Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #16 "let's ditch intensive farming" with Michael Grunwald

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Bad Idea #16 "let's ditch intensive farming" with Michael Grunwald · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
People hate industrial intensive big agriculture, and it's really
0:05
easy to see why, right? One thing that these intensive
0:08
agricultural operations do really well is make a lot of
0:12
food with not so much land. And that is really the most
0:15
important thing that agriculture has to do over the next few
0:19
decades. The challenge of if we're going
0:21
to feed the world without frying the world, it's going to mean,
0:24
you know, providing another 7 quadrillion calories worth of
0:29
worth the food over the next 30 years, which means about 50%
0:33
more food. But we can't use any more land
0:36
to do it. We're going to over consume and
0:38
overeat and you know, eat foods that we shouldn't eat.
0:41
I have very little faith in our ability to like become a much
0:45
more better for the planet species just out of the goodness
0:49
of our hearts. But I have a lot of confidence
0:52
in our ability to do cool technological stuff.
0:55
Every farm is a kind of environmental crime scene,
0:58
right? It's like a kind of echo of the
1:01
nature that it replaced. And that makes it sound like
1:04
farmers are terrible, but they're not.
1:06
They're providing this incredibly valuable service.
1:09
They're providing food that we need.
1:11
So, you know, we really, we, as they often remind us, we owe
1:15
them a debt. They make it possible for for
1:17
the rest of us to, you know, to be doctors and bankers and
1:22
podcasters and authors. The world needs more podcasters
1:26
and fewer farmers, I would say, you know, welcome to saving the
1:31
world from bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
1:34
few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
1:37
time to destroy GMO crops, and I also opposed nuclear power.
1:41
But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
1:43
Oops. I've learned the hard way that
1:45
none of us are right all the time.
1:47
So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
1:49
often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
1:53
it right. Welcome to the Saving the World
1:55
from Bad Ideas podcast with me, Mark Linus.
1:58
I'm here today with Mike Grunwald, who's the best selling
2:01
author of two widely acclaimed books, The Swamp and the New New
2:04
Deal and the new book, which we'll get into in just a second.
2:07
He's also a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time
2:10
and Politico, and the winner of multiple awards, to name just a
2:14
couple of them, George Polk Award for National reporting,
2:16
the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting, and
2:19
many others, and that's in Miami.
2:21
Mike, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me,
2:25
Mike. So the theme of this is always
2:29
saving the world from bad ideas, like I say.
2:30
So the bad idea that you're saving the world from in your
2:33
new book is we suggested that the bad idea could be, yeah, we
2:38
should ditch intensive agriculture.
2:40
Like most people think that intensive agriculture is like,
2:43
is clearly a bad thing. We've got to get rid of it.
2:46
We need to go organic, regenerative, all of that sort
2:48
of stuff. So let's explore that because
2:52
you, you know, you cover all of these topics and really quite,
2:56
you know, exhaustive detail. You've, I think you said at the
2:58
end, you've spoken to 2000 people.
3:00
I mean, that's more than I've ever done when I've written my
3:02
books. So, I mean, I'm full of
3:06
admiration for, for your diligence.
3:08
But the book's called We Are Eating the Earth, and it's
3:11
published when exactly? July 1st.
3:16
July 1st. OK, that's right.
3:17
So pretty pretty soon. And, you know, it seems to me
3:21
that if there's a kind of key theme in it, it's land, isn't
3:25
it? You know, we know we talk a lot
3:26
about carbon, we talk about biodiversity, but somehow land
3:29
hasn't really become the key issue that it should in the sort
3:33
of the, the border environmental discourse, has it?
3:36
I think that's exactly right. I mean, people hate industrial
3:40
intensive big agriculture and it's really easy to see why,
3:46
right? Like they treat animals badly.
3:48
They often treat people badly. They get a lot of subsidies for,
3:54
often for no apparent reason. They make a mess in rivers, they
3:58
pollute the air, they use too many antibiotics.
4:03
They are a potential risk for pandemics.
4:06
Lots of bad things to say about them.
4:08
But one thing that these intensive agricultural
4:11
operations do really well is make a lot of food with not so
4:15
much land. And that is really the most
4:17
important thing that agriculture has to do over the next few
4:20
decades. That's why getting rid of this
4:23
style of agriculture would be such a bad idea as opposed to,
4:27
you know, trying to make that intensive, you know, lots of
4:32
food, not so much land, just hopefully with a little less
4:35
mess. Yeah.
4:36
And you'd start with quite a deep dive into the ethanol
4:39
issue, which, you know, seems to me like, you know, news from 20
4:44
years ago and that. But I think it's still going on,
4:46
isn't it? I mean.
4:48
Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, how much of the how much
4:50
of the US corn crop currently goes into producing ethanol
4:53
biofuels? It's about 40% of US corn.
4:56
And so it's like, you know, it's probably 3540 million acres.
5:00
And again, the reason I start there and my main character, Tim
5:06
Searchinger, started there is that, you know, he essentially
5:10
realized that, gosh, we're using an awful lot of farmland to grow
5:14
fuel. And we are not counting the
5:18
effect on the climate from using that land.
5:22
The opportunity cost of having that land be be forests instead,
5:28
essentially biofuels is a massive driver of deforestation
5:33
and it's using a Texas worth of land.
5:36
But of course, what Tim ultimately realized and what
5:39
essentially my book is about is that, for instance, livestock
5:42
use about 50 Texas's worth of land.
5:45
And so the, the problem is really that agriculture is
5:49
eating the earth. And, you know, to the extent
5:53
that we have more agriculture right now, two of every five
5:56
acres of of land on earth that isn't ice or desert is either
6:02
crops or pastures. It all used to be nature.
6:05
It all used to store a lot of carbon.
6:08
It all used to shelter a lot of wildlife.
6:10
And, you know, really we can't convert a lot more nature into
6:16
into agriculture. So really the challenge of if
6:19
we're going to feed the world without frying the world, it's
6:22
going to mean, you know, providing another 7 quadrillion
6:26
calories worth of worth of food over the next 30 years, which
6:30
means about 50% more food. But we can't use any more land
6:34
to do it. And that's people hate factory
6:37
farms, but when things factories are good at is manufacturing a
6:41
lot of cheap commodities on a mass scale and and we're going
6:45
to need that with food. OK, well we'll get on to factory
6:48
farms good or bad in in due course, but just to go through
6:51
the issues as you go through them in sequence of in the book.
6:56
So you've got the corn ethanol, then you've got biomass, which
6:59
is basically clear cutting forests to burn them in power
7:03
stations. And you know, including here in
7:05
in the UK, there's a huge power station called Drax.
7:08
It sounds like an evil character, doesn't it?
7:10
As you as you say in the book. Bondville.
7:13
Yeah, it sounds like a Bond villain and it's almost is an
7:16
environmental Bond villain. And it's kind of weird that
7:18
these two things, the the the biomass and ethanol sort of
7:23
start, did start off as ideas from the green movement.
7:26
And then they'd be kind of took on this, you know, they became
7:30
industrial lobbies in their own right and then became when it
7:32
turned out that it was actually a bad idea, it became impossible
7:35
to to to reverse. That's exactly right.
7:38
And I think, you know, the source of the bad idea is that
7:41
all these, you know, scientists and, and economists who looked
7:47
at these, you know, they did their life cycle analysis and
7:51
they were very excited because remember, 20 years ago, there
7:54
was really no alternatives to fossil fuels, right?
