You're listening to Heritage Radio Network. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Pot Luck Food Talks. Today, I'm here with Johan Jorgensen from Sweden Food Tech, and we're going to talk about food systems. How are you, Johan? How are you doing? Oh, I'm just fine. And talking about food systems is a lovely way to spend an afternoon. So let's start with the beginning. How did you end up in the food world? Because your background, as far as I understand, is like a techie background,
right? Yeah, well, I'm a business school guy from the beginning. But many, many, many moons ago, I joined the Swedish internet scene at the beginning of that movement. And I've spent my life in tech ever since. But in 2011, I was horribly, horribly bored with the tech sector and decided I need to get away from all these. crappy online casinos or dating apps. I was an investor at that time. And I said, I need to do something that is meaningful. And then, oops, what about
food? Because I'd been kind of interested in how to grow things with artificial light then, because that's semiconductor light and that's very techy in a way. I was always fascinated by tech. And then I said, okay, so what about food? And I took a dive and, oops, here we have the largest sector on the planet and it's killing the planet. and everyone on it, and no innovation to be seen anywhere, especially coming from the tech sector. I've been part of transforming many
sectors over the years. I didn't see the remotest similarity to that type of technological... how to say, profess or interest in the food sector. So it turned out to me, it's like, oh, this is a magic cocktail because this system really needs to transform badly and tech and innovation will be at the core of that. And the only question is when and where this will happen. I first met you, we were in Brussels. I remember your intro was incredible. You said something like, well,
the food system is a problem. It's making us
sick, poor, stupid. broke and something like that like i probably stapled all those invectives on top of each other because i i really think that that the food sector is a source of a lot of evil instead of a lot of good that it really could but a lot of food is of course good right but the system itself has been constructed in such a way that it really brings us shit instead of And I think when we start to correct food, it's not just about producing better greens or
so. It's about addressing the system itself and how it has been constructed over the years. I mean, you know, all these big food companies, they get a lot of bad rap for basically doing what the system tells them to do. Now, let's back a bit here. So why do I think that the food system... It's the thing to talk about rather than the players in the food system. Well, it's because we have this framework, this politically
constructed framework around food. Everything from subsidies to the various types of legislations regarding what you can eat or what you can serve. And all of that is driving the players in the industry in a direction. And that direction is industrial large scale. So these large industrial food companies are only doing what they're supposed to do within the realms of the system as we have
constructed it. They act completely logically and we shouldn't blame them for doing that because they're just acting as any other normal company would do. So if we want to shift or transform food, we need to start looking at the food system itself and how we have framed the food system. And then these players who are really smart and savvy, they can run in the right direction instead of the wrong direction. And, you know, we need
their force and their competences. It just needs to be right, you know, directed in another, you know, in another direction. So, I mean, the food system is big and it's massive, but it has been constructed and reconstructed time and time again. So let's just do it another time. And this one, let's make it happen so it stays with us. I guess this is one of those things that perhaps it was not designed. There was not an architect behind it. It was just like forces that shaped it and
interests and these kind of things. But let's start with the beginning. Let's start with a definition of what the food system is, because I guess some listeners could be wondering what
we're actually talking about. The way I understand it is not only, the production sector but there are it's more like an ecosystem where there are many things around and there could be logistics there could be journalists activists politicians also methods of productions and i would say at the very end is a consumer and just next to the consumer would be let's say markets supermarkets and also restaurants and chefs that also can play a role in shaping the demand and the way
of consuming. Like, does that make sense to you? Yeah, it makes, you know, to me, food says miss everything. I mean, food is running the planet. And, you know, mind you, it's also the part of how good grades the kids get at school. That depends on how we feed them, how productive we are at work. It depends on how well we eat. much in the same way as a top athlete performs better or worse, depending on if he or she has eaten well or the correct stuff. So food is affecting
everything, and that we must understand. And then I think it's also important to understand that food is not just primarily, in my book at least, about food, but rather that what's on the plate, right? The effects of food on health, so to say, our health systems as also food system, because some 80 to 90 percent of all the health care budgets goes towards chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes or, you know, heart attacks.
