Episode #216
Tina Owens: Nutritional Dark Matter

Tina Owens, co-founder and senior advisor to the Nutrient Density Alliance, and longtime organic brand representative (Kellogs and Danone), unpacks the potential of nutrient density to revolutionize our food system. She dives into the science behind “nutritional dark matter” and why most of what we eat isn’t as nourishing as we think. From her work with major food companies to raising heritage animals on her own farm, Tina explores how real organic and regenerative practices — beyond corporate greenwashing — can restore both human and planetary health. “This isn’t just values-based,” she says. “This is science-based, and it matters for your fertility, your longevity, your kids’ ADHD.”

Our Tina Owens interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

You can subscribe and download episodes of our show through your favorite podcast app, our YouTube channel, or stream the audio-only version here:

Dave Chapman interviews Tina Owens, Fall 2024

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to The Real Organic Podcast, and welcome to Tina Owens. My guest today; Tina, I’m so glad you’re here. Tina, you’ve had a lot of roles over the years – many different organizations. You worked for Kellogg for many years, and you worked for Danone for some years. That’s how I met you: you were representing Danone as we were talking about dairy. Now you are with the Nutrient Density Alliance. What’s your role with that? I know it’s a nascent organization. What’s your role there?

Tina Owens 0:34
My role there is as a senior advisor. I was recently Managing Director for the last two years. I just stepped back into the for-profit system to work with systems of scale in supply and demand and funding ecosystem services transformation – that’s a conversation for another time. But the Nutrient Density Alliance, I helped co-found alongside non-profit partners at the Soil & Climate Alliance and the Non-GMO Project to bring to consumers the most efficacious way of them understanding what the value of regenerative agriculture is for their own health. That’s what we’re about and what I’m doing there.

Dave Chapman 1:16
What is regenerative agriculture?

Tina Owens 1:19
The question of the hour. Well, so there would be multiple stakeholders that will tell you there’s no shared definition of regenerative, but I’m one of the few that would say that there’s at least a shared foundation that spans across all of them. That is; cover crops, crop rotation, no-till, and animal or manure integration, which, of course, are practice-based. But what you’re really looking for in the regenerative systems are outcomes-based. That funnel of regenerative spans everything from conventional regenerative, with people practicing those basic practices that teach them that soil health is important, all the way through to what we would consider to be the gold standard, which is organic plus-plus, or things like regenerative organic certification.

Tina Owens 2:03
You’re basing it on everything that’s possible within the agricultural system, including the exclusion of 500+ animal chemicals and 900+ agricultural chemicals – not to mention all the things that go into food packaging, and food processing in production, which are not typically included in other regenerative standards. So, organic certainly has a role to play in this, and we all need a North Star.

Tina Owens 2:30
But we’ve also got to onboard people into the basics of the movement and raise the floor, not just the ceiling. I view the entire regenerative movement as being of critical effort and worthwhile in the – I’m going to say – fight against a future climate volatility due to unmitigated climate change. It is the biggest tool in the box: we need to be using the whole thing – all of it – without trying to negate the outcomes and the improvements that other parts of the system are making that are also equally relevant in what they teach the producers all across the system. That’s where I’m at.

Dave Chapman 3:11
I want to talk a lot about nutrient density and what that means. But just because we’re here, one of the questions I often have for people who are advocating for a somewhat deeper meaning of regenerative…because the large mass of what people mean by regenerative – where money is spent and what’s being called regenerative – involves the use of a lot of herbicides. It just does. I’m curious for you…and I’m hearing that you don’t love the use of herbicide – I don’t mean to put words in your mouth – but I’m hoping that in your dream of what regenerative would mean, would it include the use of herbicides?

Tina Owens 3:59
Well, I don’t think anybody dreams of using herbicides in the food production system, especially when you’ve been part of the organic sector since 2008, Dave. Ideally, what you’re doing is you’re replacing the activities that those inputs provide within agricultural systems – you’re replacing them with plants that provide the same benefits. It takes a while, though, to pull what producers view as the tools in their toolbox, to pull them out of their hands and replace them with others, and have them have true faith in them.

Tina Owens 4:30
Even when you get producers to plant cover crops, in many cases, they’re still burning them down or tilling them under, negating the very effects of what the cover crop was bringing to the field in the first place. So, we have an organic farm here. I raise heritage, pastured animals for nutrient-dense outcomes. We don’t bring any pesticides onto our property – period. I think the strongest thing I use is vinegar on my weeds around the house because I’m scared to death one of my animals is going to eat it because they’re almost all free-range. You’ll find my personal belief system on this is fairly rigorous and one of the more stricter ones. But I’m also a realist, having worked in large-scale production food systems at scale for more than two decades.

Tina Owens 5:10
It’s not about just shutting something off and turning something else on. Rather, it’s those impacts year on year that show producers that there’s something different that they can do that leads to longer term better outcomes and better on-farm profitability. I tend to approach these things through the lens of economics because, regardless of where you stand, from a values perspective, typically, everybody at the table at least cares about the economics that they’re seeing, either on-farm or in their broader production systems. That tends to be the lens that I use to try and get more flies with honey than with vinegar, if you will.

