Table To Farm

Quinn: [00:00:00] Sometimes you buy organic, sometimes you hit a restaurant that's plant-based, or at least you choose the veggie option. Maybe the fish option at the market or the restaurant is marketed as being sustainable. Maybe you compost. It's all useful. But we've been doing it for a while and it's not moving the needle for climate, for restaurants, for farmers, for our health.

So anyone who gives a shit wants to know, what can I actually do to scale regenerative agriculture to benefit everyone? Every week, thousands of people ask us versions of that same question, the most important question in the world. What can I do? So every week I turn around and ask someone who actually knows what the [00:01:00] hell they're talking about.

That very same question, someone who's already answered it for themselves, someone who's working on the front lines of the future in food, global health, climate change, AI, medicine, whatever. I found out why they're doing the work they're doing and what we, you and I, can do to support it, to join their work, to fund their work, to find our own way to the front lines of the future.

My guest today is Anthony Myint. Anthony is the executive director of Zero Foodprint, where he and his colleagues work to mobilize the restaurant industry and allies in the public and private sectors to support healthy soil as a solution to the climate crisis. Anthony's also a chef who won the 2019 Basque Culinary World Prize for his work with Zero Foodprint. He is known in the restaurant industry as the co-founder of Mission Street Food. The San Francisco Chronicle called it the most influential restaurant of the past decade, Mission Chinese Food, which the New York Times named the Restaurant of the Year [00:02:00] in 2012. And The Perennial, which was Bone Appetit's most sustainable restaurant in the country.

Anthony is currently on the board of trustees for the James Beard Foundation, and I am so excited to share this conversation with you because food is such a huge part of everything and we're doing it wrong and we can do it so much better. And sometimes, like Anthony and his crew have, you've gotta fail a bunch of times and then take an end around before you can really start to make a difference.

For questions or feedback, as always, email me, email us at questions@importantnotimportant.com.

Anthony. Welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here.

Anthony Myint: Thanks. Awesome to be here. Appreciate it.

Quinn: No, of course. So, we don't usually do you know what is your entire life story? Of course, though, I would try to convince you to come back to Virginia for the [00:03:00] rest of this if I could.

But really try to focus and start off with it's a two part question and it sounds like the same question, but it's two parts. So, the first is why do you have to do this job? So of everyone in the world to do Zero Foodprint and this, why you? And then the second part is, Why do you have to do this work?

So, of all the different ways you could have answered the call and you've worked in business and your, you know, the restaurants and everything, why do you have to do this work in particular? Does that make sense?

Anthony Myint: Yeah, totally. So part one, I think that I am like uniquely qualified to do this because I have been failing at trying to make this change happen for so many years that nobody has learned these lessons firsthand as well as I have. And I can't tell you how many conversations I'm in with chefs and restaurateurs and food systems experts and things where they are trying to change farming by changing eating, [00:04:00] which is what I was trying to do, and they still don't understand that's not efficient and effective, but that we can just directly change farming. Which is what gets me to the second part of the question. I think that starting around like 2013 bio geochemists started to understand that we could restore atmospheric carbon in the form of healthy soil. And so this is basically like planting trees, where the carbon in the atmosphere turns into the big tree trunk after 30 years, now it would be turning into tons of living things and also microbial micro mass in the soil and sometimes mineral aggregated organic matter and these kinds of things that you know, you're not gonna see on a restaurant menu or whatever. But these are the kinds of scientific breakthroughs that basically mean we could turn back the clock and, pardon the language, unfuck the planet.

And so that idea of you know, oh my God, we could kind of save the world while growing better ingredients. To [00:05:00] me, that's the biggest story in food. So that's why it's necessary.

Quinn:I love this idea that you, and by the way, so many other well-meaning folks have, like you said, sort of failed to transform the, I love the way you used the word, the food grid to analogize it with everything else we're trying to transform, these massive interconnected systems because farm to table is great, right?

It's important to put healthier, more sustainable ingredients in front of people on their tables. It does encourage farms, this and this, but it doesn't move the needle for the industry and the food system, which is kind of where you have gotten to and we'll get to in a second really with your work on how to actually start to, to really push that.

Right. In the end, you're just buying ingredients and that's not gonna really do it. I did want to kick this off, I laughed, I watched your TED talk again and I must have missed it at the first time, but I think the first thing you said is I started cooking to not talk to people. And it made me laugh so hard.

'cause it's [00:06:00] basically why I started this podcast is I realized 10 years ago is just increasingly becoming more introverted. And everyone goes, but you have a podcast. I'm like, I know, but that's how I like check the, did I socialize? This week's box, is I have this one conversation. And here we are.

Tell me I guess just personally, like what has that transition been like as you've realized, oh, well now I gotta do a fucking TED talk and I gotta go talk to all these people. And it doesn't seem like you feel like that's your thing or what you're most comfortable with.

Anthony Myint: Yeah, I mean, when we first, when I say we, Zero Foodprint, or me and my wife, or the team, started to understand the potential, my hope was always like, oh, it's gonna be great, you know? I know so many, like influential chefs and all these things, like certainly so and so is gonna get involved in this, you know, next week, next month. And then they'll shift New York, you know, this person's gonna shift California, whatever. And it just really hasn't happened for some reason. So it feels a little bit like in the Matrix or something where, you know, Keanu Reeves is going to the Oracle to be like, so how does this work? And then [00:07:00] Oracle doesn't tell him anything, you know, and he just has to figure it out.

