas spoken by persuasive thinkers. Its website spreads information through “TED talks,” a video component that spans a wide range of topics. Here is a selection of TED videos focusing on issues from the political food world—child obesity, industrial meat production, school nutrition programs, ecologically safe fish farming, food access within an urban landscape, re-envisioned permaculture—presented by some of the top enthusiasts and specialists.

Jamie Oliver is a chef who is intent on inspiring families to reintegrate cooking into their lifestyles while empowering children to learn the importance of healthful eating. His TED talk examines the epidemic of child obesity in Huntington, West Virginia, a  city that was voted the most unhealthy place in the US in 2008. The “tipping point,” as Oliver explains, is a triangular trap of Home, School and Modern Day Life (dubbed Main Street). Home is no longer about cooking; school lunch programs are centered on corporate gain rather than nutrition; modern day life is riddled with fast foods and deceptive food labeling. As we spend increasingly more money on health bills related to heart disease and obesity—a number that will double in the next ten years—Oliver delivers an urgent call for action.

The New York Times writer and cookbook author, Mark Bittman, writes accessible recipes, often with locally sourced ingredients. He is also a mindful eater who sees an imbalance in the Western diet, one that has been heavily reliant on meat, dairy and carbohydrates, since the advent of highway expansion in the 1930’s. Now our industrialized meat industry (with the emergence of CAFOs in the mid-20th century), emits the second largest amount of greenhouse gases, behind energy production only. Bittman argues that we can find other ways to get our protein. His recommendation: eat ½ lb of meat, or less, a week; eat more plants and in doing so, encourage change in our dietary and lifestyle choices.

How do we reform childrens’ image of food? This question fuels the work of chef Ann Cooper. who has committed herself to restructuring our nation’s school lunch program. Cooper’s fight for an increase in federal funding for the National School Lunch Program is discussed in light of an imperfect social justice issue. She begs that teachers, administrators, government officials–people in power–teach children that food is a real, unprocessed, tangible resource. If we start seeing food as a form of health, then the value attributed to consuming it grows. Much like Oliver, she proposes educational programs—hands-on cooking and gardening duties, an academic curriculum tied to land work, nutritious cafeteria foods, a school compost and recycling program—and public and private spending for the sake of the betterment of our childrens’ health.

It isn’t atypical for aquafarmed fish to be fed chicken in their fishmeal. Dan Barber, the executive chef at Blue Hill, probes this reality by examining a farming system that rejects practices like this, in favor of an “extensive” system. In the south of Spain, Veta la Palma boasts a landscape that includes a 27,000 acre fish farm, where biologist Miguel Medialdea produces 1,200 tonnes of sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp each year. The restored wetlands are home to many aquatic species but also over 600,000 birds—the largest private bird sanctuary in Europe. While flamingos flock there to eat shrimp, shrimp in turn eat photoplankton. As Barber suggests, the health of predators and an organic food chain makes this ecological balance possible. His proposal for a restorative farm system in which communities around the world could feed themselves is presented through a symbiotic relationship with the land.

Carolyn Steel notes that in most cities, one’s interaction with food involves an intricate relationship with its production, transportation, purchase and sale, preparation, consumption and disposal. In ancient times, cities mapped their layout according to access to food. People were aware of where their food came from and the farmers and butchers who sold it to them. With the introduction of trains and cars, food became separated from the city-view; it became “anonymous.” Steel envisions a re-conceptualization of city planning—a “Sitopia,” or a renewed way of seeing food as central to a city—through nutritional education, local consumerism and a reinvigorated organic framework, in touch with the land.

The farther we drift away from the land that reaps our food, the more we view ourselves as a competitor against nature. Michael Pollan explains our superiority complex through the rising influence of industrial agriculture; our mentality is that “we are winning against nature.” He also offers a counter world-view through the eyes of plants and animals that manipulate nature for their benefit as well. Pollan argues that if we focus on Darwinian evolution, we can begin to see our world as a cooperative mechanism, where plants, animals and humans harmoniously act within an ecologically-sound system of production and consumption.

