I'm such an unlikely crusader for cleaning up the food supply.
I grew up in Texas,
eating my fair share of Doritos and Ding Dongs.
(Laughter)
I wasn't a foodie.
What I was, was the oldest of four kids and like you often hear about,
I inherited absolutely every single one of those Type A overachieving genes
that you read about in first born children.
Thankfully, I learned how to channel that into academics,
and I received a full scholarship to business school
before graduating as the top one in my class.
I then went on to work as a food industry analyst
and when the management teams of places like Whole Foods and Wild Oats
would come to our offices, we just kind of thought it was
"lifestyle of the rich and famous" or some hippie thing.
We didn't really get it.
After doing that for a while, my husband and I decided to have kids,
so I traded the brief case for a diaper bag.
Using all of that Type A energy,
I had four kids
in just over five years.
(Laughter)
Up until that point, I really hadn't given a whole lot of thought
about what was in the food supply.
I figured if it was on grocery store shelves, it was safe.
Please don't tell me what to eat,
and don't tell me what to feed my kids.
Then one morning, over breakfast, life changed.
And in all candor, that morning,
that breakfast was L'Eggo My Eggo waffles,
tubes of blue yoghurt,
and scrambled eggs.
Our youngest child started to have an allergic reaction.
As her face started to swell shut,
I was so unfamiliar with what a food allergy actually looked like,
that I looked at my older three and said, "What did you put in her face?"
They all gave me those blank little kid stares.
And I got really scared.
So I raced her to the paediatrician's office and she said,
"Robyn, what did you feed the kids for breakfast?
It looks like she is having this allergic reaction."
I said,"I fed them L'Eggo My Eggo waffles, blue yoghurt, and scrambled eggs."
And she says, "Well, those are three of the top beta allergens",
and she starts rattling off all of these statistics about food allergies,
and how food could kill a kid.
All I could think was, since when?
Since when has food become so dangerous?
As we got everything under control, we got back home,
and I put all the kids down for a nap,
every single analytical gene in my body went off.
I wanted to dig into that data.
Because I hadn't known anybody that had a food allergy when I was a kid.
As I turned to the research, I learned that morning:
from 1997 until 2002, there had been a doubling of the peanut allergy.
I also learned that one out of 17 kids under the age of three
now has a food allergy.
Then I learned from the Centers for Disease Control
that there had been a 265% increase
in the rate of hospitalization related to food allergic reactions.
That was doctors checking people into ER, that wasn't moms diagnosing it.
So I wanted to know, what is a food allergy?
A food allergy is when your body sees food proteins as foreign.
It basically launches this inflammatory response
to drive out that foreign invader.
It just begged the question to me:
Is there something foreign in our food that wasn't there when we were kids?
Again, I turned to the data and I'd heard from the Wall Street Journal and CNN
that milk allergy is the most common allergy here in the US.
I learned from the US Department of Agriculture
that beginning in the 1990s,
we began to engineer new proteins into our food supply.
And it started in our milk.
In 1994, in order to drive profitability for the dairy industry,
scientists, using this new technology,
were able to genetically engineer new proteins.
It was a synthetic growth hormone. and it's injected into dairy cows,
and it helps them make more milk.
Now, the analyst in me, that made absolutely perfect sense,
it was a brilliant business model
that could help drive profitability for the dairy industry.
But at the same time, no human trials had ever been conducted on that.
Animal studies were showing that it increased rates of mastitis,
ovarian cysts, lameness, skin disorders that resulted
in an increased antibiotic use.
For that reason, governments around the world said,
"This hasn't yet been proven safe."
So Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand,
Japan, all 27 countries in Europe,
they didn't allow it into their food supply.
On top of that, studies started to come out that showed
that this synthetic growth hormone, elevated hormone levels
that were linked to breast, prostate, and colon cancer.
When I learned that, I wanted to know:
what are the rates of cancer here in the US
versus these other countries that didn't accept this growth hormone?
So I turned to incredible organizations
like the American Cancer Society and Livestrong.
I learned that the US has one of the highest rates of cancer
of any country on the planet.
And that migration studies show that if you were to move here
from somewhere like Japan,
your likelihood of developing cancer increases fourfold.
I also learned that one out of two men and one out of three American women
are expected to get cancer in their lifetime.
I then went on to learn from the Centers for Disease Control
that cancer is the leading cause of death by disease
for children under the age of 15.
Correlation isn't causation.
So I wanted to look at some of these other allergens.
I turned to soy because I had learned
that soy had recently become one of the top eight allergens.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, in 1996,
in order to drive profitability for the soy industry,
because it's primarily used to fed livestock,
a new protein was introduced into the soy bean.
Again, as an analyst, it made perfect sense.
The soy bean was engineered
to withstand increasing doses of wheat killer.
So it drove profitability for the industry by increasing sales with that wheat killer
and then on top of that, you were patenting something new in that protein
that you could then license, and charge royalty fees,
and trade fees, and licensing fees for.
And again, because no human trials had been conducted,
and the one human trial that had been conducted
showed a 50% increase in the rate of soy allergies,
governments around the world said,
"We're going to exercise precaution.
We're not going to allow this into our food supply
because it hasn't yet been proven safe."
And yet, here we said, "It hasn't yet been proven dangerous."
And we allowed it.
As I kept looking, I wanted to know:
Were there other new proteins in our food?
I learned that a few years later,
through the growing concern
of the spraying of insecticides over corn fields,
scientists using this new technology
were able to engineer that insecticidal protein into the seed of a corn plant.
So that as it grows, it releases its own insecticide.
