The "Polycrisis" Stalking Our Food

This is an episode of Unconfined, the podcast of the Johns Hopkins Center for a livable future in Baltimore, Maryland. Unconfined is a podcast about industrial food animal production and its emerging alternatives. You can find us online at CLF.jhsph.edu. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Johns Hopkins University or of the Center for a livable future. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Unconfined. In this episode we're going to talk about the complicated tangle of global crises and how they affect our food supply. Just in the past decade we've got the 10 warmest years on record and warming is running ahead of the except the climate models. Like we've got modelers talking about when we should get to let's say two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels and we're basically already there. That wasn't supposed to happen for 10 or 15 more years. We've got epic droughts in many parts of the world. As we tape this there are out of control wildfires raging in Spain and France. Here on the east coast and in big swaths of the Midwest we've recently been choking on very very toxic air caused by very intense wildfires up in Canada. In the past 10 years we've had this global pandemic that wreaked all kinds of havoc with the food system, snarled up supply chains, caused food price inflation that if you're in the US for a lot of people in the US paying a little bit more for your groceries isn't a big deal. For other people it is a big deal and for large swaths of the globe it can push you into starvation. It could be this sort of lever that pushes you into famine and right now we've got no fewer than two ongoing wars perhaps forever wars at this point launched in hot spots of the global fossil fuel and fertilizer trade that's being Ukraine and Iran. There's no end inside to either of them both have caused food prices to spike and all kinds of farm sort of excess farm inputs like fertilizer and fuel and we've got 8% of the globe living in chronic hunger that means something like 700 million people. This number is was going down for a couple of decades and now it's inching back up again and then there's this super elmenio forming into you know coming into this sort of tangled set of crises and it's going to be more crazy whether or more probably droughts and floods and key growing areas and things have gotten so crazy that some analysts are talking about a poly crisis it's not just you can't look at them individually it's how they interact with each other and compound each other and to help us sort through this tangle of what it means for the food system and what the implications are our guest today is my old friend and podcast comrade Raj Patel I want to just give a brief shout out to our old podcast the secret ingredient me at rest in power. Raj is an award-winning author filmmaker and academic and he is a research research professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs University of Texas and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems Raj welcome to unconfined. It's good to be back with these all how are you. I'm doing alright I'm a little bit I'm a little bit frazzled by this situation that I just laid out and you know prepping for this interview I've been reading some of your past work and you know going all the way back to steps and starved which came out in 2007 I believe and I'm just thinking about how you have really been on the public crisis be from the beginning of your career of your public career and I wonder if you could just sort of talk through a little bit of how you're thinking about this current moment and how is it how is it evolved or devolved in the 20s you know nearly 20 years since the publication of seventh and star. What do I mean the word poly crisis has come to mean particularly in the pages of the financial times with analysts like Adam twos to mean exactly the sort of piling on of just really bad things. You're often climate but also war and harvest failure and civil unrest and a range of sort of both geophysical and political and social turmoil all happening at the same time. That you know that that feels like the word poly crisis was sort of invented for it but actually if you go back to the origins of this word poly crisis obviously it's French and it comes from a French theorist who understood that this wasn't just a series of unfortunate events it was what you would expect from a systemic problem and the manifestations of these systemic problems appear in contradictory ways so for example stuffed and starved was a book about how back in 2007 there were a billion people who were overweight and a billion people who were food insecure unfortunately that figure is now double there two billion people who are food insecure and two billion people who are overweight and at the same time you know where are in the middle of the climate crisis we're seeing a frame of democracy in a sort of undermining of the institutions of the rule of law and a rise of paramilitaries and police violence so all of these things happening at the same time have to be understood not as you know isn't it just a little unfortunate that these things are putting on top of each other but do need to be understood as systemic collapse and at the end of a cycle of capitalism that in many ways has been pressaged and and sort of compassed out by a lot of particularly Marxist political theorists yeah and we were talking just a second ago about the sort of global public health crisis of that is sort of brought on by the industrial food system by sort of over consuming things like sugar and sort of you know industrial produce fat and just sort of pumping those into food to make them palatable and I