Original subtitles

This is a moment that requires people to stay at home in the state of California.

Today, I'm issuing a stay-home, stay-safe order for all Michiganders.

- For all Ohioans. - Across Maryland.

- All Delawareans. - The entire state of Louisiana.

For the state of Illinois.

These can be very tough days.

All of us are safer at home.

Hi, Alice. How are you?

Oh, Ruth.

I mean, I keep thinking, it can't get any harder, and then it does.

I know, I know. It's such a frightening time.

It is, it's horrible.

So, Alice, I am working on this documentary

about the pandemic and what it's going to do to the food system.

I really can't send cameras to anyone or, you know...

- That's right. - This is what we're stuck with.

Yeah.

Um, I think that...

this is a disaster moment for the food system.

I would be surprised if more than half of the restaurants

were able to reopen at the end of this.

And, you know, I think the farmers are just planting

as if someday we're going back to normal.

And it's not going to be the same.

No, it's not.

The farmers may not sell all the food that they have.

And they may or may not find somebody else to take it.

I mean, we really need to rethink everything now,

I think, from the ground up.

COVID was the wake-up call.

The moment we couldn't ignore.

Our broken food system was exposed.

The abundance that we as Americans are used to could just go away.

It could all end.

I've been writing about food for 50 years,

trying to get Americans to care more about it.

Ruth Reichl, the revered restaurant critic for the New York Times...

Ruth Reichl, Gourmet magazine editor...

How we eat as a nation is important.

I mean, I think it's important to our children, I think it's important to the future.

And I think food is not just something you eat,

it's political and social...

Food is elemental to our survival,

but we take food and the people behind it completely for granted.

First I started talking to the independent restaurateurs I knew,

and then I reached out to independent farmers and ranchers.

Welcome to Bluffton.

Welcome to Spencertown. Can you hear me?

- Yeah. - Oh, good, hi.

- Hi. - Good morning, ma'am, how are you?

Can you take me through this whole pandemic process?

I was running numbers, and I'm like, I have to do something different.

My workers demanded answers that I didn't have.

The CEO of Tyson said the American food system Is breaking.

Yeah... he's right.

A lot of people are on the ropes, and things haven't been good anyway.

These folks are part of our family,

and we're going to put them on the unemployment line.

The chance of us as farmers surviving just,

you know, goes down every day.

Inexpensive food, at some point of the food chain,

someone is getting abused.

There's only one way out of that.

It's changing the systems that caused us to be

so lacking in resiliency when the pandemic struck.

They're all struggling, experimenting, doing whatever it took to survive.

Not that a paycheck is everything, but it's like, you know, what is your worth?

What's your value?

With so many of them in crisis,

I wanted to connect with those people directly.

- Hey. - Hi, Ruth.

How are you?

So, what's it like in Chinatown?

I mean, are you surrounded by restaurants that are closing?

Yeah, that's the saddest part about this neighborhood,

is, there's an eerie quietness in this neighborhood.

A lot of empty store fronts, a lot of closed restaurants.

Chinatown was the first to be affected.

People are scared to come to Chinatown.

Whether that's, you know, stereotypes or prejudices.

Just making fun of the virus in Chinese names

is depleting the stature of what this neighborhood had built.

But the hardest thing about this pandemic is that each business

has been having to handle this puzzle on their own.

I mean, it was particularly bad timing for you,

because you were just opening a restaurant.

Yeah.

I was already in survival mode, but that week leading up to the pandemic,

I was going from one to two locations, and I was really stretched thin.

Obviously, I'm not paying rent.

Hopefully my landlords won't kick me out.

But I'm the primary breadwinner of my family.

All of a sudden, I'm like, how do I take care of my own family

and then take care of all of these people?

And I just felt like I had failed everybody.

You can ask me questions while I do my hair.

Okay. So you just talked about the restaurant, how you pivoted.

I hate the word "pivot"!

I called my landlord and I said,

"Hey, I just want you to know that maybe we can't pay our rent next month."

"Can you please make sure everything's okay?"

And he's like, "It's not."

"My 80-year-old parents rely on this income."

- Yeah. - What the heck do you do?

And I'm like, there's no way I'm going to do what everyone's doing

and not pay their rent, if I can.

And, because he's an immigrant.

It's not them versus us.

It's not the-- maybe the banks a little bit, but...

Maybe the banks a little bit, yeah.

You know, if this is the foreseeable future, will you be okay?

Uh... I don't think Porridge & Puffs

is going to look like what it was, and I don't expect it to.

This is day one, minute one, brand-new business.

- Take care, enjoy cooking. - Thank you.

I don't think you sent me a Venmo.

No, I did, you must've been on, I just sent it.

Oh, okay.

When I was growing up,

most people just didn't pay much attention to food.

Today, food is as important as art and books and movies and music.

It is a huge part of popular culture.

People often ask me today if I think there's too much emphasis on food.

And you know what?

My answer is no. There was too little.

You've heard of the art of cooking.

Well, here's an artist at work.

When I was growing up,

it was probably the only time in human history

where people willfully chose not to pay attention

to where their food came from,

how they were eating, what it meant to their bodies.

The consequences have been horrendous.

I didn't mean to be unkind to mother,

but she did spend an awful lot of time in that kitchen.

Frankly, I had better things to do with my time.

Back in the '50s, advertising began to sell us the idea

that cooking should be quick and convenient.

Just reach for a can, 3 minutes to heat, and it's ready to eat.

You'll be dancing with joy when you serve Brown Beauty Spanish Rice.

If there were health consequences, nobody was thinking about it.

Efficiency was everything.

But in the 1960s on public television,

Julia Child came along and began teaching

a fairly small, rebellious audience how to cook like the French.

Cutting down this way and cutting across, do practice this method.

It does take a little practice, takes you about a week or so to learn.

It was a direct response to the idea that American food was terrible.

I mean, everybody talked about, "Oh, America,

the land of hamburgers and hot dogs, the land of fast food."

And Julia Child comes along and says, "No, Americans can cook great food."

"They just have to learn the technique."

And then you have Alice Waters come along,

and there's a revolution against that revolution,

which is, you cannot make great food if you don't have great ingredients.

I mean, Alice says, "Garbage in, garbage out."

You want great food in America, it's not about technique, it's about the quality of the food.

Just a second, I'm going to move over here so I can lean back on the couch.

I'm going to make you jealous.

Oh, oh, my God. You-- I am very jealous.

There is not a-- The best I can do is rhubarb.

Are you thinking of reopening at some point?

Well, the restaurant's just not big enough.

God, it makes me so sad.

- I mean, we have bathrooms that are big as the closet. - That's true.

I mean, the tables are very close together.

We've been making farm boxes, because, for me,

the big, big issue is keeping all of our purveyors alive.

When all of these restaurants start to close,

it will close other parts of other industries, as well.

Our order this week for produce was the smallest it's ever been.

Those are relationships that I have with farms that are over ten years,

and it sucks to not be able to support them.

It's so bleak.

You don't walk away from a farm.

You can't put farms on furlough.

It's kind of like a relationship.

You can't just ignore them for two months or three months

and then walk back in and expect to be greeted fondly.

The very first farmers I called were Lee and Bob Jones at Chef's Garden,

because I know that

almost their entire business is selling to restaurants,

so this had to be brutal for them.

So, what have the last few weeks been like for you?

You know, we're underwater. We lost a lot of money in March.

