Hacking the Ruminant: Innovation and the Mysteries of the Human Palate

During summers in high school I worked in a fish market, a little square box of a building set on a wharf in a beautiful beach community on Buzzards Bay.  The northerly side of the market sold fresh fish, the southerly side fried.  In the fresh fish case, we offered haddock and bluefish, lemon and grey sole, crabs and swordfish, cod and scrod. 

I direct your attention to those last two items.  While there is no agreement on the definition of scrod, we marketed it as young cod and told people it was more tender and sweet.  And expensive.

In the back cooler, at the start of each day, we made a genuine effort to separate the big cod fillets from the small because any number of our customers absolutely insisted on scrod.  Occasionally we would run out of the little guys, however, both in the case and in the cooler.

At those times, for those insistent customers, we were instructed to take a big cod fillet (behind the scenes, of course) and shape it into smaller scrod fillets.  Like seafood alchemy, cod to scrod.

Never once did a customer complain.  Not once.  As long as we called it scrod, it was the most tender, sweetest fillet that ever cleaved the Seven Seas.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My dad had a friend who used to stop by on an occasional Saturday night to play cards.  This friend could only drink Narragansett beer.  (No kidding.)  Any other beer, he told my father, and he would get an instant headache.

One evening, over a hand of bridge, my father went to the kitchen to refill drinks and discovered he had run out of Narragansett.  It would be an understatement to say that my dad was a boy scout, but on this occasion, his trustworthy and loyal gave way to necessity.  Dad took a bottle of Bud and poured it into his friend’s Narragansett bottle.

Disaster averted.  No headache. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

April 1985.  New Coke.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Source: Footnote 1

Beyond Meat went public on May 1, gaining almost 250% in its first month.[1]

It’s a company that manufactures plant-based meats that enable “consumers to experience the taste, texture and other sensory attributes of popular animal-based meat products while enjoying the nutritional benefits of eating our plant-based meat products.”[2]  Among Beyond Meat’s most popular products is the Beyond Burger, a plant-based patty that looks and tastes like the real thing.  “THESE ARE CRAZY,” one diner wrote. “THE BURGERS TASTED SO MUCH LIKE MEAT THAT I HAD TO GO BACK AND DOUBLE-CHECK THE BOX TO MAKE SURE THESE WERE, IN FACT, VEGAN."[3]

The company’s IPO has trounced those of Uber and Lyft.  Beyond Meat’s product is already selling in 33,000 grocery stores, restaurants, and other eating establishments.  Ambassadors for the brand include Chris Paul, Kyrie Irving, and Charity Morgan, while early investors numbered Bill Gates, Biz Stones, and Tyson Foods.  Diners report that Beyond Meat is delicious and often indistinguishable from the “real thing.”

Which means, of course, now comes the tricky part.

Food Foolish #8: What About the Birds?

Photo: Mark Thiessen/National Geographic Creative

Whenever I present Food Foolish to a live audience, I always try to end on a hopeful note, saying that if we are smart and diligent, we can reduce food waste. And when we’re successful, the result will be good for everyone: less hunger, reduced carbon emissions, a stable agricultural footprint, more available fresh water, and greater food security for populations around the world.  Nobody loses. 

I usually see people nod in agreement until one evening at a local college, someone asked, “What about birds?” 

“Birds?” I asked. 

“What,” she explained, “would happen to birds that had come to depend on landfills if we stopped wasting food?”

It was a good question.  In the United States and other developed countries, much of the food we waste shows up in landfills.  Unfortunately, I had no answer at the time.  Recently, I decided to try to figure it out: How dependent are birds on human food waste, and what happens if we reduce it—as so many individuals, corporations, and governments are now committed to doing?

Food Foolish #7: A 2017 Report Card

When Food Foolish was published in mid-2015, John Mandyck (@JohnMandyck) and I argued that minimizing food loss and waste was the most effective way to reduce chronic hunger and mitigate climate change.  We painted the picture of a broken global food model, with humankind wasting one-third of everything produced--some 1.3 billion metric tons of food.  The energy used to grow this mountain of wasted food contributed 4.4 billion metrics tons of carbon equivalents to the atmosphere, diverted enough freshwater to meet the needs of the entire continent of Africa, and destroyed wealth equal to the GDP of France.  And those stunning figures were secondary to the fact that more than 800 million people, nearly the entire population of the European Union and United States combined, went hungry each day.