want to make the case that that is part of the public crisis because when you when you sort of have you know when your food system is literally generating a public health crisis and then that sort of layers in to all this other stuff that's going on and makes it harder to sort of adjust to you know and you know substance art itself talks about the paradox of you know you know mass poverty and mass sort of lack of availability of food and also mass sort of you know diet related chronic disease based on the sort of prevalence of industrial food how do you see the ultra-process food situation playing into the public crisis or do you think it has a place in it no I'm persuaded I mean I think that what you're pointing to is the the way that capitalism has been very good at not paying its bills and the food system is I think the industry par excellence that has avoided paying its bills and so here's some evidence I mean if we're thinking about how capitalism shuts its bills then obviously capitalism is treating the atmosphere as an infinite dustbin and right now as you as you said in the leading we're now shooting past two degrees Celsius warming compared to pre-industrial levels and we're you know we're reaping the world with that and then of course you know there are other non-linear effects like glacier melting or the end of the you know the the Atlantic currents that that that actually keep Europe warm all of these are non-linear effects that come from treating the atmosphere as a free cheap thing. The food system actually was audited a little while back by the the boffins at McKinsey for a Rockefeller Foundation study and what they found was that for every dollar of revenue that the food system generates two point four dollars are externalities that the food system itself doesn't pay for and one dollar of that revenue or what one dollar that externality is precisely what you're talking about is the the healthcare costs to this is a U.S. study so the healthcare costs to Americans of one dollar for every dollar we spend on food we spend a dollar in healthcare treating diet related disease there are other diseases that's not counted it's only diet related disease that we have to spend extra dollar for every time you buy food now you have to be a genius to be able to get someone to think that that's normal and to you know if your business model to be absolutely fine by getting someone else to pay for the disease that your product causes and that is written you know in the food system the much larger problem of capitalism not paying its bills not paying its workers not paying for reproductive social labor not paying for the environment not paying for a range of things that then have come home to roost and the coming home to roost is the poly crisis so I absolutely agree that actually if you think about ultra-process food and it's it's it's detrimental effects on human health then absolutely that is of a key feature of the poly crisis now one thing that strikes me as we talk about the poly crisis is you know how do we the question of how do we respond comes up how do how do we as a society respond to all these things happening at once. and the food system being so much in the middle of it. Like, we decided for no good reason at all to start a war with Iran, and that bottles up the passage of fertilizer and fuel and that raises cost for farmers around the world. And all of a sudden people who can't afford it are having to pay more for food and that's causing hunger and inconvenience in the United States and outright starvation throughout much of the globe. And that's just sort of one sort of micro example. And it seems to me that there are multiple ways to respond to it. And one of them that we're seeing play out right now and have been for a little while across the globe, including the United States, is this sort of push to fascism. And you had a fascinating piece that is out the day before that we're recording this called Maha's fascist turn. And you discuss a really scurrilous attack on a friend of the podcast, former guest, Mary Ann Nussle, by one of the probably like the biggest of big shots in Maha world, sort of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s right hand, Kelly Means, his sister was nominated to be Surgeon General I think that's sort of gone sideways. But I wonder if you could just sort of like talk about that piece and the way that you contextualize this attack on Mary Ann Nussle as part of the fascist playbook. - Let me wind back just a second because I've got a way of getting us to thinking about this about the sort of fascist turn in American food politics. But only through thinking about the poly crisis 'cause you asked, well, how do people respond to the poly crisis? What are the options? And there are only four. One option is to try and get someone else to pay. And so you find some new continent to explore or some new territory to be able to mine for money. - Find it even. - Maybe you are. - So exactly, I mean, that's it. So low earth orbit is exactly what Elon Musk has occupied now. But you could also think about the genome or you can think about cognition, right? So this is what the AI play is in part. It's also a financial play more than anything else. But look for a new frontier. That's option number one. Option number two is to ration. To think about actually recognizing that there are costs to be born and that they need to be rationed internally. And so China is the place that's doing this at civilizational scale within China. Though, of course, China is still exporting its costs and drinking the Atacama's water and relying on a great deal of resources being pulled in through the Belt and Road. You can also common, a lot of social movements and