Again, because no human studies had been done,
governments around the world said,
"We're not going to introduce this into our food supply.
Or if we do, we are going to insist on labeling
so that consumers can make an informed choice."
In some countries, they didn't want it fed to their livestock.
In some countries, like in France, in New Zealand,
they were so concerned, they didn't want it planted in their soil.
As you can imagine, upon learning all of this,
there were some pretty dark nights in our house.
When I thought, "How many bowls of cereal have I poured this milk on
not knowing that it contained this synthetic growth hormone?
How much of the soy have I fed my family
not knowing that consumers in other countries
were able to make an informed choice?"
As I sat down with my husband, I said, "I cannot unlearn this information.
I have to do everything I can to try to teach other people about this.
I don't know what they will say."
Together, the next morning,
we sat the kids down at the breakfast table and I said,
"You know how mom has learned some pretty tough stuff
about what's going on in our food?
It's not in food in other countries,
and it's especially not in food fed to kids.
I'm going to have to do something about it."
One of the boys looked at me, and he said,
"Mom, how many people are on your team?"
(Laughter)
I said, "Well, it's you four. And daddy."
(Laughter)
And he said, "Mom, you need a bigger team."
(Laughter)
He was absolutely right.
At that point, people were saying, "You should reach out to Erin Brockovich,
you should really reach out to Erin Brockovich."
All I kept thinking was, "Who am I?
Who am I to reach out to Erin Brockovich?"
But at the same time,
I thought maybe if I could get through to somebody like that,
we could start to create this change.
Truly harnessing every single one of those Type A genes,
I spent two weeks crafting a four sentence e-mail to Erin Brockovich.
(Laughter)
When I fired it off, I don't know if I ever really expected her to reply.
But when she did, I suddenly thought,
maybe one person really can make a difference.
As I continued to look into this research
and the research that was being presented by the industry
about how we needed this new operating system on our food supply,
that we needed these genetically engineered proteins,
and all the chemicals that went with it,
I realised that they had done an incredible job manufacturing demand
by creating this fear of scarcity
that we needed this technology to feed the world.
But at the same time, the USDA was reporting
that the US was throwing away 96 billion pounds of food, every year.
27% of the food that we were producing wasn't even making it to our plates.
So I realised while it was in the interest of industry
to drive a need for increased production, this was also a distribution issue.
On top of that, reports were coming out of the United Nations,
they were saying that conventional agriculture,
without the use of all these synthetic chemicals,
was actually doing an incredible job of meeting this demand.
As I stepped back from that I thought, "How can we eat this way here?
Without all of these synthetic chemicals
and without all of these newly introduced proteins
for which no human trials had been conducted?"
I kept coming back to organics.
In all candor, it was driving me absolutely nuts
because of the high price for those foods.
So I looked into the business model there.
I learned that as a national family, sitting down to our national dinner table,
with our national budget, our resources are used to subsidize the growing of food
with all of these genetically engineered proteins and all of these chemicals.
And at the same time, the farmers that are growing things organically,
which by law means without the use of these synthetic chemicals
and without the use of these genetically engineered proteins,
these guys are charged fees to prove that their stuff is safe.
On top of that, they're charged fees to then label it, and then on top of that,
they don't get the same crop insurance and marketing assistance programs
that these guys get over here.
So I reached out to these farmers that had adopted this new operating system.
That's when I learned that the farmers
that had been feeding our country for generations,
are suddenly having to pay new costs with these new technologies
because of the patents in those seeds, they can no longer store seeds
as their grandfathers did and their great grandfathers did.
But rather, they've got to license the use of that technology
and pay royalty fees, and trade fees, and licensing fees
for the privatization of these profits to these shareholders.
As I reflected on the fact that the US was one of the few countries in the world
to have so boldly adopted this new technology,
and all of these chemicals that it was dependent upon,
I wanted to know,
"What are our rates of disease here versus the rest of the world?"
I learned that the US spends more on health care
than any other country on the planet.
That 16 cents of every dollar we spend is spent managing disease.
As an analyst, I reflected on that. and I thought,
we can't drive our profitability towards our core competencies
at the corporate level because we're busy managing disease.
Our global competitiveness could very well be at stake.
So as I stood in my kitchen, having learned all of this,
looking in my cabinets and realizing that these synthetic ingredients
and these genetically engineered proteins were in just about everything.
I turned to the Grocery Manufacturers Association
to learn how I could avoid them.
I learned that 80% of our processed foods
contain these genetically engineered ingredients.
But at the same time, I learned that Kraft and Kellogg and Coca Cola
aren't using them in the products that they formulate in other countries.
When I first learned that, it was kind of depressing.
But then I thought,
We're not asking them to reinvent the wheel.
We haven't called upon them together to exercise the same level of precaution
and to either label these ingredients so that we can make an informed choice
or remove them from the products that they sell here in the US,
and place the same value on the lives of the American eaters
that they've already placed on the lives of eaters in other countries.
In all candor, that day, standing in the kitchen,
we simply began to make changes
by trying to eat a little bit less processed food.
Because it wasn't about the perfect being the enemy of the good.
It was about progress, not perfection.
What I came to realise is that each and every single one of us
has something that we're uniquely good at.
When you leverage that with something that you're passionate about,
it can serve as a rocket fuel to create extraordinary change.
The bottom line is that our country was founded
by courageous and creative entrepreneurs.
So I invite you to lend your talent so that together,
as a nation of 300 million Americans,
can create the change that we want to see in the health of our families,
in the health of our food system, and in the health of our country.
Thank you.
(Applause)