Home delivery, I think, is a good move, but we're starting from zero.

How are we going to handle this?

What decisions are we going to make

to protect our team physically, emotionally, financially...

You haven't had to throw anything out, have you?

We're planting literally every day,

and so those products, right after the restaurants closed down,

that product just kept coming and coming and coming.

You know, there was definitely a period there where there was

a lot of dumping.

But if we're going down, we're going to go down fighting.

I began thinking about what might be happening out there

to the small, independent ranchers,

the ones who supply meat to our restaurants and supermarkets.

And then I came across a rancher from Kansas.

He was all over social media,

talking about the challenges that were facing his community.

You know, the state of the cattle business

has turned into more than just a cattle business problem.

It's turned into a United States economics problem.

Good morning, ma'am, how are you?

I'm very well, thank you. If you could tell me the story

of COVID for you, it would be great.

Okay. Uh...

We're starting to back the cattle up.

You've seen on TV, I'm sure, and everywhere,

of disposing of milk and hogs.

And we're probably not far from that in the cattle part.

You have this huge discrepancy now.

You've got record beef prices.

So the consumer's paying twice what they were 60 days ago,

and you have a packer that's making a billion dollars a week processing cattle,

while all the producers are going broke.

It sounds like the Big Four packers,

the meat processors, have too much control?

Exactly. The packers got so big,

and the monopolization of processing plants so common,

that if you take two of them offline,

all of a sudden we have a meat shortage,

when there's no shortage of food here.

We could feed a small country right now with what we're wasting.

- Absolutely. - But our system is so specialized

that any kink and we're in trouble.

I think that will eventually bite us.

The majority of mass agriculture in the United States

is all about how cheaply can you produce it.

And that's what's gotten us to where we are.

Other countries can't spend per capita what we do

on entertainment and vehicles and housing,

because they're spending it on food.

- Right. - You know.

For the last 50 years we've thrown agriculture under the bus

as the bargaining tool for everything America thought

the other countries ought to be doing.

Coming out of World War II,

there was a very conscious decision on the part of the American government

to make food political.

They had a huge stockpile of ammunition left over from World War II.

They decide to convert it into fertilizer.

There is a deep encouragement to replace the animals on the farm with machines.

There's privileging of efficiency, the factory model,

and there is a whole notion that one way we can fight communism

is by having the cheapest and most abundant food on earth.

We had an arms race and a farms race.

You plan to outstrip us,

particularly in the production of consumer goods?

Nixon actually had what were called

the "kitchen cabinet conversations" with Khrushchev.

He took him through supermarkets,

and this notion is, "Look at what we have in this country."

Nixon's secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz,

actually said to the farmers, "Get big or get out."

We're going to make this industry pay.

P-R-O-F-I-T.

He encouraged them to take out huge loans

to buy combines and expensive equipment.

And they did.

Then, in the early '80s, the overproduction of food,

combined with enormous farm debt and high interest rates,

caused farmer after farmer across the middle of America to go bankrupt.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Bless us, O Lord, and these our gifts,

which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Oh, there you are.

Oh. Hi! Hi!

I don't do much video conferencing,

and I usually choose not to do the video, because I'm just kind of shy, I guess, I don't know.

No, I totally get that.

So, tell me what COVID has been like for you.

The markets took a hit, but they're crappy anyway.

So, you know, it's just one more thing.

So, what do you grow?

Well, we grow corn and beans.

And, in 2013, we put wheat into our rotation.

And we've done Sudan for forage for cattle,

because we just know we have to get an income source other than corn and soybeans.

Because it doesn't pay.

Farming economics for the last eight years has been stressful.

We're at cost of production or less.

We're buying land, we're buying equipment.

It's a half a million dollars, almost,

for some of these combines and tractors.

We've got bills up to here. I mean, we are highly leveraged.

So we're transitioning acres into organic.

But you'll get more for organic.

Yes, but the hard part is that 36 months of transition.

It's a nightmare.

Right, yeah, 36 months of no money.

Right, and tell your banker that.

We go every year to the bank to renew our ag loan.

And it's only from beginning of the year to the end.

And it's like, there's no, there's no flow in between years,

where soil health needs that.

Transition to organic needs that.

So, do you have animals as well?

Just kids.

Agricultural economics is totally upside-down.

So, the majority of farmers in the United States go to the bank every winter,

and they borrow operating capital so that they can buy seed and fertilizer

and all of the inputs that they'll need to grow their crops.

They farm all year and hope they can make enough at the end of the year

to pay that note back and hope that the lending institution

will do it again next year.

Over, and over, and over, and over.

And in our history, that's exactly what happened to us.

It was Economics 101 in the '80s.

We lost the family farm in '83.

I mean, everything, it was an auction,

and everything right down to my mom's car and our home

were auctioned off in a foreclosure.

And it was survival mode.

Unfortunately right now feels eerily, eerily like that.

It's a stupid business. Nobody else does that.

I mean, go to any financial advisor and say, "All right,

I'm going to risk $8 million this year,

and I'm going to work 100 hours a week for a $50,000 return."

I mean, they're going to tell you you're an idiot.

I mean, the more I report this documentary,

the more I feel that the finances of farmers

are at the crux of so much of what's going on in this country.

The degree of risk that these folks take on is staggering.

Like, we get...

You know, we're talking about forgiving student loan debt, right, as a way of like,

you know, recognizing that the economy has been stacked against people

who've graduated in the past couple of years,

and that it's a real drag on economic growth.

Oh, my God, you know how much farm debt's out there?

Those folks are part of a food production system.

They deserve to be able to make a living doing what they're doing.

That's a choice.

We made a conscious decision to favor agribusiness interests,

as opposed to investing in the people that were on the land.

If you ask how many farmers are actually able to make a living just from farming?

It's almost no one. Almost no one.

If, if you're generous, it would be about seven percent of farmers.

You just have to think about that.

You know, what economic sector would sustain

with only seven percent of them being able to make positive revenue?

- How are you? - How we doing, Chef?

- Good to see you. - I'll show you...

- Hey, Marcus. - How are you, dear?

You can tell, quickly, what business is in Harlem,

but not of Harlem, right?

I'll show you the difference.

If you're in Harlem, it's just boarded up with plywood, right?

If you're of Harlem, there's art on your gate.

So, in and of.

- Ready to go. - How you doing, Chef?

- What's up man, what's going on? - That's the chef.

You have restaurants all over the world, right?

"Had" is the key word there.

It took me 25 years to build this.

It took ten days to break it all down.

When people said, Ruth, everybody's left New York City,

I find it almost disrespectful.

People have not left.

Do you need another mask?

Yeah, I could use another one.

There are deli workers, nurses,

homeless people, people with mental illnesses.

And on top of that, every day, Harlem gets busloads of homeless,

or people that are incarcerated, and just get dropped off on 125th street.

I mean, it's, it's horrendous.

Do you want some food?

- I got some. - You got some, good.

One of the things that I'm looking at is,

in 1920, 19% of the farms in America were Black-owned.

Now it's like one percent.

- Wow. Do you know this amazing woman, Karen Washington? - No.

She's fierce. You'll love her.

Ten to one.

And if they don't come, it's donated to La Finca.

All right. Let's make sure everybody got their order.

One red Russian kale six-pack.

- Uh-huh. - You got the parsley?

- Yes. - Chives?

Yes. This will do good in shade.