On Saturday, 3,000 people gathered at John Jay public high school for the Brooklyn Food Conference, a grassroots, volunteer-organized discussion around the state of our food system, featuring keynote talks by Dan Barber, Anna Lappé, Raj Patel, and LaDonna Redmond.  Along with these talks were 70 workshops throughout the classrooms of the school, on subjects as varied as growing your own food, starting a co-op and the value of breastfeeding.

According to the accompanying bright yellow guide, one of the goals of this event was to “bring Brooklynites together to demand — and participate in creating — a vital, healthy, and just food system available to everyone.” By my assessment, that is just what’s begun to happen.

Kicking off the day, Dan Barber gave a chef’s perspective on sustainability (speech text here) through a story about two fish he has served, each labeled ‘sustainable.’ He found out the first fish was receiving chicken in its feed, which the grower thought sustainable because they were taking advantage of the waste produced by the chicken industry. Grossed out, Barber began to use the second instead, which grew as a part of the recuperation of an entire ecosystem, “a farm that doesn’t feed its animals and measures its success by the health of its predators.” He warned, “We are on the verge of an ecological credit crisis, and it’s going to make this economic credit crisis a walk in the park.” In order to reverse this, he seemed to say, we have to rebuild farms and communities.

The next speaker was Raj Patel, (speech text here) who was not at all shy about talking about the possible relationship between Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and swine flu:

CAFO doesn’t really do justice to what was going on there. In this sort of feedlot and slaughterhouse, 950,000 swine a year are killed. 950,000. Of course, 950,000 pigs produce a ton of waste. And that waste was very poorly regulated, and the people in the city near this pork-processing facility fell ill. About 60% of them came down with mysterious flu-like symptoms about three weeks ago. The Mexican press covered it. Of course, the US press didn’t.

He laid some of the blame on NAFTA:

NAFTA made it safe for Smithfield to have its large factory in Mexico. NAFTA displaced farmers into the cities, but NAFTA also made it safe for large corporations to come in and start marketing their processed food products very heavily to Mexicans. And that’s why today the world’s second most obese country is Mexico. And the closer you get to the US border, the fatter Mexican teenagers, for example, are likely to be. That is a consequence of NAFTA.

Patel proposed that the answer to these problems is political — to take back our food system and in order to do this, to take back our politics. He accused many of us of thinking of our new president as “the pizza delivery dude of change” — as in, we are sitting at home waiting for a delivery of “hot, fresh, steaming change.” But as Patel is wont to do, he left us with something positive. He had just come from Mexico, where he was visiting a group of people who were wearing masks, but not because of swine flu. They were Zapitistas. He highlighted this group because of their good governance councils, where residents rotate on and off the council every week. They even have a sign when you enter their territory: “Welcome to Zapatista territory. Here the people lead and the government listens.”

Rounding out the morning, LaDonna Redmond came to the stage to remind us that our current unjust food system was built on the backs of individuals — through slavery and exploitation of Native Americans, African Americans and now Mexican immigrants. Furthermore, she said, we have never had a just food system. “Our unjust food system hides the faces of those it doesn’t want you to see,” she said, like the factory farm workers, the slaughterhouse workers, and those harvesting our food. She spoke about defining green jobs as those that pay a living wage, have a career ladder and protect the environment at the same time.  She also pushed us to redefine agriculture a green job before we demand that Van Jones allocate money for farming. (Later on she even read a poem about recovering from previous ways of thinking, which was beautiful and inspiring — is there anything this woman can’t do? I doubt it.)

Following these inspiring talks were the workshops. Unfortunately, I could only choose three workshops — and honestly, I would have enjoyed going to most of these sessions — but there was only so much time. I’d love to hear about your experiences and read your notes from workshops like Climate Change and the World’s Food Supply; Challenging Big Food: How Food Transnationals Harm Our Health and Environment and How to Fight Back; Food Sovereignty North and South: People’s Control Over Their Own Food; Food Rebellions; The Perils of a Globalized Food Supply: Trade Policy and How to Change It; Passing the Hoe: Our New Farmers Share Stories and Experiences — you get the idea, there were lots of great workshops to sit in on. The downside to so many great workshops besides choosing only three was almost missing lunch and totally missing the expos, which were filled with interesting people doing a variety of things to change the food system. Next time, my suggestion to BFC organizers is to have keynotes, lunch and expos fill conference day one, and to move the workshops to a separate day or convert them into weekly ‘salons’ to discuss all of these pressing topics.

