Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Standing on the TED stage looking stunning in a blue dress, neuroscientist and author Sandra Aamodt  reveals that three and a half years ago on New Year’s Eve, she made a decision: She gave worrying about her weight. Instead, she learned to eat mindfully — and lost 10 pounds. For Aamodt, who had been dieting unsuccessfully for 30 years, this was a major life change. She started her first diet at age 13, and found that the weight always came back.

As a neuroscientist, she wondered what made losing weight so hard. Turns out the brain is an incredibly efficient regulator of body weight. Isn’t weight loss about how much you eat versus how much energy you burn? Nope, it’s not that simple an equation: it turns out that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly behind the scenes, and this unconscious force is stronger than mere willpower. The brain has its own sense of what your body should weigh — no matter what you believe — called the set point, which has a range of about 15 pounds. While lifestyle changes can shift your weight within this range, it’s much harder to move outside of it.

Like a thermostat, Aamodt says, chemical messengers from the hypothalamus gland help regulate hunger, activity and metabolism to keep your weight stable as conditions change. Think of it this way: You can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in winter, but your thermostat will kick up the heat to balance the difference in temperature. Our brains work the same way, managing to maintain our weight at what it considers normal. It’s a response to our evolutionary history: For most of human history, food was scarce, and our bodies worked hard to keep us from starvation.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

This means that whether you start out fat or thin, when you try to override the system by dieting, the brain thinks you’re starving. You get hungrier, and your muscles burn less energy. Even after keeping weight off for seven years, your brain still wants to make you gain it back. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, increasing our chances of survival in time of famine, but as Aamodt wryly notes, it doesn’t work out so well in our time of drive-through burgers. (Changing the food environment, she suggests, might be the most effective solution to obesity.) Even worse news is that while set points can go up, they rarely go down.

So if we’re outgunned by our hardwiring, what hope is there? Aamodt says psychologists categorize eaters into two sets: intuitive eaters, who eat according to their bodies’ hunger signals, and controlled eaters, who try to control when they eat — like dieters. Intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, while the controlled eaters are vulnerable to binging. Children are particularly vulnerable, she says: Girls who diet in their early teens are more likely to gain weight five years later, no matter their starting weight, and the same factors lead to eating disorders. Something else that predictably leads to eating disorders: a family member who makes fun of them for their weight. ”So,” Aamodt says, “don’t do that.”

But surely we have to keep weight down for health reasons? That’s another myth. Aamodt says lifestyle choices are far more important to maintaining health than weight. She cites a study that measured the risk of death over a 14-year period based on four healthy habits: eating fruits and vegetables, getting exercise, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. For someone who is overweight and who practices no healthy habits, the risk of death is high, but adopting just one good habit brings that person back within normal range. (Note that this is true for overweight people, not obese people. For obese people, it takes all four habits to bring them back into a normal range.) And regardless of weight, for those who adopted the four healthy habits, weight makes very little difference to health. The message: if it’s really health you’re worried about, you can take control by adjusting your lifestyle.

And if that’s not convincing enough, Aamodt makes the counterintuitive assertion that dieting typically causes gain weight over time. Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight — and 40% have gained even more than they lost. It would seem that dieting contributes to obesity rather than preventing it.

For her own part, Aamodt solved the conundrum by becoming an intuitive eater, shifting her attitude towards food. “My solution, in a word, is mindfulness,” she says. Not as in yoga or meditation, but giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want, slowly, and without distractions, paying attention to how your body feels when hungry or satisfied, and letting hunger determine when you’re done. “It took about a year to learn,” says Aamodt, “but it was worth it. I’m so much more relaxed about food than I ever have been in life. It’s like aliens have taken over my brain.”

She warns that intuitive eating may not make you lose much weight, but every diet tested has failed in the long run, and as willpower is a limited resource, any weight-loss strategy that relies on it is doomed to fail when it’s necessary to focus on something else. It also does a lot of collateral damage. In the United States, 80% of girls at age 10 have been on diet. Shocking. “Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by a wrong scale,” concludes Aamodt. “If they stopped dieting, most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults most of them would probably be thinner. I wish someone had told me that when I was 13.”

