I have been looking forward to this talk and to meeting

Daphne, and having all of you meet her, since I

knew she was coming.

She's a family physician.

She's a writer.

And she teaches in the Department of Family Medicine,

UC San Francisco.

But first and foremost, I think, it's just striking to

note that she's a doc.

She sits in her office three days a week and sees patients

all day long, from birth to age 102, and she

takes care of them.

And she's the first doc I've taken around Google, and I've

taken many doctors around, who said, let me take a picture of

the size of your desserts.

And let me take the picture of the size of the cheese you're

serving, because I want to show my patients how small

you're serving them.

This is how she cares about her patients

and about their health.

And she prescribes good eating, among other things.

And as she said to me at lunch, if you care about your

food, you ultimately have to find out and care about how it

is grown and where it comes from.

So I'm so excited for her to come and talk to us, to make

this connection between our natural world, what's grown,

how it's grown, and how that connects with our health.

I'm talked to quite often by people who

say, there's health.

Tell me what I should eat and what's good for me.

And then tell me about what's good for the environment.

They have nothing to do with each other.

And to me, they have everything to

do with each other.

And I think Daphne's going to talk to us about that, among

other things.

So she's also a writer.

She's a columnist for the "Washington Post," in the

Health section.

And she's got these two books. "Farmacology" just came out.

Very excited to see it and to hear about it.

I thought I'd end by reading to you some of the titles of

articles that she's written.

"Locavorism vs. Salmonella," "Take a hike and call me in

the morning," "Prescribing Food," "Farm-Fresh Goat-Milk

Lattes."

And to me, this is the fascinating thing about her.

She is comparing small family farms, which I consider to be

in pretty fragile state, to integrative medicine, medicine

for the whole person, and drawing lessons from farming

when both of them are things that are really kinda edgy.

So I can't wait to hear more.

Please welcome Daphne for me.

[APPLAUSE]

DAPHNE MILLER: Thank you so much.

It's lovely to be here.

I have to tell you guys that you're kind of

like my lucky penny.

Because five years ago, when "Jungle Effect," my last book,

came out, it was at Google that I gave one

of the first talks.

And that book went on to do quite well.

And once again, this is one of the very first talks that I'm

giving on "Farmacology," so maybe I need to rub all of you

afterwards.

So I'm going to tell you a story about soil and your

health today.

But first, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I

got into all of this in the first place.

Maybe one way to illustrate it would be to tell you about a

conversation I had with a reporter a couple weeks ago.

This was a reporter that was interviewing

me about the book.

And at the end of the interview, he told me about

something that he'd seen down at Stanford at their new

technologies, cool new inventions expo.

And what it was, was a box.

And you could buy a cartridge, just like you can for a

printer, and the cartridge contained a plant and soil and

a computer chip.

And you would put it in the box, and shut the lid, and

push the button, and you would get a plant.

And the inventors, they're actually on Kickstarter, were

saying this is great.

Now anybody can be a gardener or a farmer.

And the interviewer wanted to know what I

thought about this.

Well, the geek in me thinks it's pretty darn cool.

What is that computer chip doing?

And all you have to do is add water.

Are you serious?

And this plant grows on your counter.

And you need light, but you don't

even really need sunlight.

And I was, like, on my phone trying to find the website and

everything

But the healer in me had some real hesitations.

How do we think that we can reduce something so

complicated, something that nature does with so many

elements as growing our food, down to a cartridge and push

the button, and a computer chip?

It's the same hesitancy I have when I think, how can we

reduce something so complicated as depression down

to one neurotransmitter, or diabetes down to one hormone,

or cancer down to one missing piece of DNA, or one excessive

piece of DNA.

And in fact, it is exactly that concern about the

reductionism that sent me out of my medical office to learn

from sustainable farmers.

Because from my vantage point, I actually saw them as being

professionals, who were in charge of healing an entire

system, that had thought about all of those pieces, sun,

moon, bugs, rain, and brought them all together to make

something grow.

And that was what I was interested in doing in my

medical practice, is that kind of complexity thinking.

So that was one of the first things that started me looking

outside of the 8 by 10 walls of my medical practice.

It was also my interest in food.

And as Liv said, you talk about food long enough, you

have to start to wonder where it comes from.