Quinn: There is no spoon right.

Anthony Myint: So I think it's been a voyage of discovery along those lines where I probably started out as like the quiet guy who drank a bunch of beer at the end of the shift. And that was how I interacted with people socially. And I think now probably Covid, just in terms of my activism has been beneficial because it's like you said, I can be on Zoom and have five calls with people, back to back and it's a little bit less of a psychic drain than like the in-person every single meeting or whatever.

Quinn: Yeah, it's complicated, right? 'cause on a societal level we're seeing, you know, a lot of pros and cons and interconnected things with that. But yes it seems like people like ourselves it helps to check the box, right? And it can still be obviously very effective.

Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate it. So you talked about why you are the person to do this work because you, and again, so many others have, quote unquote, at least failed to, you know, reorient this [00:08:00] entire system, to reinvent it with the desired outcome to make temperatures stop going up, et cetera, et cetera.

And you have a quote where you said, how do we save the world while feeding the world? And that immediately stuck out to me, one of my all time favorite humans and two, two or three time guests is Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist. And she has always had this quote, which is, how do we use the ocean without using it up?

Right? It's acknowledging that it is a huge part of who we are and how we're gonna survive, but we are not doing a good job of caretaking it. And now we need to, you know, rescue it in a lot of ways. So you've been through so many trials and tribulations with all this and you talked a little bit about needing the restaurant industry to think 20 years ahead instead of two hours or two weeks.

And my old man was a part owner of a seafood restaurant about a hundred yards that way. And I remember starting to work there when I was 14. I remember the first time I saw the books and you realize there's no margins here. You know, for a restaurant to think 20 years ahead [00:09:00] is impossible almost.

Right. And the same thing applies to farms. What was your journey like to realize this isn't working and now this isn't working? What didn't work? That I think most people think is the answer to fixing the food system.

Anthony Myint: When we started Zero Foodprint, the first thing we did was start doing lifecycle assessments of food service operations. So, it began with my co-founder, Chris Ying and some others, and they did a lifecycle assessment of Noma, which is a restaurant in Copenhagen that is credited with starting the new Nordic movement and was the number one restaurant in the world at various times. And then the next restaurant in California, mine, Mission Chinese Food, some others. You know, the Corporate Cafeteria At Square, Jose Andre's, Fast Casual Chain, Beefsteak, others. And basically what we found after 80 lifecycle assessments was that the vast majority of the carbon footprint of every single business, restaurant, food service, was the food, you know, which shouldn't be surprising, of course. And then basically that carbon [00:10:00] footprint was representing the agriculture. So the plowing, the fertilizer, the deforestation, whatever, different aspects of it. And so, I mean, it's pretty obvious now having gone through this voyage of discovery, but in order for anybody to make a difference, we needed a way to change farming.

But at the time, you know, I was a consumer, I was a chef, I'm buying food, et cetera. So I was trying to change it by better choices. You know, I think that's kind of like the trope in sustainability is I'm gonna give up the plastic straw, you know, whatever.

I'm gonna reduce food waste or something. And then all of that is kind of like a less harm approach. You know, turn off the lights when you're not home, or switch the light to an LED light bulb, whatever. Right? And that all makes sense. But then I think changing farming would be like improving the grid in energy. And so it becomes like super obvious to me after years of failure that it's well gosh, we just need a way to change farming.

Like how would you even do that? And so then that kind of is like chapter two of [00:11:00] Zero Foodprint when we started, you know, my wife and I closed the restaurant in San Francisco where we were trying to champion regenerative ag through a farm to table approach. And so basically it was like, how do we start going table to farm?

What would that even look like? And so we began a collaboration with the state of California and started to imagine you know, if you think about energy there's these programs, you know, a simple version would be like a dollar per month on the energy bill. And usually that kind of program isn't even like a 100% mandated requirement.

It's just an option and often they have the most impact when it's an opt out. You know, you imagine yourself, your energy bill was 50 bucks, you know, starting next year there's gonna be this thing, so it'll be 51 unless you check the box and let us know. And so just no big deal. Right? But then that paradigm allows, you know, Los Angeles to commit to a hundred percent renewable energy or San Diego or something like huge cities. And so to your comment about Ayana Johnson and how do we use the ocean while not using it up or whatever, I think that the thing we're saving it from [00:12:00] is ruthless, extractive capitalism. And if there is even just that tiniest component of reciprocity, the equivalent of planting one seed for next year or something. Things can be on track essentially. So in that collective action paradigm of energy it's pretty simple, I mean, it's still freaking complicated. There's not enough progress, whatever. You just pay for energy once. So if you add that $1 you're kind of like covered.

With food, it would be complicated because you're probably buying food from 40 different companies, you know, each month or whatever, the coffee shop, the restaurant, the farmer's market, Trader Joe's or something. And then if you were buying from, you know, Whole Foods or wherever, there's a brand. Maybe it's Bob's Red Mill. There's a distributor, maybe it's UNFI. There's Whole Foods, there's farmers. There's processors for many ingredients, like it's a stacked value chain. So the question kind of becomes well, whose dollar and then how do you get companies to split [00:13:00] up and each pay 20 cents instead of a dollar?