This glorious spread of food at TEDxSydney was crowdsourced from local growers. Photo: courtesy of TEDxSydney

Catering a TEDx event can be — how do you say it? – costly. So we think it’s so cool that the organizers of TEDxSydney decided to crowdsource the food for the 2,200 people attending the event in May. All the food in the amazing spread above comes from community gardens and from plants grown in the backyards, windowsills and balconies of both attendees and generous urban farmers throughout New South Wales. This incredible crowdsourcing was organized by Sydney’s Grow it Local. More than 250 local growers donated food in the end.

These are the lengths people go to for TEDx events, dozens of which are held around the world every week. From those events, the TEDx team chooses four favorite talks each week, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the community and its diverse constellation of ideas. Below, listen to this week’s talks — on topics ranging from public policy to the future of humanity.

Make public policy more fun: Vass Bednar at TEDxToronto
Is public policy just for policymakers? Absolutely not, says Vass Bednar. In this impassioned talk at TEDxToronto, she explains how to put the public back into public policy, by taking a cue from hacker culture and allowing governmental systems to be open source — with apps, games, and lots of sharing. (Filmed at TEDxToronto)

How does the War on Terror end?: Chris Fuller at TEDxSWPS
What’s driving the global War on Terror? It’s not necessarily what you think, says historian Chris Fuller. At TEDxSWPS, he explains how the effects of economic forces along with climate change — rising temperatures, arid farmland, flash floods — are driving citizens in North Africa to join militant groups like Al Qaeda for solutions — and makes a call for Western nations to change their approach to combatting terrorism. (Filmed at TEDxSWPS)

The multiplicity of truth: Julian Baggini at TEDxKingsCollegeLondon
There is no one lens that can bring the truth about reality into focus. Instead, Julian Baggini suggests in this talk from TEDxKingsCollegeLondon, the truth is “nothing more than a totality of different points of view.” The trick, he suggests, to finding truths about the world or ourselves is finding the right lenses for the right occasions and knowing which ones bring the truth into focus and which ones distort reality.(Filmed at TEDxKingsCollegeLondon)

Today, and the future of humanity: Nick Bostrom at TEDxOxford
Our ways of life are at risk. From rising sea levels to nuclear threats, humanity could easily end. How often do we consider the full breadth of these risks when we make decisions; big or small, political or personal? At TEDxOxford, Nick Bostrom describes the exponentially spiraling effect that seemingly trivial actions today could have on the distant future and argues that we need to be more mindful of our decisions. (Filmed at TEDxOxford)

Below, some highlights from the TEDx blog this week:

• 5 TEDx Talks to make learning a language easy
• A look at the Map Your Memories project, from a TEDxWilliamsburg speaker
• 5 talks in Russian: TEDx’s first Russian playlist

Jamie Oliver, who won the TED Prize in 2010, has declared May 17 as Food Revolution Day. Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about foodHis vision: that people gather in homes, schools, workplaces and social spaces to share their culinary knowledge, cook together and simply enjoy each other’s company as they chow down and discuss the centrality of food in life. Anyone is invited to host a Food Revolution Day activity — Oliver recommends organizing a potluck dinner, leading a farmers market tour, planting a community garden or throwing a street party. There’s a downloadable activity guide for those interested in hosting an event, and a search engine for those interested in joining one in their area. Anyone is also welcome to get involved by sharing a treasured recipe.

Why Food Revolution Day? Because Oliver has been on a many-year mission to change the way people relate to food. As he explains on the holiday’s website, “Cooking skills used to be passed down from generation to generation, but now millions of people lack even the most basic cooking skills. We need to get back to basics: to cook and eat fresh local produce; to share cooking skills and food knowledge; to join forces within communities and get as many people involved as possible. Food Revolution Day is our opportunity to get the world to focus on the importance of good food and essential cooking skills.”

In an unexpected TED Prize synergy, Oliver has teamed up with fellow prize-winner JR, who launched the global art initiative Inside Out, to get the word out about Food Revolution Day. Oliver visited JR’s studio and shared a snapshot of himself holding his portrait on Instagram. He also posted an image of JR pasting the poster in Times Square, along with thousands of other portraits.