intentional communities keep the costs of this party crisis internal and they manage them collectively. But the other fourth option is to demand tribute from a predetermined set of people. And this is also a way of dealing with crisis where you designate a group that is going to, whose bodies are going to bear the cost. And it's always racialized form of capitalism is as old as capitalism. But in our present moment, has some particular sort of modulations. And that's what I was particularly concerned about in the Mahas fascist turn on Marian Nestle. Because what you're seeing is a very familiar fascist playbook where certain kinds of critique and certain kinds of people are demonized and others are lifted up to be, frankly, a master race. And that's why a lot of people of color and a lot of activists of color in the food world can hear the dog whistles in Mahas a mile away. And as soon as Mahas started talking about ideas of purity and bodily responsibility, these are the tropes that have long been a part of American racism. And we heard it and we wanted nothing to do with it. Marian was a bit more conciliatory because she saw in Mahas some redeeming qualities. These are people who want to rein in big food and they want to help push back against food coloring in the stuff that's coming to our kids. I mean, who could possibly disagree with that? But amid those concerns were concerns not to make sure that everybody got to eat well. This is not a sort of egalitarian program. It is an individualist program for you to monitor your own bodily health and luckily the means brother and sister will sell you the devices to be able to monitor your own blood and your stool and keep your color on sort of sparkling clean. You can buy from Cali Means website a, what one of these B-Day things that it was a sprayer. Absolutely done until you can see your face in it. So, this kind of grifting only becomes reasonable once you take away actual scientists and Marian is an actual scientist. And the way that the sort of playbook here is draws on a very long antisemitic history and is, you can see it's parallels absolutely in Nazi Germany as well. I'm not exaggerating here, I mean, in the article that you refer to in Mahas fascist turn, I sort of show the receipts of how actually the playbook that Cali Means is following is one that was used in Nazi Germany and is used by Nazis today, contemporary Nazis who are also concerned about the food system but want to vilify Jews and people of color. Yeah, and it also struck me with the timing of this attack on Marian, where he basically paints or some sort of food industry shell. It did have the sort of stench of AI, the way that he like made up the name of a group like the National Sugar Association or something like that that supposedly gave for money and it doesn't exist. Sounds a little bit like an AI hallucination but the timing of it with the Trump administration sort of giving this big clammy hug to the pesticide industry, which is supposed to be everything Maha is against. It seems like partially the timing of it was, let me go take down this other person and call her a sell out. The accusation is actually like the guy screaming the false accusation is actually guilty of what he's screaming about. It seems to me in this case. I mean, I described it as the world's most inept character assassin. He is pretty useless at this. And yet it is in the failure and in the repetition of these lies that he achieved success, right? It's not what he's saying is true. He's just from his platform repeating it over and over again and doubling down on it and having his followers do the same thing and repeat the same lies as well as you pointed out to me on social media. There are a lot of people chiming in, coursing that actually, you know, Kelly means is fighting the good fight for Maha Mums. And that rhetorical device is precisely how fascism works. I mean, the goal here is to undermine peer-reviewed science and reason. And instead replace it with vibes based medicine, which is why the piece that I wrote ends with the SNL sketch, Mah Hospital. Because that's exactly what medicine looks like once you bring the vibes in and take the science out. Exactly. Well, OK, so that's one response to public crisis. It's sort of the scapegoating. It's essentially a version of a new frontier. It's finding a new set of people to exploit and abuse and blame. That's right. To sort of maintain a status quo that works for you. And that's the whole Maha sort of pitch is that you can create a world that works for you by buying-- That's right. --this bidet and this probiotic supplement-- Just kidding, exactly. --from this particular guy. But let's talk about what you have in another bit of writing, talked of as polysolutions, sort of community-based, solidarity-based responses to this madness that we're talking about. Tell me about some of those. One thing that you've written about quite a lot and has been in the news quite recently is the publicly-owned grocery stores in New York City. Talk about that as a polysolution, if you would. Well, I mean, if you're really concerned, as Maha professes, at least in a couple of its moments, with the problem of food as medicine, right? If you recognize that food is medicine, then you wouldn't do what, in fact, it means father did, which was to advise the Nixon administration to cut food stamps. And you wouldn't be part of this administration's wholesale war on the poor. What you would do is make good, healthy food available and affordable to every American-- in fact, everyone in America, American or not. And that is what the Mandani administration is doing, both by raising wages. Because affordability-- affordable doesn't mean cheap. Affordable means you can afford