7:57
There was hardly any wind, really no solar to speak of.
8:01
And people started talking about biofuels for cars and biomass
8:05
for electricity. And it's like, great, because
8:08
you're replacing fossil fuels and and you're not using fossil
8:12
fuels. And they literally counted it as
8:15
carbon neutral. The idea being like, well, yeah,
8:18
you know, we're we're burning corn in a car, but then we're
8:22
growing corn. So we're soaking up corn from
8:26
the soaking up carbon from the atmosphere.
8:28
Same with same with burning trees.
8:30
It's like, yeah, OK, we're burning the tree in the up the
8:33
smokestack, but then we're growing a new tree.
8:35
So that's going to remove the carbon.
8:37
But again, it forgot about the opportunity cost of this land.
8:41
It treated land as if it was free.
8:43
And land is not free. Land is land is precious.
8:46
It's kind of at this point, you know, it's kind of the most
8:49
important environment asset that we have got.
8:52
Ain't making any more of it. Like like Mark Twain said.
8:56
And when it it, it turns out that, you know, if you don't
8:59
count the land costs of using land, things that are really bad
9:03
can look really good. But biofuels and biomass power
9:08
are climate disasters that have been sold as climate solutions.
9:12
I mean, and land isn't just a, an asset that's a factor of
9:15
production. It's, it's also habitat, you
9:18
know, for, for ecosystems, which are that, you know, under such
9:22
stress that, you know, we're potentially in the six mass
9:25
extinction. And so the, the argument you're
9:29
making, I guess, is that when food, you know, a third of the
9:33
US corn crop gets put into cars as ethanol, then that food that
9:36
would have gone to humans has to be produced elsewhere.
9:39
So that's the opportunity cost concept, right?
9:42
That's exactly right. And that's, you know, and look,
9:44
when agriculture is now, it's the leading driver of water
9:49
pollution, water shortages, biodiversity loss,
9:53
deforestation. I mean, it's it's making a big
9:57
mess. And, you know, we need it
9:59
because we need food. It turns out that for biofuels,
10:03
like we have something better. We have electric vehicles for
10:09
biomass electricity, we have solar and wind and nuclear power
10:13
that can, that can do this job without.
10:16
But a turn for food we really need, we need land, we need to,
10:20
we need to grow it. We need agriculture.
10:23
And so really the challenge is going to be how can we, how can
10:26
we grow this food to to feed the world?
10:29
Because, you know, we can't just hand wave away 10 billion hungry
10:32
people, but how can we do it without expanding agriculture's
10:37
footprint to the extent that, you know, with some of these,
10:40
with some of these projections, you'd essentially need another
10:43
planet. So, so you land on this
10:46
character, Tim Searchinger, who I admit, I don't know why, why
10:51
he's kind of an unlikely hero because he's sort of got the,
10:55
the, the sort of all the qualities of an accountant
10:57
really. I mean, it's, it's, it's
10:58
finding, it's like finding and disproving other people's
11:01
figures, which seem to be his, uh, murderous operandi and his,
11:04
his great superpower. You're so unfair.
11:06
I would. I would describe him more as a
11:07
slightly obnoxious accountant. Oh, OK, he's probably.
11:13
Even more effective in that for that reason in that case, but
11:16
what he's so gone. Why?
11:17
Why him? Why?
11:17
Why Tim searching on? It's funny, Tim is a really
11:20
brilliant guy, but a lot of what he has figured out is really
11:23
simple, right? It's essentially like, like,
11:25
hey, you got to count the cost of using land.
11:29
And that turned out to be why, you know, he was, he wrote the
11:32
1st paper in science back when he was just an environmental
11:35
lawyer, basically pointing out like, hey, all the world
11:39
scientists are doing biofuels wrong because they're not
11:42
counting land. And he thought he would just
11:44
write the paper and then people would be like, oh, that was
11:47
silly. We were doing it wrong.
11:49
But it turns out that, as you mentioned, there's, you know,
11:52
not only are these, they're giant agricultural industries
11:56
that depend on biofuels and have a have a lot of political
12:00
influence, but there's this cottage industry of scientists
12:03
and analysts and economists who have made their careers around
12:07
the idea that biofuels are great and part of the future solution
12:11
to climate change. And Tim was essentially coming
12:14
along and saying, like, no, you know, your, your work is
12:17
useless. They didn't like that.
12:20
And they have a lot of power, not just, you know, at land
12:23
grant universities in the United States, but at the IPCC.
12:27
So he's been fighting that fight.
12:29
He's been fighting the biomass fight.
12:31
And ultimately that led him to fighting the agriculture fight
12:35
because it's the same thing where you have a lot of people,
12:39
you know, and a lot of money pouring into solutions that will
12:42
essentially make the the climate problems of agriculture worse.
12:46
Yeah, I want to look at the IPCC issue because, you know, I've
12:50
spent a lot of time like you in the climate culture wars, and
12:54
the IPCC is sort of like the voice of God.
12:57
We we talk about, you know, you've got to listen to the
12:58
scientific consensus. 99% of the world's scientists say
13:01
something, you've got to listen. But that doesn't mean that.
13:04
And if you don't, if you don't, if you don't, you're like a
13:06
climate denier. You're like, you're bad, man.
13:09
Exactly. But that doesn't make the IPCC
13:11
gospel. I mean, they got this badly
13:12
wrong over a longish period of time, didn't they?
13:15
They, they've been really bad on this stuff.
13:17
And, and I actually, you know, you talk about how I tried to do
13:21
some nitty gritty reporting, like I tried to make this a fun
13:24
narrative for people. But I felt like, you know, some
13:27
of this biofuel stuff is so crazy that I'd, and the idea
13:31
that the IPCC has been endorsing this and endorsing some really
13:35
bad ideas on food and land that I did feel a need to try to do a
13:39
little bit of, of reporting, reporting out how, how it
13:42
actually got so bad. And what you really saw was, you
13:46
know, these essentially biofuel shills and biomass shills who
13:51
have made their career around bioenergy and are advising, you
13:55
know, not just the IPCC, but the World Bank, the UN, the FAO, you
14:01
know, the International Energy Administration, you know, every
14:08
big international institution has this, you know, little
14:11
coterie of, of biofuels shills who are essentially made it
14:17
their business to try to knock down competing science.
14:21
And that's what happened initially.
14:25
They just completely controlled the IPCC focus on bio bio energy
14:30
that. Works specifically.
14:31
Sorry to interrupt. I mean, do they write the
14:33
chapters of the IPCC? Are they the ones who are
14:35
actually compiling the the sort of summary of the research?
14:38
Like, how does how does this kind of corruption within the
14:40
IPCC actually take place? Yeah, I think that's, I mean,
14:45
it's sort of that simple. I told sort of two stories.
14:48
One was I guess from 2011, they did a report on renewables and I
14:53
interviewed the guy who who was in charge of that and he had
14:56
seen Tim's, Tim Searchinger's science.
14:59
And he said to the biofuels, the people who are doing the
15:02
bioenergy chapter, hey, you need to look at this, this seems
15:05
really important. And they just blew him off.
15:07
And he said they were incredibly hostile.
15:10
All the people working on the bioenergy chapter were bioenergy
15:13
people. And he kind of forced them to
15:15
put but in a essentially as a caveat saying like, hey, this
15:19
idea that bioenergy is inherently carbon neutral is,
15:23
you know, problematic. But then all of the studies that
15:27
they relied on for their conclusions all concluded that
15:31
bioenergy was carbon neutral. And so you had this sort of bad
15:36
first principles and bad assumptions leading to bad
15:39
conclusions. Then in 2014, they went back and
15:42
looked at it again and they actually had a guy in charge of
15:45
the bioenergy chapter had no skin in the game.