The proverbial dollar, let's say, that's complicated because these are just for profit companies off on their own serving shareholders. And then even if you had the money, like you worked it all out somehow, you got all the buy-in, all the money's there. You're not just building one, you know, $10 million community solar project. You would be trying to decide which farm gets it too. Is it the thousand acre ranch, the 200 acre wheat farm, the two acre lettuce farm? You know, is it the vineyard operator? They're rich, but they're still not shifting their practices, so how do you decide? And so we've basically just been navigating and piloting that for a few years.

And then I think we kind of a year or so ago have finally turned a corner and established like proof of concept and started in new states and regions. And so, at this point now I can say with some confidence that I think we are starting to improve the food grid. And then it's not just like a one-off of a grocery store crowdfunding for one project, but it's starting to be a systematic [00:14:00] approach that could turn into law someday.

Quinn: I think it's great. I have 7,000 questions, which I'm really excited about. Before we get into the whole, what people can do and stuff. So I wanna understand the operation. So, you know, my brothers at one point started a chia seed bar company. I don't know, 11 years ago, they ended up selling it to Pepsi five, four or five years ago.

I don't know, something like this. But you learn a lot about food, obviously, and especially when you're getting to the, who's gonna purchase this thing is when you do the famous mind map and realize at least in the American food chain, it's all owned by five or six companies, right? Like you said, the stack is crazy in itself.

Just on that part of it. And then you bring in again, you know, with the meat stuff and you look at your Cargills and all that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you looked at that and you are skipping that whole corporate stack and going from, like you said, table to the farm. So you're not saying, oh, well let's give it to this, and who do they give it to in shareholders?

Tell me what [00:15:00] the sequence is and then basically how you operate as the middleman, I guess, and start projects and how you pool 'em and et cetera, et cetera.

Anthony Myint: Okay, sure. How long you got?

Quinn: All the time you need, man.

Anthony Myint: The first part we'll say. Let's talk about sort of, farm to table and business sustainability as usual. So first I think there's a stat from Marion Nessel or various research where of each dollar spent on food in the US, 16 cents, let's say, makes it to a farmer. So along the way there's a lot of, you know, processing, distribution, retail, whatever. So let's not judge any of that. But let's say that you know, somehow a consumer pays an extra dollar, so then of that dollar, 16 cents maybe would get through that value chain back to the farmer on average. So of that 16 cents, let's imagine you are the farmer. So you have now this 16 cents from the $1 premium that a consumer paid for some ostensibly, like better product or[00:16:00] something. So how much of that 16 cents are you using for the next thing that you might do?

You know, that typically is zero. You know, the farmer's making ends meet, they're in debt, their equipment's broken, they gotta cover this, their daughter's going through college, whatever. And so there's no contract where like, of the premium, X amount is going to the next thing happening, it's all retroactive. So that would be a little bit like if a, you know, Ivy League graduate got a high salary or something, just because that happened, there's no reason, like some under-resourced student in a different place would suddenly be like, oh, well let me just start working harder to get a higher salary.

Like we all know that reward exists. That's not enough to change the system, like pretty obviously, but if you buy that student like a laptop, you know, or free school meals or something so they can concentrate, like those resources are critical. And so I think that what we're doing is trying to focus on that kind of resource [00:17:00] side.

So first just saying you know, a proof point of sustainability as usual, not really working is like organic is 1% of acres after 50 years, even though there's very clear price signals and you know it's on the shelf at Walmart and all these things. So. Nevermind that. So what we're doing is kind of like you said, almost like an end around, so a company, it could be a Michelin star chef, it could be a wine company, or an amazing pasta company, or even a franchisee with every Subway location in Boulder adds a 1% fee, or you send 1%, you know, there's very well established program programs, like 1% for the Planet, where companies are just sending 1%. So. In any way they want. They send 1% or even just any amount. So we have some participating businesses where they're like, I can't do 1%. I'm gonna do a dollar per cocktail, you know, whatever. So those funds come to us and then we are deploying 95% of those funds to farm and ranch projects. It's like skipping the whole value chain.

So instead of, you know, 16 cents from the premium trickling [00:18:00] back to the farmer and then the farmer using as little as zero for the next thing, we're saying, Hey consumer, you wanna make this change? Gimme your penny, and then we'll use 95% of those pennies, you know, aggregated together to be millions of dollars or whatever. To then just directly instigate the next practice on the next field with farmers. And so the way that next practice works is we are essentially asking farmers to request funds from the program. The request is not you know, oh, I had a tough year. Let me write an essay. The request is, I want to do this project. Compost application on 10 acres instead of fertilizer. You know, I wanna plant cover crops on 20 acres. I wanna plant trees and shrubs on two acres, whatever it is. I need this much to do the project. I'm gonna work with this local expert to kind of oversee and validate and coordinate the project. You know, they'll take a picture, send a report, et cetera. Those local experts, conservation districts or university cooperative extension staff, et cetera. Are basically the same experts who [00:19:00] oversee government grants. So we're not like creating a whole system, we're just using private sector dollars to do more.

And so, I sometimes make a very boring analogy, but where that work is kind of like what an insurance company might do. You know, where instead of giving money to doctors and patients for procedures and prescriptions, we're giving money to technical assistance providers and farmers to cover the cost of the cover crop seed and the cost of the compost or whatever it is to just do the next thing. Instead of a patient, you know, we're deploying the resources to the next field. And so, it's boring and complicated. And so behind the scenes that's what we're doing. But that whole system is what makes it then super easy for a business to just be like, I'm in, I'm ready to start, you know, basically restoring the climate. Here's my penny. And then you mentioned like the low margins of the restaurant industry. And so as an operator, it was clear to me that you know, nobody has money in the restaurant industry. You wanna pay staff more, you wanna use better ingredients, your refrigerator's [00:20:00] broken, you know, whatever. There's never money. But at the same time, like customers kind of want to feel good about their purchase. So there's a lot of research, like there was a study where 69% of respondents and it was like 130,000 respondents 69% indicated they would use 1% of their income for climate solutions.

