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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-01
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJKi5SjCOBM
the %HESITATION most intimate relationship you will have he's with food you put it inside your body every day and it literally turns into you and that relationship is also deeply in motley emotional we celebrate by sharing food and when we saw what we eat Saigon many of our strongest memories also coupled food and flavors but we also define who we are three feet so you might
remember those little books that we had when we were kids you know everybody filling in one page putting a name your favorite color your hobbies and a favorite food now we take pictures of what we eat posted on Instagram telling basis what I eat this is how I want you to see me even on team there people how what very limited space to give the first
impression and they want to tell the bay of beacons of budgetary and we'll meet lovers so I think it is a very powerful way to express our values and our social status to tell you we are as individuals but it goes way beyond that we as a group as a nation as a culture we find ourselves through food some people eat meat some ate pork summit
beef some eat chicken hearts some eight Brett meta fry it tells us who we are and it gives a tool to separate the enemy's from friends you eat food that looks familiar to me you're probably one of the good guys but goes even further than that we define ourselves a species three what we eat life you would have access to alien because P. beyond check human
it would probably say about human is a primate that uses controls other animals and plants produce our food and if you take a look on earth from far enough that's quite obvious we species our farmers wasn't like dot voice you go back two hundred thousand years the anatomically modern human being was already there we were collecting of food from the environment knots roots leaves occasional animal
if we caught one %HESITATION so in many ways we were just another primate just another eight and harmless insignificant species on the planet and we lived like that for most of our history it was only some ten thousand years ago but some things started to change we start to farm and this was a major transition and how we fed ourselves agricultural revolution did not happen overnight
but it did change everything we sought to domesticate clowns are not most to make them easier to control so that we could settle down and produce more food than we need for our family so that we could support some others as well it focused on other kinds of tasks administration trait sort of things so those small communities state building to Bailey chase will achieve began towns
towns became cities cities became connected by trade we build civilizations civilization spill technology and science and tech talks all the good stuff but all this accelerated in the past one hundred years it has been breathtaking tractors industrial fertilizers plant breeding have enabled us to produce more food than ever before and to support large population then ever before actually right now we are more than one thousand
times more than we were in the beginning of agricultural revolution and that did not come without some trouble the way we produce food nowadays is the largest environmental disaster that we have cost the nutrients we put on the fields they leak into the water systems agriculture produces more greenhouse emissions than all traffic combined and it uses about forty percent the first time surface of earth slice
of South America and all that space is away from biodiversity that is cost nature extinctions so we are quite literally conceiving our planet and that's not gonna get any easier because by twenty fifty we need to produce up to seventy percent more feet without increasing the field service area and the climate is finding fighting back changing climate extreme weather conditions flops wrote the hitting hardest or
food production so we on this vicious circle the way we produce our food harms the environment and the environment punches back making optical to really hard obesity is a lot of things that we could do right now easy things stop wasting food reduce the amount of meat we concede come up with more resource efficient farming systems yes we should do all of those things but they
have just incremental improvements into existing six we need something neat something else the greenhouse structure that protects the crops from the weather and this is the reason we can produce fresh vegetables in Finland through the whole year well the northernmost country on the planet the talks that greenhouses allow control to the environment of the crops see about allows more efficient use of nutrients and water and
these technologies developing great fox in the modern greenhouse the plants are growing on the LED lies stocked vertically on several layers in close to completely contain six why use water nutrients six free me efficiently and these can be placed anywhere Antarctica Sahara Finland on the ground this is a step forward and definitely part of the solution but this is not enough I think we can do
much better and this is me with my parents some years ago we have this old green house in our backyard and we're growing all kinds of plants there that was my playground when they're at home somewhere in eating things that I was not supposed to eat like probably right there for the bad moments that's going into my mouth I don't know if it's supposed to go