“Me laid out!! My TED brother @jr pasting the paper & glue in Time Square NYC for his incredible ‘Inside Out project,’” Oliver wrote. “FOOD REVOLUTION DAY is coming this Friday thank you. @jr Can’t wait to do a massive wall for the #insideoutproject.”

Oliver is planning on doing an Inside Out group action, around his message of getting people to eat healthier. Stay tuned for more information.

Are you or someone you know interested in launching a worldwide project on the scale of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution? Nominations for the 2014 TED Prize are open, from now until June 16 »

Oliver with his Inside Out poster.

JR pastes Oliver’s image in Times Square.

]]> http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/16/jamie-oliver-gears-up-for-food-revolution-day-on-may-17/feed/ 3 Jamie-Oliver-Food-Revolution kateted Jamie-Oliver-Food-Revolution Jamie-Oliver-poster Jamie-Oliver-poster-painting http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/13/ron-finley-inspires-young-gardeners-across-country/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/13/ron-finley-inspires-young-gardeners-across-country/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 17:30:53 +0000 Kate Torgovnick http://blog.ted.com/?p=75781 ]]>

David Lozano of San Antonio was inspired to plant a community garden after watching Ron Finley’s talk. Photo: courtesy of David Lozano

Ron Finley is motivating people across the country to pick up a shovel and “get gangsta” by planting fruits, vegetables and herbs in their neighborhood.

Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LASince appearing on the TED2013 stage to talk about why he plants edible gardens in the nooks and crannies of South Central Los Angeles, Finley has been profiled in The New York Times and appeared on Russell Brand’s talk show, BrandX. On Saturday, Finley was featured in this CBS News segment, which tells the story of Terence Satler, a 20-year-old who once dreamed of playing football but now is in culinary school. He says that gardening alongside Finley taught him the joy of food.

“The most extensive knowledge I’ve acquired so far has been through Ron’s garden,” Satler tells the CBS cameras. “He has things you would never see. Especially in my ‘hood.”

We in the TED office are also hearing stories of those influenced by Finley to pick up a trowel.

In April, David Lozano of San Antonio watched Finley’s talk and wrote the gardener, saying, “I saw you on TED yesterday and have watched [your talk] three times since … Needless to say my household is going to plant a food garden for everyone to enjoy. We live just two miles south of the Alamo in San Antonio… How do you deal with stray dogs digging up the garden? And could you give me a suggestion what kind of herbs and vegetables you would have a novice gardener plant?”

Last week, Lozano wrote Finley to share an update, with images attached.

“These pictures are of everything when it was planted last month. In the whiskey barrel, we planted zucchini. We decided to not plant directly in the ground due to the metal recycling plants refuse in the air close to our house,” he wrote. ”The neighborhood grocery store has been planted for a month now. We are getting our first jalapeños.”

Lozano’s zucchini, planted in a whiskey barrel. Photo: courtesy of David Lozano

More herbs and vegetables in a planter. Photo: David Lozano

]]> http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/13/ron-finley-inspires-young-gardeners-across-country/feed/ 3 David-Lozano-2 kateted David-Lozano-2 David-Lozano-3 David-Lozano-1 http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/13/ted-weekends-traces-the-origin-of-the-all-american-chinese-take-out/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/13/ted-weekends-traces-the-origin-of-the-all-american-chinese-take-out/#comments Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:00:09 +0000 Shirin Samimi-Moore http://blog.ted.com/?p=74717 ]]> Turns out the fortune cookie that came with your chop suey isn’t actually Chinese … and neither is the chop suey. So where did they come from?

Jennifer 8. Lee hunts for General TsoIn this TED Talk, journalist Jennifer 8. Lee shares the origins of some of America’s favorite “Chinese” food, and takes us on a culinary tour of Chinese restaurants around the world — whose menus often do not resemble those of restaurants in China.

This week’s TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post explores culinary cross-cultural evolutions, with great essays about the origins of our associations between cuisines and cultures. Below, find three great essays to pique your interest. And make you hungry.

Jennifer 8. Lee: Made in the USA… Chinese Food

When a dish really hits a nerve with the American palate, it can take off across the entire country, facilitated by food vendors’ freedom to copy good ideas. We saw it happen with General Tso’s chicken. We’re seeing it happen with other Asian-influenced culinary creations too…

When I was researching my book on Chinese food in America, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, it puzzled me why Korean cuisine (unlike many of its Asian brethren) had not gone mainstream yet.

Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian and Vietnamese restaurants had all hit critical mass, with footholds in suburban towns. But Korean cuisine remained mostly ensconced within Korean-American communities, with an occasional lone outpost defiantly offering bibimbap. This puzzled me, because Korean savory barbecued meats — short ribs, grilled marinated beef — should be widely appealing to an American palate, which never met a barbecue recipe it didn’t like. But Korean restaurants basically remained serving Korean clientele, with the occasional Chinese family, like mine, that celebrated our Thanksgivings there. Read the full essay »

Fabio Parasecoli: General Tso Chicken: An Immigrant Life Saga

When I was studying Asian languages in Italy, back in the 1980s, the few Chinese restaurants open in my native city of Rome only served two kinds of desserts: fried fruit and fried ice cream — the unlikely creation that Jennifer 8. Lee singles out in her TED Talk about Chinese American food. When I moved to Beijing to pursue my studies, I soon discovered that these crunchy treats are unheard of in China. Chinese cooks in Italy likely came up with the concoctions to meet the expectations of Italian customers.

Fried ice cream, just like the General Tso’s Chicken, highlight the role of immigrants in facilitating the global circulation of culinary traditions, and in shaping the food of their host communities. These two examples show how moving populations have practiced the adaptation, assimilation, and appropriation of foreign or unfamiliar flavors, dishes, techniques, and behaviors all around the world. Culinary exchanges have been taking place for a very long time in the most remote corners of the globe, and they were not always peaceful and enjoyable. Lee reminds us that nineteenth century Asian immigrants to the U.S. were disparaged for eating rice, instead of more civilized fare. Sicilian cuisine still echoes the food traditions of the Islamic communities that once ruled the Mediterranean island in the Middle Ages. Roti became a common dish in many Caribbean locations after farmers were brought from India to work in the sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery. Read the full essay »

Theodore Johnson: African Americans and the Watermelon Stereotype

A photo of my expecting mother eating a slice of watermelon is a family favorite. She attributes my lifelong disdain for the fruit to the fact that she ate it every day while pregnant with me. I carry this story in the form of an oval, deep green blemish on my left hand. It’s true — I’m a black man with a watermelon for a birthmark.

In many countries and cultures around the world, this would be unremarkable. But in the United States, where watermelon is associated with historic African-American stereotypes, my birthmark takes on a more complex symbolism. Just as the undesirable leftovers of farm animals, such as pig intestines and feet, are linked to the slave diet, watermelon is the food most associated with the 19th and 20th century depictions of blacks as lazy simpletons. Read the full essay »

Ron Finley, the self-described renegade gardener, gave a hit talk at TED2013 on his gardening efforts all over South Central LA. Finley is an object of my fascination for more than one reason: In the 35 days since Finley’s talk went live, he’s left 178 comments on the site, making him the 3rd most prolific speaker commenter. (Trivia: the 1st and 2nd are Curator Chris Anderson and TED2011 speaker Janet Echelman.) To put it in context, as someone who receives speaker comments in a daily digest sent to me by email: Of the 1,250 speakers on the site, only 211 have left comments, and the average number of comments they’ve left is 19.

Here are my 10 favorite comments left by Ron Finley on TED.com — with just a touch of context, since that’s how I receive them in my inbox. Click on the link to see the full discussion going on in the thread:

Mar 7 2013, on his own TED Talk:

“THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! I’M SITTING HERE CRYING READ YOUR PASSIONATE COMMENTS. MAN THIS IS A BIG TASK!!! WHAT THE HELL DID I GET INTO!?!?LOL CAN’TSTOPWON’TSTOP!!”

Richard Turere: My invention that made peace with lions

Mar 31 2013, on Richard Turere’s talk about defending his land from lions:

“Im so Proud Of my ‘LiL Brother Richard!!! Seeing him here brings me to tears. So happy for him. He deserves it all. Someone offered to sponsor him at MIT this summer, as soon has he walked off stage!! That is what TED is About!! . . .That’s me barking in the back ground!!!”

