good morning everyone thank you so very
much for gathering here today it’s a
huge honor to be up in front of you
and and speaking to you don’t worry
about tweeting or facebooking anything
that’s comfort confidential because I am
NOT an expert on anything except lemons
and bluefish so I have nothing that’s
unpublished and that is actually how I
want to start off is that I I’m not an
expert I’m not I’m a little different
from a lot of my colleagues here in
National Geographic I’m not a PhD I’m
not a so focused on it on one discipline
but I am a witness to a drama that
unfolds around each and every one of us
every day and that’s the Hat with which
I want you to listen to my presentation
if you would which is as a witness the
world of food is dramatic and it really
goes to explore everything about how we
relate to our world this quote here is
one of my very favorite spoken by a
fisherman and the classic book blues by
John Hersey in our quest for food we
begin to find our place in the systems
of this world and I’ve always absolutely
adored this comment because it so
accurately describes that we are not
sovereign over our resources but rather
that we are because of them and that
through our resources we begin to
discover our place within this natural
systems I’ve had a very intimate and
long relationship with food from a very
early age family dinner in my house was
a very important time it was a place to
share to give to receive in fact it was
where my family became a family and I
was very lucky in that I was able to
really participate in the production of
these meals both my parents were great
cooks from scratch and they’re also very
intrepid cooks we were born and raised
right here in Mount Pleasant in DC in a
very multi-ethnic neighborhood shopping
at Korean Eritrean Ethiopian Latino
market shopping daily in a very
unamerican sense and really coming home
and enjoying the bounty of whatever we
found at the market and it was
incredible and it was such an experience
my father I remember
him making tacos taco night from scratch
and he would moisten the masa harina
dough and these two little toe head boys
would gently press the dough in the in
the you know to form the tortilla and
you can imagine us you know rapturously
and wondered by this process that to
everyone around us in the neighborhoods
like come on
this is eons of our history but to us it
was a window an opportunity to explore
how we connected to the people right
next to us who we played football with
in the street but yet we didn’t
understand we didn’t share their
cultures
he was this fluency with food that
allowed me to step out of the
traditional path of Education when in
college I realized very quickly that the
traditional path wasn’t for me and it
was the fluency with food that allowed
me to find structure and in guidance in
my life in restaurants and restaurants
really became my laboratory I mean I was
first cultivating my ego I was going to
be the best chef in the world it didn’t
work out so well it worked out pretty
well but what I ended up realizing is
what I really enjoyed about food was
cultivating the relationships through it
and then cultivating really a deep
understanding of what those
relationships really mean to us in our
world in our communities really as
individuals and of how we connect to a
myriad number of human values through
them I became very interested in
sustainable seafood Sylvia Earle hates
it when I show this but I’m in the dead
fish business which is a little bit
different for a conservationist and I’ve
been in the business for a long time
I still get this excited over bluefish
and nearly everything this is a poor
little sculpin which I believe off the
coast of Cape Cod was my first first
victim but as a chef I began to realize
that some of my favorite species were
disappearing the crabs that I so
lovingly caught off the docks of the
Patuxent River when I was a child the
blue fish the striped bass that I would
pull out as a child easily they were
becoming scarce they were becoming
altogether unavailable they were
becoming exorbitantly expensive
prohibitively expensive and I realized
that it’s really an opportunity and a
burden that chefs have in that the cook
has become the guiding hand of natural
election in our world and it’s the chefs
who have wiped out bluefin who have
popularized shark fin soup who have
taken a little-known species known as
slime head and turned it into a delicacy
called orange roughy this is our fault
this is our opportunity but it’s also if
we can destroy we have the opportunity
to begin to guide restoration through
consumption it’s this belief that really
evolved my passions outside of what a
restaurant kitchen alone could provide
for me and to really see food is a lens
of exploration in a broader sense of how
we relate to each other our communities
our natural world through the resources
that we consume on a daily basis and
this has led me here it’s a National
Geographic so my great friends dr. Enric
Sala John Fahey the whole team alex mo
and miguel jorge have been so generous
and and welcoming in their hospitality
and bringing me into the fold and i met
so many incredible people here
utterly incredible talents and some of