Dave Chapman 5:49
I’ve been accused of using vinegar a lot in my approach. That’s fair. Just so I’m clear, it sounds to me like in your personal choices for your farm, you’re choosing traditional deep organic practices.

Tina Owens 6:06
So much so that to order bulk organics on our farm, we’ve literally had to order from a couple states away and pay several hundred dollars in shipping just to be able to use that supplementally with our animals, Dave. This is part of my DNA. It’s been fully embedded since 2008, when I started working in the organic community. I’ve had a lot of connections with people in the NOSB, or at the OTA, or within organic brands that work on the world’s largest organic brand, and some of the first movers in the mainstream organic movement.

Tina Owens 6:07
I happen to believe that organic still offers a lot of things that aren’t being offered in other food systems – I think we need to talk more about this as an industry – but specifically, the chemicals that aren’t used in food production systems or in packaging systems, artificial colors and flavors, and things that you just can’t find necessarily elsewhere in the food system that organic does have the rigor behind, and it’s also the only one that’s actually codified into law.

Tina Owens 7:07
We need to spend a lot more time as an organic industry talking about the things that we have that are uniquely different and unique to us and not just fighting over turf wars, if you will, on where regenerative starts and stops. I happen to believe all roads within regenerative can lead to organic because it’s a mindset shift that you’re after.

Tina Owens 7:31
I appreciate what everybody and organic is trying to do to raise the ceiling. I think now more than ever, from a climate change lens perspective, we need to be raising the floor. That’s why, arguably, the organic sector has not gotten the spate of growth that it could – it is because the floor is so polarized from where the top is going that it creates this chasm in between. We need to start bringing those other people along with us rather than alienating them.

Tina Owens 7:57
That’s been a personal mission of mine for many years now. It’s one of the reasons I looked to nutrient density within regen Ag – it is because it cuts through some of that noise for producers, for brands, but especially for consumers. I look forward to sharing more about the work that we’re doing on that, that I think unlocks the supply and demand system within regenerative at large, for consumers to understand that this really matters for their health and why.

Dave Chapman 8:26
Well, I certainly agree with that. As I say, I want to go into it. We don’t have to keep going, but I haven’t given up hope about organic changing the world – I really haven’t. It’s growing faster in the rest of the world than it is in the U.S. It’s growing faster in the EU, and the sales now exceed U.S. sales of organic. They’ve done that without compromising the standards. In fact, they’ve gotten tremendous government support for increasing their percentage of organic acreage to 25% – that’s their goal – by 2030, 25% of their land being certified as organic.

Dave Chapman 9:11
I think that it’s possible to take a very strongly pro-organic position, and it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to change the rest of agriculture. It means the rest of agriculture is going to go, “Oh, maybe we can make a better living if we do it this way.” As well as all the nutritional benefits. I’m not giving up on organic. There are millions of organic farmers in the world. The U.S. lag so far behind the world now in any kind of leadership and organic, but I think that we’ve done a lot in the past, and we can reclaim that. We can try and catch up with everyone else.

Tina Owens 9:48
I hope so. It was what? 2018, when they started helping producers transition? The actual transition assistance started coming through the Farm Bill, etc. That should help with the catch-up. Even though organic acres in the U.S. have doubled in the last 10 years, we’re still at roughly 1% of all acres in the U.S. I think it’s still shocking to our industry to understand that the bulk of what they see in the grocery store, or at some of our largest product expos, that almost all of that is based on imports. The demand is here: we need to make sure that the supply is here.

Tina Owens 10:24
But we also need to remove some of the polarization that keep people from seeing organic as a viable option because of where those lines have been drawn. I happen to believe regenerative is one of those things that helps get people over the fence. Once they see why you put the health of the earth as central – the centricity around soil health practices, etc. – at the center of your farming system, as opposed to the more of a factory approach, stacked trait inputs requirements, where it’s just step by step, rather than actually paying attention to what’s happening within the production system around you in the upstream and downstream effects, which is where regenerative is very strongly tailored to start creating that awareness regardless of which regenerative system you’re talking about. Meeting people where they are is quite important in this moment.

Dave Chapman 11:14
I dearly hope you’re right. When I see the backers of regenerative at the moment, they’re all big Ag. It’s every big company you can think of saying, “We’re regenerative,” or, “We’re pledged to be regenerative.” I doubt it, but I understand I might be wrong. Maybe Bayer is going to change, Syngenta is going to change, ADM is going to change. Cargill, we’ll see; Pepsi and McDonald’s, we’ll see. They are all there.

