In June of 2017, I volunteered with a group at a local food pantry on the south side of my home city in Atlanta, Georgia.
It was a Friday afternoon, the day of their weekly food giveaway.
And as I drove up, I saw people beginning to arrive, many with their rolling carts in tow, prepared to receive their food supply for the week.
As I was walking in the door, there were about 40 people outside waiting in line.
And I was so excited, because there are very few things I enjoy more than giving back.
But then, as I entered the room where the volunteer meeting was taking place, I immediately realized: we weren't about to give these people any real meals.
We were essentially just giving them food.
I took my place on the assembly line, where -- get this -- I was in charge of making sure that the Weight Watchers Ding Dongs made it into every family's bag.
As the bags started to come around, I'm thinking to myself: What on earth are we doing here?
Each bag contained two 20-ounce diet Snapples, a gallon of barbecue sauce, a bag of kettle potato chips, a box of superhero-shaped vegetable-enriched macaroni noodles, a box of belVita breakfast bars, a can of refried beans, a can of sweet peas, a miniature can of corn, I can't forget about those Ding Dongs and french fried green onions, you know, the kind that go on top of a green bean casserole.
And that was it.
We made over a hundred of those bags that day, and people indeed stood in line to receive one.
But a feeling came over me; I felt bad and a little angry.
It was like, how could I even feel good about the work that I was doing when I knew for a fact that not one meal was to come from the food we had just given to over 100 families?
I mean, who wants to have a meal with barbecue sauce and Ding Dongs?
(Laughter) And the reality is, I've been part of this process all my life.
I've participated in food drives, I've collected cans since I was a kid, I've donated in the grocery store more times than I can count, I've volunteered at shelters, I've worked in food pantries, and I'm sure, like me, so many of you have, too.
In 2013, I even created a pop-up restaurant, called Sunday Soul.
And I rented tables and chairs and linens and I printed out menus and I took these experiences to alleyways, underneath bridges and in parks to allow people that were experiencing homelessness to dine with dignity.
So I've invested in this fight for quite some time.
In almost every major US city, the food bank is viewed as a beloved community institution.
Corporations send volunteers down on a weekly basis to sort through food items and make boxes of food for the needy.
And can drives -- they warm the hearts of schools and office buildings that participate and fill the shelves of food banks and food pantries across the nation.
This is how we work to end hunger.
And what I've come to realize is that we are doing hunger wrong.
We are doing the same things over and over and over again and expecting a different end result.
We've created a cycle that keeps people dependent on food banks and pantries on a monthly basis for food that is often not well-balanced and certainly doesn't provide them with a healthy meal.
In the US, our approach to doing good, or what we call "charity," has actually hindered us from making real progress.
We're educating the world on how many people are food insecure.
There are television commercials, billboards, massive donations, the engagement of some of our biggest celebrities in the fight.
But the ever-present reality is that, even with all of this work, millions of people are still going hungry.
And we can do better.
Globally, 821 million people are hungry.
That's one in nine people on this planet.
And here in the United States, nearly 40 million people experience hunger every single year, including more than 11 million children that go to bed hungry every night.
Yet, we're wasting more food than ever before -- more than 80 billion pounds a year, to be exact.
The EPA estimates that food waste has more than doubled between 1970 and 2017, and now accounts for 27 percent of everything in our landfills.
And as this food sits, it gradually rots and produces harmful methane gas, a leading contributor to global climate change.
We have the waste of the food itself, the waste of all the money associated with producing this now-wasted food and the waste of labor with all of the above.
And then there's the social inequity between people who really need food and can't get it and people who have too much and simply throw it away.
All of this made me realize that hunger was not an issue of scarcity but rather a matter of logistics.
So in 2017, I set out to end hunger using technology.
After all, food delivery apps had begun to explode on the scene, and I thought surely we can reverse-engineer this technology and get food from businesses like restaurants and grocery stores and into the hands of people in need.
I believe that technology and innovation have the power to solve real problems, especially hunger.
So in 2017, I created an app that would inventory everything that a business sells and make it super easy for them to donate this excess food that would typically go to waste at the end of the night.
All the user has to do now is click on an item, tell us how many they have to donate, and our platform calculates the weight and the tax value of those items at time of donation.
We then connect with local drivers in the shared economy to get this food picked up and delivered directly to the doors of nonprofit organizations and people in need.
I provided the data and the analytics to help businesses reduce food waste at the source by letting them know the items that they waste repeatedly on a regular basis, and they even saved millions of dollars.
Our mission was simple: feed more, waste less.