We demonstrated the magnitude of our broken food model by detailing the loss of some 50 percent of the banana crop in India, impoverishing nearly 35,000 smallholder farmers in that country.  We described the 1.7 million deaths that occur annually due to low consumption of fruits and vegetables--foods that suffer particular loss because of their perishability.  We interviewed professionals who had battled international hunger through the World Food Programme, and those fighting domestic food insecurity at the Houston Food Bank.  We described the impact of micronutrient deficiencies on some two billion people, many of them children faced with anemia, blindness, stunting, and wasting.  And we discussed the impact of a twenty-first century mega-trend, urbanization, which is rapidly creating a global middle class that is just as rapidly becoming removed and detached from its sources of food.

We find different ways to lose and waste food around the world, but we're
all consistent in destroying a third of everything intended for our stomachs.

Saddest of all, we did the underlying math on the global food model and found that not only do we produce enough food to feed all 7.4 billion of us today, but if we can reduce loss and waste, we can essentially feed all 9 or 10 billion of us likely to inhabit the planet by 2050.

More than two years after publishing Food Foolish, as we close out 2017, it's a good time to take stock.  How are we doing?  What progress have we made against climate change, hunger, and food waste?  And what's next?

Here's a brief report card, with two caveats:  All opinions are mine.  And, in Food Foolish University, there is no such thing as grade inflation.

More Heat to Start 2017

When John Mandyck and I wrote Food Foolish in 2015, we focused first on hunger and then on its relationship to food loss and climate change.  While our interests ranged from carbon emissions to fresh water to urbanization, we never lost sight of the fact that 800 million people around the world are chronically hungry, and that climate change, at its roots, is a question of social justice.

An article in the recent issue of the MIT Technology Review ("Hotter Days Will Drive Global Inequality") makes this all too evident.  “Extreme heat, it turns out, is very bad for the economy,” the article states.  “Crops fail.  People work less, and are less productive when they do work.  That’s why an increase in extremely hot days is one of the more worrisome prospect of climate change.”  Scientists at Stanford and the University of California have now hung some numbers on this threat, estimating that the average global income is predicted to be 23 percent less by the end of the century than it would be without climate change.

Warmer weather, and weather extremes, are going to destroy a quarter of all economic wealth created by human beings by 2100.

Another Very Hot Year: Things I Learned in 2016

Another year, another hot one.

In fact, it was a record year for global heat, by a significant margin.  This follows the hottest five-year period on record.  As I write this, the North Pole is 50F above normal.  In the Antarctic, C02 levels hit 400 parts-per-million for the first time in four million years.  For those of you just joining us, welcome to the New Anthropocene.

America's President-elect signed a public letter in 2009 calling for cuts to America's greenhouse-gas emissions.  Three years later, he dismissed climate change as a Chinese hoax.  When he needed votes he promised to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.  After he was elected he admitted to "some connectivity" between climate change and human activity. And then there was the wall he wanted to build at his luxury resort in Ireland to protect his property from the impact of climate change. More recently, a Trump transition official said that the new President might try to eliminate NASA's Earth Sciences department.  And the President-elect in December said, "Look, I'm somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows.  It's not something that's so hard and fast."  (More on this insane flip-flopping is here.)

Imagine a cabinet where the only official who admits that human beings contribute to climate change is the former head of ExxonMobil.  You cannot make this stuff up.  (Seth Meyers has a good piece here.) In the end, The Huffington Post wrote, "It's hard to overstate how anti-environment Donald Trump's cabinet picks are."

So, to begin 2017, we've got that going for us.

Spitting Bullets: An Interview with Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)  He's smiling.

Me: Are you smiling?

Malthus: I am.  That’s as good as it gets for an eighteenth-century English cleric.[1]  Anyway, I’m ahead.  Winning big time.

Me: How so?

Malthus: You know.  Population.  Food.  Everyone talks about my famous quote: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”  A beautiful quote.  The best quote ever.  Believe me.