Mar 7 2013, on his own talk:

“EACHONEREACHONEEACHONETEACHONE”

Mar 7 2013, on his talk:

Thank you A! Start NOW. No Wait!!

Apr 2 2013, also on his own talk:

“Thank You Leslie!! Find The Train! ~r”

Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx
Apr 4 2013, on Stephen Ritz’s talk on gardening in the South Bronx:

“STEPHEN YOU ARE THE TRUTH! A REAL LIFE GAMECHANGER, A REAL LIVE, LIFE CHANGER!!! TED PRIZE!!!!!! AllGoodThings! ~r0n”

Mar 20 2013, on his own talk:

“Im working on IT!!!. . .Give me Thyme”

Mar 13 2013, also on his talk:

“Plants SunFlower First.”

Mar 14 2013, you guessed it, on his own talk:

“Hi Helena, Waiting for you & your Big Ass Shovel!!”

Mar 20 2013, by far my  favorite comment of his ever, on his talk:

“We have an agreement, They don’t pee in my garden I don’t Eat TheM!”

Angelo Vermeulen taking soil samples for microbial analysis during the shakedown mission at MDRS in Utah. Photo: Kate Greene.

Can real food be cooked on Mars? Thanks to the work of artist, biologist and space scientist Angelo Vermeulen (watch his TED talk), the answer may one day be yes.

When the Universities of Cornell and Hawai’i put out a call for participants for their NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars simulation, investigating the feasibility of real food on Mars, Vermeulen – known for his Biomodd art installations creating symbiotic relationships between plants and computers — landed the crew commander position. The HI-SEAS crew has now been in training for months and, on April 15, they’ll enter the simulation habitat itself — located in Hawaii — for four months.

Vermeulen will be blogging about his experience from within the simulation for the TED Fellows blog. In the meantime, we ask him about the mission, what it means to be a space crew commander and why boredom in isolation isn’t actually a problem.

What will the HI-SEAS simulation be investigating and teaching us?

The Mars simulation we’re setting up is called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog & Simulation or HI-SEAS. It’s primarily a food study. One of the main problems during long-term space travel is so-called menu fatigue. It’s basically astronauts getting tired of their food and losing appetite. By the way astronauts do not eat out of tubes and do not swallow food pills. That’s an old persistent cliché which is still in a lot of people’s minds. It’s almost an archetype of astronaut life. However this dates to the ’50s and ’60s, and has been long abandoned. The food that astronauts currently eat is pretty good, but it’s all pre-prepared. It’s add-water-and-heat, and you have your meal. But even those meals, even when they try to make variations, after a couple of months people get tired of that, and so they start to eat less. As a consequence they might also perform less, and jeopardize the mission.

For example, in the Mars-500 experiment — an isolation study of 500 days near Moscow, a collaboration between Europe and Russia — food became the item that people constantly talked about. Food is absolutely crucial to the psychology of your crew, and you need to handle that carefully.

One of the solutions could be to allow the crew to cook. Because cooking empowers you over your food. You can make endless variations, and there’s an interesting bonus: it improves social cohesion. You talk about food, you share food. It’s a basic human thing. The reason that space agencies have been holding it off are twofold. First of all, current human space exploration is done in microgravity conditions — like in the ISS — and as such cooking has hardly been possible. One needs a good deal of gravity to cook meals. In HI-SEAS we’re talking about simulating life on the surface of Mars, not about traveling to Mars. And since there’s a decent amount of gravity on Mars (38% of Earth’s gravity), you can do your regular cooking.

So what you’re doing is not for people in a space vehicle.
No, it’s not for the transit phase. It’s for an actual stay on a planetary surface, such as Mars, but also the Moon. The second reason space agencies have been holding off cooking is because it takes more time, water and energy, and all of those things are extremely precious in outer space. A pre-prepared meal is indeed way more efficient. But it’s a tradeoff: if your crew becomes unhappy and starts to perform less, you might want to invest a little bit by allotting more time and resources for preparing food.

We are actually the first crew in the history of space exploration to be allowed to cook properly. Obviously we’re not real astronauts, we’re simulating astronaut life. But still. This is the very first, very thorough study of the potential of cooking. That’s the baseline research — that’s why we’re funded.