So that's a really big study. Another one is PricewaterhouseCoopers found like 9.7% is the premium that consumers would pay for sustainability. And that's even amidst like inflation, cost of living, you know, everything that’s bad. Like people are still gonna pay that, let's say 10%. And so if there's a way to just kind of make it super easy and it's just 1% and whatever, but it's 1%. It's 1% for the Planet, but directly for the planet, you know, not just to charity.

Quinn: Yeah.

Anthony Myint: So that's how it works. And then the reason that I think it's really scalable is that opt out choice architecture, because that's what makes [00:21:00] it possible for like local laws to take place. You know, you could start to imagine a dollar per trash bill, something like that, or 1% at a hotel or you know, restaurant or whatever benefiting local natural climate solutions. And you know, it could be voluntary, it could be whatever, but like currently, I don't think there is any kind of systematic funding for local natural climate solutions or agriculture like this.

Quinn: That's amazing. See, that didn't take very long. That was so exciting. So I have all of these thoughts. So we realized a couple years ago, this is kind of mid Covid, we realized the thing that people really come to us most for is to help them answer the question, what can I do?

And that could be people or cities or companies or countries, states, whatever it might be. And it could be an art teacher in third grade, or could be someone who runs like a college endowment or whatever. Estate planning, doesn't matter, the whole spectrum. And so part of what they [00:22:00] trust us to do and we've really worked at is what are the most reputable versions of that?

Of however they can take their impact and show up, donating, volunteering, getting educated, whatever it might be so that they, when they smash their finger on the button to say, I'm gonna show up for this thing, or donate to this thing, or, okay, I'll watch this whole Crash Course series on YouTube.

They're like, someone's done the homework already. And what's so interesting about all of this is you've cited all these different models that I love that are really effective that we point people towards a lot. Or I think of how do we use existing resources for, so you talked about you're not reinventing an entire workforce with the folks who do the validation.

Right. They're the people who do government grants. And it always reminds me, this seems crazy of the original Netflix model of, well, the US Mail already exists, right? We just buy all the DVDs and then we don't need our own shipping service. Right. It [00:23:00] reminds me of one of our favorite nonprofits, Give Directly, which does exceptional work, and they just give people cash. 'cause the lowest margins are people who need cash in places of extreme poverty and they deserve to have the agency to figure out how they need to use it. 'cause water wells are great, no question. But sometimes the next day you need a roof or food or medicine or whatever it might be, or to invest in your new business, you've cited 1% for the Planet, which we're part of and big fans of.

And like you said, some people do a lot more, some people can't do that much, but it does add up at scale, obviously even in a small mom and pop business, you cited, you know, the standard for electric bills and obviously electric utilities are whole other complicated conversation for a thousand other reasons, but those do matter.

And then the last one you pointed out, which I really love is the opt out mechanism. And that really became something that I talk with folks, [00:24:00] policymakers a lot about, and psychologically liberty mindset about in the mid to late Covid, because the biggest Covid, Long Covid studies that were done came out of the UK and the NIH.

And part of that is because when you were born, your health data sharing is, you know, anonymized, but it's opt out. And in the US it's the complete opposite. And so we have these hugely fragmented systems where we can't get enough people in clinical trials and they're so expensive and it's a nightmare, whereas sure you can opt out, but as everybody knows, like that's kind of a pain in the ass.

It's just a little bit of friction and it can go such a long way. And that's what I love about this idea is that you're normalizing it, you're standardizing it, but also using that, you know, behavioral psychology of, Who's gonna stand there and uncheck the box at the register, you know, and not donate that $1.

And we all see it everywhere, but if you can really [00:25:00] say to where it's going instead of some huge organization that does that and that, hey, this is going to a pool for this thing in this area that might benefit this restaurant and others. And the food chain. That is so much more one-to-one for people.

Does any of that make any sense at all? I'm just seeing all these pieces and going oh, this is, you've clearly like really paid attention to what works, but like you said, seeing all the versions that don't work or don't move the needle enough, which is when you go, oh, we have to do something more.

It's a little bit like it's one thing to say stop consumers, don't buy plastic. It's bad for your body and it's bad for the overall system. Or hey, we need to do a better job of recycling it 'cause we only recycle 5% of it and China stopped taking it in 2018.

This whole thing. But it's better when a state goes, oh, we're just gonna start charging the companies who are putting out plastic, because that's how you really cut down the system. Right. It's kinda like the inverse. It's the penalty for yours is you actually have to go to that source to make a thing.

'cause that's when they'll go, oh shit, we gotta start packaging this in cardboard or paper. Right. You have [00:26:00] to keep going closer and closer to the source.

Anthony Myint: Yeah, and well, I mean, almost getting back to this, maximally extractive nature of capitalism. I feel like here was a crystallizing moment for us as small business operators. We were starting this restaurant. It was called The Perennial. We were trying to champion regenerative ag and make everything super sustainable in all these different ways.

