In This Episode

Host Matt Eastland convenes diverse voices at the forefront of food systems change, posing one powerful question:

What’s the biggest challenge facing our food system in addressing climate change?

The answers span philosophy, technology, policy, finance, and culture, showing us just how interwoven the food system truly is.

Key Themes & Takeaways

1. Food is Culture, Care and Complexity

The food system resists simple decarbonisation. Unlike transport or infrastructure, it involves multiple greenhouse gases, layered stakeholders, and feedback loops across agriculture, logistics, retail, and consumption.

Food is deeply embedded in cultural, spiritual, and ecological systems. Treating it as a separate commodity undermines its role in human identity, community, and planetary health.

2. Disconnection is the Root Problem

Siloed thinking and competition continue to block trust and collaboration across the food system.

Convenience culture reinforces disconnection. Food becomes an abstract product, stripped from its origins and impacts. Systems thinking is needed to reconnect growing, eating, and caring for the land.

3. Funding is Misaligned and Often Missing

Agrifood consistently receives less funding than energy or mobility. Its complexity and broad societal relevance make it harder to define and prioritise in investment frameworks.

Smallholder farmers and low-income communities are excluded from the transformation unless equity is built into financing from the start. Redistribution of funding is essential for real change.

4. Tech Can Help, But Simpler Isn’t Stupid

Technologies like traceability systems, satellite mapping, and soil diagnostics can support better decisions. But without interoperability and clarity of origin, they risk adding confusion rather than solving problems.

Low-tech, farmer-led solutions, like microbial soil treatments or local distribution models, can be just as impactful when aligned with regenerative goals.

5. Everyone Has a Role, But Power Must Be Shared

Food systems can’t be changed by buyers and corporations alone. Without buy-in and cooperation from farmers, processors, and communities, interventions stall.

People experiencing food insecurity are often excluded from decisions. Their realities must be represented if solutions are to be effective and fair.

Participation across all levels of society is not optional — it’s the only way to achieve meaningful, lasting transformation.

Practical Actions for Listeners

Whether you’re a policymaker, producer, chef, startup founder or citizen, here are five grounded actions you can take based on this episode:

Map the Web, Not the Line: Visualise the food system you’re part of as a web. Who are the overlooked nodes?

Source Like It Matters: Connect with local or regenerative producers. Even one supplier switch can ripple.

Fund What’s Hard: Support initiatives that aren’t “sexy” but critical things like soil labs, farmer cooperatives, local food councils.

Translate Tech to the Field: If working in agtech, test solutions in real conditions. Co-create with farmers, don’t just sell to them.

Widen the Table: If your event, org, or policy circle looks and sounds the same you have to change the invite list.

Big Questions to Ponder

• How do we avoid reinforcing a food system that only serves the privileged?

• Can we create digital infrastructure that supports traceability and equity?

• Are we innovating away from resilience, or toward it?

• What would it look like to build a food system based on love, not leverage?

Featured Voices

• Richard Zaltzman, CEO, EIT Food

• Andrea Falcone, Institute of Indigenous Knowledge

• Fabio Volkmann, Climate Farmers

• Tom Hunt, Eco-Chef and Food Activist

• Simon Partridge, Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein

• Dr. Christian Reynolds, Centre for Food Policy, City University

• Tom Pearson, Regenerative Farmer

• Amy Chappell, Livestock Farmer

• Mark Kaplan, WholeChain