15:49
He was just neuroscientist who, you know, was new to the issue.
15:55
And there were even a couple of people on his team who were bio
15:58
bioenergy critics. They had a much more balanced
16:00
idea, but they just, you know, the, the bioenergy supporters
16:04
were so adamant that, you know, one of them describe it to me as
16:07
like, you know, you weren't allowed to say that their baby
16:10
was a little ugly, that they just were like, no, we will not
16:14
compromise. And it ultimately went to, you
16:17
know, sort of above their head. And the the leaders of the IPCC
16:21
land sector sided with the shells, so much so that the guy
16:25
who was in charge of the bioenergy chapter had to go
16:29
write essentially A competing paper in a sort of obscure
16:34
journal talking about how, you know, basically, bioenergy
16:37
science sucks. Wow, amazing story.
16:40
And the other thing they come up with is this concept of Becks
16:43
which is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.
16:46
Like carbon capture storage itself doesn't really exist.
16:49
And if you plug in bioenergy, which is chopping down well cut
16:51
clear cutting trees, like, I don't know who thought this was
16:54
a good idea, except that it made the models add up because you
16:57
could put a big gap at the in the second-half of the century,
17:00
which was carbon negative. And we're supposedly removing,
17:04
you know, billions of tons of excess carbon from the
17:06
atmosphere using this specs thing.
17:07
But what was your take on that? Yeah, you just nailed it.
17:11
I mean, it's like it was this magic asterisk where they were
17:14
like, oh shit, we're we're heading past, you know, 2°C.
17:19
We're going to need negative emissions.
17:22
Well, hey, well, why don't we just, what if we burn trees,
17:26
then we grow them and we still, we call it carbon neutral, but
17:31
then we capture the, the carbon at the smokestack.
17:35
So then we call it carbon positive.
17:36
This is like, you know, we're saving the earth by burning
17:39
trees and it's, and it works great if you don't count the
17:42
burning trees. And so it's really, it's, it's
17:46
kind of nonsense dressed up. And, you know, since biomass
17:50
power is actually worse for the climate than coal, you know,
17:54
biomass power with carbon capture and storage, you know,
17:58
even if we're going to assume it exists and you know, it can
18:01
work, is worse than doing that for a coal plant and much worse
18:05
than doing it for a gas plant. So yes, I mean, the idea of
18:08
capturing stuff at the at the smokestack does make things, you
18:13
know, does make things better than it would.
18:16
But, you know, like I say, it's sort of like, what if you didn't
18:20
cut down the tree and burn it, right?
18:22
Like what if the tree didn't fall in the forest?
18:25
And that's the kind of opportunity cost that these
18:28
studies never take in mind. It's sort of like, you know,
18:31
assume we're burning a tree. It's like, well, wait, don't,
18:34
maybe don't do that. And and it turns out that not
18:37
doing that is a lot better from the climate, you know, because
18:40
trees are really good. And, you know, if you had to
18:43
summarize my my book for, you know, in the most simplified way
18:48
possible, it's like we should try to keep as much nature and
18:52
we as we can. And agriculture keeps
18:56
overrunning it. Well, well, duh.
18:59
As your hero, Tim. Searching, I might say.
19:02
Yeah, exactly. You know, some of you also says
19:04
like DOI and he says, you know, duh, he has all kinds of.
19:09
Yeah, can't wait to meet him. So.
19:11
Yeah. So.
19:12
So your Marvel superhero, obnoxious accountant Tim
19:17
Searchinger goes and writes this report for the World Resources
19:20
Institute. 500 and six, 546 pages, I think you say, which
19:24
nobody reads. I haven't read it.
19:26
The press don't cover it like it's this huge doorstop, but it
19:32
has that has a pretty clear conclusion, doesn't it?
19:35
And that's that basically one word, meat or actually beef
19:39
probably is the main issue, right?
19:41
In terms of the whole, we are eating the Earth's thesis,
19:45
right? Well, I think he would say that
19:47
they're, you know, look, he has 22 kinds of solutions and.
19:50
2,000,000 millions. I can I can ask you to name all
19:54
22 like. Exactly.
19:56
You know, at this point I could probably do it like I think the
19:59
fact that nobody read these 560 pages, I made-up for it by
20:03
probably reading it 560 times. But but but yes, I mean.
20:10
A huge part of the problem is, you know, people say meat, The
20:14
Lancet report kind of said meat, but there's a that's really, you
20:19
can say it's beef. And in fact, I have, you know,
20:22
since I started working on this book, I don't eat beef for lamb
20:25
anymore. I still eat chicken and pork.
20:27
And look, chicken and pork is not as good for the climate as,
20:31
you know, beans and lentils and it's probably 4 times worse.
20:36
But beef and lamb are probably 10 to 20 times worse than
20:40
chicken and pork. And it's a huge part of the
20:44
problem. I mean, pretty much 2 thirds,
20:48
2/3 of all agricultural land is now pasture land.
20:53
And then if you include also the, the grain that they, they
20:56
used to feed cows, you're probably getting close to 3/4 of
21:00
agricultural land is, is used for beef and dairy.
21:05
And so, yeah, if it were easy to eat less beef, that would be an
21:11
awesome way to fix the problem. And definitely when I talk
21:14
about, you know, the importance of, you know, industrial
21:17
agriculture making a lot of food, I do hear a lot of times
21:20
we're like, why don't we just stop eating beef?
21:23
And I always say like, OK, you know, you got a plan cause
21:29
'cause the world has been eating, you know, we 350 million
21:34
tons of meat every year and, you know, we're actually eating a
21:39
little less beef than we did per capita and we're eating a lot
21:43
more chicken. So it is possible to, to shift.
21:47
But, you know, I think these, these ideas where you can snap
21:51
your fingers and just, it's, it's sort of like, oh, well, we
21:54
don't need to, people don't need to stop smoking.
21:57
They should just get more exercise.
21:59
It's like, OK, you know, it's great, but ultimately we're
22:03
going to have to sort of do all the things.
22:05
Yeah, I mean, for me the big villain is sheep.
22:08
Uh, because I live in the Welsh borders and all of our upland
22:11
areas are devastated. Well, we say sheepwrecked, I
22:14
think, which was a term that was, I think it was coined by
22:18
George Mombio, who is a friend of the friend of the show.
22:21
And like all of the, you can see places in the hills where tiny
22:25
little trees are trying to come through and the sheep just get
22:27
in there and just eliminate everything.
22:30
So all that you've got left is a couple species of grass and some
22:33
bracken. There's no biodiversity, no
22:35
wildlife, nothing. Because of this, because of
22:37
these ruminants which have, you know, very extensive grazing,
22:40
probably quite low stocking rates.
22:41
I mean, you don't get meat out of these ecosystems, but you
22:44
know, this, this is land which would, you know, in, in natural
22:48
circumstance be I think an Atlantic rainforest, you know,
22:51
which is a habitat that's virtually ceased to exist on
22:53
Earth thanks to, I do occasionally lamb because I'm a
22:56
massive hypocrite and I like the taste.
22:58
But I would love to see the, the sheep industry, you know,
23:01
drastically reduced. But, you know, it's sort of
23:04
thing as, yeah, it seems this organic, this, this good thing
23:07
that, you know, has huge cultural power for everyone
23:09
loves farmers and all of that. So yeah, beef, beef.