And, you know, bending over backwards to like, be good basically. And so, first of all, like coming to terms with oh, well, maybe just us being good isn't gonna be enough to change the system? But then the real kernel of learning, there was, we were establishing that restaurant and you know, I told the lawyer like, oh, you know, we want to have this as a B Corp. And he was like, okay, just check this box. And I was like, oh, I thought there was a whole, you know, certification and process and whatever criteria. And he was like, oh, that's like the marketing certification. But the IRS just cares if you check this box. So I was like, oh, well what's the difference between, you know, S Corp and C Corp and B Corp? And he was like, oh, well [00:27:00] if it's S Corp or C corp and you use any of your profit for something other than giving to shareholders, then the board of directors can sue you.

If it's a B Corp and you use profit for something other than giving to shareholders, they can't sue you. So it started to become, you know, that's kind of like The Usual Suspect's moment where the inspector's like dropping the ceramic and it's shattering and it's oh. So legally every corporation can't do any good.

If it's for marketing. Okay. But if they do too much good that they could have just given for profit, they're at legal risk. So. You know, that's where the opt-out becomes pretty important because it's like the consumer is at the transaction level making the choice, and that's to me, the silver bullet. So it has nothing to do with restaurants or hard work. Every single transaction in all of capitalism could have an opt-out. It could be one penny, it could be literally any amount. But that's [00:28:00] when capitalism starts changing.

Quinn: Sure. And you see examples of this, again, electric grid, this and that, you see, Stripe and Shopify have started to try to build it in for carbon removal, right? They're funding specific projects for that, which, you know, some people like it'll never work and other people are like, well, we should probably fucking try.

And this is one way to do it, is again, like at the transaction level, do the end round and give that directly to these pilots and again, will it work? Is it a good use of funds? That's a question, but the model, like you said, skips a lot of these other pretty thorny by design systemic issues that are otherwise a nightmare.

You know, it's crazy to try to take on this stack or deal with the fact. And that's if you have the most well-intentioned board out there because in the end what you're asking, you know, with your most logical participants to do restaurants or whatever and farmers is to continually try to do more with less and there's no two industries that really [00:29:00] just cannot do that anymore.

You know, especially with, I'm starting to see so many of these effects of climate, right? Just because you ordered this fish or this crop doesn't mean it's gonna be available because we might've had a drought or a flood and they only have so much insurance. Or their farm workers don't have heat protections or they're getting deported.

You know, it's such a fucking complicated mess. So I really appreciate the taking a step back. And going, but that doesn't mean we can't do this. There has to be a way to do this. Like where do we have control? And that's such a big part of our work, is helping people see what can you actually control and what's out of your control.

Anthony Myint: I completely agree that basically it just took a lot of trial and error to kind of understand that, you know, oh, even if we bought the good one or whatever, that just means someone else didn't buy the good one. That didn't actually instigate any kind of systems level change. It just was, you know, we're good or something.

And so that's, I feel like too much of the focus is on like consumption, demand, you know, products essentially [00:30:00] as opposed to production, supply. Almost like the service of transition that needs to occur.

Quinn: It's a little bit like how we currently have decided that, you know, the fight against screen time and Big Tech is basically on parents essentially, and it's impossible. And you know, you're outnumbered many billions to one. And it's just not gonna move the needle, right?

I wanna focus on community because we talk about that, you know, it's easy to think okay, at the international and the federal levels where we're gonna make the biggest impact for a lot of this stuff. Sure. Those are pretty broken for the moment in a lot of ways.

Not to say state and local or even your school board or a school or a restaurant are not or complicated. But at least for now, we are really trying to focus a lot of our effort on state and local actions that people can make really measurable stuff. So [00:31:00] before we get into those specifically though, you had an NPR interview.

It was a great episode. As a, just a little context, I'm an atheist monster, but I majored in religious studies. To really try to understand like why people do what they do in groups and in person throughout history. I've worked in philanthropy and policy and all this different stuff, and again, we're trying to emphasize more state and local action, knowing it's gonna be most practical and where you might see the effect, but at the same time, there's measurably less state and local, especially local, community than ever before. At least in the US people are going to church less. There are fewer third places, we're talking on the phone less, hanging out in person less, getting driver's licenses less, having less sex. They're on their phones, but not talking. People are more isolated and lonely. And of course the overlap in margins among all that stuff is so debatable.

But you loosely quoted your wife in that interview [00:32:00] and you said. It almost sort of fills a little bit of a religious void for a secular person where I feel like I'm actually working to save a little bit of the planet at a time. A dollar at a time, a thousand dollars at a time, an acre at a time, one practice at a time, and in the way, that's actually what each community’s going to need in the medium term.

So if a community did this, they would have less of a problem at the next fire or flood or drought or whatever. That's really indicative of what we need and where we are. And I would love if you could expand on how that actually works itself into the work itself.

Anthony Myint: Well, let me go get my wife to wax poetic.

Quinn: Yep. Perfect. Yep.