And those diseases come out of bad consumption habits, mainly food, some tobacco, some alcohol, but mainly food. And the same thing goes for the environment. So all our environmental negative effects today, we could fix the climate by fixing food. Piece of cake. But we need to realize that food is the major culprit when it comes to climate
degradation. Do you have a particular take on what could be some strategies or directions or which are the players that could help in reshaping or rethinking the way we interact with the food system? Ultimately, this is about political leadership, political insights, or insights rather, that policymakers... internalize and then react upon and then realize they can actually do things with the stroke of a pen. So let's back a bit
in time. So the industrial food system that we have today is basically a construct from the 1950s, 1960s, when we realized that demographic curve of planet Earth told us, yeah, we'll be four times the population that we are today and we need to feed them. How the hell are we supposed to do that? And we threw exactly everything we had at the problem. You know, industrial scale machinery, new financing solutions. We banged farms together in order to increase industrial
efficiencies. And lo and behold, we actually fixed it. So we have enough food today to feed close to 10 billion people, right? I understand also that... This period you were talking about, like the Marshall Plan had an important role in it, which was the plan of the American army to rebuild the food system in Europe after World War II. And after it was implemented, it stayed like that, which was like a... like a war measure, a way to, like an emergency measure, and it stayed
like that for decades. Food was being produced with lots of fertilizing, heavy machinery, this green revolution you were talking about, that's how it was called. And yeah, at the end of the day, we destroyed very valuable things we had in the previous food system. Yeah, yeah. We must remember, however, that the previous food system that we had wasn't up to the task. We couldn't produce food for 10 billion people or 8 billion people with the methods we had before, smallholder
farms, etc. We weren't up to the task. So it was the failure of that system to scale to the extent of the population explosion. That required us to think in new ways, like the Green Revolution, where we, as you said, we introduced pesticides and fertilizers and super greens, super seeds, etc. And we must also realize that the founder of this movement, the scientist Norman Borlaug, got the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the Green
Revolution, essentially. His take on this was basically, yeah, I hope this can buy us a couple of decades. And within that time frame, we need to rebuild our food system into something that, of course, provides health and sustainability. But everyone got hooked on this industrial calorie machine that could produce safe and cheap calories and just push them out there. That gave rise to the fast food sector, to various types of new dishes that we consume in Sweden, for instance.
Low quality, cheap, high availabilities, can be stored forever. We put ourselves on a grain diet instead of a green diet. And that has proven very detrimental. I think what we see now is that we get it in the neck now. So now we need to fix another problem. Okay, so we have food. Now we must make sure that we have food that's good for us and the planet. And that's the next green revolution. It's going to be of a similar
magnitude as the previous revolution. But it seems really hard for us to understand and wrap our heads around this transformation. And we must remember that there was a huge debate going on during the time when we introduced and cemented this industrial food system. Everyone was, you know, all these small farms that were forced to close and people had to sell and move to the cities. And we saw, you know... Fewer and fewer
farms producing milk or whatever it was. And there has always been a huge debate about that. And now I look forward to another type of debate regarding how we transform or tear down and rebuild, if you like, the food system of today. So for me, that has to be fueled with the technologies and the innovations that we have under our hands today, much in the same way as we scaled. the industrial food system that we have today, with the technologies and innovations we had in the
1960s, we have come further since then. And so now we can use what's at our disposal right now and then turn this food system around. And I think it should just be a positive thing for everyone, including the current food system players. I think... However, that we're mentally very, very reluctant to change things that are so fundamental and close to us, such as food, that makes it tricky. But you could also say it's an even more fun and challenging potential. Our main audience
on this show are chefs and cooks. So what could you say about, do you think chefs and cooks have a role that, or they have like a frame of action within transforming the food system? Or do you know any cases where this has been the case, actually? I think this is, you're nailing it here, Eric, because chefs and food professionals, those are the people who will shift the planet.