Enjoy, and take us some pictures and send them to us.

When I moved to the Bronx, I had a huge backyard, and I decided, you know what?

Let me try and grow some food.

I started with green peppers and tomatoes,

and it was the tomato that changed my world completely.

Because prior to that, tomatoes were always pink, they were never red.

They tasted like cardboard.

And so when I grew this tomato, first of all,

I was mesmerized that it grew on a vine.

That it was red? What?

And when I picked it and I bit into it, it just rocked my world.

The taste was so intense, so sweet, and I was hooked.

COVID hit communities of color so hard,

because of the preexisting diet-related diseases that we've had.

The high incidence of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, obesity.

I've been on this journey, getting politicians and people to understand

the importance of growing food, and why it's so important,

especially in low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, to do so.

When you talk about food desert, you're not getting the underlying problem

when it comes to race and economics and demographics.

And when you talk about food apartheid, people start to listen.

It's important that we look at our food system to see who's growing the food.

Who are the farm workers, who are the farmers?

Because out of 57,000 farmers in New York state,

only 139 are Black.

- Oh, my God. - You tell me, you tell me what I'm fighting for.

And so we can't talk about a sustainable, equitable food system,

if we're not in it.

In the early 1900s,

there were more Black farms than there were white farms.

96% of land-owning farmers are white.

And they control 97% of land.

So you essentially have a system that is structurally racist

because of the way that

the federal government intervened

to first of all appropriate that land

and then distribute it.

The vast majority of African American farmland lost

has been in the 20th century.

It's happened since 1950, right?

So this is not ancient history, this is current history.

This is very real to people who were

on the land.

They're still alive, those people.

I mean...

we have never had the reckoning within our country that we need.

And we certainly haven't had it within agriculture.

As part of the New Deal, everybody got the right

to the minimum wage for the first time, except for groups of Black workers.

Farm workers, domestic workers, and tipped restaurant workers who were told

you get a zero dollar wage, as long as tips bring you to the full minimum wage.

And we went from zero in 1938 to $2.13 81 years later.

Prior to the pandemic, the restaurant industry

was the second-largest and absolute fastest-growing sector of the US economy.

But it was also the absolute lowest-paying employer.

Every year, the seven lowest-paying jobs would be in the restaurant industry,

and the eighth-lowest would be farm workers.

So, part of what you're seeing in the protests

is a lot of unemployed service workers out there.

I mean, George Floyd himself was an unemployed restaurant worker,

and there are

a ton of our people

fighting for their lives.

It is about police brutality, and it's about so much more.

After emancipation, employers first demanded the right to hire newly freed slaves

and not pay them anything and have them live entirely

on this new notion that had just come from Europe at the time called a tip.

And it really was slavery that mutated this idea of tipping,

not as a bonus or an extra on top of a wage, but rather the wage itself.

Because there was a desire to hire Black people, in particular Black women,

actually, at the time, not pay them anything, and have them live on tips.

But I think the surprising thing is,

we are seeing dramatic new willingness

of lots and lots of independent restaurants to totally change their business models.

I get my affinity for fighting against any kind of injustice from my mom.

When we were made fun of in school, she would, like, teach folks about Arab culture.

And she always made sure that anyone who came through our household was fed.

My grandmother was the same way.

And I started to see the virtue of Arab hospitality.

You are trying to use this time

to figure out another way.

Yes. Exactly.

It was really scary.

Our sales plummeted,

and lack of tips was a huge blow to my workers

when we stopped our restaurant operations.

My employees formed a collective to, like,

demand answers from management, but also, I think, to take care of each other.

So I was like, how do I take care of my workers

so that they're better off from this whole debacle than they were before?

And the only answer to me was worker ownership.

I'm fascinated and admiring of your efforts

to share the ownership of your business with your employees.

Living your principles in your work life is really difficult.

I mean, as I told you,

I've sort of come out of this movement

and sort of watched it happen in the '70s.

In 1973, we put everything we owned, including our cat,

into a big green van and drove out to Berkeley.

You know, it was all these counterculture people.

And after the Vietnam War movement, we started looking

for the next cause, because we felt like we'd made an impact.

And so, what do we see?

We see that American food is becoming industrialized.

It wasn't really new.

But what we were seeing now were the environmental costs

and the exploitation of labor and agriculture.

People started protesting.

Everyone I knew was reading Diet for a Small Planet.

And there was this new consciousness about limited resources.

I started cooking at a restaurant collective called The Swallow.

I was writing occasional

little pieces for New West--

where to go to get ice cream and things like that.

And one of my editors said, "Have you ever thought about being a restaurant critic?"

And I looked at him and said, "Don't be ridiculous."

"I don't even have a credit card."

"What do you mean, be a restaurant critic?"

And he said, "Just give it a try."

I went home to my commune and said to everyone, "We're going out to eat."

So, for the next six years at New West magazine,

I just wrote short stories with the review kind of threaded through it.

And then the LA Times called me and said, "We want you to be our restaurant critic."

And I was like, Oh, maybe this is my real life.

I first met Alice in 1973.

I thought she was the most glamorous, exciting creature.

I lived in a commune in a broken-down old house.

We were kind of scruffy, and Alice always felt, to me,

like, kind of, I guess, the person I wanted to be.

And then we did become friends.

The way we've always worked has been collaboratively.

For 50 years, we've been buying directly

from the farmer and the rancher,

giving the farmer all the money.

No middleman.

Because when we said to Bob Cannard,

"We're buying everything you do,

you'll have all the money that we would give to a wholesaler,"

it was that that really changed us.

Because we followed his cycle, not ours.

And once we got in his rhythm, we've never looked back.

And he brought all the values right through the kitchen door.

To think that that biodiversity is out there,

it's just waiting for us.

You grew up in Newfoundland, right?

- Yeah. - How'd you end up in New Haven?

Uh, I chased a girl.

So, how did you come up with the notion of doing kelp?

What we did was ask the ocean,

what does it make sense to grow?

And when you ask the ocean what to grow, the ocean says,

"Grow things that won't swim away and you don't have to feed."

As soon as you make that shift, you listen to the ocean,

it becomes really pretty simple and you've got a lot of different crops you can grow.

So kelp is the ultimate specialty boutique food right now, right?

And we're repurposing our crops to non-food.

The bioplastics for N95 masks.

- Oh, yeah. - Made out of seaweed.

But that's the sort of "don't let a crisis go to waste," right?

I believe in polyculture because that allows for resilience.

That quadrant farm, where we're harvesting food,

we're harvesting byproducts, so things that are not food-grade.

We're harvesting data, and we're harvesting carbon and nitrogen.

And all of those are different crops.

You have a crop fail, you've got many, many different things

you can sell year-round, right?

I'm going to move a little bit.

Dad's last operating note at the bank was 24% interest.

And then, he was starting to see that it was taking

greater and greater amounts of inputs to produce less and less outputs.

So, at the same time he was getting his economic lesson,

he was getting this agronomic lesson in soil health.

40 years later, we understand that model of economics, and we don't want any part of it.

We're a 12-month operation, so we've been able to cash flow without an operating note,

just because that we're selling 12 months of the year.

We met this guy by the name

of Jean Louis Palladin,

who said, basically,

"I yearn for the produce of Europe,

because your produce here tastes like nothing!"

And he said, "There are enough of us chefs that will support you

if you do this the right way, because it will taste good."

We are indebted to him forever,

for hurting our feelings so badly.