Anthony Myint: No. I think there's a way in which I'm like you, where I’m kind of atheist, rational, that's not how I grew up. But I really feel like the reconnection with nature, like my wife is big on ritual and so sort of just like creating ritual and it seems a little bit [00:33:00] goofy or corny, but like the actual act of sending a dollar or sending a penny or doing whatever feels good. If you imagine being like a tourist and you're just there visiting and extracting and consuming and you know, whatever, and then like you don't give back anything. You know? And so just that idea of well, in a way we're all sort of like temporarily inhabiting this place, and if we literally never give anything back to our local environment. That doesn't feel good. And eventually we've externalized everything and we don't have a local environment. And so like you said, essentially like I think that there will start to be bioregional economies and laws will start to work around those as resources become increasingly scarce. We're kind of like already seeing that with water. It will be incumbent on local governments to create policies that preserve their communities and resilience and, you know, [00:34:00] water and all the things. But I think that for some reason that hasn't happened yet. And that's where the religious-ish, spiritual-ish element comes in, where it almost feels like, you know, now I'm the preacher, you know, trying to preach this, which is again, insane because I would rather just drink a beer and watch sports or something. But no one else is doing it for some reason.

Quinn: It is an opportunity, isn't it?

Anthony Myint: I mean, it's the biggest opportunity because like nature can heal itself. There's some stat from Project Drawdown where if you look at like regenerative cropping and managed grazing, each dollar invested creates something like $40 of benefit. You know, water, carbon, resilience, nutrition, more profitability because of lower input costs.

You know, the food tastes better. Like every single thing is better, and the only reason we aren't doing that is because of inertia.

Quinn: It's an opportunity for people though too. So a lot of what we've built into our app and our work and Drawdown [00:35:00] has done a really great job of course, of building these out and standardizing co-benefits as they call 'em, you know, with the predictable, measurable secondary effects or side effects, positive side effects of a particular policy or decision. And like you said, it's a huge opportunity for all those reasons, right? It's the same reason we push electric school buses. Right. Or free kids' lunches. You alluded to it exactly. You know, you can focus more when your school or your bedroom is not as hot at night. When you can breathe the air, that means your grades are better. That means you go to school more. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Your parents don't have to stay home from work some more.

It's endless. And it's so easy to see these, and understandably, and you almost have to, in sort of a Churchill way of we're fucking in it. This is the shit. But if you can also see them as ways to pick apart these systems and see all the different pieces and then realize like these things will almost automatically start to get improved along the way if we [00:36:00] do these specific things with this $1 transaction, which seems insane.

And obviously it's not that simple. It requires someone as thoughtful as you and your wife looking at it and going no, these projects matter and these are who we're gonna trust to validate them. And no, you can't just write a fucking essay because you know you gotta do this. It requires a lot of process and a lot of thought, but it can go a long way.

It can normalize new behaviors on every front. Right. We think a lot here about, and I want to get to these, you mentioned that you all have like model ordinances drafted and we work a lot with Rewiring America, and they do a lot of that stuff with their mayor's program, normalizing those not lowest common denominator, but common denominators. What are policies that work in the most places? How do we boil 'em down to those things so the more people can take 'em to their city council or take 'em to their favorite restaurant and go, here's the stack of papers. This works in six other cities.

Here's how we benefit and here's how we pay for it. It matters, right? You're socializing those [00:37:00] things. So tell me about those ordinances.

Anthony Myint: Yeah, basically it's just a lawyer worked with us through the NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Counsel. He was working with us pro bono. Otherwise we wouldn't have this. But basically, he just adapted the community choice aggregation legislation and policies. That's kind of like the renewable energy work like the dollar per energy bill.

So it's basically just, you know, literally just instead of a public utilities commission kind of establishing like a local healthy soils commission that would oversee the incoming funds. Pretty simple stuff. Like it could be a farmer, a city council person, an environmental person, a restaurateur, right?

Anything. So then there's exhibit A and B and C, and it's basically just a dollar per trash bill. It's an opt-out. Same exact policies. Things like 1% at restaurants or hotels, you know, that could be an opt-out or an opt-in. It could be at the time of business license renewal, you would just have local, you know, marketing programs, essentially [00:38:00] like Cool Petaluma or something like that.

And then, you know, people know oh, I'm gonna go to the Cool Petaluma Coffee Shop instead of the Dunkin Donuts or whatever, or maybe Dunkin Donuts is part of it because they don't wanna risk losing that business or whatever. And then you would just start to have millions of dollars that the commission could deploy to the projects. And we're seeing already like interest in this, in the sense that cities and counties have climate action plans that they update periodically. In California, you know, out of 400 jurisdictions or whatever, there's, you know, 30 or 50 that have like soil carbon sequestration as part of their climate action plan. So it's starting, but even the ones that have it. Very few have an actual plan. They're just we will prioritize this or whatever.

And then when it comes down to it, a lot of them set targets and they screw up, frankly, because they are focusing their targets on publicly owned agricultural land.

So one example is we're in good [00:39:00] conversations with Sonoma County. They're very good actors. They want to solve this. They just did a whole climate strategy or climate plan update. Sonoma has 140,000 acres of agriculture or crop land, even more of range land and pasture. But let's talk crop land for a minute and their climate action plan involves taking action on 20 acres, 20 out of 140,000. And that's because, you know, some 60 or something acres of cropland are publicly owned and then they're addressing 30% of it to be in line with statewide targets. So that would be like if Los Angeles or someone is okay, here's our plan on renewable energy. We're gonna do nothing in the whole city except put a few panels on the government owned buildings, right? That would be ridiculous.

But that's the mistake that every single jurisdiction in California, even the absolute most progressive on carbon sequestration, that's the mistake they're making, miscategorizing and no implementation plan. So again, I [00:40:00] wish other people were working on this, but we don't, we're not even a policy shop, but I'm like having to go to climate action plan meetings and public comment and try to change that. So there's a big opportunity, as you say.