It's not consumers. It's not consumers going to the retailer and buying new ingredients and cooking them up at home because regular people don't know how to do that. If I take a look at my own home country in Sweden, you guys, you sit in Spain and the Basque country and everyone is a super chef there. But in my home country, people don't like to cook and they cook very badly. So how do they construct meals? Well,
they take... Dried pasta, boil that up, serve that together with ready -made meatballs and a sprinkle of ketchup, a generous sprinkle of ketchup. That's one of Sweden's favorite dishes, right? And the other favorite dishes look exactly like that. It's like taco. Fry up minced meat, pour a bag of ready -made spices on top of that, serve it with canned maize, hack some cucumber and onions, and there you go. Again, open up a jar of ready -made sauce and top the tortilla
with that one. So, I mean, it's hilarious how bad people are in the kitchen. And the only way forward, I guess, is to involve all these chefs and professionals in the kitchen who can cook. healthy and sustainable meals for us. So I think we need to reorganize the food system. That's one of the key parts of the next green revolution is reorganizing how we cook and eat food in the
world. And the pros need to step in and the pros need to step in and they need to use all tools at their availability, such as machines or novel ingredients and things only they can make sense of. And then we perhaps can scale to Well, scale the next -gen food system. You guys who listen to this, you are the most important people in the world. And I think you should take your rightful position as those most important people in the
world. And you deserve recognition for what the amazing magic you do every day in your kitchens and realize that you are the only ones who can fix this. Here in the show, we've done a couple of episodes. talking with some players, some actors that played a role in the New Nordic cuisine movement. And I was wondering, how did this impact Sweden? Did it change? What were the changes? Is it something that you could see, like across the street, for example, or in the supermarket?
I'd say mostly in the attitude towards food. And what happened before New Nordic came about was that we cooked like... french people in sweden we tried to emulate the french and uh and then suddenly someone said yeah but do we have anything to contribute you you must remember the history of food in sweden or the nordics that's it's porridge Yeah, as far as I understand, there was very strong religious constraints, right? Like it was a sin to have like a super pleasurable
meal. Oh, that too, that too. I'm like, we're in Protestant territory here. Exactly. But we're also in the far northern latitudes, so not much grows here. So it has been a very strong, you know, milk and meat tradition. And that's why Swedes still can stand to drink milk, because we have the necessary enzymes. But it really isn't a food culture in the sense that you guys
think about it as a food culture. So I'd say that what happened with New Nordic was that we liberated ourselves from the constraints, the French constraints, with the help of innovation. Suddenly we said, yeah, no, we can innovate. We can work with what we have. It's not totally crap, everything. We can find and define a new type of cuisine that's more... you know, close to nature, innovative, no limitations really,
seasonal. I mean, it's a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today as a necessity for transforming the food system, as opposed to going back to, so to say, old school French cooking with sauces and whatever have you, recipes. Yeah, all the French foundations, yeah. Yeah, the French foundations, the techniques, the recipes, the ingredients. So that was very liberating and it was innovative in a way to be able to free yourself of the shackles of the old system and
to be able to move ahead. You could basically say a fusion cooking is, new Nordic cooking is kind of a fusion cooking because you could suddenly, you know, take whatever you had out there in terms of techniques or ingredients and make do with them and start making interesting new things happen. And that has liberated, I think, the mindset of a generation or several generations of chefs coming after these pioneers, you know, freeing themselves and saying, yeah, food can
be really interesting. experience not just a well -tasting dish it's it could be something else and i think the typical example of this is really i think we're the best one of the best examples is the danish restaurant the alchemist that i think everyone on your show probably has heard of oh yeah of course and where they serve this dessert that that that is made partly out of blood And it comes in the form of, there's a QR code on the plate. I don't know exactly
how they do it. Some flour through a specific QR code. I don't know. And then what happens? People take up their phones to take a picture of the dish. That's what they always do, right? Camera eats first. Yeah, exactly. That would be another way of attacking it. But people take up their phones. They try to take a picture. What happens, of course, when you hover a phone over QR code is that it takes you to a web address. In this case, the sign -up page for blood donorship
in Denmark. And they have this magnificent conversion rate. And that is, you know, suddenly placing food in some sort of societal context. And I think that's what chefs have started to play around with. So they're not anymore just people. doing dishes in the kitchen. They try to be actors in society. And I also had this discussion with a Swedish chef called Markus Samuelsson, who has a great restaurant in New York. Yeah, he has a Swedish and Nordic restaurant. Before,
Nordic was a thing in New York. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Already plenty, 30 years ago, yeah. Exactly. Aquavit was his first place, I remember. Yes, yes, exactly. And when we had this discussion regarding how COVID When COVID came, New York was emptied, right? So all the people who could, they left New York for their summer houses. But he was there and he realized that, yeah, someone needs to feed all these first responders, the
nurses, the firemen, the police. And he realized then that, yeah, no, as a chef, I'm not just running a restaurant. I'm a community leader.
