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TED and TEDx Videos
Ann Cooper: Talks school lunches
“Renegade lunch lady” Ann Cooper talks about the coming revolution in the way kids eat at school — local, sustainable, seasonal and even educational food. Ann Cooper cares — a lot — what kids eat for lunch. As the head of nutrition for Berkeley, California, schools, she serves organic, regionally sourced and sustainable meals to lots of lucky children
Arthur Potts Dawson: A vision for sustainable restaurants
Chef Arthur Potts-Dawson shares his very personal vision for drastically reducing restaurant, and supermarket, waste — creating recycling, composting, sustainable engines for good (and good food).
Arturo S. Rodriguez: Why we need unions more than ever
Arturo S. Rodriguez, president of United Farm Workers, has more than 37 years experience organizing farm workers, negotiating UFW contracts and leading numerous farmworker boycott and political drives across North America. The laws on the books are often not the laws that exist in the fields for farmworkers.
Barry Estabrook: Following the Money in Lake Apopka, FL
Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland, about how industrial agriculture has ruined the tomato in all ways. His talk is about what happened on the shores of Lake Apopka, Florida, was an unprecedented environmental and human tragedy. Looking at who profited from it and who paid for it is a stark reminder of how little we respect and value the men and women who feed us.
Barbara Askins: In Harlem, a business culture for healthy eating
Barbara Askins is the President and CEO of the 125th Street Business Improvement District in New York City. She talks about the business of food and how it is changing the landscape in Harlem.
Benjamin Wallace: On the price of happiness
Can happiness be bought? To find out, author Benjamin Wallace sampled the world’s most expensive products, including a bottle of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, 8 ounces of Kobe beef and the fabled (notorious) Kopi Luwak coffee. His critique may surprise you.
Brian Halweil: From New York to Africa: Why food is saving the world
Long live the Food Movement! Brian Halweil, publisher of “Edible Manhattan,” discusses the problems with the global food system and the solutions he’s found cropping up everywhere.
Britta Riley: Research and do it yourself
Artist and innovator, Britta Riley, explains R&D-I-Y. Using social media and mass participation, the community has researched and developed her unique approach to growing food in small urban apartments using a window, plastic bottles and some plants. Join in: research and develop it yourself.
Birke Baehr: “What’s wrong with our food system”
11 year old Birke is wise for his age. His talk is about what’s wrong with our food system, from CAFO’s to GMO’s to how corporations market food to kids. The best quote is “a while back I wanted to be an NFL player, then I decided when I grow up I’d rather be an organic farmer instead.”
Cara Rosaen: Online system for restaurant goers to find out where their food comes from
Cara Rosaen is the Co-Founder of the crowd-sourced nationwide food guide, RealTimeFarms.com. Real Time Farms is quickly and richly documenting our food system, so we can easily know where our food comes from and feel good about the food we eat.
Carolyn Steel: How food shapes our cities
Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world.
Cary Fowler: One seed at a time, protecting the future of food
The varieties of wheat, corn and rice we grow today may not thrive in a future threatened by climate change. Cary Fowler takes us inside a vast global seed bank, buried within a frozen mountain in Norway, that stores a diverse group of food-crop for whatever tomorrow may bring.
Cheryl Rogowski: Being a family farmer
Cheryl Rogowski is a family farmer and a McArthur Genius Award winner. Watch her moving talk about sustainable farming from a farmer’s point of view.
Co-Founder of the Brooklyn-based documentary production company Wicked Delicate and co-creator of the Peabody award winning film King Corn, Curt Ellis is now focused on launching the national AmeriCorps school garden program FoodCorps, which promises to combat childhood obesity while training a new generation of farmers.
Chef Dan Barber tells the story of a small farm in Spain that has found a humane way to produce foie gras. Raising his geese in a natural environment, farmer Eduardo Sousa embodies the kind of food production Barber believes in.
Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish
Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie’s honeymoon he’s enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.
Don Katz - On the origins of taste
Don Katz is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brandeis University, studying how context and experience affects taste preferences and neural coding. His talk reveals what the social life of rats can tell us about the origins of taste.
Dr. David Wallinga: Antibiotic resistance
Physician, writer and full-time advocate, David Wallinga, M.D., represents the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) as a de facto doctor to the nation’s ailing food system. Dr. Wallinga talks about the astounding amount of antibiotics fed to farm animals and the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.
Dr. Melony Samuels: Campaigning against hunger
Dr. Melony Samuels is the Founder and Director of the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger. She not only helps provide food to low-income families in Brooklyn, she’s started an urban farm to help residents get the healthiest, freshest food possible.
Dr. Robert S. Lawrence: Health/meat reduction/consumption
Robert S. Lawrence, MD is the Center for a Livable Future Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health talks about the effects of a high meat diet on public health. Dr Lawrence covers everything from arsenic in animal feed to the use of antibiotics in animal production, from the environmental impact of concentrated feeding operations, to increasing incidence of diet related illness from eating too much meat.