it. And if your wages are higher, then you can pay down the line so that workers in the field are paid better as well. So higher wages are definitely part of the affordability puzzle. And that, by the way, is going to be very important as we confront over the next 18 months, the consequences of the war in Iran. We opened with that. And here's a government in New York City reading the writing on the wall. The writing on the wall is that we know 18 months from now, food prices are going to spike. And that's the perfect recruiting ground for the far right to blame immigrants and to blame the sat in the other one. You know, vicious and dark forces again to return to the sort of Maha fascist trope. But there's another way of doing this, which is to say, well, what we're going to do is have public grocery stores in the city. Now, what this means is not that these grocery stores somehow have to make enough money to be able to break even. In fact, that would be a disaster. And a lot of people are already preemptively saying, well, yeah, God, why would you have government run grocery stores? But what I like about the Mamdani experiment in New York City is that what it's trying to do is replicate the most successful government grocery store scheme that I know of, which is the US government grocery store scheme. If you don't like, if you think governments can't run grocery stores, then I, I'm fortunate, I have evidence that they can. The US government has 235 grocery stores on its bases around the world. The defense commissary system is run very well. It's so well, in fact, that in a consumer report survey of the hundred or so top brands in America, the commissary came seventh tied with Costco. And so, you know, if the government's good enough to be able to run things to the extent that people love it as much as Costco, the government can run grocery stores. It is running grocery stores and what it costs is $1.4 billion a year. That is the price for the defense commissary agency. And it's important to embrace and recognize that these stores run at a discount have to be paid for somewhere. And we pay for them in taxes because that's what a service is like. You know, you don't ask a library to run a run at a profit. And you shouldn't ask these public grocery stores to run at a profit either. What you should do is build a supply chain that makes sure that good healthy affordable food gets to the people who need it if you are serious about making America healthy again. And of course, as I've suggested, my heart isn't. I hate to date myself, but I was a child in the 70s. In the 70s, we have that like. It was wild. And in the 70s, we had an inflation crisis. That was very palpable that families that, you know, my family's income level felt very much. And we had a neighbor whose father was a military veteran and they were able to shop at the commissary, which was then at Berkstrom Air Force Base, which is now where the Austin Airport is. And this family, I never got to go to the commissary with them, but they loved it. They talked about how great their prices were. And it was this amazing sort of like institution that sort of helped their household get by this very difficult period when meat, you know, this is the era of hamburger helper where you put this industrial glock into your hamburger meat to extend it and stretch it out. And you know, this is the sort of things that families were doing and it really helped them. And I think that this is a great analogy. And our mutual friend, Errol Schweisser, is I think advising the mom Donnie team on this. And he is using, I know that he knows about that and is sort of mimicking it along those lines, which is fantastic. I also just realized that Rina Khan is on the board of this initiative. It's a development cooperation, that's right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it's funny, the outcome of the the mom Donnie initiative is sort of 75% the way to the defense commissary agency, which means that when it comes to public grocery, and this is Errol's line, the Department of Defense, the DODs to the left of the DSA. And that's because the DOD recognizes that actually, if you are going to do this properly in a way that is concomitant with the needs and demands of service people on bases, then you are going to have to eat some of the cost in and you are going to have to build out your supply chain. I'm not hearing that yet from the request for proposals that come out from the mom Donnie administration, but I very much hope that they recognize that New York City is already spending what, $500, $600 million a year on school meals and $100 million on feeding the unhoused. And this is quite a large budget for food. And if you add on top of that, five grocery stores, and in fact, if you scale it out so that as some counsellors in New York City, want you have five per borough, so 25 stores, you would be able to have a really good supply chain. And one that doesn't just bring in the sort of Nestlé's process crap, if we're serious again, to take the idea of my face value, if we want healthy food to be affordable, then you don't just want discounted ultra-process food. You want healthy food at decent prices for folk and you want their wages to go up. But that means you have to engineer the supply chain. You can't just sort of take whatever it is that you and FI or whatever CNS, your big wholesale chains offer you. You do need to create your own. And I think there's some real fantastic opportunities, particularly in New York State, which is such an agricultural powerhouse, to be able to bring healthy food into the city and build partnerships with red New York State to make sure that farmers are paid well, farm workers are paid well, and that people in