And for a long time I was feared.  “Malthus,” they would say, “he was right.”  Get to Broadway much?  Ever see Urinetown, when they all shout “Hail Malthus!”?  That felt good.  Maybe my finest moment.  Everyone on stage is dying and they think of me. 

Sometimes I hum the soundtrack to myself.  Gets me through the last fifteen minutes of morning prayer. 

Anyway, 25 million people died of famine in the nineteenth century.  Sixty million in the twentieth.  Right in line with my calculations.

And then along came Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution.

Me: Missed that one, didn’t you?

The Greatest Race in History: Climate Change vs. Artificial Intelligence

In 2014, two technology historians authored a short essay called The Collapse of Western Civilization.  Naomi Oreskes of the University of California and Erik Conway of the California Institute of Technology assumed the role of a future historian from the Second People's Republic of China, writing in 2393 to mark the tercentenary of the end of Western Civilization (1540-2093).  

The essay is a reflection on what befell Earth and its people, searching throughout for an answer as to why the “children of the Enlightenment” failed to act on overwhelming information about climate change and the damage it would bring.  The only conclusion this future historian could reach was that Western Civilization had fallen into the grips of a second Dark Age “in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.”

In other words, future historians would one day decide that we knew what was happening but were powerless to stop it.  Climate change would be seen as the great, slow-motion train wreck of our time.

According to this "future" history, the tipping point for the collapse of Western Civilization came in 2041 when a heatwave destroyed food crops around the world and incited rioting in virtually every major city.  With a mean global warming of 3.9 degrees Celsius, water and food rationing became universal.  Governments toppled.

Richer and better protected than most countries, the U.S. still saw great swaths of its farmland become desert.  The government announced plans with Canada to create a United States of North America to allow a northward population migration.

The second half of the twenty-first century included a devastating shutdown of the Indian monsoon, collapse of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet, some 70 percent extinction of species, and a Second Black Death.  Human life was decimated.

Food Foolish #6: A Year Later

What a difference a year makes.

It was about this time in 2015 that we began assembling material for Food Foolish.  Food waste was an important topic then, but nothing like it’s become in the last twelve months.

I now follow about 70 food-related Twitter feeds, from the Michael Pollans and Mark Bittmans of the world to groups focused on campus kitchens, ugly produce, food banks, and climate action.  Together, they present a picture of improved understanding and rapid acceleration around solving the issues of food waste and climate change.

Some of the 70 or so feeds I follow to keep track of food waste and related climate issues.

Things I Learned in 2015, A Very Hot Year

The head of the Senate Environment Committee:
If climate is changing, it's because of God, not man.

These are some of the things I learned in the year 2015.

It was the warmest on record, and by a staggering margin.  As of November, no one under 29 years of age had ever lived through a single month that was cooler than its 20th-century average.  

The rainforest in Washington state’s Olympic National Park caught fire for the first time in living memory.  London reached 98F during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.  Miami Beach may have less than 50 years to go before it's completely underwater.  Poison ivy under high carbon conditions is now growing bigger and more toxic.  Warmer temperatures are helping bark beetles destroy thousands of acres of Western pine forest in the US.  In America's Southwest, evergreen trees may virtually disappear in the next century.  Cranberry farmers in Massachusetts are facing warmer springs, higher incidents of fungus and pests and warmer falls; Ocean Spray has begun growing cranberries in New Brunswick, Canada.  Meanwhile, Canadians are losing their reputation as winter people.  