23:11
It's what's for dinner, right? And, and it's, you know, look,
23:16
you hear all the time like, oh, these, you know, these cows are
23:18
magical creatures. They're turning, you know, grass
23:21
we can't eat into, into food. We can.
23:24
But like you, you, what you said is exactly right. 40% of all
23:29
grazing land on Earth used to be forest, you know, and then the
23:34
rest of it, it's not like it had no, you know, carbon benefits
23:37
too. And you're seeing, seeing a lot
23:39
of cattle in the, in the Brazilian Cerrado, which was,
23:43
you know, an incredibly biodiverse Savannah is really
23:46
kind of like the Brazilian Serengeti.
23:49
So it's, you know, the, it's impossible to overstate the
23:53
importance of, of beef to these climate problems.
23:56
But one thing I, I, I often say it's like, yes, so we as
23:59
particularly in the rich world, we need to eat less beef because
24:03
you know, there's still 6 billion to 6.5 billion people on
24:07
earth who eat no beef, right? And they're going to start
24:11
eating more as they, you know, get richer, you know, God
24:14
willing, you know, we, we want that.
24:16
So it does mean that people in, in the first world are going to
24:20
have to eat less. But what it also means, you
24:23
know, right, like Willie Sutton, he robbed banks because that's
24:26
where the money was. If you care about reducing
24:30
emissions, you have to make better beef because that's where
24:33
the emissions are. And that means, as you said, it
24:37
means making more beef with less land.
24:40
That means higher stocking rates.
24:42
And, and it turns out, you know, I did a lot of reporting.
24:45
I went to Brazil and it's, it's there's so much degraded ranch
24:51
land where there were, you know, they call it the Columbus
24:53
method, where they just send out the cows in the in the fall and
24:57
go discover them in the spring. And it's incredibly inefficient.
25:02
You said the cows look incredibly skinny.
25:04
You know, they look like they're hunger strikers.
25:07
It's, you know, and most of these ranches they're owned by
25:11
like, you know, some guy who has a business in Sao Paulo and it's
25:14
like a tax break. There is a lot, you know, you
25:17
can, it would not be difficult to triple the productivity of
25:22
ranching and beef production in Brazil.
25:25
And you know, that means it would use 1/3 as much land.
25:28
You know you could save a few Texas's right there.
25:32
It's, I mean, the whole livestock thing is just amazing.
25:34
A lot of Brazil's soy exports come to come to Europe to feed,
25:40
to feed animals, you know, pigs, cattle, sheep, whatever.
25:43
And actually go back to George Rumbio had this lovely quote
25:46
which always stuck with me, stuck with me.
25:49
He said if you, if you want to reduce soy, eat more soy because
25:54
you know, by substituting it for beef and you know, it's so
25:57
inefficient feeding soy cattle and then then eating the cattle.
26:01
So it's this, that's the metric that you keep coming back to,
26:04
right? Is this?
26:05
Efficiency and soy gets a bad rap to be honest.
26:07
It's like, yes, soy gets that is you know, is responsible for
26:10
deforestation. So if you knew you can have
26:13
either your big soy moratorium and boycott soy so great.
26:17
They're gonna they'll use less efficient crops and that will
26:20
require more land to provide the same amount of feed.
26:24
Yes, it would be better if we ate soy in the form of tofu and,
26:28
you know, and edamame. All right.
26:31
But, you know, right now we don't, you know, we're feeding a
26:35
awful lot of it to to chickens. And you know, until we stop
26:43
eating chickens or come up with alternative pro, you know, the
26:47
fake meat that replace chickens. And you know, I'm all for that.
26:51
If we can make it taste good and make it cheap, which we are, you
26:55
know, making progress towards but have not yet achieved, we're
27:00
going to have to, you know, we're going to have to produce
27:03
food efficiently. And efficiency has become this
27:06
kind of dirty word, right? You know, like it's like these
27:09
rapacious evil corporations that are kind of like squeezing
27:12
dollars out of the dirt. But you know, efficiency.
27:17
It means, you know, you get, we should start thinking of
27:20
efficiency as forest protection, as wetlands protection.
27:25
You know, it's, it's not enough to have higher yield farming
27:29
that won't by itself protect the Amazon, the Congo rainforest.
27:34
But I can tell you that if we don't have high yield farming,
27:39
those rainforests are screwed. And yet there seems to have
27:44
been, you know, a resurgence of interest in low yield farming.
27:50
And I mean, regenerative agriculture in particular is
27:52
like the latest buzzword. There's all these fads that come
27:54
and go on there. I think you call Regen AG a
27:59
faith-based transformation of food, food production.
28:01
There was this film Kissed the Ground all about soil carbon.
28:05
And I have kind of a reverse Godwin's law about anything RFK
28:10
Junior says, like if he's for it, I'm against it.
28:13
And of course he's for this as well.
28:15
So like give us this, give us a story on on regenerative AG and
28:19
and and carbon farming. Yeah.
28:21
I mean, it is like, you know, it's at this point beyond fad.
28:24
I mean, it's like, you know, the UN is for it, the World Bank is
28:28
for it, you know, the, you know, Agri businesses, right, like
28:35
Danone and our children, you know, JBS, you know, you're
28:39
hearing General Mills, you know, this is the, it's, it's
28:47
definitely all the rage is that we're going to reduce our, you
28:51
know, our impact on the planet and the climate by shifting from
28:58
these industrial practices to regenerate practices that treat
29:03
the soil better. And I should say in many ways
29:06
they do treat the soil better. But then the idea is that it's
29:09
going to store tons of carbon in the soil.
29:13
I mean, kiss of the ground, it was going to store all the
29:15
carbon that are fossil fuels have popped into the atmosphere
29:19
is going to be essentially repatriated underground.
29:23
Our soil is going to save us. And that's just total bullshit.
29:28
There is the Yeah, exactly. The science is unbelievably
29:33
thin. You know, even if you could
29:36
measure this stuff, even if you could make sure that people who
29:41
put the their carbon allegedly underground, then don't till the
29:45
soil and pop it all right back up into the atmosphere.
29:49
There's the science shows that essentially to add more carbon
29:53
to the soil, you're going to have to add more nitrogen to
29:56
your soil. And nitrogen is a huge carbon
29:58
problem. That means more fertilizer and
30:00
more manure. Most of the when you see
30:03
somebody claiming they've they've increased their soil
30:06
carbon dramatically, mostly what that means is they've moved cows
30:10
onto their onto their field and which is fine, but it means
30:15
those cows are not on some other field and so somebody else is
30:18
losing that carbon. And so it's essentially a shell
30:20
game. The, you know, there's just the
30:24
the Rockefeller Foundation, which, remember, they financed
30:28
Norman Borlaug's original work on the Green Revolution that
30:32
provided these incredible yield advances that have tripled
30:37
yields since the 1960s and have made it possible for us to still
30:42
have standing forests on this planet.
30:45
Well, I'm I'm basically about as well, right?
30:47
So. Yeah, exactly.
30:49
That's how we fed the world, right?
30:50
When everybody said that there was just going to be, you know,
30:54
you know, endless famine and there were bets made.