And he said he felt that was... affecting him quite a lot in seeing himself as a chef in a transformed society and i think that is also how chefs need to see themselves as the players the actors who transform food now and not just being no chefs in the restaurant and we've seen i think also super interesting how chefs go out of the kitchens and into various types of innovative positions So, for instance, we have this company called Endless in the Nordics coming out of what
was Amas, I think it was. Yeah, with Matt Orlando, yes. Matt Orlando, exactly. So Matt is on board with Endless with a couple of other guys, and they make chocolate out of old beer grains. Oh, yeah, I've heard about the project. Yeah, it's a fascinating project. It is absolutely a fascinating project, and they do that based on their expertise
in fermenting. And so suddenly they could take their chef knowledge and suddenly start to build products in this case or start attacking one of the largest problems on this earth, which is that we will run out of chocolate. But now we can still have that chocolate experience. We can save the true chocolate for the chocolate experience and we can replace chocolate as an ingredient with the endless stuff. And it's truly endless because as long as we drink beer, we
can have chocolate. And I think that's a wonderful prospect. Yes, that sounds amazing. No, no, definitely. I think I can also think of NotCo. You know this company in the States? It was originally, I don't think it can be called a startup anymore. It's already like a scale -up. And I saw a TED talk of Matias, the founder of NotCo, like an old one before it was like the huge thing that is today. And he was calculating, like the same
talk we had at the beginning. He was talking, because this is still a big topic, like will we as humans be able to feed ourselves in the year 2050? Which is a question that has not answered yet. But on the study he was talking about, it said that if we continue eating heavily on animal protein, the way we're doing today, the possibilities are around 15 % to 20 % to actually make it. And if it's using heavily on vegetable -based products, the possibility was of 100%, which
is... Interesting, right? And I think that also requires a mind shift because, for example, my generation and many of the people born, let's say, in the 80s or 90s, we were raised in a way where the conception of a dish is like a big piece of meat and vegetables around and not the other way around. For example, like the way the Chinese eat, where they have like a wok of lots of vegetables and some bacon or some, you know,
like cured. pork or whatever, just to give it flavor, but not to be the central part of the... And I think that's not only the healthiest way, but also the most sustainable way to eat. Definitely. And I mean, that's also how we've seen some of the chefs, you know, responding in Sweden too. We have one that's called Paul Svensson, which is one of the local heroes. And that's his philosophy, you know, make veggies the centerpiece of the plate and meat as some sort of addition aside.