Speaker 1 11:46
They have a role to play, for sure. If we’re going to leave big – if we’re going to just say big is bad – it almost doesn’t matter what we do in the rest of the system. It won’t be big enough to combat some of those outcomes. We have to hope for the changemakers that are within those companies, that are truly interested in seeing systems transformation, that we’re enabling them wherever possible. Because if we’re just going to leave them to their own devices, without the benefit of hearing the other perspectives, it makes the other work that we’re doing less effective.

Tina Owens 12:20
Again, working with some of the largest food companies in the world, there’s a big, big role that those companies have to play. While they’re saying the right things, let’s help them do the right things so that they’re seeing those outcomes in real time. When you change individual hearts, that’s when you can have a chance of changing the group part, if you will. Where you find those believers within those companies, they need to be supported as much as possible, because that is how you’re going to affect long-term systems change. It really is.

Dave Chapman 12:53
We could have a wonderful long conversation about this. But let’s talk about nutrient density. I know that you believe that understanding it, testing for it and labeling it will be a tool to transform agriculture. It’s a way of connecting what people really want with what they’re being offered. Let’s talk about nutrient density. What does that mean?

Speaker 1 13:24
Well, there’s two ways of looking at nutrient density. One is the standard definition of calories versus nutrients – that is what you would find if you Google the term. The other is what some of the leaders in this space have argued, and it still needs to be measured. That would be all of the nutritional dark matter that actually exists within food, that our tools are only now catching up to be able to measure.

Dave Chapman 13:51
I have to jump in because I heard you say that before, I thought, “Oh, what a charming phrase.” Nutritional dark matter, what does that mean?

Speaker 1 14:01
The person who coined that term was Dr. Albert-László Barabási, who’s the head of the physics department at Northeastern and a lecturer at Harvard Medical. You can find research in Nature Food that was published in 2019, talking about how there are 26,000 biochemicals in food, that was, at the time, peer-reviewed. Nature Food is not an entity to sneeze at. The USDA tracks the 150 biochemicals in food. At that time, if you do the math, 0.005% is what we’re measuring to put on the side panel of a box. When you look at the nutrition panel, it’s literally less than 1%.

Speaker 1 14:41
Since then, though, there’s been additional research that are peer-reviewed saying that there’s 200,000 to 300,000 biochemicals in food. The tools that were used to measure the human DNA, and then the human microbiome – where we learned we are more microbe than human – those tools are being turned on the world around us and looking at food. There’s some entities like the Periodic Table of Food Initiative with the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Heart Association, that are at the top end – the ceiling of this, if you will – looking at the top 1,600 foods on the planet at a molecular level, and what it means to grow them in different soil types or with different agricultural practices or different varietals and what it actually means tied to human health.

Tina Owens 15:27
Where we’re at in the system with the Nutrient Density Alliance – where I’m now a senior advisor, and our eco-dietician, Mary Purdy, just recently took over as the Managing Director – we were looking at some of the bottom of the system outcomes, if you will. Things like: how does a food company measure higher protein outcomes and have it show up on their side panel, so that you can start to have this conversation with consumers not through the lens of food values, which is how the organic and non-GMO movements have approached consumers in the past, and we’re starting to do that with climate as well.

Tina Owens 16:02
I have a little side note that I need to make here. Because consumers approach these movements through the lens of their values, we have labeled these movements as values-based when they are science-based. Both the organic movement and the non-GMO movement are based on solid science. Their regenerative movement, whichever end of the spectrum you’re on, is also based on the solid science of soil organic matter vastly mattering for above- and below-ground biodiversity and upstream, downstream effects, water infiltration, and driving the local water cycle. But it’s also matters for things like nutrient-dense outcomes and human health.

Tina Owens 16:45
What I was learning, a lot of us as stakeholders in this movement were hearing some of the same fallacies over and over again and thinking that because a wheat that was grown regeneratively had 40% higher protein, that you might have to do human health trials in order to put it on a box. That’s just not the way the system works. You don’t have to do that when you add more soy to a granola bar. We were just looking to address some of the fallacies within the food system.

Tina Owens 17:13
To begin with, then what we found was that there were a lot of companies of all shapes and sizes interested in understanding more what this meant for their own portfolios. One of the first things that we look to do is create the foundation from a brass-tacks perspective, of how the existing processes, paperwork, lab tests, and just the normal food production system could be leveraged in order to segregate an ingredient with a higher nutritional outcome and actually move it through the food system in a way that it showed up on the side panel of a box and therefore was concrete.

Tina Owens 17:51
But, again, if that’s only 0.005 of what’s in that box from a nutritional perspective, what you’re doing is just setting a basepoint for where the food system is heading next, which is understanding how all of these biochemicals matter for human health on an ongoing basis. What you’re looking at is the birth of an entirely new way of understanding, talking about digesting nutrition as a globe, really, from an academic perspective, and what it means tied to your wearables, your cortisol level, your diabetes management, your phone integrated in it. This is not just a one-dimensional shift in understanding nutrient density; it’s understanding it in relation to all of the other technology that’s around you, helping you understand your own body and how you’re moving through the world.