New York City get to eat healthy food. But this is what a public health initiative looks like, not blood test monitoring and colon cleansing. But yeah, that's an excellent point about the scale, the food buying that happens at the municipal level in New York City and how they could really leverage that. And not just New York State, but New Jersey is a major producer of fruits and vegetables. You could be propping up local farms and proving wages among farm workers, et cetera, et cetera. Now, you know, I said before Raj, that your whole career has sort of been on the Polly Cross to speed in one way or another, but you've also always, from the very start, been on the Polly Solutions beat. You've just written and made films and documented so many projects across the globe in the United States and everywhere else of communities sort of banding together to create sort of food sovereignty, to create healthy food systems. I wonder if you could talk about a few of your favorites of those from your long career documenting that kind of thing? Well, you know, I mean, before I sort of leave the US and celebrate things outside the US, I mean, it is important to know that a mutual hero of ours Mike Davis observed that America, I mean, certainly the US was much more interested in the international scene and particularly the international left than it was after 9/11. I mean, before 9/11, you know, we had the, you know, alter globalization protests. We had the battle in Seattle in 1999 where you had unions from across the world coming and sort of collaborating and thinking about how they would work together and you had peasant movements from across the country and across the world meeting up and thinking about this idea of food sovereignty, which was still then still a five-year-old term is very, very new. But I think it's important just to recognize that there is a long history of American curiosity and learning from the rest of the world that has only recently started to sort of revivify particularly with protests around Palestine and an interest in the rest of the world, particularly as it becomes clear from within the US, as it is outside the US, the US is circling the toilet right now. And with that in mind, there are lots of places from which the US might learn. I was lucky enough to work with a group called Soils Food and Healthy Communities in Malawi and I did a documentary about them called The Apps and the Grasshopper, which was a story about how using agroecological farming about which you've talked on this podcast many times, it's possible to generate a really diverse set of nutritious food. But also to be able to change gender relations so that everyone gets to eat democratically. Because as we know, hunger is always gendered. There are more women and girls going hungry in the world today than men and boys and that's just because of gender inequality and patriarchy. And here's a village that managed to end that. And which is also combating climate change and the story of the film was, well, what happens when some of the women activists from that village come to the United States and confront us here with our sort of chauvinism around climate change. So we've got terrific examples about that. But often the pushback that you and I get is, well, you know, this is all very sweet. This will work on half an acre, but this can't possibly scale. How would you get millions of farmers to adopt this kind of policy? And for that, I, I'm really inspired by the work that's happening in an Indian state called Andra Pradesh, where, you know, it's a population about 50 million. And there are four million, five million farmers, one million of whom are already farming agroecologically. It was driven by women's concern of not being poisoned by pesticides. And they, you know, they noticed that in their exposure to pests, pesticides, they and their kids were much worse off. And what they want to do is wean themselves away from pesticide intensive farming. And they developed a series of experiments and processes to come up with and revivify an old Indian tradition called zero-budget natural farming. But the idea that the ideas that they've developed have gone far beyond any sort of traditional idea. And they have these amazing fields, like one of my favourites is something called the ATM farm, where you're planting 25 different crops. And the ATM means any time money, which is to say, at any given time, there's always something for you to take to the market and be able to sell. Whether it's flowers for the temple, or whether it's tubers, or whether it's rice, or whether it's something, there's always something to harvest. And that steady income stream has resulted in millions of people, well over a million, doing far better than their conventional agricultural counterparts. And this is the place that I would urge people to look at if they're saying, well, we can't possibly do anything because we're locked into a particular way of farming. If you look where agroecology is successful, it's successful in precisely the places that are the hungriest. And it's doing very well there. Yeah, a couple of observations on that. First of all, the scale that the fact that a million farmers are involved just reminds me that I think in the United States, after a century of policy and market forces pushing people out of farms, we have something like a million farms, maybe generously speaking 1.5 million farms. And so the entire U.S. population of farmers, or something close to it, is this scale you're talking about? And the second thing that I think about when I hear this is for so long, in the sort of, we can call it the neoliberal era of policy. The idea of, you know, a million, you know, 5 million farmers in a state of India