Angelo Vermeulen growing vegetables inside the greenhouse at MDRS in very harsh winter conditions. Photo: Sian Proctor.

What else does the mission entail?

While we’ll spend most of our time researching food in different ways, there is a second layer of research, and that’s our personal research. Each crew member had to define his own or her own research program.

Normally in space exploration you’re strictly an operator, and you do what you’re told. But in HI-SEAS, we get a higher level of autonomy, and being able to define your own research is a clear example of that. In my case, I chose to research the potential of remote operated gardening — basically gardening using robots over long distances in a separate location. It’s the first step to semi-autonomy where robots can start taking care of crops, partially by themselves.

The personal research programs vary a lot. Roboticist and crew engineer Simon Engler will investigate the use of rovers when we’re doing so-called EVAs or explorations outside of the habitat. Crew biologist Yajaira Sierra Sastre is doing research on bacteria and nano-materials. She’s more specifically researching the use of antimicrobial garments. We’re testing NASA’s Advanced Clothing System for that purpose.

You’ll have a lab?

We have a lab, yeah. Crammed with all the other stuff in a 36’ diameter dome. The last layer of research is opportunistic research, very characteristic for space exploration. This means that other institutes, agencies, and researchers use the opportunity of the HI-SEAS isolation campaign to run research on us. We’re glad to help out because the more publications we can churn out after HI-SEAS, the better for science, for progress, and for future funding.

So while you’re there, what will the space conditions simulation be like? Will you be wearing suits, or will the atmosphere be different?

Inside the hab we’ll wear regular clothing. Once we want to go outside of the hab, we have to go through an airlock and wear space suits. They’re not real space suits — those are multi-million-dollar devices — but we’ll be wearing suits that simulate space suits, inhibiting our movements, with a glass helmet, and so on. We’re trying to get as close to the real experience of living on Mars. Essentially we’ll be subjected to restrictions that you would also experience in space exploration missions.

If you’re growing food on Mars, the environmental conditions will be very different and you’ll have to work around that by using shielded greenhouses for example. Here I have to add something about my personal research project. In fact I cannot access the food that I’m growing in the remote-operated farm.

Why not?

Because the food study is focusing on shelf stable ingredients. These are ingredients that don’t need refrigeration and that can be kept at room temperature for multiple years. Moreover we’re only using food that is relatively light. And then you end up with things like flour, rice, honey, and lots of freeze-dried ingredients. And that’s what we have to work with during the 4 months of the study. Mixing in fresh vegetables would obviously confound the study, and therefore I can’t harvest my own robot-grown plants. We can grow sprouts though, and this will be the closest we get to fresh food.

Crew of the HI-SEAS Mars mission simulation inside the MDRS training facility in Utah. The lighting devices are part of a sleep study. From left to right: Yajaira Sierra Sastre, Oleg Abramov, Simon Engler, Angelo Vermeulen, Kate Greene and Sian Proctor. Photo: Sian Proctor.

And you’re crew commander. What are your responsibilities, and why do you think you were chosen for this role?

Crew commander is a central role in isolation and space missions in general. It’s a bit like the captain on a ship, quite a comparable role. But with this difference: in space missions you’re dealing with highly trained, highly accomplished people. As a commander in such a situation, you simply can’t start the day by delivering orders to everybody. That’s not how it works. You’re much more of a facilitator and mediator.

The reason I was offered the role of crew commander was because of my experience in community building in complex conditions, such as in Biomodd and other projects. I worked in the Philippines for a long time, in a volcanic disaster zone in Indonesia, and in many other places around the world, always with the goal of building communities around challenging art/science projects. Last year I’ve created a new Biomodd version in New York City with a heterogeneous group of collaborators with culturally, socially and professionally very different backgrounds. In this way I have quite some experience keeping groups together, and that definitely helped.

How has doing this research changed your perspective?

It’s changed my perspective on designing spaceships. Every engineer that works on spaceships should go through a similar isolation experience. Through physically living in a confined off-grid space with people, you come to realize so many things. A lot of assumptions actually seem to be wrong. A classic one: most people think when you go into an isolation study, you’ll be bored for sure. It’s a universal thing, people ask me this question all the time. However, it’s rather the contrary, you hardly have enough time. The crew gets up at seven, and almost every day we work until 10. By  then we’re all pretty exhausted. We have to almost enforce a day off, like on Sundays, otherwise we would just keep on experimenting and doing research. So boredom is really not an issue at all.