A blue marlin was caught near Catalina Island--1,000 miles north of its typical range.  The shells of pteropods are dissolving due to ocean pH.  Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade.  Mount Everest’s glaciers are turning into lakes.   If the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru continues to melt at its current rate, it will be gone by 2100.  Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is at its lowest level in 500 years.  There is a“high probability” that the planet’s 26,000 polar bears will suffer a 30% decline in population by 2050 due to the loss of their habitat, which is disappearing at a faster rate than predicted by climate models. (As a small consolation, they can now at least mate with grizzly bears.)  China released a detailed scientific report on climate change that predicted disastrous consequences for its 1.4 billion people, including rising sea levels and the likelihood that more than 80 percent of the permafrost on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau could disappear by the next century.  Glacier retreat in western Asia now threatens China’s water supply.  The International Energy Agency recently reported that the global energy sector emitted as much CO2 in the last 27 years as in all previous years of the Industrial Revolution.  Climate change is slowing down the rate of the earth's rotation.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Senate Environment Committee brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax.  He noted, "It's very, very cold out.  Very unseasonable."  Chris Christie announced, “Hell no,” America shouldn’t lead on climate change.  Ted Cruz said, “If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming.”  Donald Trump said, “I believe in clean air, immaculate air, but I don’t believe in climate change.”  Ben Carson said, “There’s always going to be either cooling or warming going on,” and that “as far as I’m concerned that’s irrelevant.” Marco Rubio said, “I believe climate is changing because there’s never been a moment when the climate is not changing,” but “we’re not going to destroy our economy the way the left-wing government we’re under wants to do.”  And Carly Fiorina added, “Here we have a bunch of liberals and people in the EPA who are willing to sacrifice other people’s lives, other people’s livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”  

Mark Twain (or maybe Robert Heinlein) once said, “Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”  Perhaps they meant that weather is what you get but climate is what you deserve.

Food Foolish #5: Some Lessons from the Field at Thanksgiving

Thanks to Gettysburg College and the Gettysburg Foundation
for hosting an evening of Food Foolish discussion.

Since we published Food Foolish in July 2015, my co-author John Mandyck and I have been on a variety of calls, Webex’s and in-person lectures to talk about the issues of food waste and climate change.  John has been especially busy, so if you have an interest in these topics, you should be sure to connect with him on Twitter (@JohnMandyck).  (And I'm on Twitter here.)

As I meet with folks, I get asked a lot of questions that, frankly, I can’t answer.  So I've been studying up on everything from food security, ugly fruits and vegetables, drought, precision farming and composting, to agroecology, urban gardens, food banks and even so-called Frankenfish.  I have found Twitter to be especially helpful in channeling the daily flood of material being generated.  Food + Tech Connect in particular is a terrific feed for entrepreneurial news, and the Guardian in London seems to have the broadest coverage of food and climate change news.

Now, as the season of food (and thanks) is upon us here in the States, I thought I might share just a few of my many lessons from the field.

Getting Mom to Waste Less.  Let’s begin with the very nice woman in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who asked me how she should deal with her mother, who refuses to eat the dark meat from the turkey.  I am still formulating my answer, which might require as much Dr. Phil as Michael Pollan.  (My own dear mother hated parsnips, though it never came to a crisis stage.)  

It’s worth noting, however, that Americans toss out 204 million pounds of turkey annually, worth nearly $300 million and containing about 105 billion gallons of embedded water.  In fact, if we start counting embedded water on our Thanksgiving plate, we’ll find that a can of cranberry sauce has 1,559 gallons, a gallon of apple cider nearly 1,500, and a bowl of mashed potatoes some 2,528 gallons.

So, as I think about how to motivate Mom, let's all plan and shop wisely.  And once the big event is over, work on those leftovers.  I discovered in my travels that many folks now plan “Leftover Parties” on the Friday after Thanksgiving to insure that they reduce things down to the carcass.  This, along with the budding “Meatless Mondays” movement, are small signs that there is a fundamental change in the way Americans are thinking about their food.  (See “The War on Big Food” from Fortune here.) 

Ages Matter: The New Anthropocene

What Ages do we live in?

It seems like a silly question, but think of it this way:  How many people can you name who lived between 500 AD and 1000 AD?  Yes, Charlemagne; everybody gets Charlemagne. 

Joan of Arc?  Sorry; off by 400 years. 

Venerable Bede?  Well yes, but now you’re Googling.

There were maybe 200 million human beings alive in 500 AD and 300 million alive in 1000 AD.  If we figure on a good 30-year life span, that means several billion were born and died across those 500 years. 

This period is traditionally called the Dark Ages.  It’s a half-a-millennium stretch in which most of us can remember the name of exactly two people who lived--and on one we had to cheat.  This was not mankind's happiest era.

Ages matter.

Food Foolish Files #4: Can AgTech Really Save the World?

Earlier this week, a Silicon Valley investor wrote an excellent article entitled “The Next Food Frontier: How AgTech Can Save the World.”  (See here.)