Dave Chapman 18:41
Let me just go back for a minute because lots of people who are going to hear this aren’t going to know what a biochemical is. Have we got some other words for biochemical?

Tina Owens 18:55
The nutrition molecules – let’s just call it that. Within the peer-reviewed research, they’ll call it biochemicals or bioactives within food, but it’s the individual molecules that are being measured within food that are called nutritional dark matter. Because while we might now be mapping them, we still don’t necessarily know what they do. There’s also a role of AI in here. Some companies and startups that are already mapping some of those plant bioactives and then using the AI to review the existing human health research to understand where there might be a correlation in similar health research to understand where they should move forward in human health trials.

Speaker 1 19:39
Something that used to take a decade might now take months or a couple of years in order to understand what the potential efficacy is for us as humans in eating or supplementing with that compound and then moving it through the food system. I’ll give you one example, although I think we should go back to talking about food system process and understanding nutrient density after this. The example would be from Bob Gilman at Penn State and the work that Rodale Institute has also done around the role of ergothioneine as an antioxidant that the mycorrhizal fungal community creates and then trades with plants as part of the nutrients in the carbon cycle.

Speaker 1 20:20
Ergothioneine is largely removed through tillage, and you need it – the only way you get it is through food. What ergothioneine does is it protects your brain from neurodegenerative diseases. When you have lower ergothioneine in your diet, you’re at higher risk for mental disorders, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, etc. There’s peer-reviewed, published research showing this correlation with other populations that have a higher ergothioneine level and have lower instances of these diseases. The fungal community and the understanding of fungi in the soil and the role that they play in interacting with plants for nutrient uptake, that understanding has only just begun.

Speaker 1 21:03
But let me go back to what I was saying about this being a values-based movement versus a science-based movement. With consumers, with organic, we try to convince them to buy through their values and what they should care about – even Fairtrade USA. “What do you care about this other human being on the planet to go buy?” With regenerative, we’re going down this road of, “Hey, if you care about this – if you care about climate change or what have you – go buy regenerative?” What we’re saying is, that’s 15% or so of consumers reliably. Those consumers are also getting fatigued with the number of badges and messages they’re getting. But 86% of all adult humans in the U.S. have some sort of pre-metabolic syndrome, outright cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc., and have something that they need to manage.

Tina Owens 21:51
Rather than gearing them up to go save the soil, the climate, and the farmer, which only works for a narrow band of people, instead focus it on themselves: my health, my fertility, my longevity, my diabetes, my kids ADHD. Therefore, you’re telling them about the nutrition and the benefit to themselves. If they want to learn about regenerative, they can go down that path and learn about it. But you’re not asking them to care about something outside of themselves before you ask them to care enough about themselves to be interested in why this is more nutritious for themselves.

Tina Owens 22:28
It’s about capturing the widest possible audience of demand for the regenerative movement writ large because we need farmers to see that this is a safe place for them to convert and to start taking those steps – to move those practices, to have guaranteed demand and offtake – not just a sharp corporate elbow coming at them about Scope 3 emissions. This is the thing that bridges all of those topics and stakeholders.

Dave Chapman 22:50
I love it, but I have to say, I think it’s common knowledge that if we wanted to dramatically reduce metabolic syndrome, we would simply stop eating ultra-processed foods. Everything would go down, and diabetes would disappear – all kinds of very good things would happen. What you’re talking is a little bit different, which I love. Which is yes, but how is that carrot grown? Is this carrot better than that carrot, for you nutritionally, for your health? I think that’s a wonderful question. I have a great deal of confidence in the answer.

Dave Chapman 23:35
But I’m curious, if we’re seriously saying that the goal here is to appeal to those 86% are struggling with health problems caused by their diet, it seems like a much more direct way to deal with that is to say, “You shouldn’t drink Pepsi, you shouldn’t eat Pringles.” You can, of course – we’re not saying it’s illegal – we’re just saying it will make you sick. [inaudible 24:05] …talk about how we grow those carrots?

Speaker 1 24:06
But the carrot has to have more nutrition in it. Even at the baseline – even if you’re eating in a completely raw or plant-based or whole foods diet – those products are way less nutritious than they were a generation or two ago. It has to do with the varietals that we’re growing, it has to do with how long food sits on the shelf, the soil that it’s grown in, and how it’s processed. Even if I have that regenerative wheat with 40% higher protein, if I put it through an extrusion process, does that still molecularly change the wheat structure in a way that causes a metabolic response from me that’s not good for my health? Those questions still have to be answered.

Speaker 1 24:50
You stated in the beginning that this is a complex issue, and that is definitely the case. Each of those things that I just mentioned are being studied, but some of it is going to trickle out from the academic space or the work that the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Heart Association are doing on your metabolic response to some of those foods. Versus if I’m in Whole Foods or a specialty retailer, or I’m working directly with a local farm that’s at scale, and they are doing some representative sampling of their products as it comes off field and showing that they have better antioxidant activity or more vitamin C in their oranges, or in their blueberries, I would want to know that as a consumer.

