than any other time in history
because we care more about food today
than ever before you think about the
constant barrage of advertisements and
commercials on radio and television
millions of posts every single day on
social media we’re faced with more food
brands and food products and food
choices than ever before there’s an
organic a regular a diet a local non-gmo
all-natural option for just about any
food out there and there are scientific
studies that say things like wine and
coffee cost cancer and there are studies
out there that say wine and coffee
prevent cancer each our vegetables but
only if they’re organic because of the
pesticides well wait a minute those have
pesticides too
dairy is ruining the planet milk does
the body good sugar is good and fat is
bad wait a minute scraps that fat is
good and sugar is bad extra virgin olive
oil is it real or is it fake
are we supposed to eat grass fed or
lab-grown meat now or no meat at all
local is the future of food the wait a
minute maybe it’s pizza by drone is the
future of food or maybe the future of
food isn’t food at all its meal
replacements that we drink every few
hours and then my favorite headline of
all is this one right here our modern
food system works as designed and that’s
becoming a problem at its core maximum
calories with maximum efficiency to the
most people possible that’s a good thing
but surrounding it all now
is the most competitive largest market
opportunity that exists on this planet
and it’s become a shouting match
it’s my product versus your product in
your product versus her product it’s my
way versus your way in your way versus
his way this shouting match and all this
chaos has become the language of the
food system but the problem is food
already had a language and it was food
itself
since the beginning of time nature
created a pretty simple system for us to
follow fruit would tell us when it was
ripe or in season we figured out which
plants were edible and which ones were
not we could follow the migration
patterns of animals based on weather and
plant cycles and food we communicated to
food we communicate to us with a sense
and tastes and nutrients that we could
choose from this system was by far not
perfect but it worked for millions of
years and then just a few decades ago
humans like we do said hold on we got
this and we started speaking on behalf
of food it was the language of these
labels in these brands in these studies
and promotions and advertisements and
this is what I call the perception of
food the perception of food or what
we’re paying for says that this new food
system will grow it process it package
it ship it store it and sell it to us no
matter where we’re at in no matter what
we desire so do you want apples and
strawberries all year long no problem
what about 99-cent gas station sushi
it’s everywhere how about three cups of
coffee a day even when there’s a
shortage of beans we got you covered in
the whole time this has been going on
the language of food still exists
sometimes its varied and it’s hard to
find or hard to recognize that it’s
there
and I call this the reality of food so
the perception of food says hey I can
eat an apple all year long and that
Apple will be the same whether it’s
January or June or October the reality
of food says you know what after several
weeks or even a few days for certain
foods the nutrients that we think we’re
getting and paying for just don’t exist
99-cent sushi come on
even $35 sushi we think there’s this
endless supply of fish that will support
our cravings and it doesn’t exist
the reality is 2/3 or even since some
cases more than that of the fish that
we’re buying is different than what’s on
the menu or on the label coffee coffee
is a great example so recently we’ve had
a shortage of fresh coffee beans and so
there’s been a problem in the market
hey as coffee drinkers guess what guess
who didn’t fill that shortage us you
know why because somehow they magically
found beans that have been stored for
years in some cases nine years and they
continue making coffee without missing a
beat now there’s our five dollar
americano have nine year old beans in it
probably not but what about the canister
at the supermarket or maybe the coffee
pot at work I bet it does and the thing
is is that the label didn’t change I’m
not here to bash big food and not here
to bash big government as consumers we
are equally and fully responsible for
this mess just as much as anyone is
here’s my point
food is trying to tell us something and
we’re not listening or we can’t hear it
because all the noise and all the chaos
is happening within this food system we
are making changes to our food today
that we don’t understand in these
changes are having unintentional but
catastrophic consequences to all of
humanity today we are sicker
we’re fatter we are more malnourished
than we ever have been we waste 40% of
the food that we produce food fraud is
rampant trust in food and food suppliers
is at an all-time low in food production
there’s one of the leading causes of
environmental devastation now I’m not
here today to say let’s go back to a
food system built for another era I
don’t think that’s the answer and I’m
not here today to say let’s blow up the
current system I actually think the
answer probably resides somewhere in
between the two
so I have an idea that I want to share
with you that’s been gaining some
for the past several years there have
been a group of us that had been working
alongside some of the biggest food and
technology companies in the world along
with a couple of the top tap top
academic institutions as well and the
goal of this work has been to trade a
series of devices that would tell us
exactly what’s in our food and we have
been successful in building and testing
these devices in the real world but in
doing so we uncovered something very
troubling we found that we were actually
contributing to and even compounding the
problem that we actually set out to
solve we were adding to the noise and
I’ll tell you why because as we were
developing this these devices or these
platforms along with hundreds of other
companies trying to do the same thing we
were developing another language and a
unique set of standards and that’s a
problem because these devices in these
platforms didn’t easily communicate with
the existing technologies that run our
food system today Nord of these
technologies communicate with each other
very well so think about that for a
minute from a consumer standpoint
