Kimbal Musk wants to feed America, Silicon Valley-style
It’s easy to understand why some people in this town of soul music and dry-rub ribs don’t know what to make of the tall tech billionaire in a big white cowboy hat who has been opening restaurants and buying up hundreds of acres of land that used to grow cotton.
Kimbal Musk, 45, got rich working in tech alongside his older brother, Elon. Now he wants to do for food what his brother has done for electric cars and space travel.
Although Musk has food ventures humming along in Colorado, where he lives, as well as in big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, he has become enamoured of places like Tennessee, Indiana and Ohio — parts of the country he believes are the ripest for a revolution in eating .
“The Americana here gives me goose bumps,” Musk, who grew up in South Africa, said during a visit to Memphis last spring. Musk is promoting a philosophy he calls “real food,” which nourishes the body, the farmer and the planet. It doesn’t sound much different than what writers like Michael Pollan and everyone who has ever helped start a farmers’ market or community garden have preached for years.
But Musk has big ideas about what the Silicon Valley crowd likes to call the food space, which is as exciting to him as the internet was in 1995. In short, he wants to create a network of business, educational and agricultural ventures big enough to swing the nation’s food system back to one based on healthy, local food grown on chemical-free farms.
Like a politician on the stump, Musk travels extensively to pound home the message that Americans — especially millennials — are demanding real food and rejecting what he calls industrial food. But many people who have long laboured on the front lines of the battle are still not quite sure what to make of him.
“All the indications are that the guy’s head and heart are in the right place,” said Michel Nischan, the founder and chief executive officer of Wholesome Wave, which works to make fruits and vegetables more affordable for lower-income households. “The problem is that the people who made their money in tech understand disruption and scaling, but they don’t know how to get their hands dirty and engage the neighbours.”
For all his business and tech acumen, Musk can sometimes seem tone-deaf. At a conference on food waste in New York last month, he declared that “food is one of the final frontiers that technology hasn’t tackled yet. If we do it well, it will mean good food for all.” When the comment was posted on Twitter, Lawrence McLachlan, a farmer in Ontario, shot back: “You might want to visit a Farm show. Or even a farm. I think you might have missed 70 years of Ag history. It’s Hi-Tech stuff bud.”