my very favorites are the photographers
you know I mean just incredible brave
men and women sent out into the world to
create a relationship to take a snapshot
then of that relationship as a souvenir
to bring back to us to publish in the
vaunted pages of the yellow magazine I
mean how many of us had our lives
changed by the look in one girl’s eyes
in Afghanistan or had our whole
understanding of entire subject
radically altered by the visions that
Brian scary or the charisma of Matias
you know I mean it’s incredible but I’ve
realized that just as the photographer’s
take snapshots of it banking through the
hills of glacial Alaska of the Southern
Oceans you know down in in parts of the
world where most of us will never go of
the spice plantations of Madagascar I
mean these are great relationships that
you and I are most likely to never have
but how many of us have eaten Chilean
sea bass or sprinkle black pepper on a
steak or had a piece of Alaskan salmon
while National Geographic sends an
expert eye an exploration of our world
so too do we but we send our Forks it is
how we relate to the world around us and
it’s an opportunity that we have in this
global ecosystem global food system to
really begin to connect to the human
values
that really govern it well I believe
that there is still plenty to explore
about our world plenty new knowledge to
gather I believe really the next great
phase of discovery is not finding new
information but making sense of the
information that we already have to
define our place in the systems of the
world through the resources we take from
it my great friend and doctor and mentor
dr. Karl Safina has a wonderful quote
which I’m gonna butcher here but he said
we went from a hunter-gatherer society
to an agrarian culture from agrarian we
moved to a civilized society the next
great leap in our evolution will be to
become humanized and I don’t know of
anything that is more human than the
ritual of dinner it is one of the traits
that truly makes us as human beings
unique as animals on this planet and
it’s one of the things that really
reminds us of really of what what it is
of the beauty that it is to be human of
the opportunity to commune I want to
tell a few stories of my travels around
the world that really represents to me
it’s really kind of the overarching
narrative of my work which is a lot of
environmentalism focuses on the Garrett
Hardin idea of the tragedy of the
Commons of measuring the impact that we
have had on ecosystems and a lot of the
work that I do as I’ve been explaining
it’s sort of more about the communion of
the Commons what it is that brings us
together what it is about our resources
that actually unite us one of my
favorite women in the entire world dr.
Patricio Maalouf down in Peru
she’s a preeminent marine biologist an
incredible woman and just a brilliant
thinker and Peru is home to the world’s
largest single species fishery the
Peruvian ant Ravenna 10 million metric
tons per year are taken out of the water
it’s a huge number of fish 97% of those
fish get ground up and into what’s
called a reduction fishery there in the
adhesive that binds curtains and carpets
they’re in the polyurethane on the
floors they’re in the lipstick ladies
that you’re wearing the moisturizer on
your face they get fed to chickens to
pigs to salmon in aquaculture farms
97% of these go into an industrial use
3% for human use Peru is wracked with
poverty it’s racked with hunger and they
have a cultural taboo against eating
anchovies strange they have more ancho’s
that they need to feed the entire nation
ten times over and the work that
Patricia is doing is beginning to create
markets with great chefs such as gastón
Acurio and really bringing the idea of
anchovies not as a reduction fishery but
really is something to celebrate that’s
something to put forth you know put
forth right on the plates and really
pronounced as it as a great cultural and
natural resource for the Peruvian people
and then to export it around the world
and it’s a great story of just making
better use of an existing resource which
is a lot of what the sustainability
dialogue is really all about and then
another story that I love a few months
ago my wife and I were traveling in
Switzerland and we’re up in the Alps in
this tiny little village Hamlet called
fruit Egon and up here just outside of
Zurich about an hour out a beautiful you
know Hollywood setting of the Alps this
backdrop is absolutely incredible and
they had board a tunnel through one of
these mountains to connect two Canton’s
and to promote trade and tourism in
industry and basically just to connect
more of Switzerland to itself and while
he did this they tapped into a
geothermally heated spring and out of
either side of the tunnel came a hundred
litres per second of 68 degree water now
on one side of the tunnel this was
really seen as a liability I mean this
environment is not 68 degrees the
water’s hair is is more closer to 40 so
just dumping sixty eight degree water
into the lakes into the streams would
kill all the flora and the fauna and
ruin the whole ecosystem so in a you
know stroke of good thinking they
realized oh my we can’t do this so we’re
gonna build an energy intensive plants