He's one of the ones we all really miss.

Absolutely. But he started a revolution.

What we didn't understand was,

as we researched how do we grow really great-tasting vegetables,

we had no idea that we were bringing nutrition along for the ride.

And the medical community is taking note of our work

and the work of many, many other regenerative farms,

who are growing healthy crops

and raising the body's ability to defend itself from disease.

I often wonder what our country would look like

had we made a different choice in 1948.

What if we had decided we were going to have the most nutritious food?

From 1940 to 2000, we've lost 40% of the nutritive value

of the food we grow in this country.

Now, we have the highest per capita spending of healthcare

of any industrialized nation in the world,

because we have the lowest per capita spending

on food of any industrialized nation in the world.

The big picture is that what this system has been generating

has been sanctioning the concentration of wealth

in the very few large monopolies

and sanctioning the production of junk food,

which happens to be very profitable for the food industry

but horrible for the health of the entire population.

After World War II, chain restaurants began to proliferate.

Everybody loved them, but they used

inexpensive labor and low-quality ingredients

that came straight out of the industrialized farming system.

These fast-food corporations made huge profits

offering cheap food, and they became symbols of American culture.

We exported them all over the world.

COVID revealed the fragility of independent restaurants.

One in five look likely to close,

and I worry that the chain restaurants are going to gobble up the real estate.

The workload seems already better.

What do you guys think?

I feel like...

It feels like it's the same.

They had all sacrificed and been in quarantine, never got out of quarantine.

And then we had to compete with places opening.

I talked to my team, I said, like, "This isn't working, we're not going to survive."

And that's the first time I felt that, ever.

You know, I think I've been in the system so long

where I just have to be like, you have to be humble.

You have to just work twice as hard and charge half as much,

because you're a woman and you're an immigrant.

And they're just like, "Oh, my God, we've all worked in fine dining."

"You would charge $40 for this."

"And we need to, because you're not being fair to us."

"You expect us to work all the stations,

do all the things, and then you charge $13?"

"Like, come on," and I think it's a culture where people

really don't want to pay a lot for food.

But I don't know that you can have your standards and try and do cheap food.

I mean...

I mean, because you're using really high-quality ingredients.

Your food is very labor intensive.

Should I just become a fine dining restaurant?

I mean, this is... I mean, this is...

I think you have the answers for me, Ruth.

Uh...

Maybe you should, um... and then the question is,

are people going to go to fine dining restaurants?

I mean, a lot of the fine dining chefs I'm speaking to

are saying, "I don't think I'm going to reopen as a fine dining restaurant."

I mean, it just doesn't seem to make sense in this particular moment.

You can't really be defensive right now,

and you can't wait for the cavalry to come.

You have to scale it to a point

where it's like you're feeding an army for it to work out.

I started going like, "Hey, what are we going to do for Thanksgiving?"

We paid up and bought a couple thousand turkeys.

I mean, how many pounds of stuffing are you going to make, Grant?

- Uh, five thousand. - Are you serious?

Five thousand pounds of stuffing?

I mean, I think thinking the way you do is frightening to people.

You're taking a lot of risks.

I disagree. So there's like...

There's risk and then there's being risky.

So, I guess you're taking risk, but risk is like,

you used it in a pejorative way, right, like risk is bad.

No, I'm, I'm not.

I mean, I think what I'm learning

in all this reporting I'm doing is,

I'm starting to understand risk.

I mean, farmers, more than anybody, I mean,

for their whole lives it's about managing risk.

That's why they're so great to deal with.

- Because they understand it intuitively. - Yeah.

So, right after this, I've actually got a phone call

with a really forward-thinking farm.

White Oak Pastures, it's in Georgia.

They're a carbon-negative farm.

I called them last week with no reason.

Like, I made up a reason to call them, because I was in a bad mood.

And I was just like, "I need to talk to somebody positive right now."

Completely the cultural opposite of where we live,

and yet, like, I'm like, why is someone

not making a documentary about these people?

I mean, I'd like to get those south, catch them in the triangle.

And then shoot them down, maybe to Bermuda Bend.

I'll check with Tyler to make sure their fencing ain't going to be in the way.

I wanted to talk to you about, what got you on this path,

and whether it's possible for other people.

You know, 25 years ago, I didn't say, "The food system is not resilient,

I think I'll work on making it resilient."

That did not happen.

I am the fourth generation of my family

to raise animals on this farm in Bluffton, Georgia.

And my father started the process of industrializing,

commoditizing, and centralizing this farm.

I farmed that way for 20 years.

In the mid-'90s,

I found that I had become disillusioned

with the excesses of that farming system.

So I started just very gradually moving away from it.

For me, the first canary in the coal mine

was animal welfare.

Really, it's incumbent upon me, as the herdsman,

to give the animals the opportunity to express instinctive behavior.

And you can't do that in the confinement model.

These cattle out here, walking and grazing is instinctive behavior.

Those chickens right there, scratching and pecking is instinctive behavior.

Those hogs in that swamp over there that's rooting and wallowing,

that's instinctive behavior.

Over a 20-year period, the organic matter in our soil

has gone from about half a percent to five percent.

And by the way, all that carbon came from greenhouse gasses that used to be up there,

that got, through photosynthesis and microbial activity and animal activity,

got marooned in the soil.

I saw my land go from a dead mineral medium

to an organic medium that's teeming with life.

Everything is tied to everything else.

I don't think of this farm as a factory.

I think of it as an organism.

We're at a turning point in this business, as far as I'm concerned.

It is a broken pricing system.

Call where you do business

and ask them to call the senators and representatives.

Sign that petition, stand up for your rights. We are bringing attention to it.

So, if there is one thing you could explain

to the American consumer about your business, what would it be?

I would like the American consumer to understand that

the person that does all the work and has all the investment

is doing it literally for nothing, and the middlemen are getting all the money.

The system's so monopolized.

This packer takes these yards,

and this packer takes this area of this state.

And nobody else comes in and messes with them.

I mean, how would it work, in your dream world?

I would like them to break up the Big Four, like we did in 1917.

I would like to start with the two that are majority foreign-owned.

I want government to police a level playing field.

Then let us fight it out on the economies of scale and efficiency among ourselves,

and let the best people win and stay in business.

That's America.

Perhaps the most important person

for the continued sustainability and viability of American agriculture

and the welfare of the American farmer

is not the Secretary of Agriculture, but is in fact

who is in the Department of Justice and their antitrust regulatory unit.

That person is going to matter a lot as to whether or not we get an ever more concentrated,

more consolidated food system,

or start paying farmers more fairly for the products that they produce.

I would like to have smaller beef plants every 300, 400 miles.

If one went down, it would be two, three percent of the daily slaughter, not 15%.

I would like producers to own those packing plants.

I think that would be better for states and communities and producers.

Do you still have to depend on the big packing companies?

Well, ultimately I made the choice

to build slaughterhouses on my farm,

which at that time was unheard of.

I was blessed, I had equity, I was left the farm, I was not hand-to-mouth.

So I could lose money for a while, and I did.

And now I have about $7.2 million invested

in further processing infrastructure.

You know, the front side of my card says,

"land steward and herdsman."

It don't say "meat processor," cuz I don't like that part.

It don't say "marketer," cuz I don't like that part.

So... but I'm all those things.

How big do you envision White Oak Pastures becoming?

What we do here is not highly scalable.