The first workshop I attended focused on Organizing in the Obama Era, featuring Leslie Hatfield, editor of the Green Fork, as moderator, Winton Wedderburn, organizer of social media for the Brooklyn Food Conference, Naomi Starkman, editor here at Civil Eats and media maven for Consumers Union, and Natasha Chart, editor of Change.org’s Sustainable Food blog. The workshop operated like a crash course, discussing the tools helping to build this movement online, from action alerts to the power of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We sort of take the internet for granted these days, but Hatfield reminded us that “the internet is the greatest hope for solving the problems we face”– in our food system, our environment and more, no other tool has the potential to organize so many so quickly into coalitions.

The second workshop I attended was titled Our Meat Industrial Complex: Hazardous to Our Health and Our Environment. Moderated by Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally, the panel featured Brigid Sweeney, the farmer outreach coordinator for the Animal Welfare Approved program, Gowri Koneswaran, who works for the US Humane Society on animal agricultural impacts, farmer and physician Ken Jaffe of Slope Farms, and Alex Patton from Food & Water Watch.  This informative panel focused on all you need to know about CAFOs: the pollution they produce, the unavoidable mistreatment of animals in these unwieldy settings and how you can play a role in changing bad practices. The session was great whether you were new to these topics, as Koneswaran gave a spectacular overview with a powerpoint presentation and Sweeney filled in the blanks with an equally interesting powerpoint on labeling sustainble meat, or you were more advanced, Jaffe spoke in more detail about the science behind corn in a rumen stomach.

The third workshop I attended was Defending Against Genetically Engineered Food: Saving Seeds, featuring Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, writer and producer of the Bioneers conference, J.P. Harpignies, Howard Brandstein, co-founder of SOS Food and Executive Director of Sixth Street Community Center (Home to my CSA share!), and Bazelais Jean-Baptiste, and agronomist for Seeds for Haiti. In this talk, we got an overview from Harpignies of the issues behind the use of genetically modified seeds, notably a question of what belongs to everyone and what should be privatized — seeds having been a fundamental community right for centuries before big agriculture came along and patented them. The panel focused on what to do about the issue, with Brandstein focusing on a campaign to erradicate GMOs, and to have them labeled, Jean-Baptiste talking about Haiti’s plight trying to become once again food secure, and Greene discussing his seed library, where members take part in seed saving, which the Hudson Valley Seed Library also teaches. What was most inspiring for me was the fact that 40 people were crowded into the Old Stone House in Park Slope to talk about GMOs.  I think the tide is shifting, and as Monsanto and others have begun out of fear of losing their bottom line to try to expand their PR campaign to the comment sections of this and other blogs, we will continue to inform and dessiminate appropriate information about GMOs and the roles these companies play in tainting and controlling the world food supply.

Some of the other goals of this conference included: to “create an agenda and constituent base for legislating food democracy in Brooklyn; organize neighborhood meetings; influence public policy by educating officials and showing them the depth and diversity of public interest; create a useful, cross-referenced directory of attendees; help partner organizations grow their constituencies by offering attendees avenues for action.” Sadly, I missed all of the sessions with politicians, where consumers were given a chance to be heard — but this was an important way to make change on that same day.  The Brooklyn Food Conference ended Saturday night, but before parting coordinator Nancy Romer announced a series of “neighborhood meetings” in two weeks, which will be detailed on the Brooklyn Food Conference website by the end of this week, to form coalitions and to follow-up on the conference. I for one will be in attendance at one of these neighborhood meetings, and will keep you updated on how New York City is doing on its food system.