to remove the energy from the from
remove the heat from the water and pass
it down into the streams on the other
side there’s this Romanian engineer who
had this idea he was part of this
project he said you know what you know
what this village really needs
I got 68 degree water we need bananas
you know but I think of Switzerland I
think of cows and bananas
so he built this greenhouse here and
it’s absolutely incredible and in it
he’s growing these bananas and he’s got
spices he’s got cinnamon and nutmeg
cloves and cardamom I mean you walk in
there and it’s just I mean it’s
incredible it’s like walking into an
Eastern Market and you just your senses
are assaulted and it’s so cool coming
out of that you know crisp clean Alpine
air into this warm dank dense sultry
sexy smelling spicy environment oh I
mean it’s really cool you’re just in a
totally different world and then he said
I’ve still got all this hot water what
I’m gonna do with it I know you know we
cows caviar and bananas that’s it
caviar that’s what I had forgotten
60,000 head of sturgeon 35 pounds apiece
he’s gonna be harvesting his first
harvest of caviar this year
Swiss caviar 35 pounds apiece times
60,000 head that’s a lot of meat and
then he went on to say you know what
else we need we need a restaurant
somewhere to serve these bananas cows
and caviar not all together on the same
plate so we opened two restaurants he’s
got this the Torah sorry and then he’s
got another Lourdes cafe and then he’s
got this other thing where he’s got a
museum there that shows all about
geothermal heating what it is to really
tap into into existing resources he’s
got this whole museum we’re about the
spice trade about how we’ve connected to
each other and shared cultures through
the products that we extract from the
earth it’s so cool
through that tunnel two hundred thousand
Germans every year flock to eat at this
restaurant eighty-five jobs created in
this tiny little hamlet due to this hot
water and at the end of the day that
water goes into the stream as pure as it
was filtered by the sturgeon at point
two five degrees above the natural
temperature with no energy input what I
love about that is that it really shows
that sustainable resource management
which I’ll get to in a second is really
a human story there’s nothing as unsexy
as sustainable you know it maintain the
status quo nothing sexy there
and the dialogue in front of us about
food specifically it’s not about finding
more food to feed more people but it’s
really about better nourishing people
with the resources that we already have
accessible to us and the title of this
panel I would say should it really have
been restoring resources through
management as that I think is a more
active dialogue and one that
acknowledges that we are currently
putting our place in the systems of this
world in deep jeopardy restoring
resources through management is a more
hopeful it’s a more useful in a more
human way to consider our predicament to
heal our wounded planets even as we
continue to take from it it’s not nature
that’s in danger
it’s our current reality within nature
that is in danger and we seek to feed a
very complicated hunger through food we
seek to nourish with much more than just
calories dinner is a ritual of place of
self of community of sharing and of
giving of joy and of health it’s also
about a reverence to our place in the
systems of this world and this world can
I truly believe provide for the needs of
the coming 7 billion for the coming nine
billion but this world will never be
able to provide for our desires the
compelling narrative of conservation is
really a story of responsible
consumption it’s not about what we don’t
do it’s not about what we sacrifice or
abstain from but rather it’s what we do
and how we do it as we talk of
restorative resource management we must
also begin a dialogue about sustainable
resource use it’s not enough to just
have green products like that sturgeon
if we use it unwisely
if you have sustainable shrimp and you
put it on an all-you-can-eat shrimp
buffet
fail you’ve failed at the human aspect
not the environmental aspect and as I
saw in the example of fruits again
restoration is really creativity in the
presence of decline and/or liability it
is creativity in redefining economic
value and sustainability is really about
redefining our values re-examining the
products that we already have on our
plates such as the work that pettersson
Maloof is doing and it’s also about
re-examining our
patience of maintaining our place in
this ecosystem and this dialogue
luckily begins with dinner dinner is the
confluence of nearly every scientific
enterprise that there is dinner is
universal it is human dinner is small
portions of protein diverse protein it
is giant piles of green beans broccoli
quinoa
you know sweet potatoes with a cilantro
almond pesto it’s it’s good but dinner
is joy dinner is reverence dinner is
family dinner is our place in the
systems of this world
and the very best part about this is
that beginning to cult them not
cultivate an understanding of this to
begin the conversation of inspiring
people to care about the planet is
beyond doable it’s it’s actually just
delicious
so thank you
you