But it's highly replicatable.

There could and should be one or two or three White Oak Pastures

in every agricultural county in this country.

It's an amazing thing that you do,

where you train people to farm the way you do.

So I believe in scale, but it's not scale through size, it's scale through replication.

What made you start GreenWave?

I was doing well with kelp,

and so GreenWave was the way to just create this organization,

which is built on sharing, on building knowledge networks.

Our backs are against the wall, we have to innovate.

We've got a program called Project GreenWave,

where we hire inner-city kids to package, cook, process all of our food.

They learn about 3D farming, they learn about sustainability.

I was getting pressured to become, like, the kelp king, right?

And everybody was like, "franchise your model,"

and, like, all these sharks from Wall Street were coming

and telling me that there was huge opportunities.

And, I mean, what's my metric to success?

It's having 10,000 climate resilient farmers on the ocean.

Like, that'll make me die happy.

It started out, this little kind of tiny, you know,

we're training eight, ten farmers a year,

southern New England, really small, so that's what it was going to be.

And then 8,000 people signed up for farmer training on the website.

When people think regenerative ocean farming, hopefully this would be their starting place.

It's really interesting, because every restaurant in America

is complaining that they can't get workers,

because people just don't want to do bad jobs anymore.

I mean, God forbid we gave people a taste of agency

and beauty.

Right? Whoops!

Like, wow, that's really too bad.

There are a lot of people who are questioning,

do they want to go back to things the way they used to be,

and you're offering an alternative.

And it's so funny, people from all over the industry are emailing me,

like all of a sudden I've become like an expert on co-ops, and I'm not.

You know, I'm just learning.

I have to figure it out, so that other people can follow suit.

But people are interested.

Food is a gateway for learning about so many things,

from culture to the way that communities have survived,

to the way that we build community.

And it really wasn't just about feeding myself, I learned.

It was about feeding others.

It was like in feeding others that I felt satiated.

Restaurants are more than just restaurants.

We are these third spaces that are just more than a transaction.

I love restaurants, I hope they continue to exist.

But I feel like a lot more people have to reimagine what hospitality looks like.

The, like, true meaning of the word.

My parents didn't care about food,

but they loved restaurants.

We went out to eat a lot.

My father was German, and he was 26 when he came to America.

We lived near Luchow's,

and we went to Luchow's at least once a week when I was growing up.

And I saw with that that it was how my father went home.

My father's office was above one of those little French restaurants

in New York called the Dubonnet.

And we had a waiter, Max, who was our waiter,

and my parents were always in a good mood when we went there.

Max would take me into the kitchen

and get me to learn what spices tasted like.

And that was just a place that I loved and felt really happy in.

And my mother was enchanted with Restaurant Associates' Joe Baum.

Joe Baum was the great maestro of American restaurants in the '50s and '60s.

I mean, he invented the Four Seasons restaurant,

the Twelve Caesars, La Fonda del Sol.

He redid the Rainbow Room. I mean, he did these restaurants as drama.

Joe Baum is the one who brought the large peppermill to the table,

and also is responsible for, "Hi, my name is..."

He was a showman, and my mother loved his restaurants.

And we couldn't afford to go to places like the Four Seasons,

but we would go and have a drink,

and then we would go to the Automat or something for dinner afterwards.

So I thought of restaurants as places that connected you to home,

places where people were happy,

and places that gave you a chance to be someone else for a while.

I mean, I watched my mother walk into the Four Seasons, and she was just...

you know, she was a rich woman for a little while.

The funny thing is,

when I got to the New York Times as a restaurant critic,

my job was actually to eat at many of these expensive places.

I wanted to keep my identity a secret,

so I invented various personalities.

This is not the real Ruth that we're seeing.

No, I actually do not have carrot-red hair.

When you go to restaurants as a critic, are you disguised?

- Yes, but-- - All the time? - Not all the time.

When I first got to New York, I went to Le Cirque.

And everybody went there, all the ex-presidents went there, it was a big scene.

I wrote one review as the restaurant critic

of the New York Times, and what happens,

and I wrote another review as Ms. Nobody.

He had had four stars. I took a star away.

I said, "The food was very good, but you cannot treat people that way."

There's still this voice inside me saying,

"Yeah, but all you're really doing is telling rich people where to go eat."

And, um, if I had thought

that was all I had done with my life, it would make me very sad.

When my husband's dad was farming,

they did the oats and the wheats and the pearl millets.

And we just got away from it.

And using chemistry to take care of our weed problems.

So, I'm guessing that you were the one who wanted to go organic.

Yes, it makes all the sense in the world.

It's just, it's very scary, because we don't farm like that.

Well, you were ahead of your time.

I don't know if my family thought so.

- I got a list. - A list?

I do.

Okay, so last year,

the field that had the greatest contribution margin

was the organic.

The field that had one of the lowest yields was the organic.

So it's not all about yield.

My husband and I struggle a lot, because he's a numbers man,

and it's all about yield, and how much money you're going to make.

Whereas like, well, maybe if you got your soils in a little better condition,

you would get that yield that you want.

It was bad, I can tell.

It didn't tank.

It wasn't perfect.

Okay, next thing.

It takes time,

and that's a huge problem with farmers,

that they want everything in that one-season window,

and it doesn't work that way with soil health.

The only thing I was wanting to bring up was goals.

Because I don't think we're all on the same page in that, and I think it'll help.

It's a tough road. We've had a lot of heated discussions.

We would not be organic if I hadn't done it myself.

I planted the field.

I mean, I made sure it got in that year.

You know, it's their name that gets run through the mud if things go bad.

It's not the wives, it's the guy.

They can't separate themselves, where we can go hide in our kitchen.

This is a family business, but it's not just our family.

You know, we have 120 families that I'm responsible for.

And we have an amazing crew of seasonal staff,

many whom have been with us for over 25 years.

And I have been keenly aware

of attempts at immigration reform over the past 30 years.

H-2A is a visa program we use here on the farm,

and it is the only legal avenue we have

for seasonal agricultural workers in the United States.

Americans will not do this work.

We're either going to have foreign folks

and allow them to come in and do this type of work,

or we'll round up all 11 million undocumented,

we'll send them all back, we'll seal up the border,

and then we will import all of our food,

from where the wage is $6 to $8 a day.

And then we compete with that here.

That model doesn't work.

Society has to make some of these choices.

Are we willing to pay more for quality food that we know is grown right,

and socially responsible, or not?

So, what's important? Make a choice.

Families lined up to get fresh farm food outside of the Maplewood YMCA yesterday.

It's all part of a program through the USDA.

And the hope is to ease the pandemic's burden on families,

and getting farmers' produce where it's needed.

The USDA Farm to Families Program right now

is providing an unbelievable help on cash flow.

If we had not gotten those contracts, we would have had to furlough more people.

This is buying time to allow the restaurants to come back.

We're waiting to see if we get a renewal on the new program.

I can't imagine you won't.

Until I have that contract in my hand, I'm not sleeping well.

So if you don't get the contract, will you have to furlough people?

Yes.

You're on hiatus for a bit.

We're not opening, you know, the doors to our place,

you know, we don't have an outdoor space.

But I actually have something really exciting to share.

We're looking at an outdoor venue to do a pop-up. Come on and follow me.

Once they're in here, there'll be someone here to give them their amuse and their cocktails.

Remind them not to mingle with other people.

So that's our dining room.