In the photo, you’re taking soil samples in a spacesuit, doing extra-vehicular activities. If the mission is about cooking, why do you need to do this?

It’s to increase the fidelity of the mission. If you’re doing a food study that’s supposed to be useful for a stay on Mars, you have to do all the things you would actually do when you were there. Or at least try to get as close as possible to that kind of life. Otherwise the results wouldn’t be really relevant.

But would you personally like to be shot into space?

I wouldn’t mind.

Angelo will be blogging for the TED Fellows blog on a regular basis from within the HI-SEAS simulation. Stay tuned for transmissions!

In today’s TED Talk, guerilla gardner Ron Finley tells the story of how he was issued a citation, and then a warrant for his arrestRon Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA, all for planting delicious vegetables in the 150 x 10 foot patch of earth in front of his house in South Central, Los Angeles. It’s a rousing talk — one that will make you want to stand up and cheer … and maybe even plant some kale. As Finley says, “Let’s all become gangsta gardeners. We have to flip the script on what a gangsta is. If you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t gangsta. Let that be your weapon of choice!”

Yesterday, the day before Finley’s talk made it to the TED.com homepage, TEDActive’s own Nick Weinberg and Sean Gannet stopped by Finley’s gardens in South Central. Above, a view of the strip of no-man’s-land between the sidewalk and the street that Ron planted with leafy green vegetables and flowers. And below, look for more photos: a garden in a swimming pool and a closeup of Ron’s famous red Swiss chard.

Inspired? Check out these great TED Talks about growing your own food:

Britta Riley: A garden in my apartmentBritta Riley: A garden in my apartment Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles — researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.

Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South BronxStephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx A whirlwind of energy and ideas, Stephen Ritz is a teacher in New York’s tough South Bronx, where he and his kids grow lush gardens for food, greenery — and jobs. Just try to keep up with this New York treasure as he spins through the many, many ways there are to grow hope in a neighborhood many have written off, or in your own.

Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapesPam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes What should a community do with its unused land? Plant food, of course. With energy and humor, Pam Warhurst tells at the TEDSalon the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, and to change the narrative of food in their community.

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about foodJamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, West Virginia, TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

And another great TEDx talk on the subject: Roger Doiron’s My subversive (garden) plot. A vegetable garden can do more than save you money — it can save the world. In this talk, Roger Doiron shows how gardens can re-localize our food and feed our growing population.

Here, more images of Finley’s amazing gardens.

In an abandoned swimming pool behind his house, Ron Finley is growing artichokes, brocolli, kale and more, plus succulents and cacti (check out the mini garden behind the blue tiles). The blue barrels are collecting rainwater, and the black bins are for compost. Photo: Nick Weinberg

A closeup of Ron’s famous Swiss chard. Easy to grow and delicious to eat. Photo: Nick Weinberg

Photos: Ryan Lash

Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of MIT Technology Review, wants us to think about why we can’t (or think we can’t) solve big problems anymore — what is our generation’s moon landing? Some people blame the culture of Silicon Valley, or VCs unwilling to invest in big problems, but Pontin doesn’t buy this excuse. The real problems are that humanity’s big challenges are hard, our political systems are unwilling, and too often we don’t really understand the real issue. Landing on the moon, it turns out, was relatively easy. “The solutions of our future will be harder won,” he says. A sobering start to the morning.

In a hilarious talk, David Pogue shares some basic tricks for using our technology — tricks that you might think everyone knows, but they don’t. For example, hit control (or command) and “+” to make the text in a web browser bigger. When writing, double-click a word to highlight just that word. (We’re asking him for the list.)

2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant, the president and CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, is here to tell us the good news about pandemics. Hurray! This is important; as he and his team helped to lay out in the movie Contagion, which they advised on, pandemic viruses are a huge, insidious threat to humanity. But with social media, participatory surveillance, better policy and better regional cooperation, global pandemics might become a thing of the past. “I think we can end pandemics in our lifetimes,” he says.