An essential. That's, of course, the way to go. But then, of course, we need to make sure that these veggies are super tasty. Of course. And that's, again, only chefs can do that. People in their, you know, regular dudes in Sweden, perhaps, again, not in the Basque country, but in Sweden, regular people cannot make that happen. We don't have access to the greens and we don't have access to the knowledge. So we need some help in order to do that. And as you say, if
we can do that. conversion from meat to veggies instead, without sacrificing taste, then we can save the planet and be healthier. So yeah, it's a win -win, as they say. I also wanted to ask you about Sweden Food Tech and the event you're organizing for September, if you could share a little bit about that. Sure. So Sweden Food Tech is a think tank that I lead together with some colleagues, and we do basically three things. give people advice on where is food heading,
you know, strategic advice. So not what type of flavor should we have for Coke next year, but, you know, the real transformative stuff. We're always science -based. It's not just speculation. We talk about the stuff that you can see around the corner if you have the ability to see around corners. And, you know, once people then wake up and say, okay, so I thought I was in the sewage business, but now I come to realize that I'm part of the food web. Yes, you are. So who should
I talk to? Who are my new best friends out there? And I say, yeah, sure, let's connect you to a couple of those. That could be chefs or entrepreneurs or scientists or other players out there. You could turn sewage water into basically anything with the help of modern technology and some fermentation. And once people have started to do that, they rapidly see that, shit, this is a... really large sector and I can make an imprint here. So suddenly the food sector grows in all various directions.
And once a year we run something called, it's nowadays called the Bite Stockholm, bitestockholm .com. And that is a big show that we do together with the Stockholm Fairs, where we try to build a completely new meeting spot for the future of food. It's basically based on the fact that we burnt down their old... food trade show. And so I said, this is shit. This doesn't cut it anymore. We need to do something about it. And so we reinvented the Bite Stockholm food meeting
spot. And we poured into this also our own yearly
summit called The Big Meat. So it's going to be a trade show, a summit, and not the least, a fantastic test kitchen where we're going to... test stuff uh you know new ingredients new machinery new concepts together with some of the best chefs in the world eric i hope you will come and join us in the kitchen i will i will make everything i have in my hands yeah i will make it one way or the other yeah just see you guys i mean like that's you know we need to we need to have the
expertise and the The innovation power of the truest, greatest chefs out there are to make this. And we try to put them front and center. So actually, we have the commis in the kitchen. That will be the venture capitalists and the buyers. So they will be there chopping onions and doing the dishes. But learning from the best. And also, a last question I wanted to make you. So as I mentioned, our audience are mostly chefs.
Which could you say that are now... chefs that are doing really interesting stuff in Sweden that are worth checking their work for someone who wants to have a first approach to the Swedish food scene or restaurant scene? Oh my god, you should have prepared me for this one. There are several great, so to say, fine dining chefs. I'd probably take a close look at... Jesse Sommarström, which is young and she's already hit the world.
And she cooked the Nobel dinner. The Nobel Prize winners always are invited to a huge, big, fancy dinner. And she cooked that this year. And she, for instance, used hydrothermically processed grains in order to cook a porridge. Where the processing of the grains make all the nutrients in the porridge available. She removes the anti -nutrients from the porridge. And that was a big coup. She's also helped IKEA to this furniture store that's blue and yellow coming from Sweden.
That you might have heard of. I've heard about it, yeah, I think so. And they're big in meatballs. And she's now constructed a 50 -50 or hybrid meatball for IKEA. That's going to hit the restaurants now as well. Okay, super interesting. Yeah, so she's super cool. Yeah, that is definitely one of them. I think one of the most fun restaurants in Stockholm is a restaurant called Punk Real, which is a fine dining but super punky experience. Loud, noisy, you know, a lot of smoke, high energy.
loads of alcohol flowing party party party uh it's it's it's absolutely totally crazy shit and there you cannot bring in your phones that's the first thing they snack from you and then they put them in a in a locked uh that's very punk definitely no camera no problem totally agree with you that that's also fun they've expanded and they're now a chain Like McDonald's that exists in several countries. That's not so punk, but okay. That's not so punk, but hey, it works.
Yeah, sure. Amazing. That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks. If you like what we're doing, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can also find us on Instagram and TikTok as Potluck Food Talks. The show airs every Monday.