You guys follow me, this is where we're going to meet.

I do want to be more grown-up than Porridge & Puffs.

I do want it to be a tiny little bit more formal.

But we have to be warm.

Never, ever, ever be aloof.

I love fine dining, but my biggest complaint is, it's always so sterile.

We can be cerebral and smart and warm at the same time.

Let me ask you a practical question.

Sure, yes.

How do you get more farms

by Black people in New York state?

Okay, easy question.

I tell people, give us three things.

Give us the opportunity to farm,

give us the land to farm,

give us the capital and resources to farm.

Where I farm now, the Chester Agricultural Center, perfect example.

My farm, Rise & Root Farm, we have three acres of land.

We grow food, we have farm tours, we have school groups.

People from the city come up to see four women--

two are women of color, two are white, three of us are LGBTQ women.

And so we run the gamut of what America looks like.

I run a low-income farmer's market in the Bronx.

We're going into our 19th year.

And it took a long time, first of all,

to build trust with the people in my neighborhood,

because in a low-income neighborhood,

there is the soup kitchens and food pantries,

the fast food, the processed food, the junk food.

Then I had to educate that I'm the farmer, I grew the food,

and I have to pay bills, and I have to feed my family,

and I have to buy the seeds.

And so there's a cost and value of food.

Because no one talks to them about that.

I mean, the costs are going to be huge

if we plant the product and the restaurants aren't ramped up.

It's a matter of trying to time... you know?

Well, we're going to plant as if they are open,

and if they're not open, we're going to take it on the chin.

Last time we spoke, you were waiting to hear whether or not

you were going to get back into the Farmer to Families Program.

- Mm-hm. - Did you?

- No. - You're kidding.

No.

USDA came in and said, "the only box offer that we'll take is a combination box."

Sysco got 32 states. Yeah, all the small guys got shut out.

The fresh produce that they're getting in the boxes that I saw

were a bag of apples and a bag of potatoes.

They were getting fresh, leafy greens from us. So we're out.

But this is supposed to be bailing farmers out.

I mean, it's not supposed to be bailing Sysco out.

- Right. - Things are driving me crazy, I'm taking them off.

You know, we were really counting on that contract,

to do what the program really intended.

Farm to Families Food Box Program.

Help the farm, help those families...

and then they changed it.

In this last round of food boxes,

if you do not include the letter from Donald Trump

and the White House in the box, you don't get paid.

- No. - The letter has to be included in the box.

It's a disaster.

We were counting on that, so we planted up for that.

We have to make a decision as to how much to leave in the field.

We cannot spend the dollars, because we don't have them right now, to harvest that

and store it and then throw it away.

We have several million people in New York City alone that are going to bed hungry.

And here we are just a handful of hours down the road, with the product in the field.

120 families here

that we don't know how we can keep on the payroll.

We're not smart enough as a society to work together to connect those dots.

I don't know what to say.

We're trying every way we know how, Ruth.

The chefs are in trouble.

It's a ripple-down effect, and it's a struggle.

You can't do it all.

You can't.

Uh... this is, this is a societal problem.

You know, this is, this is all of our failure.

All of us.

When we were in our twenties and we all moved to California,

you know, the idea was, we would follow our passions.

You know, you only go through life once.

We weren't going to be beholden to corporate America.

Um, you could live really on nothing in those days.

We all bought that house together, that group of us.

I mean, Doug and my share of the rent was $45 a month.

We raised half our own food,

and, you know, there were

15 people for dinner every night and we split the cost.

- Yeah. - It was really cheap.

And I don't think you can do that anymore.

We're so spoiled.

We're used to everything, all the time.

That's the thing that's missing, is--

Oh, God, I didn't leave the beans on the fire, did I?

Did you?

Yes...

Can I ask a really stupid question? Are you a good cook?

Yeah, I am a good cook.

I'm not a great cook, I'm not a trained, you know, I'm not a "chef."

But I have, I started-- So like, the cover of my first book,

Tender at the Bone, is a picture of me cooking at 7.

I've always loved to cook.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's what I do, you know,

when I am sad, or in trouble.

- I go into the kitchen. - Yeah, yeah.

It's my best place.

I feel like I've sort of spent my whole life working up to this project.

- Really? - Yeah, yeah.

It also makes me feel like a terrible failure,

that we didn't fix this.

We were talking about the concentration

in the food industry in the early '70s.

And we just let it happen, you know?

This wave came over us,

and we got sidetracked by "deliciousness," you know.

You know, a whole group of us who started out with the politics of food,

and then became cooks, and opened restaurants,

and let this really egregious thing take hold.

And we should have been fighting it.

We should have been fighting it tooth and nail,

the moment we saw it coming over the horizon.

And we just let it happen.

And I feel, you know, culpable and devastated by that.

What is the weather supposed to be Sunday?

- I mean, Saturday-- - Just cold.

Just cold, but, I mean, hopefully it won't be iced over.

What do you guys do this time of year?

Well, we've been hauling bales.

So there's a lot of cattle feeders around here.

They'll use it for bedding for cattle.

So the guys have been busy with that.

I did some hauling yesterday,

and then just kind of getting ready for taxes,

because I'm so behind.

And then, all the seed people, the chemical people, they come knocking at your door.

To get the biggest discounts, you have to buy the inputs in October, November, December,

and we won't be using them until April or later.

But you have to put that money out up front so you can get that big discount.

That seems so unfair.

Yeah.

How are things going with your husband?

Well, working with Kerry's been challenging,

but also rewarding.

I mean, when we do disagree,

we, uh, disagree respectfully most of the time

and try to keep it, you know, it's about the farm.

It's not personal between us.

And it's about a practice.

But it is getting better.

And it does help that the boys are older now

and they're in the conversation.

My husband has been in the hospital, so I've been...

- What happened? - Um...

He got very dehydrated and then his kidneys failed.

- Oh, no. Is that... - He's home.

He came home yesterday, but I'm not...

uh, totally on top of things right now.

Is that going to be something long-term that affects--

No, but it was really bad.

I mean, we didn't realize how sick he was

until, you know, it was really bad.

Were you able to go in the hospital with him?

- No. - Yeah, wow.

And, I mean, I want to tell you, you know,

it's given me a whole new perspective

on when they talk about these COVID patients dying alone.

- Yeah. - ...the hospital for almost a week.

They are so stressed, they are so overworked.

I never once talked to a doctor.

- I mean... - Wow.

And the nurses were really lovely, but, you know,

they would call me when they could to give me information.

And Michael was terrified, alone.

Uh... It was horrible.

Really horrible.

You do not want to get sick in the middle of a COVID crisis.

Yeah, yeah.

So, are most of your people still with you,

or have you had to furlough a lot of people?

We went from 167 to,

we're right about 95 right now.

I really hold myself hugely responsible

for the financial mess that we're in,

because I didn't create enough of a diverse business,

not focused on just one revenue stream of restaurants.

Just... I got blindsided by it.

Coronavirus, it's a horrible thing.

You know, through this, you have to maintain hope.

And we're going to find new ways to do business.

It's going to be the new normal, and we have to figure out what that is.

How are you?

I'm pretty good, how are you?

I'm good, I think. It's a little bit nasty here.

We got a bunch of ice and snow, wet last night, so...

How much COVID is there around you? Still really low?

Oh, you know, we'd be low as far as, just because the population's so low.

But honestly I think our percentages here

are probably higher than yours where you live.