And by 2018, our clients included the world's busiest airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson, and we were working with brands and corporations like Hormel, Chick-fil-A and Papa John's.
We even had the opportunity to work with the NFL for Super Bowl LIII.
And over the last two years, we've worked with over 200 business to divert more than two million pounds of edible food from landfills into the hands of people that needed it most.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) This has accounted for about 1.7 million meals and allowed us to start to expand our efforts to other cities, like Washington, DC, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia and more.
That's just one approach that actually tackles the problem.
Another was the launch of our pop-up grocery stores.
We recover excess food from businesses and set up free community grocery stores right in the middle of food deserts.
We bring out a chef, and we do on-site taste-testings and allow families to leave with recipe cards.
We give every family reusable grocery bags and allow them to simply shop minus the price tag.
We wanted to give people access to meals and not just food.
We wanted to change the way that we think and work to solve hunger in this country, get people to believe that we can solve hunger, not as a nonprofit, not as a food bank but as a social enterprise, with the goal of reducing waste and ending hunger.
But it hasn't been as easy as I thought to change the narrative and the thought process on how we think that hunger can be solved.
In 2016, France became the first country to ban supermarkets from throwing away unused food.
Instead, they must donate it, and they're fined if they don't.
Yes.
(Applause) In 2017, Italy followed suit, becoming the second European nation to pass an anti-food-waste ban.
And they stated it so simply as it was passed through legislation: "We have millions of pounds of good food going to waste, and we have poor people that are going hungry."
That simple.
Denmark now has a mandated food waste grocery store.
Its name: Wefood.
They recover excess food from local grocery stores and sell it at up to a 50 percent off discount.
They then use all the proceeds and donate it to emergency aid programs and social need issues for the people in need.
It has been hailed as "the Goodwill of grocery."
And last year, the world got its first pay-what-you-can grocery store, when Feed it Forward opened in Toronto.
Their shelves remain stocked by recovering excess food from major supermarkets and allowing families to simply pay what they can at their grocery store.
This is amazing.
This innovation we need more of.
Everyone can take on the roles of changing the attitudes about how we solve hunger.
When we think of how we've allowed innovation and technology to change our lives, from how we communicate with each other to how we view our entertainment to how we even receive food, it's amazing that we haven't solved hunger yet.
We literally have cars that can drive themselves and millions of people that cannot feed themselves.
With millions of dollars being donated to end food insecurity, we should've solved hunger years ago.
And I asked myself -- (Applause) I asked myself, why can't we escape this vicious cycle?
Why haven't we solved this problem?
I remember meeting with investors and pitching the idea, trying to raise funds for my business, and one of them said to me, in true seriousness, "Hunger is already being solved," as if millions of people weren't going to go to bed hungry that very night, and as if there was nothing else to do.
And the reality is, one would think that hunger is being solved, but the truth is, it's being worked on.
If we really want to solve hunger, then we have to change the way we've been doing it.
The same actions will always garner the same results.
There are hundreds of social entrepreneurs all over the world.
They have a focus to solve really big problems, like hunger, but they'll never get the same support that we give national hunger-fighting organizations and food banks.
But, if given the opportunity, they have the ability to foster insight and perhaps be forward-thinking enough to solve this problem.
That's why I'm traveling the world and I'm really talking about what hunger looks like in America and explaining the difference between giving people access to food and access to meals.
I've been meeting with city council members and city organizers across the US and telling them that technology indeed does have the power to connect businesses with surplus food to people in need, and explaining to them what a meal can actually mean to a family.
I've been meeting with school boards and school districts to talk about how we feed hungry children, and health care organizations, sharing the message that food is health, and food is life, and that, by solving hunger, we can solve so many more problems.
So if we want to know that we don't live in a nation where perfectly good food goes to waste when our neighbors don't have food to eat, then we need to change the laws.
We need to introduce new policies, and, most importantly, we need to change our minds and our actions.
Food drives are fine.
Food banks serve a huge purpose.
And yes, sometimes I like Ding Dongs, too.
But the reality is that food drives do not solve hunger.
And if we are smart about connecting the dots that are right in front of our noses, we can do far more than give a family a box of superhero-shaped vegetable-enriched macaroni noodles and a gallon of barbecue sauce to feed themselves.
Instead, we can give them back their dignity.
Perhaps we can increase school attendance in schools.
We can improve the health outcomes for millions.
And, most importantly, we can reduce food waste in our landfills, creating a better environment for all of us.
The thing I love most is that we can feel good about it in the process.
If we solve hunger, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
So let's do it.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Helen Walters: Huang, it's so good to see you.
Thank you for joining us.
How's your 2020 been?