30:56
And, you know, the Malthusians were wrong, the Green Revolution
31:00
was right. And we've, you know, we've got
31:05
high yield seeds and better genetics and fertilizer and
31:10
irrigation and all these, these wonderful advances that have
31:14
made farming more productive. And now the Rockefeller
31:17
Foundation, which is behind all that is part of this, you know,
31:21
coalition of philanthropies that want the world to spend $4
31:24
trillion on a global transition from industrial to regenerative
31:30
agriculture. And and no one done the maths.
31:33
No one done the maths on the land use implications of this.
31:38
It's incredible. And you know, you have these,
31:41
you know, in the United States, there's this guy Will Harris,
31:44
who has a regenerative farm in, in a really, I guess farming and
31:50
ranching operation in Georgia. And he's got this he's he's got
31:55
somebody to do a General Mills actually got somebody to do a
32:00
life cycle analysis that found that it was carbon neutral.
32:03
And then when you look at the assumptions even this completely
32:07
in the tank study admits that it's going to use two to three
32:11
times as much land to promote produce the same amount of food.
32:15
So like, if you tripled the amount of pasture land in the
32:19
United States, you'd need a new United States.
32:23
It's just these incredibly bizarre assumptions that where
32:27
you just hand wave away the idea that you're going to need all
32:30
this land that is essentially going to come out of nature.
32:35
I write in the book about the Washington Post did this
32:39
incredible feature about the the sort of the grain of the future.
32:42
The headline was this grain. New grain may be a recipe for
32:47
solving hunger and climate change.
32:49
This is the perennial. It's a perennial grain.
32:51
It's the perennial grain called Kearnsa, done by, like, very
32:54
nice and by the way, very honest people at the Land Institute in
32:57
Kansas. And they are right up front.
33:00
And they say like, this isn't ready for prime time because as
33:03
you find out in the 38th paragraph of the Washington Post
33:07
article, it takes three times as much land to make the same
33:11
amount of grain as a wheat field.
33:14
And, you know, that is totally unacceptable.
33:17
That doesn't work. But there's this idea that, you
33:20
know, oh, except for, you know, that one thing.
33:23
It's a very much a like, you know, other than that, Missus
33:26
Lincoln, how is the play? Other than yields, Low yield
33:30
agriculture is great, but yields are the most important thing we
33:33
need from agriculture. I'm just trying to figure this
33:36
out. You said is it 2/3 of the
33:37
world's habitable land which is used for agriculture already?
33:41
It's 2/5. 2/5 OK, so 2 of. Every 5 acres it's about half of
33:46
the yeah, 2/5 of the ice free desert Freeland is is
33:50
agriculture and, and, and, but it's on it's on path to in the
33:55
next 30 years, even if if we continue to increase yields at
34:00
the same rate we've increased them since the green Revolution
34:04
began. So that's it's very steady
34:06
yield, yield growth, faster yield growth than we're getting
34:08
now. We're still on track to deforest
34:11
another dozen Californias by 2050.
34:14
My point is let's, let's do what the regen AG and the organic
34:17
people want and reduce yields by, you know, down down to 30%
34:22
of what they what they are. You have to multiply by three
34:25
your land. There's already 2/5.
34:27
Like how much of the world is left for nature in that
34:29
scenario? None.
34:31
Then we need, we need a second planet.
34:33
It's you know, then it's time to start terraforming Mars or
34:36
whatever. And and it turns out Earth is
34:39
like way better at this. Like Earth is excellent.
34:43
Earth has pizza and reliable Wi-Fi and breathable air.
34:48
Like you know the idea. All the things we.
34:50
Need. It's really good stuff.
34:53
Like it is like it is very well suited for agriculture.
34:57
It is as climate change gets worse, it is going to get
35:01
slightly less well suited for agriculture.
35:03
That's going to be a drag on yields.
35:06
But so it's really important. You know, I, I just did this
35:10
event at Berkeley where, you know, there were like 200
35:14
hippies and foodies in the room. Alice Waters was sitting in the
35:17
2nd row glaring at me the whole time.
35:19
Who's she? Oh, she's the the chef of the
35:24
sort of the most famous started the slow food movement.
35:27
Chez Panisse is the you know, where she, you know, beautiful,
35:32
you know, slow cooked, slow grown, regenerative organic food
35:36
that you can, you know, get for, you know, just $1000 a meal.
35:41
She's like very tight with Al Gore.
35:45
But the last question was the New York Times reporter was was
35:52
she asked me. She's like, well, you know,
35:54
Mike, you've been giving us these facts and figures.
35:56
You've been giving us this data and science.
35:59
But isn't this really a moral issue?
36:01
Isn't the question of industrial agriculture?
36:04
You know, it's it's so much bigger than these numbers.
36:07
And I was like, yeah, it's a moral issue.
36:10
Like people are going to freaking starve and climate
36:14
change sucks. And if we deforest the Amazon,
36:18
like the people who are going to feel that are going to be
36:20
indigenous people in the Amazon and people live in the
36:23
floodplain in Bangladesh, it's not going to be rich white
36:25
people in Berkeley, right? Well, you know what?
36:28
She's, you know. What she's really saying, she's
36:29
really saying my stop with these pesky numbers and all of this
36:33
dumb this science stuff. Just go back to your feelings,
36:36
you know? No exactly and.
36:37
This. I get this again and again where
36:39
it's like, and then and then it's partly the the anyway
36:43
errors, right? Like, OK, the what about ISM?
36:45
It's like, OK, fine, you know you these numbers are terrible,
36:48
but we can just stop eating beef or we can just waste less food
36:52
or we can stop using biofuels. But even if the rich world ate
36:57
50% less beef and the entire world wasted 50% less food and
37:03
we just stopped using biofuels entirely, we're still going to
37:07
need way more food with less land.
37:10
So the, you know, the, the math is really ugly.
37:13
You know, I, I, I wish you were better.
37:15
You know, it's, you know, I tried to make this a non Debbie
37:18
Downer book. You know, a lot of it is about
37:21
potential solutions and way we can, ways we can whack away at
37:24
this kind of eating the earth problem.
37:26
But it's a big freaking problem and, and the, and it's very
37:31
tempting and you know, I see why it's alluring to say like, oh,
37:34
well, you know, if we just do this nice regenerative AG, which
37:38
of course, like we're going to give farmers a lot of money to
37:41
do and giving farmers money, money is always good politics
37:47
nationally and internationally. It's, you know, it would be
37:51
really nice if that would solve all our problems, but
37:55
unfortunately it's going to be a lot harder than that.
37:57
And we're going to need, you know, some agriculture that we
38:02
that we don't necessarily love, right?
38:04
I think, you know, one of one of my, you know, what I keep
38:07
banging my spoon in my high chair about is that the
38:10
beautiful Alice Waters, Michael Pollan farms that they
38:14
romanticize, right? Where, you know, the soil is
38:18
treated with love and the animals have names instead of
38:22
numbers. And, you know, you can there's a
38:25
diverse group of crops. It's not just these horrible
38:28
monocultures that you're bombing with chemicals all the time.
38:32
Like those were an environmental catastrophe 60 years ago, right?
38:36
Because they replaced nature. And it's true, like turning
38:39
those, you know, twee organic farms, you know, the throwback
38:43
farms into more intensive industrial farms.
38:47
There is an environmental cost to that, but it's not nearly as
38:51
big as the environmental cost of turning nature into agriculture
38:55
in the 1st place. And, and when we lower yields,
39:00
that means less nature and more agriculture.
39:02
That's, you know, that's my message, right?
39:05
So. I mean, you this, this is the
39:07
kind of land sparing, land sharing perennial debate, right?