Dr. Scott Kahan: Why we eat the way we eat
Dr. Scott Kahan is the Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center in their School of Public Health. He explains how our current food system predisposes us to eating unhealthy food.
Dr. William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?
Dr. William Li, President of the Angiogenesis Foundation, presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game. To see an update on his research check out his video shown at TEDxManhattan2011.
Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic?
Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens — and the environment. Eben Bayer is co-inventor of MycoBond, an organic (really — it’s based on mycelium, a living, growing organism) adhesive that turns agriwaste into a foam-like material for packaging and insulation
Elizabeth Meltz: The reality of green restaurants
There’s more to making a restaurant “Green” than installing energy efficient hand dryers. To tell us all about it is Elizabeth Meltz, Director of Food Safety and Sustainability for Mario Batali and Joe & Lidia Bastianich.
Elizabeth Ü: Money’s many shades of green
Elizabeth Ü is Executive Director of Finance for Food, a nonprofit she founded to educate food system entrepreneurs about financing opportunities available to support their work. When we think about all the work that has to be done to shift the food system, one very important part is finding ways to finance food entrepreneurs.
Ellen Gustafson Obesity + Hunger one global food issue
Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of FEED, talks about the issues of hunger and obesity being two sides of the same coin, it stems from the way we do agriculture. Ellen talks about her 30 project, to try and change the global food system in 30 years.
Eric Schlosser – If you eat, you are responsible
In 2001 journalist Eric Schlosser wrote a best-selling book called Fast Food Nation. Most people remember the unappetizing parts about hamburgers, but he also wrote about meatpacking workers. Since then, he’s become an outspoken champion of all farmworkers.
Evan Kleiman: How to expand the choir
Evan Kleiman. renowned owner and executive chef of one of LA’s favorite restaurants, Angeli Caffe, and best-selling author of numerous cookbooks, including “Cucina Fresca” and “Pasta Fresca,” talks about expanding the choir. Her talk is about Diggville an interactive online learning tool that looks like a game that engages youth to know more about their food.
Flavio Cornejo: What farmwork does to a body
The human body was not designed to stoop low to the ground for eight or more hours a day. In this 6-minute talk, Dr. Flavio Cornejo, farmworker physician, describes what happens to it.
Frederick Kaufman: The measure of all things
Professor Frederick Kaufman from the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism discusses the major research projects currently underway to develop actual metrics to define what sustainable food is.
Fred Kirschenmann: Soil: From dirt to lifeline
Fred Kirschenmann has been involved in sustainable agriculture and food issues for most of his life. His talk is about the importance of soil, its not just dirt but a living community necessary for plant health. The way we currently farm is increasing soil loss or is severely degrading it, reducing our ability to grow food. And soil is not easily replaced.
Gary Oppenheimer: Food pantries and food distribution
Frustrated by the wasted food from gardens nationwide, the “no food left behind” AmpleHarvest.org Campaign was created to enable America’s 40+ million home gardeners who grow food to easily find a local pantry eager for their excess bounty.
Gerardo Reyes-Chavez: Making corporations pay
Gerardo Reyes-Chavez is a leader and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which represents tomato pickers in Florida—a group with seemingly no power in our society. Yet the CIW has moved some of the largest corporations in the world to pay Florida workers a penny a pound more for their efforts as well as institute fair labor practices.
Heribert Watzke: The brain in your gut
Did you know you have functioning neurons in your intestines — about a hundred million of them? Food scientist Heribert Watzke tells us about the “hidden brain” in our gut and the surprising things it makes us feel. Heribert Watzke studies the brain in our gut — and works to develop new kinds of food that will satisfy our bodies and minds.
Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche: Cooking as alchemy
Chefs at the restaurant Moto in Chicago, masters of post-modern cuisine, talk about the new ways to cook and eat food. The chefs are constantly experimenting and presenting their guests with mind blowing gastronomic experiences, but they aim to be more than just a neat party trick, they are also serious about using new food technology for good.
Howard Hinterthuer: Veteran’s Food Production Project
Howard is the Communications Coordinator for the Center for Veterans Issues and peer-to-peer mentor in CVI’s Organic Therapy Program. His talk is about using organic gardening as self-help therapy for veterans, allowing them to gain control over their own lives. The garden program has additional benefits, it provides exercise, diet modification, exposure to new foods, and social interaction.
Co-Founder of the Brooklyn-based documentary production company, Wicked Delicate, and co-creator of the Peabody award winning film, King Corn, Ian Cheney talks about his new film, Truck Farm.
Jaime Oliver’s TED prize wish: Teach every child about food
Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
Jennifer 8 Lee: Hunts for General Tso
Reporter Jennifer 8. Lee talks about her hunt for the origins of familiar Chinese-American dishes — exploring the hidden spots where these two cultures have (so tastily) combined to form a new cuisine.