Huang Hung: My 2020 started totally normal.
In January, I went to Paris, did my interview for the fashion week there, came back to Beijing on January 22nd, and finding things a little bit tense because there were a lot of rumors.
Having lived through SARS, I wasn't that concerned.
And on the 23rd, I had a friend of mine from New York come to my house who had a flu, and we had dinner together, and another friend who came, who left the next day for Australia for vacation on an airplane.
So we were not taking this terribly seriously until there was a lockdown.
HW: And we've seen that echo around the world.
I think still some people find it hard to understand the magnitude of some of the measures that China took.
I mean -- what else are we missing about China's response in all of this?
HH: You know, historically, we're just two very different countries in terms of culture and history.
I mean, these are two completely different human experiences for its people.
So, for China, when the lockdown happens, people are OK.
People are OK with it, because they think that's what a good parent should do.
You know, if a kid gets sick, you put him in the other room, and you lock him up and make sure that the other kids don't get sick.
And they expect that out of the government.
But when it is outside of China, from America, it becomes a huge issue of the right political thing to do and whether it's infringing on personal freedom.
So the issues that you have to deal with in a democratic society are issues that one does not have to deal with in China.
I have to say that there's a word in Chinese that doesn't exist in any other language, and the word is called "guāi."
It is what you call a kid who listens to his or her parents.
So I think, as a people, we are very "guāi."
We have this sort of authoritarian figure that Chinese always look up to, and they do expect the government to actually take the actions, and they will deal with it.
However much suffering there is, they feel that, OK, if big brother says that this has to be done, then it must be done.
And that really defines China as a separate mentality, Chinese has a separate mentality, as, say, people in Europe and America.
HW: That sense of collective responsibility sometimes feels a little absent from this culture.
At the same time, there are, I think, valid concerns around surveillance and data privacy, things like that.
What is the balance here, and what is the right trade-off between surveillance and freedom?
HH: I think in the internet age, it is somewhere between China and the US.
I think when you take individual freedom versus collective safety, there has to be a balance somewhere there.
With surveillance, the head of Baidu, Robin Li, once said the Chinese people are quite willing to give up certain individual rights in exchange for convenience.
Actually, he was completely criticized on Chinese social media, but I think he is right.
Chinese people are willing to give up certain rights.
For example, we have ...
Chinese mostly are very proud of the payment system we have, which is you can go anywhere just with your iPhone and pay for everything, and all they do is face-scan.
I think that probably freaks Americans out.
You know, China right now, we're still under semi-lockdown, so if you go anywhere, there's an app where you scan and you input your mobile phone number, and the app will tell the guard at the entrance of the mall, for example, where you have been for the past 14 days.
Now, when I told that to an American, she was horrified, and she thought it was such an invasion of privacy.
On the other hand, as someone who is Chinese and has lived in China for the past 20 years, although I understand that American mentality, I still find I'm Chinese enough to think, "I don't mind this, and I am better, I feel safer entering the mall because everybody has been scanned," whereas, I think individual freedom as an abstract concept in a pandemic like this is actually really meaningless.
So I think the West really needs to move a step towards the East and to think about the collective as a whole rather than only think about oneself as an individual.
HW: The rise of antagonistic rhetoric between the US and China is obviously troubling, and the thing is, the countries are interlinked whether people understand global supply chains or not.
Where do you think we head next?
HH: You know, this is the most horrifying thing that came out of this, the kind of nationalistic sentiments on both sides in this pandemic.
Because I'm an optimist, I think what will come out of this is that both sides will realize that this is a fight that the entire human race has to do together and not apart.
Despite the rhetoric, the global economy has grown to such an integration that decoupling will be extremely costly and painful for both the United States and China.
HW: It's also been interesting to me to see the criticism that China has received quite vocally.
For instance, they've been criticized for downplaying the death toll, arguably, also for trying to demonize Dr. Li, the Wuhan doctor who first raised the alarm about the coronavirus.
I just saw a report in "The New York Times" that Weibo users have been posting repeatedly on the last post of Dr. Li and using this as kind of a living memorial to him, chatting to him.
There's something like 870,000 comments and growing on that last post.
Do you see a change in the media?
Do you see a change in the approach to Chinese leadership that actually could lead to China swinging perhaps more to the center, just as perhaps America needs to swing more towards a Chinese model?
HH: Unfortunately, not really, because I think there is a way between authoritarian governments and its people to communicate.
The night that Dr. Li died, when it was announced that he died, the Chinese social media just blew up.
Even though he was unjustly treated as a whistleblower, he still went to work in the hospital and tried to save lives as a doctor, and then he died because he contracted the disease.