Quinn: And it's fascinating too. And again, control what you can control. If they only own 30% of the crop land, but few places are as incentivized right now as somewhere like Sonoma County that's already burned, to do this right, to do versions of this. Even if it's not directly measurable where they are.

Anthony Myint: Right.

Quinn: It can add up. I mean, and that's a lot of money coming through there. Right? Wow. Alright, let's get to specific actionable things folks can do and we're gonna bring those ordinances in for sure. So in our app and our work, we qualify them as basically a bunch of verbs. It's kinda like, Mad Libs, I want to x about x.

I want to donate, I want to volunteer, I want to organize, I want to learn. I want to teach. I want to invest. I want to buy, if that matters. 'cause the consumer level does matter, right? We are social. It's just not nearly enough. [00:41:00] So tell me where folks with your work particularly can have the most effect.

And I'm interested as well in, part of this is, I mean, what you've really got is a two-sided marketplace, so I'm curious what the best practices are. Is it starting up with projects or is it starting with restaurants and then attracting projects? What's gonna be the most effective for new municipalities?

Anthony Myint: Okay, well this is complicated and there's a lot of answers.

Quinn: Yep. Yep. Great.

Anthony Myint: I'll just start with the individual. So I think for just the average person, we would love donations, of course, we can get the money directly to farm projects, et cetera. In places where there is not composting. I think composting is probably like the most clear agricultural act that like a citizen can take. You don't have a garden, you don't have whatever but if there's a way to compost and then get that compost to farms and ranches to replace fertilizer and improve soil health you know, it's like literally just closing this like organic resource loop and nutrient loop. And people like hands-on stuff.

And so basically [00:42:00] kind of like getting involved with local composting and local compost policy, et cetera. One missing component of that is that even if the compost is created, then there's not necessarily funds to cover like freight and logistics and get that to the farm that needs it. So you might have the, you know, essentially rich, well-resourced farm, buying the compost, but it's not necessarily reaching like the broader agricultural community. So that's where, you know, we could talk about the Farm Bill and subsidies and all these things, but nevermind that basically just the last mile of compost work is pretty important to make transformative change that would be like the most additional. And then in terms of learning I feel a little bit like the Cassandra, where I think that too many food systems leaders are thinking about changing consumption and better choices instead of just taking a direct intervention. Like a, an economic intervention really into agriculture to help de-risk this transition for farmers. And so I [00:43:00] think on the learning side, you know, people could basically, especially people who are not like food system veterans, could join the space and promote thinking about food systems change through agriculture instead of consumption. You mentioned of course the ordinances and policy. So if anybody is like a city council person, sustainability person please get in touch. But the other is it doesn't need to be a law. So you could imagine someone like, let's say the Napa wine industry. So huge industry, $7 billion industry, 1% would be 70 million. So if Napa wine was 1% more expensive. You'd have $70 million. The whole industry is linked to 45,000 acres of agriculture, so you'd have $1,700 per acre per year. Napa could just become super resilient and water conservation and you know, regenerative, organic, biodynamic certified or whatever in just a couple years, probably be amazing marketing, honestly, if so, if you were just doing it [00:44:00] just for money, they should do it. But then it would also make sure that their whole industry doesn't collapse with climate and water and everything. That they can still keep growing the kind of grapes they want or whatever, like for all the reasons they should just do it. Napa's probably an extreme example in terms of the economic levers or whatever, but the California Almond Board, you know, dairy associations, et cetera, every single industry could start to regenify itself. And so, you know, this is a, everybody knows somebody who's in the food industry like somehow. And so basically you know, thinking about how they can change farming is a pretty big opportunity. But the interesting thing is it's not the usual suspects. So often I'll pitch like a farm to table chef and they just completely ignore this because in a way they're like already good.

Quinn: And being already good, is already a pain in the ass for them.

Anthony Myint: Exactly right. Right. So I don't judge them, you know, like it, [00:45:00] because it just takes a whole, you know, if you have a heat pump and an EV and solar panels on your roof, good for you. You maybe don't need to show up at the town hall and try to get the dollar per energy bill. That's okay. But you also could still try to get the dollar, you know, if you wanna make the change happen, you could. So I think we're just trying to advance this notion of collective regeneration, that anybody can do anything and it could start to make a difference because nobody's currently working on this at the right scale or in the right way.

Quinn: Are you familiar with the folks at Mill Industries? Gentleman who, yeah. Hey, had the co-founder Matt Rogers on the show, I mean, time means nothing anymore, Anthony, a year ago, two years ago. I don't know, man. It's a really interesting intervention in sort of the, I guess depending on how you're defining the last mile of it of compost in the sense that people are like, oh, I don't have a garden.

Or it's too runny, or, it's too, I don't have a place for it. Or, what's the right bucket? And they're like, we're gonna give you this really fancy [00:46:00] fucking trash can that the Nest and iPod guy designed. And it's nice and it, and then in the morning it doesn't smell. And then you ship it out using the post office and it goes to these farms and obviously, it's obviously starting with wealthier folks for sure. But you know, we're also big fans of the kitchen sink approach here, right? We have to throw all of these things at it as much as we can. And if that helps, and if that's scalable and it becomes lower cost or we can move into schools, whatever it is.