Joann Lo: Organizing workers in the food chain
Joann Lo is the executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. In the U.S., 20 million people work throughout the food supply chain. Who are these people? At lower end of the system are people of color, immigrants, and female workers. These low-wage workers subsidize corporate profits and cheap food
Josette Sheeran: Ending Hunger Now
Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Program, talks about why, in a world with enough food for everyone, people still go hungry, still die of starvation, still use food as a weapon of war. Her vision: “Food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person. We have to stand together.”
Josh Viertel: Building a slow food nation
Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA, dreams of a world where fruit is cheaper than fruit loops and there are more school gardens than McDonald’s has franchises.
Joshna Maharaj- Redefining hospital food
Chef, Writer & Activist Joshna Maharaj delivers a Talk at TEDxToronto 2011 on the theme of Redefining Hospital Food. Imagine being in a hospital and receiving a meal that not only tastes good, and is good for you, but supports local farms.
Kate Orlef: Reviving New York’s rivers- with oysters!
Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean — thus driving even more innovation in “oyster-tecture.” Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.
Karen Hudson: The hidden price tag of industrial agriculture
Karen Hudson is the President of the Dairy Education Alliance and founder of F.A.R.M. (Families Against Rural Messes), a grassroots group in Illinois that opposes CAFO’s (concentrated animal feeding operations) and their impacts. She talks about the dangers of industrial agriculture to public health, and how she stood up to stop it.
Kathy Lawrence: Transforming school food
Kathy Lawrence has worked for twenty years in sustainable agriculture, local food systems development, and non-profit management and she is the Program Director of School Food FOCUS. She discusses the broken school food system.
Kavita Shukla: Organic paper that keeps produce fresh
Kavita M. Shukla is the Inventor and Founder/CEO of Fenugreen (www.fenugreen.com), a pioneer in the movement towards sustainable, active, natural food packaging. Fenugreen is addressing the massive, yet often overlooked global challenge of food spoilage (25% of the world’s harvest is lost to spoilage each year) with its simple and all-natural FreshPaper innovation.
Kenneth Cook: Turning the farm bill into a food bill
President of the Environmental Working Group, Ken Cook, discusses the Farm Bill, the massive subsides paid to industrial farmers and how we can all act to help advocate and improve this important legislation.
Kerry McLean: Green cart program in NYC
Kerry A. McLean is the Director of Community Development at WHEDco where she directs community planning and revitalization initiatives, including the Green Cart Microenterprise Program, which helps community members become street vendor entrepreneurs selling fresh fruits and vegetables in their own communities.
Laurie David: Dinner makes a difference
Producer of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” Laurie David has authored best-selling books, executive produced television specials & documentaries and has been called the Bono of climate change by Vanity Fair. Now she’s bringing it all home to her kitchen table.
Lucas Knowles: Local food nation
Lucas Knowles is the USDA Coordinator for “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.” He demonstrates the huge demand for local sustainable food through three promising approaches.
Malcom Gladwell: Spaghetti Sauce
Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce — and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.
Marcel Dicke: Why not eat insects
Marcel Dicke makes an appetizing case for adding insects to everyone’s diet. His message to squeamish chefs and foodies: delicacies like locusts and caterpillars compete with meat in flavor, nutrition and eco-friendliness. Marcel Dicke wants us to reconsider our relationship with insects, promoting bugs as a tasty — and ecologically sound — alternative to meat in an increasingly hungry world.
Maria Catalan: From farmworker to farm owner
A third-generation migrant farmworker, Maria Catalan was born in Guerrero, Mexico, where she helped her parents on the family farm before immigrating to the United States in 1986. For many years she worked for California’s biggest farms, now her and her family cultivate 14-acres and sell at 13 farmers’ markets and to high-end restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mark Anderson- How I feel in love with a tomato
Investment banker turned farmer, Mark’s career path has taken some unique turns to his current position operating Certified Farmers’ Markets. Known by many as “Farmer Mark” or “Tomatoes”, he is a farmers’ market fanatic, slow food supporter and healthy eating advocate. He is passionate about supporting small farmers and is involved with the State’s Certified Farmers’ Market Advisory Committee.
Mark Bittman: What’s wrong with what we eat
In this fiery and funny talk, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what’s wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking), and why it’s putting the entire planet at risk.
Marianne Cufone: Recirculating Farms, what they are and how they’re helping people
Marianne Cufone is the Executive Director of the Recirculating Farms Coalition, an environmental attorney, and long time sustainable food advocate. Her talk is about Recirculating Farms, an organization that promotes growing plants, fish, or a combination of both, without chemicals and antibiotics, while efficiently using water and energy.