So there was anger, frustration, and all of that came out in kind of commemorating a figure that they feel that the government had wronged.
The verdict and sort of the official voice on: "Who is Dr. Li?
Is he a good guy or a bad guy?"
completely changed 180 degrees.
He went from a doctor who misbehaved to the hero who warned the people.
So under authoritarian government, they still are very aware of public opinion, but, on the other hand, when people complain and when they commemorate Dr. Li, do they really want to change the system?
And my answer is no, because they don't like that particular decision, but they don't want to change the system.
And one of the reasons is because they have never, ever known another system.
This is the system they know how to work.
HW: What is wok-throwing, Huang?
HH: Oh, wok-throwing is when you blame somebody else.
Basically, someone who is responsible in a slang Chinese is someone who carries a black wok.
You are made to be the scapegoat for something that is bad.
So basically, Trump started calling it the "Chinese virus," the "Wuhan virus," and trying to blame the entire coronavirus pandemic on the Chinese.
And then the Chinese, I think, threw the wok back at the Americans.
So it was a very funny joke on Chinese social media, that wok-throwing.
There's a wok-throwing gymnastics aerobics exercise video that went viral.
HW: But tell us, Huang: You're also doing dances on TikTok, right?
HH: Oh, of course.
I'm doing a lot of wok-throwing aerobics on TikTok.
HW: I mean, a potential silver lining of all of this is that it has laid bare some of the inequities, inequalities in the system, some of the broken structures that we have, and if we're smart, we can rebuild better.
HH: Yes.
I think one of the silver linings of this pandemic is that we do realize that the human race has to do something together rather than to be distinguished by our race, by the color of our skin or by our nationality; that this virus obviously is not discriminating against anyone, whether you are rich or poor, important or not important or whatever skin color or nationality you are.
So it is a time to be together, rather than to try to pull the world apart and crawl back to our own nationalistic shells.
HW: It's a beautiful sentiment.
Huang Hung, thank you so much for joining us from Beijing.
Stay well, please.
HH: Thank you, Helen, and you stay well as well.
This is a sculpture I made, which is a way of, kind of, freeing a form into an object that has different degrees of freedom.
So, it can balance on a point.
This is a bronze ball, an aluminum arm here, and then this wooden disk.
And the wooden disk was really thought about as something that you'd want to hold on to, and that would glide easily through your hands.
The aluminum is because it's very light.
The bronze is nice hard, durable material that could roll on the ground.
Inside of the bronze ball there's a lead weight that is free-swinging on an axle that's on two bearings that pass in between, across it, like this, that counterbalance this weight.
So it allows it to roll.
And the sphere has that balance property that it always sort of stays still and looks the same from every direction.
But if you put something on top of it, it disbalances it.
And so it would tip over.
But in this case because the interior is free-swinging in relation to the sphere, it can stand up on one point.
And then there was a second level to this object, which is that it -- I wanted it to convey some proportions that I was interested in, which is the diameter of the Moon and the diameter of the Earth in proportion to each other.
I was exploring, really early on, wanting to make things float in the air.
And I thought up a lot of ideas.
This is sculpture that I made that -- it's magnetically levitated.
The thing is, is that it's slightly dangerous.
Normally it's sort of cordoned off when it's in a museum.
But it's uh -- let's see if I can manipulate it a little bit without, um -- oops.
So this is just floating, floating on a permanent magnetic field, which stabilizes it in all directions.
Except there is a slight tether here, which keeps it from going over the top of its field.
It's sort of surfing on a magnetic field at the crest of a wave.
And that's what supports the object and keeps it stable.
I think we could roll the tape, admin.
I have a sort of a collection of videos that I took of different installations, which I could narrate.
This is a sculpture of the Sun and the Earth, in proportion.
Representing that eight and a half minutes that it takes light and gravity to connect the two.
So here is the Earth.
It's a little less than a millimeter that was turned of solid bronze.
And here is a similar sculpture.
That's the Sun at that end.
And then in a series of 55 balls, it reduces, proportionately -- each ball and the spaces between them reduce proportionately, until they get down to this little Earth.
This is in a sculpture park in Taejon.
This one is about the Moon and then the distance to the Earth, in proportion also.
This is a little stone ball, floating.
As you can see the little tether, that it's also magnetically levitated.
And then this is the first part of -- this is 109 spheres, since the Sun is 109 times the diameter of the Earth.
And so this is the size of the Sun.
And then each of these little spheres is the size of the Earth in proportion to the Sun.
It's made up of 16 concentric shells.
Each one has 92 spheres.