Probably because everybody here just bored on with total disregard.

So, are you seeing any effect of the election on your business?

Uh...

I would probably say no.

I mean, the, the effect it's having is,

is most cattle people are very conservative and very to the right.

So, they're in a poor mood about it.

I think the Democrats have a big burden in rural America.

Well, and I'm going to say this quite honestly,

ag does not necessarily flourish under Republican administration.

Our lifestyle and beliefs out here

is what makes everybody to be so conservative, and regulation.

But quite honestly, ag probably is better off under Democratic administrations,

if you look back over history.

One of the things that you bring up

is this rural/urban divide...

- Yep. - ...and your fear

that rural America is basically going to be pushed off the map.

These little towns, you know, the town I live by, 6,500 people, it's all ag.

You know, those 50- to 100-head cowherd guys,

they get their stuff repaired in town,

and they buy their pickups in town, and they eat in town, and...

I mean, they support all the local businesses.

You get to where you have 800 to 1,000 cows,

you don't have to buy your mineral from the local mill,

you can order it by a semi-load from somewhere like Kansas City.

You can get your medicine direct,

and you don't have to go through a local retailer.

I mean, these towns are about to dry up and blow away anyway,

with just the migration that ag has already took.

The kids out here, about all get an excellent secondary education.

And then they have the work ethic and the morals

that the companies in the cities want.

And so, they pay them way more than what they could stay here and make.

It's just a steady flow of pushing everybody into city.

You said you thought that next year,

10% of the cow/calf people around you would be out of business.

Do you still think that?

Yeah.

You know, there's a day of reckoning coming.

Bluffton peaked in population in 1900.

When I was growing up in the '60s, Bluffton was still a town.

You know, it still had stores, and...

but under the industrial commodity scenario,

it atrophied and atrophied.

When it hit its bottom, which was probably 10 or 15 years ago,

the town became economically irrelevant.

But when we hired 100 and something young,

educated, passionate people here and paid them well,

they needed a place

to eat and sleep and shop and play.

And so we built it.

Now we've got 176 employees.

We're the largest private employer in the county.

Our average employee makes way above the county average,

in one of the poorest counties, in one of the poorest states in the nation.

And what resulted is a really nice community.

You know, it's still tiny, but it's gone from ghost town,

literally, to destination, in a decade.

So, I'm very proud of that.

So I hear you've been doing something with a solar power company now, too?

Some friends of mine owned a very large farm, near my farm,

and they sold it to a renewable energy company.

I was not very happy about that,

because they take really good farmland,

and they use Roundup, and erosion is horrible.

It becomes a moonscape.

We populated that solar field with about 2,000 sheep for vegetative control.

And later on we added a few thousand chickens, a few hundred ducks.

Yeah.

It has been a wonderful success.

Everybody wins.

They actually pay us the same amount of money

they would pay a company to spray and mow and trim,

and we're building organic matter in their soil, and preventing erosion.

It's created new jobs and produces some really good lamb for our customers to eat.

I mean, everybody wins.

This was farmed-to-death row crop land.

Now, perennials are coming.

So that is Bermuda grass,

which is a great warm-season perennial grass.

That's evidence that life's coming back to the land.

Hi, Zuzu.

You want to say hi to Auntie Ruth?

- Hi. - Bye-bye, Auntie Ruth.

Bye-bye.

Our landlords won't give us any relief.

They won't work with us, they haven't negotiated with us.

I mean, one option is to stay.

Second option is to break the lease early.

And then the third option is to fold both of our locations together, in the Mission.

Have you discussed this with your staff?

- We're doing it today, actually, having the big meeting, yeah. - Really?

It's a good sort of stepping stone,

before worker ownership even comes into play,

as I figure out how to, like, involve the collective

in whatever decisions that I'm making as an owner, about this transition.

If we decided to go work at the Mission temporarily,

we would have to go roll in at like three,

four in the morning before, before y'all open up.

I'm going to go to the landlords and tell them,

"You're going to give us relief, or we walk away."

If they say, "You know what, we'll give you relief,"

then I'll bring it back here and we consider it.

If they say no, which I think they are, unfortunately, we move.

We know that that's going to be our goal,

is to make sure that our workers stay in Oakland.

I haven't cut my teeth in the industry

as much as some of the people that work for me, you know?

So there's a lot of wisdom and skill there.

Hot pita, hot pita!

Luis is, like, from a third generation

of bakers from the Yucatán.

It's, like, in his blood.

Like, I learn so much from him every day. I mean, I learn from them.

Luis is like, it's about our change of mentality.

We have to think like employees and like bosses.

I'm really OCD, you guys.

This makes me so batty.

So, you've opened your new place. How is it?

It's great and it's horrible.

I think...

uh, I'm just going to say it.

The food is like an A-minus.

The service is a C-minus, maybe a D.

Ooh.

I think I'm at 20% of where I want to be.

So, there's a lot of room for improvement.

And I think I broke my back-of-house team.

We were there until 2:30 a.m.

I don't lose my shit, usually, and I lost my shit.

- They were mad. - That sounds brutal.

- And I just, like... - And God knows there are a lot

of out-of-work front-of-house people at the moment.

But none of them want to work. I literally called 100 people.

They don't want to work, Ruth.

And especially the way that I want to set up,

where I want to take, I want to pay the front of the house

and back of house equally, you know.

I set a price, I said everyone across the board in service,

no matter if you're the porter or the dishwasher,

you get $20 an hour, because it's so fucking hard.

But servers will not work for $20 to $25 an hour.

Whereas my back-of-the-house team will break their backs

and don't think they're doing enough for that amount.

- Right. - I think there's financial literacy

that needs to happen in our industry.

And that financial literacy needs to be taught to everyone

who's working, as well as to diners.

Well, more senators are calling for a hearing

to review legislative proposals to improve the meat-packing industry.

In his weekly call with reporters just yesterday,

Senator Chuck Grassley called for a hearing as well.

I call this hearing

of the US Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry to order.

We're going to focus specifically on our cattle markets today.

You know, COVID really showed how fragile our food system is.

Consumers were paying higher prices for meat, while ranchers were paid less for their cattle.

But the big, consolidated companies really made record profits.

- I've been watching the hearings. - Uh-huh.

So, how did we actually get to the point that there are these hearings?

Well, I don't want to take a lot--

I mean, I...

Me and three or four or five others being relentless,

I think, finally got enough people starting to pay attention.

I mean, I have flown and met with countless senators and legislators.

We've drove people nuts, man.

Good for you.

I'm getting hundreds of calls

from beef cattle producers that are saying,

"Cindy, what is wrong with this market?"

Ultimately, aren't these people putting themselves out of business?

I mean, if nobody's going to raise cattle anymore,

the packers are ultimately out of business too.

But they're going towards total vertical integration.

They know that the biggest, most efficient, elite producers

will get bigger as the smaller ones go out.

And when you get to where there's five producers where there was 100, they will unify.

And they will charge what beef's worth,

and then the American consumer will be paying a lot more for food.

We have to address this issue of lack of competition

and the fact that there is an oligopoly

and that price setting and market power's being misused

in a way that disadvantages the very people

that are out there trying to make a living on the land.

If those senators and representatives are smart,

you don't want this country's food supply in limited hands.

Have you gotten the first vaccination yet?

Yes.

I got it last week.

Didn't you feel like... a kind of lightness from that?