39:11
I mean, my, my take on this is very much a land sparing one
39:14
because I'm, I'm a fan of rewilding and I'm a fan of
39:17
natural ecosystems. And even the most nature
39:20
friendly farm with with it's lower yield is like, I don't
39:23
know, 10 well, probably 1% of the biodiversity of an actual
39:26
natural ecosystem that would be on that same patch of land,
39:29
right? That's exactly right.
39:31
And you know, and you hear and it is true.
39:33
You know, I went to Tom Steyer's farm and his ranch in
39:36
California. Who's he?
39:38
Tom Steyer is the American. Billionaire big environmental
39:42
climate activist ran for president as a Democrat in 2020
39:46
on a climate platform. And he has this regenerative
39:49
ranch in California that he wants to be a sort of lab for
39:53
the world. And it does have like, better
39:57
biodiversity than it did when it was a conventional ranch.
40:01
And it has like, you know, more different types of grasses, but
40:05
it's still a freaking ranch, you know, And it had more
40:10
biodiversity when it was just. Nature and and that is really
40:15
the, you know, the land. One line I use that farmers
40:19
hate, I use this in my New York Times essay, was that every
40:24
farm, you know, even the ones with the red barns and the, you
40:28
know, and the farmers with the overalls and pitchforks who are
40:31
like, you know, feeding their pigs by hand, Every farm is a
40:36
kind of environmental crime scene, right?
40:39
It's like a kind of echo of the nature that it replaced.
40:44
And that makes it sound like farmers are terrible, but
40:47
they're not. They're providing this
40:48
incredibly valuable service. They're providing food that we
40:51
need. And you know, we really, we, as
40:55
they often remind us, we owe them a debt.
40:58
Not quiet, are they? They They tell us.
41:00
A lot and and they make it they. Make it possible for for the
41:03
rest of us to, you know, to be doctors and bankers and
41:08
podcasters and authors, right? You know, we, the world needs
41:13
more. The world needs more.
41:14
Podcasters and fewer farmers, I would say, you know, well, it's
41:17
true. It's a.
41:17
Sign of a it's a sign of a wealthy society, right, when
41:21
more of us can write and and talk and, and less of us have to
41:25
farm. But the fact is like, you know,
41:28
we need what they're doing, but we can't ignore that.
41:31
It makes a mess. And so, you know, they like to
41:35
think of themselves as stewards of their land.
41:37
And some of them are and some more than others.
41:40
But collectively, they are stewarding a mess.
41:43
And so, you know, it's it's not as maybe not my message is not
41:48
as inspiring as the people who say, like, our soil can save us.
41:52
You know, we can transform agriculture from a climate
41:55
problem to a climate solution. You know, I'm just saying like,
41:59
you know, make more food, but try to make less of a mess.
42:02
Let's make a deal. And that's maybe not as
42:05
exciting, but I think that's much more realistic.
42:09
And to me it's more moral because it's, you know, it's a
42:13
way of actually preventing climate change, right?
42:16
You know, people talk like energy is still 2/3 of the
42:19
climate problem, but food is 1/3 and it gets 2% of climate
42:23
finance and maybe, you know, 1% of climate discussion.
42:28
We got to start thinking about this shit and and you know, that
42:33
means taking it seriously, not just these like, you know, kind
42:36
of airy fairy ideas of how it's going to save the world.
42:39
Well, and there is a country that.
42:40
Tried to implement these airy fairy ideas in in in quite a
42:44
sort of Trumpist radical way, which is Sri Lanka, which
42:47
literally from one year to the next went went organic, right?
42:51
I mean, I think they banned. Oh, yeah, that works great.
42:54
Yeah. How did that go?
42:55
Yeah. It was amazing.
42:57
It was terrific. Like they, they went from like,
43:00
you know, self-sufficient agricultural economy that made
43:03
all of its own rice to a freaking basket case.
43:07
You know, they banned agrochemicals And, you know, six
43:11
months later, yields had crashed and the the president had to
43:16
flee. You know, it turns out that
43:19
people like food. They don't want to, you know,
43:23
pay way more for it. And, and the way to do that is
43:27
to, you know, make a lot of it. It was a complete disaster.
43:32
All the agronomists said what would happen?
43:34
You know, they, they, you know, their tea industry went organic
43:38
and that was their source of foreign currency.
43:40
That was their main export market.
43:42
And that disappeared overnight. And their rice, which was what
43:46
they, you know what, you know, Sri Lankans eat their, those
43:50
yields crashed almost in half. And basically they were like,
43:54
OK, nevermind. But and, and obviously, you
43:59
know, we talked about this at Berkeley and of course the, you
44:02
know, the agroecological people say like, Oh no, it was, you
44:06
know, it was just implemented wrong.
44:07
It's kind of like communism, right?
44:09
It's like it didn't fail. It was just never tried, but in
44:13
a way North Korea and the Soviet Union and.
44:15
All the other places it was tried, yeah.
44:17
It's like people, people want. And look, I'm not like synthetic
44:22
fertilizers have some real problems right there.
44:24
The we have a goal. We have a dead zone the size of
44:28
Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico.
44:30
And it's all because of, you know, synthetic fertilizers
44:33
coming down the Mississippi River from, you know, the
44:36
Midwest, you know, the Great Lakes, the algae blooms, those
44:40
are from fertilizers. Pesticides, you know, create
44:43
real problems. You know, they're they're
44:45
they're often toxic. They're in the soil, they're in
44:48
the air. But The thing is, fertilizers
44:50
help stuff grow. And pesticides are really good
44:53
at killing pests. And that's really important.
44:57
You know, there's this idea that like, you know, their chemicals
45:01
are evil. And I get it.
45:02
They have some negative, negative, you know, impacts on
45:07
the environment and, and sometimes on human health.
45:09
And that's why I'm really excited about, I wrote in the
45:12
book about a, a biological fertilizer where they're
45:16
genetically editing microbes. It's just the RNA one.
45:20
No, this one, this is pivot. Bio, which genetically edits
45:24
microbes to essentially fix nitrogen from the air, which
45:29
they used to do naturally, but they've gotten lazy since we've
45:32
pumped so much, so much fertilizer into the soil.
45:36
So they're like, oh, we don't need to do it.
45:37
And they turn it off. They've edited their microbes.
45:40
So like basically, so they don't sense all the nitrogen around
45:43
them and they start feeding nitrogen to crops again.
45:46
And that would be a very exciting way to reduce our, our,
45:50
our fertilizer. You, you just mentioned a
45:52
company I wrote about called Green Light Biosciences, which
45:57
is used the mRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines
46:01
essentially to send messages to potato beetles, which are these
46:06
horrible pests. Somebody described them as kind
46:09
of a cross between like an M1 tank and Cookie Monster.
46:13
They just kill everything and they just keep coming back.
46:17
They're indestructible, but it sends them a message to stop
46:20
pooping, so it constipates them to death.
46:24
And it's instead of like, I feel sorry for the Colorado beetle,
46:27
for the. First time ever, but yeah, well
46:29
I guess it's better than being Nuke.
46:30
Nuke with. Hideous pesticides, right?
46:32
Exactly. And it doesn't kill.
46:33
All the ladybugs and the, you know, the good, the good
46:37
microbes in the soil. So it's really, it's more like
46:40
sending in the assassin to kill the bad guy rather than nuking
46:44
the entire city. And so I'm very excited about
46:47
all these alternatives to, you know, some of the, you know, the
46:50
20th century was really about chemistry and it was amazing.