Matthew Kenney- Crafting the Future of Food
Matthew Kenney is the world’s leading raw food chef, the writer of several best-selling cookbooks, and an entrepreneur specializing in the raw life style. He graduated from the French Culinary Institute and, after working in upscale New York City kitchens, opened a number of his own highly regarded restaurants in New York and along the East Coast.
Michael Pollan: Gives a plants eye view
What if human consciousness isn’t the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn’s clever strategy game to rule the Earth? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see the world from a plant’s-eye view.
Chef Michel Nischan: Great tomatoes for all!
Chef, restaurateur, award-winning cookbook author, Wholesome Wave CEO and leader in the sustainable food movement, Michel Nischan discusses food deserts and solutions to make healthy choice possible. How can we energize the superheroes in the communities that need them most?
Michael Conard: Rebuilding our food system infrastructure
Michael Conard, Assistant Director at the Urban Design Lab, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, discusses the new distribution systems needed for changing the food system.
Michelle Hughes: GrowNYC-Immigrant farming
Michelle Hughes is the Director of GrowNYC’s New Farmer Development Project (NFDP), which identifies and trains immigrants with agricultural experience to establish their own family farms. Since 2000, the project has supported the establishment of 22 immigrant-owned farms by offering production and business training, land identification, marketing support and a microcredit loan fund.
Mitchell Davis: How taste affects food behavior
Mitchell Davis is the executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, a cookbook author, a food journalist, and a scholar with a Ph.D. in Food Studies. His talk is about using taste to help create a meaningful food system. Tastes are created and they are cultural and could be used as a tool for social change.
Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes
What should a community do with its unused land? Plant food, of course. With energy and humor, Pam Warhurst tells at the TEDSalon the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, and to change the narrative of food in their community.
Patty Cantrell: New roads to market
Patty Cantrell is a community organizer and a journalist focused on making the business case for local and regional food. As Regional Food Solutions LLC, she works with nonprofit and educational clients to communicate new food and farm business options and public policy directions.
Paul Lightfoot: Commercial hydroponics on top of stores
Paul Lightfoot is the Chief Executive Officer of BrightFarms, which designs, finances, builds and operates greenhouse farms at grocery retailers, eliminating time, distance and costs from their produce supply chain.
Robyn O’Brien- On food allergies
Robyn shares her personal story and how it inspired her current path as a “Real Food” evangelist. Grounded in a successful Wall Street career that was more interested in food as good business than good-for-you, this mother of four was shaken awake by the dangerous allergic reaction of one of her children to a “typical” breakfast. Her mission to unearth the cause revealed more about the food industry than she could stomach, and impelled her to share her findings with others. Informative and inspiring.
Selina Juul: Stop wasting food
Consumers are the key players in reducing food waste. Within the last 4 years, the Danish Stop Wasting Food movement (Stop Spild Af Mad) has grown from a small Facebook group to the biggest Danish NGO against food waste, influencing the retailers as well as the politicians and helping to put the topic on EU’s and UN’s agenda.
Food has become a political tool for changing the world. The consumers have become the new politicians — and consumer movements are gaining the power to create global change.
Stephen Ritz: Edible food walls and how they’re changing student’s lives
Stephen Ritz is a South Bronx teacher/administrator. With the help of extended student and community family they have grown over 25,000 pounds of vegetables in the Bronx while generating extraordinary academic performance. His Bronx classroom features the first indoor edible wall in NYC
Tristram Stuart, author of the book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, sounds the warning bell on global food waste, calling for us to change the systems whereby large quantities of produce and other foods end up in trash heaps.
U.Roberto Romano: Children in our fields
Robin is an award-winning producer, still photographer, and investigative filmmaker. By some estimates 20% of the handpicked food we eat is picked by kids. In our own country we have legalized an early end to childhood that we do not tolerate abroad.
Urvashi Rangan: Labeling and the controversy around it
Urvashi Rangan leads and directs the Consumer Safety and Sustainability Group for Consumer Reports. Her talk is about labels; how consumers are willing to pay more foods that are labeled, how labels are currently used to mislead consumers, and why we should fight to make labels that are held to the standards of truthful, transparent and trustworthy.
Wayne Pacelle: Impact of factory farming
As President and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Wayne Pacelle leads the nation’s largest animal protection organization with 11 million members and constituents. His talk is about the disconnect between a nation of animal lovers and the way we allow farm animals to be raised in the country for food.
Wenonah Hauter: Food/farming consolidation
Wenonah Hauter is the Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. She has worked extensively on food, water, environmental and energy issues at the national, state and local level. She talks about vertical integration in the poultry industry and how it’s hurting farmers.
Will Scott: Bring back black farmers
Slavery left a bad taste in most African-Americans’ mouth when it comes to farming. But as Will Scott points out, when we eat together, we don’t fight. This nation needs more small farmers, more people growing food in general — black and white