hundreds of devices out there and if I
have one knee a single need maybe I have
a gluten allergy
and maybe one device will actually
satisfy that but find someone who wants
to know if there’s gluten or I want to
verify if my milk is real or my fish is
real or I want to know the nutritional
content of food or I want to know any
range of things I could be walking into
a store sitting down in a restaurant
with a purse full of devices and
applications it’s not practical so we
thought well what if there was another
way what if we could translate the
existing language of food in a way that
can communicate across all these
existing technologies and future tech
technologies in a way that we can all
fully and equally understand our food
together so the last couple of months we
tried something that we’ve been working
on for a while apple season dis wrapped
up in the US and so we’ve been traveling
around the country visiting apple
orchards everywhere and picking the top
varieties of apples and sending these
samples back to our lab here in Boston
within 24 hours and when the apples get
back to the lab we’ve been creating what
we call a digital food fingerprint these
fingerprints are built solely off of the
information we get from the Apple not a
label not literature just the apple and
you think about these fingerprints in
the sense that they are essentially
these comprehensive profiles if you will
of a particular type of food now each
food type in each food individual food
has a unique characteristics so a
McIntosh Apple that comes from Riverview
farm in New Hampshire has its own
fingerprint or profile and when you
combine that Apple or that fingerprint
with other McIntosh apples you start to
create the profile for that variety of
apples and when you combine that with
Red Delicious apples from Washington or
Fuji apples from New York well then you
start to develop the unique and the
common or shared chemistry of apples in
general and then eventually fruit and so
on and so on
so once we’ve established these
fingerprints had a very very high
resolution in the lab we then went out
and we purchased the same varieties of
apples at regional stores and online
retailers and we brought them in and we
scanned these with an off-the-shelf
device a simple scanner you can get
anywhere and we collected just a few
data points with this scanner and we’re
able to compare that information with
this high resolution lab fidelity
fingerprint that we had just created and
what we discovered is what we hope we
would see that the apples were talking
to us
the apples we could see a very distinct
and unique characteristic within the
apples that we bought at the store
versus what we had picked fresh in the
orchards so we could see things like
unique freshness characteristics in
terms of quality and nutrition based on
where the Apple was from the climate in
which it grew down to the individual
farm how it was shipped how it was
stored how old this Apple was difference
in retailer apples from retailer a to
retailer B difference in conventional
and organic apples so this was exciting
for us because there was something that
we hoped we could do but we weren’t
really sure so we were highly encouraged
by this information because now a single
piece of food in this case an apple
could tell us exactly what’s happening
to it in the lifecycle of this item
simply by comparing how something starts
its journey through the food system and
how it looks at any particular moment
within that food system equally exciting
was the fact that we could take this
information that the Apple was giving us
and we could translate it in a way that
would integrate with an existing
technology and giving it an answer in a
matter of just a few seconds and with
the user having no special skills so
think about food as its own label no BS
in a real time situation something could
tell you what it is where it’s from
whether or not it’s fresh and what the
nutritional value of it is so think
about that in combination with something
like the blockchain if you know exactly
how something started its life then
blockchain all the sudden makes sense
with food because now if I know how it
starts I can track it throughout every
transaction until it gets to a consumer
and then once it gets there not only can
I confirm of all the different steps
that’s gone through that
also can confirm that it’s actually
worth going through all that that there
is some nutrition left and there’s some
value left in that food
so think about combating food fraud when
it comes to wine or milk or fish or meat
or olive oil or what about combining it
with environmental sensors in the supply
chain if I know how food starts and I
can see it degrading over time I can go
specifically into a point in the supply
chain and say I have a problem here it’s
degrading faster than it should and I
can solve that problem and that could go
a long ways towards reducing waste or
getting fresher food to people faster
and then finally what about
incorporating cooperating this type of
information into these handheld devices
and or smart phone imagine never having
to buy or eat food again that isn’t real
or isn’t good for us but more
importantly if you could do that using a
common language you can share that
information with everyone and they would
understand it whatever technology they
were using whatever language they
actually spoke they would know hey this
is good for me or this is bad for me so
it’s early days so we’re highly
encouraged by this work it’s exciting
we’ve seen enough and proved enough that
we are moving on very rapidly to
creating these fingerprints for the top
fruits and vegetables as well as the
foods that are most adulterated in
so look as humans we cannot separate our
fate from our food system and will
either continue to head down this path
of perception attending like it’s
working and literally feeding ourselves
to death or will cheat to listen to our
food again and we’ll get real about what
it can and cannot do for us but food is
too important to leave up to the experts
we’re all in this together we all
created this mess and we all have a
responsibility to clean it up so I’ll
leave you with the challenge and that
challenge is the next time you sit down
for a meal ask your food these questions
what is it is it real and how is this
decision impacting my body my community
and the planet and only when there are
answers to these questions well you know if we made the right choice thank you