In it, he discussed some of the problems facing Big Agriculture in America.  For example, corn farmers in Iowa are feeling the effects of increased costs for seeds, fertilizer and herbicides.  Environmental costs are also growing, especially greenhouse gas emissions.

 

The solution, we’re told, lies in low cost sensors, improved computational capabilities and advanced machine learning techniques.  “The advancements,” the author wrote, “are enabling farming to be run as efficiently as a Silicon Valley tech company—with precision, data-driven decisions and automation.”

Some of you may have gulped hard thinking the standard of excellence for efficiency is a “Silicon Valley tech company,” but we get the point.  Efficiency can and should be improved on corn farms in Iowa.  Precision farming is one good solution.

Others problems the article noted are a decrease in yields, and improving options for more health conscious Americans.  Solutions include genetically engineered microbes for improving seeds and soil, computational biology, tissue engineering, and automation.  From this we can create things like biofabricated meats to replace traditional, often inefficient animal-based proteins.

Again, all promising and cool ideas.  (Though when it comes to cutting into a big slab of biofabricated beef—you first.)

“Technology is the answer,” the author concludes.

Food Foolish Files #3: Summer 2015 Update

I call it the "Diaper Syndrome." It works like this.

You get married and are going along just fine when one day your wife announces she's pregnant.  On your drive to work the next day you see a billboard for diapers.  First time ever.  Must have been erected the night before.  Then a bus goes by and it has a diaper ad on its side.  Weird.  And then there's a lady at the park who is diapering her baby.  Do people diaper babies outside? 

Then, of course, you make the mistake of typing “we’re going to have a baby” in a Gmail to a friend and you are inundated with on-line ads for diapers.

Been there?  Who knew anyone thought about diapers that much?

Well that's exactly what’s happened with Food Foolish.  John Mandyck and I researched and wrote about food waste and its connection to hunger and climate change.  Now, everywhere I look, I see, well--food waste.  Or more importantly, people, organizations and countries trying to solve the issue of waste food. 

I've been keeping a log of clippings, and here's just a few you might find interesting.

Food Foolish Files #2: The Magnificent 7th Banana (A Parable)

In chapter 4 of Food Foolish, John and I write about the magnificent banana.  It happens to be the world’s favorite fruit.  Americans eat 27 lbs. of bananas on average each year.

Me, I eat a banana most every morning.  I talked myself into thinking that bananas stop my legs from cramping after I run or bike, but the truth is I just like them.   I figure at 300 a year, I eat about 936 ounces (@ 4 ounces each less 22% for the peel), or about 58 lbs. of banana.  That makes me very close to an expert on the topic.  A 58-Pound-Gorilla, so to speak.

Bananas come in bunches.  (You can quote me on that.)  So when I buy a bunch I might get, say, seven bananas.  (Remember, this is a parable.)  The first banana on the first morning is kind of hard and not real sweet.  The third and fourth morning’s bananas are perfect.  And the last morning?   Well, sometimes it’s not pretty.

But first, skip ahead in Food Foolish to page 125.  (What?  No copy yet?  See here!)  A study done in 1939—in the midst of the Great Depression—determined that the average UK household wasted about 3% of its weekly groceries. 

A recent study pegged the average weekly UK household food waste at about 25%.  What happened?

Food Foolish Files #1: It's a Panacea

A panacea.  Not.

In Food Foolish we try to deliver two simple messages.

First, when we waste food, we harm people, damage the environment, deplete our land and water resources, reduce national security and slow the growth of livable, sustainable cities.  That's the bad news--and we spend considerable time in Food Foolish detailing where and how some of this harm is occurring.  (As Einstein said, or should have said, "If I had 60 minutes to save the world, I'd spend 55 minutes defining the problem.")  

But the second message, and the really good news is this: We don't have to waste food--at least not at the astonishing rate of one-third of everything we produce today.  Food Foolish profiles work being done by good people all around the world to improve harvests, enhance distribution, and change buying and eating habits.  

In a world where 800 million people are hungry and millions malnourished, food waste is one of the truly "big problems" facing humankind.  What makes it an especially compelling issue, however, is that reducing food waste is a panacea.

Panacea.  That's a word we don't get to use that often.  It means universal cure.  Elixir.  Wonder drug.  Magic bullet.