back I'm also fascinated about the flavors entice of plants and why they were so different Weiss means different from strawberry and different from such my mom was a chemistry teacher so she could provide a lot of answers but you know you grow up some home until mom's at font is just not good enough anymore so I read a book called the medical plans in Finland I
was seven he was the first book I ever read which is a bit we heard but it took me to study molecular biology and similar piloting you have really wanted to really go on the bottom of it for goes around there myth smallest units of life in the cells actually to figure out how life itself works so plant cells that can be taken out of the
plant and they can be grown in laboratory in completely artificial environment and they can do pretty much the same things US plants and they can take their simply trains and turn them into very very complex finally kills but we need us food or athletics so here is arctic bramble it produces a lot of very interesting biomolecules a promise it's almost impossible to cultivate who's getting really
rare in Finnish nature site the lab where I work they hopped they took some cells and growth in the lab a cell culture and they did the same for many planned space so I go into the lab you can probably figure out what happened so they told me that inotes folks eat the stuff we are in the last you don't eat things in the lab now
I convinced them that we can do it and he wasn't that crazy after all so what if we could grow plants in the lab a groan only the best and we could tell the cells look to de so we can actually cry without burying the lap Barry Thibodeau completely contained environment but we want to take this depict product which if that's all the complex laboratory equipment
simplified it redesigned it I made the ones that you could have a no kitchen no kitchen counter growing fresh food out of plant cells out of any plots self in anywhere on the planet that's arctic bramble and a cell culture Yummy with the overture if I can do that with plans to do that with animals sure it's like a sense that stem cell out of a
cow produced muscle tissue in the lab but make a burger technology exists still ridiculously expensive but it provokes the question do we need animals to make meat the future probably not we don't need them for many other things on we can take piece of DNA out of a cow DNA that codes for me of proteins put it in Baker ceased throw that in the tank and
have the keys produce milk or gelatin for gummy bears or make proteins four bags any party so we can actually make it's completely synthetic cells engineer so the makes all kinds of components our new nutrition that we need how did engineer to take carbon from Papa doc sought from the air or me thing from the air in there are synthetic biology all these is possible nothing
it was how these tanks many times growing all these different organisms but what combine that would make complete human diets right completely contained environment and then we take all those components and put them together with three D. printer and hope throught we transitioning food system out cold seller agriculture I know you say hold on that's crazy that's not my food that's not natural what about the
risks that we cannot see yet what about playing golf what about is this technology will it be equally available for everyone one of the things that we don't know it knew absolutely right it is a scary thing sweetie farmers now if you look back the previous transition in food agriculture none of those organisms that we need to use now to make a food access it carrots
cabbage cheese rice corn none of that was there we created all of that we created Bleakley artificial environment what they correct the fields and farms and yes it did cost a lot of harm for the environment obviously it'll suffice it narrowed down our diets in the beginning and settling down because a lot of infectious diseases that we didn't have before agricultural revolution once the transaction and
it was a trade off but without that we wouldn't be here so the next transaction might be inevitable the climate changes enough we have no other choice and produce our food in completely contained environments but I hope but that would be that would be a choice that we make it would be unnecessary translation but we what willingly magic if we could make our food in small
surface area in contained environment with extreme efficiency not wasting resources we could probably reforest some of us feels we could live on this planet without consuming but it could be much more than that now if I can make up by react form well we could make the whole complete human diets that would for the first time break the bond that we have to soil and earth
docket actually enable some of us to leave this planet com truly interplanetary species space monkeys not food is in the core of our identity and when we think of who we are we tend to look to the past see that way farmers but when you look far enough tossed it's clear that we have been farmers only very short part of our history but it's clear that
we cannot go back to be hung together ex now we're facing some of the biggest challenges of humanity right now and we have to use all possible technologies or possible smart ideas to live on this planet without consuming it that requires us to fix the current system stop wasting food reduce meat consumption develop better agriculture system but use resources efficiently but that also means that we
have to take the next transition we have to develop food production system but a completely decoupled from the environment and for that we need to create a completely new synthetic single cell production organisms not thought fault feel strange and awkward because who we think we are but the world around us is changing fox and instead of looking back we really need to bravely fort not the