is seen as a problem. And the idea is how do we get all these people off the land into urban areas where they can work on factories and be productive because they're unproductive farmers. And that has been sort of the development push. And what this is, this is a vision of if people have the option to stay on the land and do it in a way that A isn't poisoning them and B isn't impoverishing them, maybe they will choose to stay on the land and you're sort of instead of solving a problem that exists, you're generating a problem. And you just brought up Mike Davis, just sort of the promise of people getting kicked off the land and going into cities and getting productive jobs, never materialized in the global south in a grand scale. And so you had, you know, this is a root of the sort of mass poverty that we're talking about. So this is a very interesting example. Yeah, you know, I was doing research on this, interviewing people in Andra. And among the people I met were graduate returnees. And there were a couple who had like biology degrees. And then that they were very committed to being in rural areas. And then there's one guy with an MBA who was in the process of sort of process of a Chessante Maude of like refilling how he felt in the world. Because, you know, he had this ambition of, you know, going and making a gajillion dollars in the city. And it turned out that, you know, the odds of him doing that were incredibly small. And the opportunities for him were slim. And he was hungry and he couldn't find a job. And so he came back and started farming and was making way more money than he would have in the city. And he was just in the process of talking himself into being as happy as he could be, which is to say, you know, he thought the MBA would be his path to riches. And it wasn't. It was actually farming was his path to riches. And he was just in the process of that, that difficult psychological dance where you're like, I tried that and it didn't work. And I've still got this sort of vestige of a dream. But the more I think about it and the more I talk it through, the more I realize that actually this was, this was absolutely a fiction that I was sold. Whereas here with my family and, you know, with, you know, everyone that I love, I'm actually doing much better. And I mean, I think that there's a, there's a really interesting set of, of ideas of psychologies, of ways of reimagining the future that this kind of agroecological world opens up for us. And it's not necessarily the case that he's destined to remain on the farm forever. I mean, I think one of the interesting things about this, the agroecology situation in under Pradesh at the moment, is that it's still kind of farm based, right? Beyond the farm is still capitalism. And what they're trying to do now is think about the supply chain in the way that mum Donnie is to think about, well, what would it be like for us to make sure that this amazing food gets to the people who really need it and what the subsidy is going to look like and how are we going to make sure that, you know, that the margins are the right ones. And, you know, the kind of person you need for that is someone with an MBA. So it could be that he ends up being in that other world. But for now, agroecology is just on the farm, but the ambition is for it to be this broader social system that makes India healthy again. You know, to bring it back home, the idea of the, of people in this, in this state, you know, realizing that they're sort of being poisoned by the farming method that they've been, you know, convinced to adapt and trying something new reminds me of some recent work I've been doing in Iowa, where over the past three or four years in the data have emerged a cancer crisis where Iowa has suddenly emerged as the state with the fastest growing cancer rate as the state with now the second highest cancer rate in the United States. After Kentucky, one of only a small handful of states where the cancer rate is still rising and mostly the United States is leveled off in inching downward, although not among under 40s, that's a different story. And so you, you, and there's been lots of convincing evidence and I've written about it in New Republic and recently in political magazine that this is being caused by all the down agrochemicals going down and other sort of other, you know, aspects of industrial agriculture in its capital, which is probably the global capital of industrial agriculture is epicenter is Iowa. And it's literally making everyone sick and they're start people are starting to get fed up with it. And then you later on top of that, all the sudden fertilizer cost have gone sky high, pesticide prices are following, you know, petroleum for your sort of diesel for your tractors has gone way up and it's difficult to make a living and is everyone's getting sick. And if you talk to people from Iowa, everyone will tell you if they themselves don't have cancer or haven't had a bat with it, they know someone who has is just like out of control there. And I'm thinking that this might be the sort of conditions like, you know, the sort of industrial agriculture at the place that is sort of highest example of it, the most efficient example of it, most successful example of it, it really isn't working for the people participating in it. And I wonder if there's on an opening there for a different kind of agriculture to, to take root. And you know, we're starting to see it on the margins. But, but yeah, I mean, I think it's just another way that we in here in sort of epicenter of global capitalism can learn something from other parts of the world. I mean, the hard part of course is the organizing, isn't it? And that, I mean, it is true that organized people can