This is in the courtyard of a twelfth-century alchemist.
I was thinking that the Sun is kind of the ultimate alchemist.
(Laughter) So this, again, is on the subject -- a slice from the equator of the Earth.
And then the Moon in the center, and it's floating.
And this is in France.
This is in Sapporo.
It's balancing on a shaft and a ball, right at the center of gravity, or just slightly above the center of gravity, which means that the lower half of the object is just a little bit more weighty.
So you can see it rotating here.
It weighs about a ton or over a ton.
It's made of stainless steel, quite thick.
But it's being balanced like that in equilibrium.
It's susceptible to motion by the air currents.
This is another species of work that I do.
These are these arrays.
These spheres are all suspended, but they have magnets horizontally in them that make them all like compasses.
So all the red sides, for example, face one direction: south.
And the blue side, the compliment, faces the other way.
So as you turn around you're seeing different colors.
This is based on the structure of a diamond.
It was a diamond cell structure was the point of departure.
And then there were kind of large spaces in the hollows between the atoms.
And so I placed one more element of each one of them.
These were white spheres.
Then I had video projectors that were projecting intermittently onto the spheres.
So they would catch parts of the images, and make sort of three-dimensional color volumes, as you walk through it, through the object.
This is something I did of a tactile communication system.
It was the idea of isolating the tactile component of sculpture, and then putting it into a communication system.
This is an idea of moving a sculpture, a ball, that would be directed around the room by a computer.
This is a clock I designed.
It has Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map edited here.
It turns once per day in synchrony with the Earth.
And then, this is like projects that are harder to build.
(Laughter) This has a diamond-bottomed lake.
So it's a floating island with water, fresh water, that can fly from place to place.
This would be grown, I suppose, with nanotechnology in the future sometime.
In the course of doing my work I sort of have a broad range of interests.
And some of it is just the idea of creating media -- media as a sculpture, something that would keep the sculpture fresh and ever-changing, by just creating the media that the sculpture is made of.
And I had a lot of -- always interested in the concept of a crystal ball.
And the idea that you could see things inside of a crystal ball and predict the future -- or a television set, where it's sort of like a magic box where anything can appear.
I had thought about, a long time ago, in the late '60s -- when I was just starting out, I was under the influence of thinking about Buckminster Fuller's grand project for an electric globe across from the United Nations -- and other things that were happening, the space program at that time, and Whole Earth Catalog, things like that.
I was thinking about mass produced spherical television sets that could be linked to orbiting camera satellites.
So if we could roll the next film here.
This has evolved over the years in a lot of different iterations.
But this the current version of it, is a flying airship that is about 35 meters in diameter, about 110 feet in diameter.
The whole surface of it is covered with 60 million diodes, red, blue, and green, that allow you to have a high-resolution picture, visible in daylight.
I came with a plan.
I brought it to Paul MacCready's company AeroVironment to do a feasibility study, and they analyzed it, and came up with a lot of innovative ideas about how to propel it.
So we have a physical plan of how to make this actually happen.
This is the control room inside of the ship.
The idea of this air genie is, it's something that can just transform and become anything.
It's like a traveling show.
It has speakers on it.
And it has cameras over the surface of it.
So it can see its environment, and then it can mimic its environment and disappear.
Here the legs are retracting.
The cabin is open or closed, as you like.
It weighs about 20 tons.
It has on-board generators.
It can generate about a million kilowatts, in order to be bright enough to be visible in daylight.
The idea of it is to make a kind of a traveling show.
It really would be dedicated to the arts and to interacting.
There would be on board a crew of artists, musicians, that would allow the thing to become actually kind of a conscious object that would respond to the moment, and to interact as an entity that was aware, that could communicate.
It's completely silent and nonpolluting.
It has electric motors with a novel propulsion system.
It could be interacted with large crowds in different ways.
Primarily I would be interested in how it would interact with, say, going to a college campus, and then being used as a way of talking about the earth sciences, the world, the situation of the globe.
The default image on the object would probably be a high-resolution Earth image.
But then one could interact with that and show plate tectonics or global warming issues, or migrations -- all of the things that we're concerned with today.
And then at night the idea is that it would be used as kind of a rave situation, where the people could cut loose, and the music and the lights, and everything.
So it could land in a park, for example.
Or this could represent a college green.
And then it would have a corresponding website that would show the itinerary of this.
And so interacting with the same kind of imagery.
It would also be able to be an open code, so people could interact with it.
It would be forum for people's ideas about what they would like to see on a giant screen of this type.
So that's pretty much it.
Okay.
Thank you.
(Applause)