Closing the conference, a pregnant Anna Lappé asked, “where is the outrage,” referring to her pregnancy books outlining the diet an expectant mother should adhere to, including fish without mercury. She asked, “Why aren’t we asking, ‘Why is there mercury in our fish?’” I think by connecting us to each other, mobilizing our minds to focus on the variety of important topics we now face, bringing our representatives to hear about these issues, and by following up with neighborhood meetings, this community organized event should be a model for future events, and could be the beginning of a real change to our food system.

Normally I don’t like soft-boiled eggs.  But there I was, sitting at Blue Hill restaurant at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, New York, with a plate of delicately cooked spinach in a savory sauce crowned with a battered, soft-boiled egg and enjoying every last bite.  That is because chef Dan Barber is out to refocus our attention on the spoils of the farm right outside: an 80 acre four-season and pastured livestock farm that grows and raises most of the food served on the premises.  Watching chickens scratch around on pasture, and then enjoying their eggs elegantly prepared is transparency you can taste.

I have to admit that when I arrived here, I figured that a restaurant with a James Beard Award-winning chef on a Rockefeller estate could only be exclusive.  But I found the exact opposite was true: In choosing to build a community through public programs and farm to table relationships, this restaurant is leading us to new ideas about the future food system in the making.

Barber described a visit to Stone Barns like a Disneyland experience for food, and talked about how it can serve as a model for individual change.  “It depends on where you live and what your passion is,” he said, “but essentially you [can] take the experience here, and try to replicate it in your everyday life.  And that could just be eating healthier, or engaging in some kind of agriculture, [or knowing] where your food is coming from.”

At Blue Hill, chefs literally wander out into the fields, pick their own vegetables and herbs, and then toss them into the pan.  The only option on the menu, the “Farmer’s Feast,” is served in courses, so that vegetables can take on the starring role without regular meat eaters leaving feeling hungry. “I feel like I’m doing what we’ve always done,” Barber said, “which is to try to have the work of these farmers be as exemplified as possible.”

The farm grows 35 types of lettuce alone, and provides two-thirds of the produce used in the restaurant.  At the peak of the season (now), they serve 80% of their food from right outside.

I took a tour of Stone Barns’ grounds before my dinner reservation at the restaurant.  The landscape could only be described as idealistic because its pastoral imagery evokes our common vision of farms (sheep, turkeys and geese at pasture, pigs nosing around for acorns in the woods, inter-cropped vegetables in vibrant rows), even though only a small percentage of farms still operate in this way.

While the farm inspires thoughts of the past, the focus is on artisan approaches mixed with useful technology, like movable electric fencing and a 22,000 square foot greenhouse that maintains its temperature in all seasons.  But new-fangled devices shouldn’t replace good farming practices, according to Jack Algiere, the four-season farm manager, who added a less expensive wood and plastic greenhouse to prove that pricey technology isn’t necessary to produce quality, pesticide-free food.

Compost is the magic ingredient in growing flavorful produce.  Made from leaves, grass clippings, livestock manure and hay, and the restaurant’s kitchen scraps, it is also sold locally at Whole Foods as a source of revenue for the farm.  This dense fertilizer is a natural byproduct of a healthy growing system, and is essential for supporting soil health and by extension, nutrient-rich food.

In the dining room, I’d traded my muddy converse for heels.  I sat as plates of pickled kabocha squash, pea blossoms, beet and root vegetable chips, as well as crisp, lightly seasoned beans arrived while we sipped a local sparkling wine from Long Island.  The perfectly petite courses kept arriving – like the tomato soup with almond, a taste of quinoa and fennel in a Greek style vinegar sauce with capers and tomatoes, and a small serving of blue fish with seckel pear and soybeans.

Tasting the bounty of the season as a diner was thrilling, but the staff seemed just as engaged in the food as I was.  Visual aids were presented just before they were served: the three types of beets they grow before a mache salad with beets and a frothy yogurt dressing, and three giant mushrooms foraged on the farm or nearby before the squash gnocchi with matsutake and maitake mushrooms.  What better way to end a meal than with a tisane from the last of the garden outside the kitchen door, which our waiter had saved from frost and placed in pots, and wheeled out to us on a tray.  He then clipped various sages for our teapots, which we poured into cups along with Stone Barns’ local honey.