much for gathering here today it’s a
huge honor to be up in front of you
and and speaking to you don’t worry
about tweeting or facebooking anything
that’s comfort confidential because I am
NOT an expert on anything except lemons
and bluefish so I have nothing that’s
unpublished and that is actually how I
want to start off is that I I’m not an
expert I’m not I’m a little different
from a lot of my colleagues here in
National Geographic I’m not a PhD I’m
not a so focused on it on one discipline
but I am a witness to a drama that
unfolds around each and every one of us
every day and that’s the Hat with which
I want you to listen to my presentation
if you would which is as a witness the
world of food is dramatic and it really
goes to explore everything about how we
relate to our world this quote here is
one of my very favorite spoken by a
fisherman and the classic book blues by
John Hersey in our quest for food we
begin to find our place in the systems
of this world and I’ve always absolutely
adored this comment because it so
accurately describes that we are not
sovereign over our resources but rather
that we are because of them and that
through our resources we begin to
discover our place within this natural
systems I’ve had a very intimate and
long relationship with food from a very
early age family dinner in my house was
a very important time it was a place to
share to give to receive in fact it was
where my family became a family and I
was very lucky in that I was able to
really participate in the production of
these meals both my parents were great
cooks from scratch and they’re also very
intrepid cooks we were born and raised
right here in Mount Pleasant in DC in a
very multi-ethnic neighborhood shopping
at Korean Eritrean Ethiopian Latino
market shopping daily in a very
unamerican sense and really coming home
and enjoying the bounty of whatever we
found at the market and it was
incredible and it was such an experience
my father I remember
him making tacos taco night from scratch
and he would moisten the masa harina
dough and these two little toe head boys
would gently press the dough in the in
the you know to form the tortilla and
you can imagine us you know rapturously
and wondered by this process that to
everyone around us in the neighborhoods
like come on
this is eons of our history but to us it
was a window an opportunity to explore
how we connected to the people right
next to us who we played football with
in the street but yet we didn’t
understand we didn’t share their
cultures
he was this fluency with food that
allowed me to step out of the
traditional path of Education when in
college I realized very quickly that the
traditional path wasn’t for me and it
was the fluency with food that allowed
me to find structure and in guidance in
my life in restaurants and restaurants
really became my laboratory I mean I was
first cultivating my ego I was going to
be the best chef in the world it didn’t
work out so well it worked out pretty
well but what I ended up realizing is
what I really enjoyed about food was
cultivating the relationships through it
and then cultivating really a deep
understanding of what those
relationships really mean to us in our
world in our communities really as
individuals and of how we connect to a
myriad number of human values through
them I became very interested in
sustainable seafood Sylvia Earle hates
it when I show this but I’m in the dead
fish business which is a little bit
different for a conservationist and I’ve
been in the business for a long time
I still get this excited over bluefish
and nearly everything this is a poor
little sculpin which I believe off the
coast of Cape Cod was my first first
victim but as a chef I began to realize
that some of my favorite species were
disappearing the crabs that I so
lovingly caught off the docks of the
Patuxent River when I was a child the
blue fish the striped bass that I would
pull out as a child easily they were
becoming scarce they were becoming
altogether unavailable they were
becoming exorbitantly expensive
prohibitively expensive and I realized
that it’s really an opportunity and a
burden that chefs have in that the cook
has become the guiding hand of natural
election in our world and it’s the chefs
who have wiped out bluefin who have
popularized shark fin soup who have
taken a little-known species known as
slime head and turned it into a delicacy
called orange roughy this is our fault
this is our opportunity but it’s also if
we can destroy we have the opportunity
to begin to guide restoration through
consumption it’s this belief that really
evolved my passions outside of what a
restaurant kitchen alone could provide
for me and to really see food is a lens
of exploration in a broader sense of how
we relate to each other our communities
our natural world through the resources
that we consume on a daily basis and
this has led me here it’s a National
Geographic so my great friends dr. Enric
Sala John Fahey the whole team alex mo
and miguel jorge have been so generous
and and welcoming in their hospitality
and bringing me into the fold and i met
so many incredible people here
utterly incredible talents and some of
my very favorites are the photographers