46:55
And, you know, particularly the fertilizer is probably the most
46:58
important invention of the 20th century.
47:02
You know, it's the reason why 4 billion of us on Earth are
47:04
alive. And you know, all good.
47:09
Green Revolution. You know, bravo, but it did make
47:13
a lot of mess. And so I think in the 21st
47:16
century, there's going to be a lot of these biological
47:18
solutions that will hopefully make much less of a mess.
47:21
And, you know, instead of, I think a lot of people turn up
47:25
their nose and say like, oh, you know, we can't rely on
47:28
technology. We need to, you know, that's
47:32
just going to help us be the same old kind of shitty human
47:35
beings that we always have been. And we're going to over consume
47:38
and overeat and, you know, eat foods that we shouldn't eat.
47:43
I have very little faith in our ability to like become a much
47:47
more, you know, better for the planet species just out of the
47:52
goodness of our hearts. But I have a lot of confidence
47:56
in our ability to do cool technological stuff.
47:59
You've written about GM OS. You've written, you know, really
48:03
smart, wonderful stuff about, you know, about the promise of,
48:08
you know, engineering our crops to be better crops.
48:12
And in some ways, I think, you know, I've, we both know that
48:15
the, the health, you know, the health scares around GM OS or,
48:19
you know, that's nonsense in some ways, though in fairness,
48:23
like GM OS haven't always lived up to their, to their hype in
48:27
terms of, in terms of yield growth, But I have a lot of
48:31
faith that they can and that these newer genetic technologies
48:35
will do even better. And I think like we should be,
48:39
you know, we should be excited that they're like really smart
48:42
scientists who are trying to reinvent photosynthesis.
48:46
Was going to say so while while you're on the.
48:48
GMO so that what what are some of the GMO type stuff that
48:51
really just really cutting edge at the moment that that gives
48:53
you some hope? Well, that is like it's
48:56
photosynthesis. Is a great example where, you
48:58
know, this is like gate foundation funded project, you
49:02
know, photosynthesis does a really nice job supporting all
49:06
life on Earth. It's been doing a really nice
49:08
job for, you know, a couple billion years.
49:11
But it turns out it's it's actually quite inefficient.
49:15
It's really good at perpetuating itself and perpetuating life.
49:19
But in terms of making crops grow, you know, there's some
49:22
examples that like these are in the weeds, but I think kind of
49:27
fun. It turns out that photosynthesis
49:29
like when a cloud passes overhead and the sun goes away,
49:33
but then then the cloud goes away and the sun comes back.
49:37
Photosynthesis is really bad at starting up again.
49:39
It's very slow. And then the the other classic
49:43
example of photosynthesis is that, you know, it takes, it
49:46
takes carbon out of the air and turns it into, you know, into
49:49
energy and fuel for the plant. But about one of every four or
49:54
five times, instead of grabbing a carbon molecule, it
49:57
accidentally grabs an oxygen molecule.
50:02
It just kind of screws up and that's inefficient.
50:05
So they're trying to train it to, they have not yet figured
50:08
out how to how to fix that mistake, but they made that
50:12
Rubisco. Rubisco ends on.
50:13
That's Rubisco, right? But they've made it better.
50:16
They've made it better. They've engine re engineered
50:19
through gene editing. They've they've figured out ways
50:21
to to make, you know, plants better at recovering from that
50:25
mistake. And again, like these are,
50:27
they're just all kinds of, you know, drought tolerant, flood
50:30
tolerant, heat tolerant stuff that will that will be really
50:34
important as climate change, you know, makes growing conditions a
50:38
lot more complicated. Pest tolerant to disease or pest
50:41
resistant, disease resistant, gluten free.
50:45
You know, they're like, you name it, they're going to be coming
50:48
up with a lot of weight. You know, they're, they can,
50:51
they can edit animals so, so that they, you know, I, I
50:55
watched the first ever genetically edited cow embryos
51:01
inserted and they were, they were edited so that they would
51:05
only have male offspring because this Allison.
51:09
Allison, I can never say her name.
51:11
And even though she's a friend of mine, we're even in a film
51:13
together. Oh, yeah, yeah.
51:16
But she she does some amazing. I mean, she's very pro meat,
51:19
right? She's not exactly a vegan, but I
51:22
mean, that's that's a business. But she's like, let's make it
51:24
better. Let's.
51:25
Make it more efficiently and, and yeah, so you're they just
51:29
the, the US just FDA just approved a genetically edited
51:35
pig that's, that's going to be resistant to a, you know, a
51:39
really bad swine disease. So I think there's a a lot of
51:43
exciting technologies. You know, what I always say is
51:47
like, we, we're sitting there, we have these devices in our
51:51
pockets that like, you know, you can video chat with anyone
51:55
anywhere around the world and you can look up any fact that
51:58
humans have discovered within 3 seconds.
52:01
And also you can use it as a flashlight.
52:04
I mean, like the idea that like, oh, well, we can't do that seems
52:08
kind of crazy. You know, like really smart
52:11
people are really smart. And so I think like this problem
52:16
of like, oh, how can we make more food per acre?
52:19
That seems like a solvable problem.
52:21
I mean, there are biological limits, but we did it in the
52:23
past with the green revolution. We tripled how much food we can
52:26
make per acre. And I think we're going to
52:29
probably have to double it again, but there seems like
52:33
there's a lot of exciting ways to do it.
52:34
And then on the on the demand side, you know, I'm excited
52:38
about the idea of, you know, growing it, you know, cultivated
52:42
meat grown from animal cells without killing animals and
52:45
without animal agriculture, you know, or maybe, yeah, I was
52:49
going to, I was going to ask you.
52:51
A bit more about the old, old proteins thing because like, I'm
52:53
a, I'm a wannabe vegan. I think veganism is a great idea
52:56
for everyone, like except me, largely because yeah, kind of I
53:01
agree other people should do it. Yeah, they really should.
53:04
I want everyone to. Listen to this podcast to be
53:06
vegan so I can have No, you really should.
53:08
It's. It's upsetting I can eat your.
53:10
Steak in that case, but like you know, given that we need this,
53:13
we sort of a lot of us are just kind of addicted to this protein
53:16
here that you can from meat. What's the what, what, what's
53:20
the latest in the whole alt proteins revolution?
53:22
Is it really going to be able to come up with plant based
53:25
alternatives or cultured cultured meat from cellular
53:30
feedstocks or is is that really going to be able to make a dent
53:33
in the livestock agriculture problem?
53:35
Well, it certainly hasn't yet. And look, I mean, you know,
53:39
we've been eating our species or like varieties of our species
53:43
have been eating meat for 2,000,000 years.
53:46
You know, it actually we sort of evolved the way we did once we
53:50
start eat, started eating meat. The sort of successful hominids
53:54
were meat eaters and they got smaller stomachs because they
53:57
didn't have to digest as much, you know, plants.
54:00
And they got bigger brains essentially because they had to,
54:03
you know, they evolved to go find meat, you know, which was a
54:06
little harder than finding plants.
54:09
And, and so I think, you know, certainly I started this
54:14
reporting at the Good Food Institute conference in 2019.
54:19
And the Good Food Institute is sort of the, you know, there's a
54:21
kind of trade group for alternative proteins of all
54:25
kinds. You know, they're sort of
54:26
leading the, the charge. And at that time, Beyond Meat
54:29
had just gone public. It's still the biggest popping
54:32
IPO in the United States in the 21st century.