Well, it was very strange, actually, Ruth,

because I got enormously depressed.

I woke up in the morning the next morning,

and I, I just said,

"We're never going to address climate change, and I might as well just...

give up," and started crying,

and I was crying off and on all day.

It frightened me.

I mean, this COVID time has been an interesting time for a lot of people,

'cause a lot of people have, like, have never had time to think before.

And, you know, I go for a walk every morning,

but I have never looked deeply

and stopped along the way, the way I do now.

That I am seeing, you know,

almost the plants grow from day to day...

...the blossoms on the fruit trees already.

And I, it's...

the closer look that I'm having.

You know, I love spring.

It's one of the advantages of farming for a living.

You get a do-over every year.

There are opportunities that have been created due to COVID.

Pre-COVID, we grew a wide variety of vegetables

and we sold them directly to restaurants.

Now, we grow a wide variety of vegetables,

we sell them to restaurants, to home consumers,

to institutions and hospitals

that are now starting to understand the whole concept of food as medicine.

In 1983, I came home from Ohio State my freshman year.

That house was the house that was sold,

and Dad's farm was at that barn, and it was full of equipment,

and it took two days to sell it all.

We bought that back.

And my son is moving in there, and his wife.

And it's kind of a full circle.

He is just coming back into the business, as is my daughter.

Lee's son works in the business.

So we're very excited to be having the next generation

come back into the business.

- I can tell you some good news, if you want. - Yeah.

So we just found out yesterday that Knuth Farms is certified organic now.

- Oh, fantastic! - Yeah, so...

Congratulations, that's amazing.

So, what does it actually mean for your farm that you've now been certified organic?

Right now, it is the dollar sign.

Instead of $3.30 corn,

we're hoping to get $6 to $7 a bushel.

So take that times 30,000 bushels, and that's a lot of money.

I like the direction with the organic and regenerative movement,

where it's coming around back to soil health.

I think that's really rewarding.

The boys are interested in seeing this unfold,

because they're saying things and I'm going,

"Ooh, you wouldn't have said that about a year ago."

It's nice when it's a family business, most of the time.

And I think down the road, they'll definitely want to work together.

So, we think they're pretty level-headed,

and, uh... and we value their opinion right now.

I mean, because, we are at that stage where we're getting up there,

and they're the future, so this is neat, because we get to hand it off to them.

We have something to hand off to them.

One of the problems in American agriculture

is that the average age of the American farmer is 64.

And we're losing young people in this business at a terrific rate.

Being 65, I can understand that.

There are plenty of young people who would love to come back to the farm.

Farming is a wonderful life, lifestyle, livelihood.

All kind of good things about it.

And I, I scold people when they say,

"Oh, farming is a hard life." No, it's not.

Have you ever seen a roofer? Now, that's hard-ass work.

You see the guys putting roofs on houses?

Don't tell me how hard farmers work, when I see a roofer working.

Well, welcome to White Oak Pastures.

My name is Jodi, and I'm a member

of the fifth generation on the farm.

My great great grandfather, he raised multi-species,

slaughtered his own animals on the farm,

sold them locally to the people here in Bluffton.

And it's very similar to our model today.

We joke now, saying, we farm more like our great great grandfather did

than when my grandfather was alive and operating the farm.

All right, so we've got the Easter campaign starting this weekend.

We've got a little bit of trim that Buck's going to try to run for ground lamb,

and then some merguez, and... are you going to run some more chorizo?

We're going to run 200 pounds of each batch.

Good deal. Uh...

Jenni is my middle daughter

and she has always been my shadow.

We have been inseparable since she got potty trained.

And I am just fiercely proud of her.

That works both ways.

It's so great to have a kid who's your shadow.

It's great to have a dad that's a mentor.

I've always told my daughters that my goal is

to have the opportunity for them to come back, but not the obligation to come back.

Jenni, did you always know that you wanted to come back and work on the farm?

I did not.

So, growing up gay and closeted,

I really had made peace with the fact that

I would have to choose

professional happiness or personal happiness,

and those two couldn't possibly coincide.

And it didn't work that way, I get to have both.

It sounds kind of like a fairy tale, to be honest.

It does, it does. I think dad and I both agree,

we get to live in our own fairy tales.

They're very different, but they're, they're fairy tales.

So, Will, what's your fairy tale?

You know, I'm living it.

To have...

I'm a little emotional.

Me too.

Something in the air.

I don't know.

You know, uh, I love what I do.

That's an understatement.

You know, it's my hobby,

my vocation, my avocation,

my legacy and heritage, every day.

We've been 14 months in the pandemic.

We have learned some things,

collectively, what business works and what doesn't, right?

A year later, we're much clearer that we need to leave Fruitvale.

We have a chance to build our own bakery here in downtown Oakland.

I want you all to see, could this be the new home of Reem's?

A business model that would be profitable for everybody.

Racks and racks and racks of dough and pastry shaping happening.

- I'd say excited. - Excited, worried?

- Emotional. - Emotional.

You know, across the board, people were really responsive

and gave us really excellent reviews.

Because I personally know what I need to work on,

you know, I know the wonky things.

I'm at 40% of where I want to be.

I feel like we're on training wheels a little bit.

How could it not be? You're a brand-new restaurant in the middle of a pandemic.

You know, with a new restaurant like yours,

where you're doing really experimental food,

and really food of your heart,

you're going to have to find your customers,

and you can't assume that everybody who comes

is going to love it, because they're not, they're just not.

And you can't take it to heart.

Yeah.

Thanks, Ruth.

Yeah.

When I was a child, I was attracted to food

because I saw that it brought people together.

But it was when I began looking at cooks that I really fell in love.

Because it seemed to me it was impossible to make great food

if you didn't have a generous soul.

Independent farmers and ranchers are also a special breed.

They understand and care about food in a way that nobody else does.

I have never connected so personally with the people I was interviewing.

The isolation of COVID did something really unexpected.

It sparked deeper relationships,

deeper understanding.

The people I met this year give me hope.

They're independent of the industrialized model,

which frees them to take risks.

Their collective vision

may hold the key to our well-being.

I've always believed that food is social and political,

but it's so much more than that.

It shows us our values.

How we grow and make our food

tells us who we are as a nation,

and more importantly, who we are as human beings.

I would love to meet you in person.

- That would be great. We'll have to one of these days. - Yeah.

My son'll be riding in that world a lot,

so if he gets up in the New York rodeo or whatever

and we get over there, I'll probably look you up.

Oh, please. Please.

I'm really proud to call you here from Glasgow.

You are the 2021 winner of the Food Planet Prize.

Oh, my... are you kidding?

The decision has been made by the Curt Bergfors Foundation,

believe it or not, to double up on the prize.

So you're not winner of just one million US dollars,

you are now the winner of two million US dollars,

the largest prize for sustainability in the world.

Congratulations, Bren, and the whole GreenWave team.

So this is confidential because they want to keep it confidential,

but they're naming the restaurant of the year.

- Whoa! - Whoa! Isn't that cool?

And then everyone around me is like, "Wait, can we just take a moment

to not react to it as, like, another, you know,

you having to react to a pivot, and just enjoy it?"

And I'm like, "Yeah, but oh, my God!"

The food that we eat, the tools that we use,

the methods of agriculture were started by your ancestors.

And every time someone says,

"Get down and dirty and go into a garden,"

you go into that garden with pride.

Thank you so much.