you know I mean just incredible brave
men and women sent out into the world to
create a relationship to take a snapshot
then of that relationship as a souvenir
to bring back to us to publish in the
vaunted pages of the yellow magazine I
mean how many of us had our lives
changed by the look in one girl’s eyes
in Afghanistan or had our whole
understanding of entire subject
radically altered by the visions that
Brian scary or the charisma of Matias
you know I mean it’s incredible but I’ve
realized that just as the photographer’s
take snapshots of it banking through the
hills of glacial Alaska of the Southern
Oceans you know down in in parts of the
world where most of us will never go of
the spice plantations of Madagascar I
mean these are great relationships that
you and I are most likely to never have
but how many of us have eaten Chilean
sea bass or sprinkle black pepper on a
steak or had a piece of Alaskan salmon
while National Geographic sends an
expert eye an exploration of our world
so too do we but we send our Forks it is
how we relate to the world around us and
it’s an opportunity that we have in this
global ecosystem global food system to
really begin to connect to the human
values
that really govern it well I believe
that there is still plenty to explore
about our world plenty new knowledge to
gather I believe really the next great
phase of discovery is not finding new
information but making sense of the
information that we already have to
define our place in the systems of the
world through the resources we take from
it my great friend and doctor and mentor
dr. Karl Safina has a wonderful quote
which I’m gonna butcher here but he said
we went from a hunter-gatherer society
to an agrarian culture from agrarian we
moved to a civilized society the next
great leap in our evolution will be to
become humanized and I don’t know of
anything that is more human than the
ritual of dinner it is one of the traits
that truly makes us as human beings
unique as animals on this planet and
it’s one of the things that really
reminds us of really of what what it is
of the beauty that it is to be human of
the opportunity to commune I want to
tell a few stories of my travels around
the world that really represents to me
it’s really kind of the overarching
narrative of my work which is a lot of
environmentalism focuses on the Garrett
Hardin idea of the tragedy of the
Commons of measuring the impact that we
have had on ecosystems and a lot of the
work that I do as I’ve been explaining
it’s sort of more about the communion of
the Commons what it is that brings us
together what it is about our resources
that actually unite us one of my
favorite women in the entire world dr.
Patricio Maalouf down in Peru
she’s a preeminent marine biologist an
incredible woman and just a brilliant
thinker and Peru is home to the world’s
largest single species fishery the
Peruvian ant Ravenna 10 million metric
tons per year are taken out of the water
it’s a huge number of fish 97% of those
fish get ground up and into what’s
called a reduction fishery there in the
adhesive that binds curtains and carpets
they’re in the polyurethane on the
floors they’re in the lipstick ladies
that you’re wearing the moisturizer on
your face they get fed to chickens to
pigs to salmon in aquaculture farms
97% of these go into an industrial use
3% for human use Peru is wracked with
poverty it’s racked with hunger and they
have a cultural taboo against eating
anchovies strange they have more ancho’s
that they need to feed the entire nation
ten times over and the work that
Patricia is doing is beginning to create
markets with great chefs such as gastón
Acurio and really bringing the idea of
anchovies not as a reduction fishery but
really is something to celebrate that’s
something to put forth you know put
forth right on the plates and really
pronounced as it as a great cultural and
natural resource for the Peruvian people
and then to export it around the world
and it’s a great story of just making
better use of an existing resource which
is a lot of what the sustainability
dialogue is really all about and then
another story that I love a few months
ago my wife and I were traveling in
Switzerland and we’re up in the Alps in
this tiny little village Hamlet called
fruit Egon and up here just outside of
Zurich about an hour out a beautiful you
know Hollywood setting of the Alps this
backdrop is absolutely incredible and
they had board a tunnel through one of
these mountains to connect two Canton’s
and to promote trade and tourism in
industry and basically just to connect
more of Switzerland to itself and while
he did this they tapped into a
geothermally heated spring and out of
either side of the tunnel came a hundred
litres per second of 68 degree water now
on one side of the tunnel this was
really seen as a liability I mean this
environment is not 68 degrees the
water’s hair is is more closer to 40 so
just dumping sixty eight degree water
into the lakes into the streams would
kill all the flora and the fauna and
ruin the whole ecosystem so in a you
know stroke of good thinking they
realized oh my we can’t do this so we’re
gonna build an energy intensive plants
to remove the energy from the from