And you have to start to get beyond those words like,

organic or GMO.

These are just kind of labels.

You just have to understand what's really

happening behind all that.

But I'd be misrepresenting myself if I told you that I

had no background in agriculture.

In fact, I was conceived on a farm.

That might be too much information.

You guys are just getting to know me here.

My parents were part of the

back-to-the-land kibbutz movement.

They moved from a small town outside of Massachusetts to

Israel in 1964.

And they were living in a little, tiny

shack on the kibbutz.

I guess when you're living in a single bed, the next thing

is you have a kid.

I don't know.

But my mother found out very quickly that children on a

kibbutz are raised just like the chickens.

They're basically kept in a separate coop.

And she decided she did not want a communal child, so I

was not born on the farm.

But I have my roots on the farm.

But I was on this farm.

And that's me that you see in the corner.

And this is a picture that was actually sent to me very

recently when the farmer's daughter found out that I was

writing this book.

But this is a piece of land in upstate New York that my

parents bought when they moved back to the States.

Actually, it was 150 acres.

And I think they bought it with their stipend from

graduate school at that time.

But this was an introduction to agriculture.

But I don't know if any of you grew up on a farm or do some

farming now.

Is there anybody in the room who is connected in

any way to the land?

OK.

Even gardeners, you count.

If you have a little box out there, that counts.

OK, wonderful, everybody in the room.

Well, this kind of farming, I think you see what's happening

with the soil here.

It's being turned upside down so that all that little

architecture of bugs and roots and all these things that

nourish plants on the top, are actually being turned deep

down into the earth where they can't do very much.

But this was kind of what farming had turned to in the

late 1960s when I'm standing there in the corner.

My next experience with farming actually happened in

medical school, where my best friend, it turns out, in

medical school, was a goat farmer from Mendocino.

And he'd been homeschooled all the way until college.

And we would sit in the back of the lecture hall.

And the professors would flash these images or slides of

diseases up.

And he would sit next to me and say, my goats get that.

Or, I know exactly how that works.

Because I've taken care of it for years on my goats.

And it was fascinating to me that he was way more advanced

of a healer than I was because of his experience on the farm.

And that stuck with me.

So then, my next experience with farming--

I'm giving you sort of my background in farming-- was as

an intern in the Salinas Valley.

I went from Harvard Medical School, which was sort of this

tertiary care, hyper-reductionist, focused

specialty training to a family medicine training in the

Salinas Valley.

And there I took care of farm workers.

And it was the first time in my life that I saw something

called organophosphate poisoning, which was a

pesticide that's now illegal, but then, in the early 1990s,

was still being used all the time in the fields.

And I remember one of my first times in the ER, being on

call, and this woman coming in, pregnant, her fingers

stained black from picking berries, seizing from

organophosphate poisoning.

And I saw an array of fetal malformations in their busy

obstetrics ward that I hadn't seen

during my previous training.

And so there it was really the dark side of farming that I

was exposed to.

But my real interest in farming probably happened the

same time as all of you, in that I started to become

interested in sustainable food, and this fantastic

movement of knowing your farmer and going to the

farmers' market and hearing about young idealists, people

in their 20s and 30s who were giving up their fancy

educations and going back to the land and starting to grow

vegetables, veritable vegetables.

And I heard these stories.

And here I was, as a family doctor in medicine, wondering

when are people going to be clamoring for their medicine

to have a face the way they're clamoring for their food to

have a face?

And when are we going to get the same idealists who are

pouring into health and healing and wanting to be

primary care doctors the same way they want to be farmers,

underpaid primary care doctors?

And I'm still waiting for that movement to happen.

But that is one of the reasons I started to look at this

paradigm of complexity and sustainable farming.

But then, the more I started to learn about farming, the

more I realized that farmers and I have the same patients.

I started to look at, actually, what they

do on a given day.

And you have to squint a little bit here, OK?

But if you do, it's amazing, the levels of the structures,

the way, actually, that they work and that the nutrients

are moved from top to bottom.

And look at those hairs.

Their hair follicles look surprisingly like soil.

I mean, there is a pattern here that repeats itself not

just between the skin and the soil but between the

intestinal lining and the soil and the pulmonary

tree and the soil.