Speaker 1 25:38
Then, of course, I correlate that with taste because if we’ve been paying attention in this industry for any period of time, we know that taste is correlated to nutrition. Even when you’re getting that organic strawberry, if it tastes like cardboard, it’s grown in an environment that didn’t allow it to have all of that nutrition uptake that it should have. Then there’s even bigger questions when you bring up strawberries, which is going to open Pandora’s box. Forgive me. Let’s open it and quickly shut it, which is we treat that strawberry as an annual when it’s actually a perennial. Even where people are studying the nutrient density of strawberries, they’re probably doing it on an annual crop rather than that 20-year-old strawberry plant.

Tina Owens 26:20
I, for one, would like to know what that 20-year-old strawberry plant has to offer versus the one that was just planted this spring and is replanted every spring for uniformity. Because I, as a consumer, have been taught to believe that it should all look the same in order to go through the entire cycle. So, there’s additional questions we have to answer. Potatoes, same thing. Are you holding it back and replanting it in the soil that it was in, or are you just getting it from the seed provider every year? There’s even more questions to ask than what are being currently answered academically and within this system.

Dave Chapman 26:20
I have a creepy question too, which is, I was told that they’re now figuring out how to insert a gene into strawberries to make them taste better. I thought, “Well, God, what if they actually short-circuit taste as a viable way of deciding whether something is nutritious or not?” Because inserting that one gene – they’re not imagining it’s going to nutritionally change the taste of the strawberry. That’s not the goal. The goal is to make it taste good.

Speaker 1 27:18
That’s where nutritional dark matter work provides the value of understanding that that taste might be driven by 2,000 or 3,000 different biochemicals and not just turning on or off one gene or inserting something. I would say, from that lens, I’m entirely hopeful that the molecular mapping of food allows answers to questions we didn’t know to ask, but through the lens of what the food system is possible of doing if we just invest in soil and the right varietals, etc.

Speaker 1 27:48
You touched on something in our prep for this call that I want to mention. If you’re mapping food at a parts-per-billion level, it’s not just nutrition you’re talking about – it’s pathogens, pesticides, allergens, and adulteration that also come along for the ride. If I was a young person going into this field, I would be choosing one of these lanes from a scientific, mathematical, or statistical perspective on how to study what we’re going to be learning in all of the data that’s coming out of this level of mapping of the food system, and how to use it to reduce human cost and environmental costs going forward, because the two are definitely linked.

Tina Owens 28:28
Companies like Edacious, that are working on not just measuring nutrient density in conjunction with the Bionutrient Food Association but doing a measurement of greenhouse gas emissions per calorie, which is how you actually prove that meat needs to stay on the table. That meat raised in pasture-based systems that’s nutrient dense that provides outcomes for humans that cannot be recreated elsewhere – no matter how hard they try to tell you it tastes like a burger – does not come with the rest of the biomolecules that are inherent within that food.

Tina Owens 29:02
If that animal is also feeding the carbon and water cycle in a way that leads to climate change mitigation, local water tables being refilled, varieties that have laid dormant within the soil coming back to life, there’s a value that’s inherent to that system that needs to be mapped and shared. Because, again, these are scientifically based systems, not values-based systems. We need to start focusing on those scientific outcomes in a way that shows people that this isn’t all just hurting feelings. I’m curious where you want to go from here, Dave?

Dave Chapman 29:37
We have discussed before about values-based and science-based, and I agree completely the science is quite strong to support my values and your values. I think that the science defense of a lot of corporate agriculture is not science…

Speaker 1 30:00
It’s for-profit research. I’ve just started calling it – it’s for-profit research. When you refuse to look at the upstream or the downstream effects of your system, and you literally bucket it within a certain timeframe in which no damage can be found, but the damage shows up in the second, third, or other generations down the road, that is for-profit research. That is not science. I’m no longer accepting this argument that the conventional system is science-based and everything else is hooey – it’s the opposite. We need to start shouting it very loudly.

Dave Chapman 30:34
Thank you. I agree. Let me ask, we know that as you start to really try to understand those 300,000 compounds, it’s complicated, because ergothioneine is great, and you say, “Well, we know that tillage reduces it.” We don’t know it? Or did we learn whether herbicide reduces it? Have we learned what are the carriers that it must be connected with in order to be actually used by your body as an anti-carcinogen? These are complicated conversations, and we won’t find quick answers to them – I don’t believe. Of course, I am concerned that some people might use a piece of information that might be true but use it in a way that isn’t true to convince people to do something – to make money.

Dave Chapman 31:34
In a very complex system, when you’re running these different plants or animal products through a mass spec and saying, “We’re actually able to see what’s happening,” but it’s pretty confusing to see 300,000 different compounds and understand how they connect to each other and what’s good and what’s bad. Do you have thoughts about that? Do you go, “I’m feeling pretty confident that if I run this tomato through a mass spec and I run that tomato through mass spec, it’s going to be pretty clear to me which one is better for my health?”

