The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Future Food Crisis

A former senior food policy advisor to President Obama breaks down how changing the way we eat can help fix the climate crisis, from rethinking daily habits to investing in new technology.

As a chef in high-end restaurants, and later, in the home of then Senator Barack and Michelle Obama, Sam Kass read a lot about how eating organic and buying local was the key to remaking a food system otherwise built on climate-change-causing petroleum. But when he followed the Obamas into the White House, he realized something: While it’s easy to identify the problems in our spoiled food system, fixing it is not as simple as getting your eggs from the farmers’ market. Now investing in startups trying to solve the environmental and human challenges of climate change in food and agriculture.

In The Last Supper, Kass shares everything he’s learned, simplifying it all down to what he calls ＂The Core Principle＂ Maximize nutrient production while minimizing environmental damage. He lays out an accessible, action-based plan to save the environment, and in turn, ourselves, based on four pillars of change:

- Culture: shifting the way we think about and approach the environment as individuals is the foundation of broader change
- Policy and legislation: the limited but important role of policy and how change is made on a governmental level and what we can do about it
- Business: How to change the businesses that provide the food we eat as the only path to change our food system
- Technology: a deep dive into the future with the new and innovative technologies researchers are using to save the environment, from CRISPR and Loam Bio to the magic of mycelium and the secret weapon that is regenerative farming

Through anecdotes, interviews, and an astounding amount of research, The Last Supper gives us the tools we need to make a difference.

Sam Kass was senior policy advisor for nutrition policy in the Obama Administration and is currently an investor in several food technology start-ups. One of the Michelle Obama’s longest-serving advisors, Sam was the executive director of her Let’s Move initiative and helped create the first major vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and was trained by one of Austria’s greatest chefs, Christian Domschitz.