When David Rockefeller and his daughter Peggy Dulany were looking to find a way to preserve these stone buildings that used to house the family’s dairy, and allow them to serve the public, it was Barber along with his brother David and his brother’s wife Laureen who contributed to the vision of Stone Barns as it stands today.  The idea was to begin to rebuild the local food system we’ve lost in the last three decades.  “The most provocative changes are going to come from the economics of the way our food is grown,” said Dan Barber.  “Smaller, regional food systems are going to end up being price competitive with the big food chain, because the big food chain can actually not survive at $100 a barrel for oil and up… When you get to the economics of cheap food literally not being cheap anymore, I think that’s going to be the most powerful force for change.”

Where the foodies go, so hopefully, eventually, goes the country too.

Read my full interview with Dan Barber here.

Photo: Chickens at Stone Barns, and Greenhouse, by Yann Mabille

I spoke with Dan Barber last week about his restaurant Blue Hill, located at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, an 80 acre four-season and pastured livestock farm in Tarrytown, New York that provides most of the food for the restaurant and conducts educational programs open to the public.  I wrote about my experience at Stone Barns and the restaurant here.

Civil Eats: Do you see Stone Barns as a model for how we need to start thinking about local food systems? Is it replicable, can people do similar things without the kind of funding you’ve had?

Dan Barber:  I do think that the sort of underpinnings of the philosophy of the place, which is to say the connections between a farm a restaurant and some type of educational entity, can be replicated anywhere.  Would Stone Barns look different in North Dakota? Would it look different in Texas, and even in Berkeley? Yes.  I just gave this example last week at a talk, take Topeka, Kansas [if] you had a chef who was interested in serving grass-fed steaks, and he contacted a rancher, who up until that point had sent all of his cattle to be finished at feedlots, and he says to the rancher I am going to buy every year five head.  Could you separate those out and finish them on grass?  And maybe the farmer has read Michael Pollan and said wow, I’d really like to try this.  So they enter into this sort of handshake agreement or they write up a contract, a five head are set aside.  So then the day comes when the meat is delivered to the restaurant, but the chef he uses the steaks for the restaurant but he realizes very quickly that he has a tremendous amount of hamburger meat on his hands.  And since his restaurant doesn’t use hamburger meat, he thinks about his daughter who is in a private school in Topeka, so he goes to the principal, and explains the situation, and says let’s remove conventional hamburger from the cafeteria, and let’s do grass fed hamburger and the principal, who might have also read Michael Pollan, would say great, the school will find a way to pay a little bit extra for this, and not only that but we’re going to advertise some of those costs and the intellectual potential throughout the curriculum.  So we’re going to talk to the biology teacher about what we’re doing, we’re going to talk to the social science teacher about what we’re doing, and that becomes not just giving the kids better meat in the cafeteria, it becomes a lesson explaining the history and the science and the thinking behind this stuff in their curriculum.  So all of a sudden in that little example, with by the way, absolutely no capital investment, just this handshake between the farmer, the chef and the principal, you’ve got the same philosophical framework as you do at Stone Barns.  Hopefully the people that come here see that underpinning, and that’s what I try to talk about a lot, and see how we can get other people looking at a shortened food chain in sort of the same way.

CE: So that is the vision…

DB:  Another way to look at how it is replicable, or how it can inspire other people is you come here, and spend the day walking the farm or taking a class or doing both and then having dinner, and you have such a great day, in the same kind of mindset of like going to Disneyland, you leave and you say, wow my kids had such a great time, and we ate such delicious food, I’d like to replicate that experience.  It depends on where you live and what your passion is, but essentially you take the experience here, and you try to replicate it in your everyday life.  And that could just be eating healthier, or engaging in some kind of agriculture, [knowing] where your food is coming from, but that experience seems to me to hopefully inspire other people to have a similar kind of food experience.

CE: So can I assume that you are optimistic about where our food system is going?