Tina Owens 32:15
Well, I will leave this to the scientists that are doing that work because we focus more on the food system processes and their current understanding of nutrition. There are a lot of people doing that work that you just mentioned – John Fagan, Dan Kittredge, Stefan VanFleet, David and Ian Montgomery, the other projects that I already mentioned, Edacious – Eric Smith, Merge Impact as a lab, Wise Code as a lab – there’s a lot of people working in that space to determine what those biomolecules are and what they mean for the food system.

Tina Owens 32:49
I will say the one benefit that I see immediately from that is being able to call BS on the fake meat piece. Where if there’s only 0.005% have biochemicals on the side panel of food, and they’re showing you that plant-based burger is side by side with a meat burger and saying it’s the same, they’re doing so with less than 1% of the information. Dan Kittredge has a visual on this, where, side by side, one of their famous meat replacement brands and an actual beef burger and showing that less than 2% of it matches up and the rest of it, your body doesn’t necessarily know how to process that as food. Just because it tastes the same or makes the mouth feel the same does not mean that it’s providing the same level of nutrition.

Tina Owens 33:46
That’s one of the things, right out of the gate, that I think is an important and critical thing to bring to the conversation about the role that animals play in production agriculture when they’re pastured. Separately, what we’re focused on is the part that everybody already knows how to measure – the conversation the food industry already knows to have, the one that consumers have been trained on, and, in fact, the same conversation that has been had for a century around vitamins, macro- and micronutrients – is are those things impacted in a way that’s measurable within regenerative agriculture production systems?

Tina Owens 34:20
Do you have a third-party agronomy or certifier body that you’re working with that is validating what’s happening in your field processes relative to things like soil organic matter growth, correlated to an outcome in that varietals that would have been grown in conventional and had a worse nutrition outcome that you can now measure?

Tina Owens 34:45
There are multiple brands, companies, agronomy services, and certifiers working in this space. Regenified has announced that are folding in nutrient density testing. John Kempf at AEA is folding in nutrient density testing. I just mentioned several labs that are working with brands on doing that nutrition testing. For our own part, our sponsors with the Soil & Climate Alliance whose sister effort is the Soil Carbon Initiative (SCI), which is an unpacked certification within the regenerative Ag space, are interested in looking at nutrient density outcomes.

Tina Owens 35:17
Wherever it can be correlated, that you growing regeneratively, grew the same varietals that your neighbor across the fence grew, and they had the standard product that goes to the elevator and everybody recognizes, that you had something that was 40% better on some metric that the system knows how to value and pay for, or that creates something that consumers are after, that’s an important distinction. It’s also one that does not require marketers who are used to talking about taste, health, quality, and nutrition to suddenly talk about dirt and soil science and climate science on their package.

Tina Owens 35:56
It cuts through to what the food system already understands, knows how to value, knows how to talk about, and knows how to sell. Now the trick is, five to seven years – here we are into the regenerative Ag movement from some of the first company commitments back in 2017 and 2018 – get it on the shelf for consumers. Right now, there’s only two regenerative brands that are nationally distributed. One of them is Tazo Tea, owned by Unilever and certified in some part by the Regenerative Organic Alliance, and the second one is the Dukkha dog, owned by Hormel Applegate, certified by EOV in Savory Institute, and now moving to a couple of additional certifications because they just announced that they’re going to take every one of their hot dogs into regenerative.

Tina Owens 36:40
Those are the only two products that you and I can walk into pretty much any mainstream grocery store and buy off the shelf. Everything else, you got to know your farmer, or you’re going to walk into one of the more bougie retailers. Not everybody has access to that. It might not even be in their market, presuming that they can even walk in and be able to afford it. Right now, regenerative products are receiving quite a premium, even above organic.

Tina Owens 37:05
There’s plenty of data around that as well, which we have on the Nutrient Density Alliance website that was provided by SPINS, who has been tracking that price percentage that those regenerative and organic products are receiving within the market and where it stands versus the premium for organic. People are really interested in there being a proof point around climate change mitigation, or at the very least, water quality or animal health.

Dave Chapman 37:30
Tina, did I just hear you say that in some cases now, the regenerative product is getting a higher price premium than the organic product?

Tina Owens 37:39
According to SPINS, yes. In most cases, it’s regenerative organic certified. So, it’s also organic with regenerative. So, keep that in mind with organic as the base.

Dave Chapman 37:49
Just regenerative organic, not just regenerative.

Tina Owens 37:52
I think they’re taking it specific to ROC-certified products, but there are some other regenerative products that are receiving a price premium that might be similar to organic or slightly above it. I think this is why the organic industry has gone into the organic regenerative space: they don’t want regenerative to eat their lunch.

Dave Chapman 38:15
I think regenerative is eating their lunch. I think there’s obvious reasons why that’s happening. But that’s a different conversation.

