Food Systems and the Cultural Influence of Creators with Sam Kass

Okay.

So there is, I feel like a very particular question that I've been thinking about.

So I, I read the last supper in like the last couple of months and had Daphne read it.

And so I would love to hear like what your take in your general argument for the last supper is, because I'm not going to try to use your words to say what you have to say about it.

But the way I read it was you're talking a lot about the influencers of food system change, talking about culture and technology was like my big takeaway.

And that piece I think that was missing from my perspective of these cultural tastemakers was the creator.

So that is the angle that I want to get into today, talking about like this massive platform that creators have to be purveyors of change.

But tell us about The Last Supper in your own words and like why you do the work you do.

It's interesting.

So the Last Supper actually comes from a dinner I did, or now a series of dinners that I have done and continue to do.

The first one that I did was in Paris around COP 21, you know, where they were doing the big climate accords.

And at the time, like food and agriculture wasn't being discussed in that context at all.

a part of the dialogue.

And part of it was because of the culture of those pods.

It was just like a focus on energy, but our culture had not expressed through food, the role that food needed to play in any kind of solution set.

And so it was an attempt to try to raise awareness and use our food to tell a story and to try to connect these issues with people in an emotional way.

So the dinner is actually all the ingredients that at the time it was that our kids and our grandkids won't have because of climate.

So it's like things we love coffee, wine, chocolate, shellfish, crustaceans, stone fruit, like peaches and nuts and a whole host of stuff.

And that makes that an emotional connection with people that I think we've failed.

able to do in the broader climate community around why people should care about this like two degrees warming coal you know like i got two kids and two jobs and i got time for that shit can i swear i should keep it clean should i keep it

you may drop all the curse words okay okay

okay you know once a chef always a chef i guess and so so the book based on you know over time i've done a lot of these dinners and so the book is really an attempt to raise some awareness about like where we sit but it's but the the path of like all the things that are bad in the food system has been well well beaten and what hasn't been there is like all right if we're serious about what would, what is it that we would have to do? And not in like a detailed prescriptive, like policy, although there's some, you know, important levers to pull, but what does change really look like in a pragmatic way? Not in the utopic ideals.

Like we want everybody with,

you know,

chickens on the, you know, and living this