beat organized capital, but there is, I mean, capital doesn't just sort of sit around and Twitter it's thumbs. I mean, the precisely the one of the symptoms of the poly crisis is the rallying of people to things like Mahar through, you know, social media, for instance. And these organs of consent and these, you know, these engines of bringing people together and generating antagonism are making it much, much harder to do the kinds of organizing that used to happen, door to door and, you know, based on trust and based on, you know, evidence. Now, we've got memes instead. And I think that that's, that that he's going to make it harder, particularly in the United States when people are so connected to social media to be able to actually build the trust that we need to be able to build social movement. It's not impossible. And of course, you know, the US has seen some of the best social movements. But again, you know, the civil rights movement wasn't built on social media. It was, you know, it was built through hard slogs and through churches and through sort of a fundamental commitment to justice. Much of that seems to have gone out the window. And so I, I don't want to underestimate quite how hard it's going to be in our, our, you know, we've all got friends there fighting the good fight and God knows we wish them well. But it, you know, to be able to fight this fight in the belly of the beast is going to be very, very hot indeed. Why don't we, why don't we wrap it up by talking a little bit about some of the recent developments in Brazil, where there is, it's also one of the, you know, after the United States is probably the number two region for industrial agriculture. But it also in recent years has put together some pretty progressive solidarity-based policies that have lifted a bunch of people out of hunger. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, the sort of counterfactual here, which is, look, Brazil also has so media and yet look what they did and what they did was over a decade lift themselves off the global hunger map, the UN hunger map where 2.5% of your population are undernourished. And Brazil was no longer on that map as of what 2017, 2018 to be on that. And then Bolsonaro comes, you know, swept in through a tide of reactionary social media and he dismantles all these policies that range from, you know, just putting money in people's pockets to popular restaurants and sort of government run restaurants. And he defunds them all. These popular restaurants now are sort of roach motels and people don't particularly want to go to them. Excuse me. But in the pandemic, social movements rallied around and recognized, look, actually, we have to feed our people. And they invented something called a "Cosino Solidaria", a solidarity kitchen where people could come and get meals for free and where, you know, the food was sourced from the landless rural workers movement and there was solidarity between rural areas and urban areas. And once, you know, Bolsonaro was kicked out, they institutionalized the solidarity kitchens so that they are public dining infrastructure where anyone can sign up to create these solidarity kitchens. And it's a really interesting public infrastructure. And you can tell it's public because it's not just left-wing social movements that are doing it. Right-wing social movements are also using the same law to feed their folk in this sort of public dining infrastructure. But all of which is to say, it is possible to organize in the teeth of all this. And it is possible, even in a place dominated by industrial agriculture as Brazil absolutely is, to be able to find spaces to be able to push back. And I think the social movement organizing in Brazil in rural areas, with the landless rural workers movement and in the urban areas, the MTSD is the movement of workers without roofs, so the unhoused workers movement, are doing some incredible work, you know, making sure that everyone gets to eat. And I think that, you know, the sort of big takeaway here is that we know how to end wild hunger. You know, Brazil didn't invent some new genetically modified crop. It didn't do, you know, there wasn't some bio-reactor, there wasn't sort of people's waffle house. What you have is a basic and decent social policy that makes sure that the working class get to eat. And there is a public supply chain that gets the food to them. And with a range of policies that ensure that agroecology, agroecologically food, grown food is paid a little bit more and mandates for a certain amount of local food to be in, you know, sold in schools by creating the markets for people to be able to sell their food into the food system in ways that are good for them and good for everybody else. Brazil gets to be made healthy again. Again, this is not an individualist approach. It is a socialist one. And that's what makes it work. So if we are interested in ending wild hunger, Brazil has fantastic policies. You don't need any of the sort of eco-modernist horseshit that we're being peddled at the moment. Instead, we've got very, very clear, very straightforward policy and all that's required is political will. And that's the secret ingredient that we need to be working on. All right. Well, I think on that note, we can wrap it up, although I could go on getting more examples from you for the rest of the day. But Raj, thank you so much for being on Unconfined. Always a pleasure. All right. Mike Milley is our sound engineer and producer theme music. Your hosts are me, Christine Grillo and Tom Philpott. Paulette O'Leary is our producer and Natalie Woodwright is the executive producer. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Johns Hopkins University or of the Center for a livable future.