Tina Owens 38:24
I think we’ve forgotten to talk about the strengths of the organic sector in a way that no one else can recreate, which is the 3,000+ chemicals that aren’t allowed in food production, the 500+ animal chemicals that aren’t allowed in animal production, the 900+ pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides that aren’t allowed. We’re not doing a good enough job as an organic sector talking about those things, and we wholly own that space. I think we’re now focusing on what’s ‘regenerative’ and ‘not regenerative,’ rather than just really blasting from the rooftops the things that consumers have forgotten, only the organic sector holds. I do think that it’s one and the same in the conversation. Keep going. Where do you want to go next?

Dave Chapman 38:24
Well, it’s so interesting. I just saw the deck from Regenified. It was very dismissive of organic, and it was somewhat ugly, I thought. I was just, “Why would you do that?” But they also had a long list of companies that are going regenerative, and they had pledges that Driscoll’s is going to be a hundred percent regenerative by 2025, and so is Kellogg’s. I thought, “Wow, Driscoll’s is going to be a hundred percent regenerative, and yet a significant percentage of their production is now hydroponic.” I’m curious how that works.

Dave Chapman 39:44
My point is that companies are making these outrageous pledges that don’t really mean much. I think it’s going to be the death of regenerative as a movement. It’s going to take quite a while to hit because there’s a lot of federal money pouring in, and a lot of industry money. When I look at what people have pledged that they’re doing now. I go, “That’s not true. That’s not true.” I don’t know what to do with that. I assume eventually everyone will just see it. But in the meantime, there seems to be a lot of aggression towards organic from that movement, and I’m sorry to see it. I don’t think it has been reciprocated. It’s starting to turn around, but…

Tina Owens 40:25
Well, there’s a couple of other things that need to be accounted for there. One is that a lot of those companies have Scope 3 emissions reduction goals around their science-based target initiative, which is maybe a topic for another time. The second is that lifecycle assessment methodology, which the food system uses writ large, while it can include these systems, it has overwhelmingly not been utilized to include organic, perennial, regenerative, or indigenous-managed lands.

Tina Owens 40:26
If I’m a Chief Sustainability Officer at a large company, I’m not even seeing what some of those solutions are related to organic, even though it’s one of the least chemical intensive food systems that we have, because it bars all of those different chemicals that I just mentioned. Lifecycle assessment methodology was created by the chemical industry in the 1970s to manage risk within their portfolio. Yet, somehow, the system that uses the least amount has been excluded from the mainstream datasets that have been provided to all of the large companies about where their intensiveness exists within their system and how to reduce it.

Tina Owens 41:29
In some ways, we’ve been left out of the conversation in a way that’s now backed us into a corner. We have the food miles issue on imports, which we can’t shake until we do much more domestic production of organic; that matters from a lifecycle assessment methodology and from emissions perspective. We have the fact that the calculations that are used around organic typically call into question some sort of yield drag, which we all know is only when you’re removing those inputs from the system altogether. It has a little bit of a crash when you get it off the drugs, and then six or seven years later it’s doing better than the conventional system that was being propped up by inputs.

Tina Owens 42:10
Some of the ways that the math has been done and the way that you’ve had to opt in by paying extra to have things like soil carbon sequestration on pasture for grazing land and dairy taken into account to the lifecycle assessment make it look like those systems have much larger footprints. This is a very big conversation we need to be having on a global level because it matters not just for the organic industry but for what governments actually fund to save and invest in biodiversity going forward. Because we’re at a point where every plant, every bug, every watershed – all of it – matters so greatly in this moment, what we do with it. The math that we use to calculate where the investment needs to occur in the system could not matter more than it does right now and will going forward.

Tina Owens 43:01
I’m a big proponent of how we get organic back into the picture in a way that shows the full benefit of that system. That’s taken me calling into question and account with some larger players, how those systems are actually measured in things like lifecycle assessment methodologies. If you happen to be at Organic Week in Washington, DC, Dave, we’re actually having a…it’s not at that one. Sorry. It’s at a June organic event that Nancy Coulter-Parker’s pulling together.

Tina Owens 43:34
We’re having a panel with Amber Sciligo from The Organic Center, and some other organic stakeholders about lifecycle assessment methodology – Kathleen Merrigan – and how organic has essentially been kind of boxed out of the system that the whole world is using now in their mathematical equations. My fear is that you throw all of that data into an AI, and you start asking questions, and the answers you get will be very jaded, because it’s excluded the very systems you actually need to sustain human life. So, there’s a lot at stake there. We’ve gone down a rabbit trail around organic and lifecycle assessments; do you want to come back to nutrient density?

Dave Chapman 44:14
No. I know we’re getting close to the end of the time that we promised. But maybe you could just wrap up a little by… I’ll say one thing that that strikes me, which is that most of what you’re talking about will be unavailable to most of the farmers I know. This is something that will appeal to large companies that have huge budgets and that are doing things on a scale where testing will have a big impact. In a smaller farm, the cost of the test, no. Tell me about it.