Again, like you said, just teaching people this action, that's great. And if we can make it a law for everyone to have to participate with a dollar more. That's great. Not asking restaurants or like these chefs who are already like, man, what else are you trying to ask me to do tonight? My shift starts in half an hour.

You know, I haven't even made family meal yet.

Anthony Myint: I'm not even looking for a dollar. I'm looking for a penny.

Quinn: Yeah. We'll take it. Right? We'll take it. It's obviously dark right now, but I have friends who are in the midst of the budgetary USAID stuff and things like [00:47:00] that at the moment. And you know, when people talk about the space budget is too much or USAID’s budget is too much, you know, you poll them and they think US foreign aid is 10% of the US budget, and you're like, if it was 10% of the US budget, like everything is fixed.

That's it. It's such a small amount, but at scale it really can add up even on the local level.

Anthony Myint: Well, another thing since you mentioned it is like the federal budget is four or 6 trillion, whatever, depending, but then like state and local budgets are 5.7. So to your point earlier, just I think there's so much potential in each municipality in each state to kind of create transformative change.

Quinn: And doing it. It's not all gonna be with your hands. Half the time, half the people won't even notice that they're not opting out of donating a dollar. We built this, I was probably 12, a playground near my old baseball fields here. I grew up here and the whole town came together and we built it and it's still there.

And that was Jesus. I don't know, man, 30 something years ago. But people remember that [00:48:00] because people use it every day and it mattered and we had a gentleman on who wrote a book recently about land power and how we use land and how it's part of the wealth building and its community decided, no, we're gonna use this for the community.

We're gonna use it for children, we're gonna build it together instead of just a contractor. And that sticks with folks, you know, and this might not be quite so tangible in an everyday way but we can do versions of that and we need to, 'cause for every, you know, one who wants to operate at the federal level and you know, regulate these enormous food companies, best wishes and thank you.

But it's gonna be a minute. I mean, with the Farm Bill is how many years overdue at this point? So. I love everything about this. I think this is awesome. Any other suggested actions folks can take?

Anthony Myint: Yeah. I would be remiss if I did not kind of shameless self plug, but aside from donating we have dozens of Zero Foodprint businesses that are sending 1%. So there's a spiffy new map and member directory on our [00:49:00] website. So you can go kind of patronize those businesses, let them know that it matters.

But also we have a kind of champions toolkit or ambassador toolkit, so anybody can sort of like use that to tell their local business, Hey, maybe you should consider this. You know, I would do this. Customers would choose you, you know, et cetera.

And so just kind of building up that regenerative economy would be a huge help among your audience.

Quinn: I love it. Anything else I'm missing? I've talked to your ear off enough. I've taken up your whole day.

Anthony Myint: I mean, if you want to give me more chances, I'll tell you more things, but a dark horse distant future thing might be fungal dominant composting.

So there's researchers from New Mexico State and others that kind of have found a methodology for creating fungal dominant compost. So most food waste compost is kind of like bacterial forward.

This is using mostly like green waste, like garden scraps and stuff. But then basically in a medium scale study, they found that two pounds of fungal dominant compost [00:50:00] mixed with water was enough to replace 140 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. So sort of like game changing, you know, in a way I kind of think like fungus is almost like the AI of agriculture where there's like a whole new horizon of improvement that doesn't even exist yet. So if you're like a scientist or some whatever, like kind of getting involved on that front could have major ramifications for changing, you know, food and climate and water.

Quinn: I love that. Unfortunately, whenever someone says fungal dominant, my friend Craig Mazen is the creator of the Last Of Us TV series which is also very fungal dominant. It doesn't end well.

Anthony Myint: Well, that's why it's the AI, you know, it. could go either way.

Quinn: A hundred percent. Yep. Great. Everything's great. I love that.

I love that kind of new shit when they're like, we might've found some bacteria that can eat this plastic. Okay. Is that gonna solve it? No. Do we need to do that? Yeah, let's keep trying. That's awesome. Last question I ask everybody. Got any time for reading these days? It could be literally just books you read to your children. Anything that [00:51:00] has changed your mind, inspired you, opened your brain to a topic you hadn't considered before.

We got a whole list up on Bookshop and people love it.

Anthony Myint: Jeez, too many. I really like Ministry for the Future because it is a really pragmatic and nuanced, quasi sci-fi about solving it. I really like Robin Wall Kimmerer whose book Braiding Sweetgrass is amazing, especially on audio because she's reading it. I mean, there's a bunch, but I think there's a lot of really good writing on kind of nature and natural climate solutions.

Quinn: Sure. Anything you read that is the complete opposite of all that turns your brain off? For me it's like dragons.

Anthony Myint: Speaking of dragons, I just was reading a book called Dragon Rider 3. And that was similar but kind of the opposite.

Quinn: Yeah, my 12-year-old just had me reading oh hell, what's that series called? Eragon, something like that. Dragon riders. I'm like, great, if it's not real world, if recycling's not involved, I'll do it. That sounds great. [00:52:00] This is fantastic. I really appreciate it. I really want to go after food more and not just in a superficial way.

I think there's a lot to be done here for sure. And I love this model that you guys are building. It's pretty awesome.

Anthony Myint: Cool. Well thanks and hopefully we can build it together.

Quinn: Yeah. And you fixed it. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thanks to your wife who's not here, but obviously she's a big inspiration for a lot of this and a big part of it. So, yeah, my wife's the same way. She's holding the whole thing together. Thank you, man.