Ghislaine Maxwell gives a stirring call to care about the oceans — a resource that is held by law to be for the benefit of all, but in reality is being exploited by the few. She proposes six things we can do to help: 1) Enforce the Public Trust Doctrine; 2) Demand more marine public areas; 3) Adopt models that produce more revenue without as much waste; 4) Ban wasteful fishing practices; 5) Fish sustainably; and 6) Come together as a community around the seas. We are all citizens of the oceans, after all.

“Look to the person to your left; look to the person to your right,” instructs Scott Noggle, director of the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory. ”One of you will get Alzheimer’s by the time you are 80.” This is not a cheery thought. “This is a catastrophe,” confirms Noggle. Yup. He’s here to tell us about his work, which involves taking living cells from cadavers of those who died from Alzheimer’s. He and his team have figured out how to re-create stem cell lines, and therefore brain tissue, to try and figure out how the disease starts and develops–with the end goal of creating more effective therapies to treat the disease. Astonishing.

Dan Miller, Managing Director of the Roda Group, is concerned with the growing food crisis facing the world — and is looking for solutions. He’s found one possibility: hydrogels, chemicals that can hold 100 times their weight in water. These can be put into the soil at the same time as seeds and fertilizer. Because of the way the gels retain water near the plants, this could increase yield while reducing water use. Some convincing tests on broccoli make his point.

Jessica Green is here to talk about the microbes that both define who we are and that exist in their own ecosystems on everything we touch. She’s been working with architects and biologists to take samples from rooms at the University of Oregon to get a deeper understanding of the microbial community within space. “Bathrooms are like a tropical rainforest,” she says. “Offices are like temperate grassland.” The implications for designers of this genre she calls “bio-informed design,” particularly for those thinking about designing air systems or working in health care, are huge.

Tony Tjan studies entrepreneurs, and tries to work out what makes them successful. He has found four attributes that each can contribute: Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck. He says there is no one way to success, but a key is the self-awareness to understand which part is their own primary driver.

Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America, is here to talk about how politics is changing, and in particular about what will be important in 2016. On his list: micro-targeting; micro-listening; micro-media buying. We’re going to get a lot more focused, in other words. Other challenges: voter suppression; voter contact; and potential cyberattack, Reed’s biggest fear. Did you know this: The presidential campaigns of both John McCain and Mitt Romney were hacked by a foreign entity. “We were safe, because we invested in security,” he says, but he doesn’t think it’ll be so easy next time around. The solution? Trust the experts. Get the right people in the right place, and let them do their jobs to the best of their ability.

TED Fellow Julie Freeman is an artist who thinks about how to represent data in art. She was asked to curate a set of artworks based on data for the Open Data Institute, and she found some remarkable examples, such as a vending machine that only dispenses snacks when there is news of an economic downturn.

David Peterson creates languages for a living, including the language Dothraki, which he developed for the television series Game of Thrones. He’s here to give us an insight into how he does it, and to take us on a whistlestop tour through the evolution of language. Why go to all the trouble? Fans, of course. Every single detail of a hit show like GoT is analyzed in depth; results are shared instantaneously, and they’ll realize quickly if a fake language is systematic or just gibberish. This respect for viewers might be the difference between a hit and a multimillion-dollar flop. That’s why it matters.

And finally, David Pogue, who turns out to be a former Broadway conductor as well as technology writer for the New York Times, returns to sing his new composition, ”The Twitter Song.” a show tune take on living in the 140-character age.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

You think your food tastes good, but food inventor Barb Stuckey thinks you could be doing better. In her book, Taste What You’ve Been Missing, Stuckey explores the science of what, exactly, what makes food taste good — and what doesn’t.

Which brings us today to: Uuuuumami! (That’s oo-ma-mee.) What is umami? That rich, brothy flavor without which tomatoes, soy sauce, sushi, mushrooms and hamburgers just wouldn’t be the same. Umami is the delicious savory fifth taste after sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

To really appreciate food, Stuckey says, it’s important to understand exactly what you taste. After all, it’s the balance of the 5 basic tastes that creates the perfect dish.

Try some taste exercises on Barb’s blog >>