Tina Owens 44:49
Can I challenge that?

Dave Chapman 44:50
Yes, please. Challenge it.

Tina Owens 44:51
Most of those big companies… 68 of the top 100 food companies on the planet have something around regen Ag. Most of them want to do mass balance, meaning that they’re not actually segregating any of the volume and doing this testing. So, where the value comes in is for the small brands that want to be insurgent within their category and have something new to take to the buyers at the retailers, which would be those nutrient-dense outcomes.

Tina Owens 45:19
There may be grants or philanthropic funding. At the Nutrient Density Alliance, we would like to see philanthropic funding as a baseline for all the regenerative certifications, every single one of them, every single product regardless of which brand it’s going in, going through nutrient density testing to show that they’re there. Because if you have that outcome in a representative sampling program the same way you would with any other ingredient today, and you’re able to carry it through to that side panel and have that conversation with consumers in a way that’s fact-based rather than values-based, that’s how you get on shelf and compete against the big guys.

Tina Owens 45:56
The big guys are looking at the cost of the test and saying, “We don’t want to do it. We don’t want to do the segregation.” Because they have created efficiency around maximizing production systems at scale, it’s very costly for them to break out individual systems. Now, what you said about incentivizing the producer, that’s the other work that I just started, which is about how you pay for ecosystem services at scale, including those that have already been doing those production systems for 10 or 20 years, that have been blocked out of things like the carbon markets. Maybe in the future, you and I can have that conversation.

Tina Owens 46:32
But on nutrient density right now, it is those smaller players or middle players that have the most to gain by punching through with differentiated outcomes and working directly with laboratories to see what their meaningful differences are in their production systems, because they probably know their growers. The companies know their growers and where their items are coming from, have the most to gain right now.

Dave Chapman 47:01
Well, one thing we know for sure is that everything will change. What we don’t know is how, but this is one of the ways in which…I believe that there’s a lot of interest in the quality of what we eat. There’s a lot of health concerns as people become less and less healthy. Also, less and less faith in the food supply chain. I think that people see that they’ve got more apparent choices than they’ve ever had before, but they’re starting to understand that they have less actual choices than they’ve ever had before.

Dave Chapman 47:39
You can’t buy the blueberries that you want to buy. They’re simply not on the shelf regardless of how many brands there might be. If, in fact, the kind of nutrient testing that you’re describing could be transformational, that’s a revolution I would welcome. I’ve had the conversation with Dan Kittredge, and I said, “Dan, the day that you actually finally have a portable spectrometer that actually gives the results and that are understandable is the day that Walmart comes out with their own version, and it will give different results.” Who’s to say which one is right? But I can tell you which one will be more popular. It’s the one that’s sold by Walmart. Because they are the biggest marketer of food in the world.

Dave Chapman 48:30
Because it’s so complex, who knows where exactly it’s going to go? But as more trustworthy testing is there, I believe that will confirm that the kind of farming that I believe everybody should be supporting will be one more voice saying, “Yes, this is the kind of farming we should support.” Because it makes better food. It makes better food for all of us. I think you believe that too.

Tina Owens 48:58
I do. I’ll leave you with one point of hope. That is that the nutrient testing space is also ripe for disruption. I know of two players that have a leap forward in technology and what they’re able to test; that’s only 10 to 20% of the cost. This is one of those areas that is about to be disrupted by a tech revolution in a way that allows that testing to become much more affordable on an ongoing basis. Again, not just nutrient density, but pathogens, pesticides, allergens, and adulteration. That’s where wearables and your personal device and eating for your own nutrition come in, where it’s a bit more personalized to what you need.

Tina Owens 49:38
While it will be an overwhelming amount of information, the interactions that we get in red, yellow, green – or understanding what we need to eat for a better sleep, diabetes management, or something along those lines – those things are going to intersect with what the Food is Medicine movement wants to see in reducing overall healthcare costs. There’s a lot of macro trends It’s at play right now that are pushing all of this to the surface in a way that I don’t think any one player is going to get away with gaming the system because there’s too much at stake – not at a billion-dollar level, at the trillion-dollar level – at this point.

Tina Owens 50:15
There’s a lot of work to be done, to roll up our sleeves, and to get as many people as possible moving in this direction with the mindset shift that soil health and nutrient density are linked. That’s one of the biggest jobs that we’re doing with the Nutrient Density Alliance: just creating that awareness and how to use the current food system processes to bring the basics to the consumers today, to build upon for the additional information that’s coming tomorrow – that’s going to be very disruptive to all of these systems in our understanding of food and nutrition going forward. Thank you very much for the chance to talk about that with you today, Dave.

Dave Chapman 50:49
Yeah, Tina, it’s great. It’s the first time we’ve mentioned Food is Medicine – it’s at the very end of this. Of course, we could have a whole interview just about that. Tina Owens, thank you very much for talking.

Tina Owens 51:04
Great to talk to you today, Dave. Thank you so much.