remove the heat from the water and pass
it down into the streams on the other
side there’s this Romanian engineer who
had this idea he was part of this
project he said you know what you know
what this village really needs
I got 68 degree water we need bananas
you know but I think of Switzerland I
think of cows and bananas
so he built this greenhouse here and
it’s absolutely incredible and in it
he’s growing these bananas and he’s got
spices he’s got cinnamon and nutmeg
cloves and cardamom I mean you walk in
there and it’s just I mean it’s
incredible it’s like walking into an
Eastern Market and you just your senses
are assaulted and it’s so cool coming
out of that you know crisp clean Alpine
air into this warm dank dense sultry
sexy smelling spicy environment oh I
mean it’s really cool you’re just in a
totally different world and then he said
I’ve still got all this hot water what
I’m gonna do with it I know you know we
cows caviar and bananas that’s it
caviar that’s what I had forgotten
60,000 head of sturgeon 35 pounds apiece
he’s gonna be harvesting his first
harvest of caviar this year
Swiss caviar 35 pounds apiece times
60,000 head that’s a lot of meat and
then he went on to say you know what
else we need we need a restaurant
somewhere to serve these bananas cows
and caviar not all together on the same
plate so we opened two restaurants he’s
got this the Torah sorry and then he’s
got another Lourdes cafe and then he’s
got this other thing where he’s got a
museum there that shows all about
geothermal heating what it is to really
tap into into existing resources he’s
got this whole museum we’re about the
spice trade about how we’ve connected to
each other and shared cultures through
the products that we extract from the
earth it’s so cool
through that tunnel two hundred thousand
Germans every year flock to eat at this
restaurant eighty-five jobs created in
this tiny little hamlet due to this hot
water and at the end of the day that
water goes into the stream as pure as it
was filtered by the sturgeon at point
two five degrees above the natural
temperature with no energy input what I
love about that is that it really shows
that sustainable resource management
which I’ll get to in a second is really
a human story there’s nothing as unsexy
as sustainable you know it maintain the
status quo nothing sexy there
and the dialogue in front of us about
food specifically it’s not about finding
more food to feed more people but it’s
really about better nourishing people
with the resources that we already have
accessible to us and the title of this
panel I would say should it really have
been restoring resources through
management as that I think is a more
active dialogue and one that
acknowledges that we are currently
putting our place in the systems of this
world in deep jeopardy restoring
resources through management is a more
hopeful it’s a more useful in a more
human way to consider our predicament to
heal our wounded planets even as we
continue to take from it it’s not nature
that’s in danger
it’s our current reality within nature
that is in danger and we seek to feed a
very complicated hunger through food we
seek to nourish with much more than just
calories dinner is a ritual of place of
self of community of sharing and of
giving of joy and of health it’s also
about a reverence to our place in the
systems of this world and this world can
I truly believe provide for the needs of
the coming 7 billion for the coming nine
billion but this world will never be
able to provide for our desires the
compelling narrative of conservation is
really a story of responsible
consumption it’s not about what we don’t
do it’s not about what we sacrifice or
abstain from but rather it’s what we do
and how we do it as we talk of
restorative resource management we must
also begin a dialogue about sustainable
resource use it’s not enough to just
have green products like that sturgeon
if we use it unwisely
if you have sustainable shrimp and you
put it on an all-you-can-eat shrimp
buffet
fail you’ve failed at the human aspect
not the environmental aspect and as I
saw in the example of fruits again
restoration is really creativity in the
presence of decline and/or liability it
is creativity in redefining economic
value and sustainability is really about
redefining our values re-examining the
products that we already have on our
plates such as the work that pettersson
Maloof is doing and it’s also about
re-examining our
patience of maintaining our place in
this ecosystem and this dialogue
luckily begins with dinner dinner is the
confluence of nearly every scientific
enterprise that there is dinner is
universal it is human dinner is small
portions of protein diverse protein it
is giant piles of green beans broccoli
quinoa
you know sweet potatoes with a cilantro
almond pesto it’s it’s good but dinner
is joy dinner is reverence dinner is
family dinner is our place in the
systems of this world
and the very best part about this is
that beginning to cult them not
cultivate an understanding of this to
begin the conversation of inspiring
people to care about the planet is
beyond doable it’s it’s actually just
delicious
so thank you
you
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