DB: Well, that depends.  I mean I see a lot of really amazing things… I look at it a little bit historically just in the sense that like you and might not have been having this conversation ten years ago but when I opened up Blue Hill New York [with my brother David and his wife Laureen], it was very difficult to talk about these issues and frame them in a way that people saw the connections between food and the way the world is used.   I think that because of people like you and Michael Pollan and all the other people who’ve been writing about and talking about this that it makes the job of chefs like me a lot easier, and Stone Barns came around at a good time, it was a fortunate and tipping point time where it seems like people’s consciousness around these issues are only a level that I’ve never experienced before.  So in that sense I feel optimistic.  And you know I guess it’s hard to do any of this work and not be a little bit optimistic, otherwise you wouldn’t be working so hard towards it.  The old food chain, that is so established in this country, its at the point where there’s going to be huge changes forced upon it, and I don’t know how much of that is going to come from public consciousness although we’ve seen such a dramatic change in the last few years so anything is possible but I think the most provocative changes are going to come from the economics of the way our food is grown.  The dependence on fossil fuels of the food system and how that is going to be threatened moving forward, this reliance on this very cheap oil to produce food and to transport food and to process food that is all in grave threat.  I think there is going to be an increasing price parity between the kind of foods that represents what Stone Barns is doing and its the smaller, regional food systems that are going to end up being price competitive with the big food chain, because the big food chain can actually not survive at $100 a barrel for oil and up.  You know that’s all very philosophical, and right, but to the mind set of somebody who only has a certain amount of money to spend for food its hard to swallow, but when you get to the economics of cheap food literally not being cheap anymore, I think that’s going to be the most powerful force for change.

CE:  Michael Pollan’s article in the recent Times Magazine Food Issue brought a lot of attention to that issue, and we could have a president in the White House who is actually paying attention.

DB:  I hope that whoever is there is going to confront this in ways these past couple presidents have not.

CE:  I could not help but notice in your restaurant that you do focus more on vegetables, which is not very common for fine dining in New York.  I was just wondering if you found it difficult to make that transition, not so much for yourself but for your clientele, and what kind of response that you’ve had?

DB:  In a multi-course menu I think you have a little bit more freedom to have the vegetables play a starring role.  So in that sense it shows off the work of Jack [Algiere, the four-season farm manager], and what he is doing with the greenhouse and with the field.

CE: But do you feel like you are re-educating your diners, because I know there is a big conversation, you know Mark Bittman put out How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and in the beginning he says “I’m not a vegetarian, and I don’t advocate for vegetarianism, but I really think we need to start thinking about putting meat on the side of the dish and not in the center of the dish,” and Michael Pollan has said the same thing.  So do you feel kind of like you are following that philosophy?

DB:  I feel like I’m doing what we’ve always done, which is to try to have the work of these farmers be as exemplified as possible, so you can do that in a variety of ways.  I like the idea of through a multi-course tasting experience you end up getting these vegetables to play the starring role they probably should play.  As for meat, it’s easier for me to put meat on the side, or in other words, have less protein in the course of a multi-course meal.  But if you’re in the restaurant business and you’re trying to do less meat and stay in business, it’s really hard on a sort of a la carte menu.

CE:  Do you think that most of your clientele goes to visit the farm, that they have a connection to the farm itself?

DB:  My sense is that people who don’t actually physically walk around, or talk to a farmer or do a program at Stone Barns have this sort of unconscious connection when they are sitting in the dining room, especially in the spring and summer when it stays light so late, or even the walk from your car, or the drive in, if you come here when it’s light out you do see some kind of agriculture, and much of the year, when you are eating your meal you are looking out at agriculture.  This was part of the point of this project, we were very aware of where we were putting the dining room and where your site lines were going.  You know, if there is a person that has no interest in the issues we just talked about, its still kind of hard to come into this restaurant and not feel some kind of connection to agriculture, and to what you’re eating and what’s going on outdoors.  So I’m okay with people who have no interest in walking around because they’re going to get it anyway.

CE: through the presentation of the beets and the mushrooms…

DB: Yeah, well this time of year we do a lot more of that, because I know people aren’t walking around, they aren’t seeing things and that’s a way of bringing the farm out to the table.

Photo: Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture by Yann Mabille