54:35
It was trading, it was like it's market cap was half as half of
54:39
Tyson's. I mean, it was like I, I, I
54:42
thought I was going to accidentally, we raise the
54:44
Series A round on the drinks line.
54:47
It was insane. It was just like, in five years
54:51
we're going to get rid of meat, you know, maybe 10, you know,
54:54
this is, and it turns out like people really like meat.
54:59
It's going to be really hard. A lot of these products, they
55:02
were not as good and more expensive than meat.
55:08
They've taken a lot. You know, they were sort of I've
55:10
not found, I've not found a single.
55:12
I mean I think the impossible burger is pretty good, but I've
55:16
not found a single plant based burger or plant based meat
55:19
substitute which is anything like meat or anything.
55:21
I will say this the. The chicken Nuggets, right,
55:25
They've they've cracked the code on chicken Nuggets now, like
55:28
chicken Nuggets, chicken Nuggets are barely meat anyway and
55:31
they're just like a vehicle for sauce, but plant based.
55:34
Like if you eat chicken Nuggets, you really shouldn't you should
55:37
really get the plant based kind. They're they're just as good.
55:40
Otherwise, I totally agree with you.
55:43
You know, impossible is good beyond even though I really like
55:47
the CEO is not good, I think, and they're both more expensive.
55:54
And but what I also point out is like this industry, like the
55:58
idea of trying to make fake meat for meat eaters is an industry
56:03
that's about 15 years old. And you know, we spend about 100
56:11
times in the more globally every year or every quarter on solar,
56:18
solar energy then we have spent in the history of you know,
56:23
plant based and cultivated meat research.
56:26
So I think, you know, these are very early days and I think this
56:30
stuff will get better cultivated meat, you know, I've tried, you
56:35
know, cultivated sushi, cultivated locks, cultivated
56:40
burgers, cultivated pork meatballs, cultivated chicken
56:43
fillets. And these cultivated is actually
56:46
from. Animal cells, right?
56:48
Just to be from animal cells like grown in.
56:50
Essentially in like a in a brewery, you know, they call it
56:54
lab grown meat, but yeah, it won't be in a lab for long.
56:58
And that is like, yeah, yeah. And that.
57:01
You know, even mixed with. Plants.
57:02
It tastes like meat, or at least it like it's somehow sends that
57:08
that meat, you know, hello, it's meat to your, you know, to your
57:12
brain because it is. I mean, it's not.
57:16
It's not. Yeah, it's not.
57:17
It's not ready. It's not, it's not there yet.
57:20
And you know, we're going to start seeing like you can buy it
57:23
in Singapore now. It's just it's just coming on
57:27
the like a few some restaurants in Australia, the first US
57:31
company that's going to be doing a blended pork like cultivated
57:35
pork fat and a blended plant based meatball that's going to
57:39
that should be available I think this year.
57:42
I bet they'll ban it in. I bet they'll.
57:44
Ban it in Europe because any kind of food related innovation
57:47
is bad for you. Bad bad in Europe.
57:48
They banned it in Italy and they banned.
57:50
It in Florida where I live because, you know, the cattlemen
57:54
went to Ron De Santis and said like, you know, we don't like
57:57
this and you know, these are Biden burgers and so and so it's
58:02
you know, the the the politics are going to be difficult the
58:06
you know, getting people to eat it.
58:08
You know it's going to be a novel food.
58:10
People don't like technology in their food that will take time
58:14
and the costs, which five years ago or three years ago, people
58:20
were saying it like there was a New York Times op-ed, the
58:24
calling cultivated meat, the revolution that died on, died on
58:28
its way to dinner, saying this will never happen.
58:32
But actually these companies are making really good progress.
58:35
And I think it will happen. It just won't happen soon.
58:38
And the at the kind of scale that's going to be necessary to
58:41
make a dent in 350 million tons of meat a year.
58:46
I mean, I agree I. Think alternative proteins has
58:48
to has to work and and the the innovations barely even started
58:53
in that whole sector. So it will work, but at the
58:55
moment you've got a substandard product which costs more in on
58:58
the supermarket shelf, which is a tough sell to meat eaters who
59:01
are, you know, but we'll make it up in volume, right?
59:03
It's like. I don't know, but you know,
59:06
before we end up. I want.
59:07
So what's the advice you give to meat eaters in that case?
59:10
Like should they, you know, should they buy the cheap
59:13
factory farm stuff which is produced more efficiently, or
59:16
should they buy the organic free range regenerative?
59:18
Like what's your you've got to decide.
59:20
You've got a talent which is, Well, from a climate
59:22
perspective, Yeah, buy. The buy the cheaper stuff, Yeah,
59:26
buy the buy the industrial stuff.
59:28
I mean, in most places you don't really have a choice.
59:31
I mean, like 99% of US meat is, is factory farmed.
59:37
But but I think the main thing I would tell meat eaters is, is,
59:42
you know, be like me, just eat. I eat no beef.
59:46
I would say eat less beef and eat more chicken.
59:50
And yeah, try to eat more plants too.
59:53
But I am a big believer in better is better than worse.
59:57
And I think the kind of climate movement has.
1:00:00
Done itself a disservice by, you know, talking about all these
1:00:03
deadlines, right? Like we need to, you know,
1:00:06
reduce emissions 43% by 2030 or else it's game over for the
1:00:12
climate, right? And then in the fact is there is
1:00:15
no game over for the climate, right?
1:00:17
There's better and worse. And, you know, I mean, 43% would
1:00:22
be great, 44% would be better. You know, 42% would be not as
1:00:27
good, but we should, but way better than 41%.
1:00:30
And I think that's sort of how we need to think of these things
1:00:32
like, you know, just incremental progress, you know, better
1:00:37
policy, you know, better corporate behavior and yeah,
1:00:40
better individual behavior too. But it's sort of moving the
1:00:44
needle with, with technology, with government action and with
1:00:50
like, you know, some common sense where I feel like, you
1:00:54
know, we have to make sure that these, you know, these really
1:00:57
dumb ideas that have incredible, you know, they sound compelling
1:01:02
and, and they have incredible juice right now.
1:01:06
Where like, you've got the Dalai Lama and King Charles and, you
1:01:10
know, the UN and the World Bank and, you know, PepsiCo and, you
1:01:17
know, and Bobby Kennedy and Al Gore all singing kumbaya about
1:01:23
this stuff about like, you know, low yield, more natural, kinder
1:01:27
and gentler agriculture than, you know, they don't say very
1:01:31
loudly makes less food per acre. You know, I think we got to
1:01:36
fight those ideas because, you know, that would make things
1:01:41
worse, and worse is worse than better.
1:01:44
Well, you're on the right podcast for this.
1:01:45
Because this podcast is about is about saving the world from bad
1:01:49
ideas. And you've mentioned more than
1:01:51
just one. So there was, there was
1:01:53
biofuels, there was the biomass thing, there's regenerative
1:01:58
agriculture. I mean, you've got at least
1:02:00
three significantly impactful bad ideas already.
1:02:04
So yeah, yeah, it's, yeah. If you're allowed to have more
1:02:08
than one, I think you've probably, you've probably nailed
1:02:10
it on this one. Well, yeah, I mean.
1:02:13
Tearing, tearing down forests for no reason is really a bad
1:02:18
idea, a really bad idea. And, and, and I'm really
1:02:23
appreciative that you're, you're out there fighting bad ideas
1:02:26
because there are so many, so many.
1:02:28
I mean, we've got, we've got 1000.
1:02:30
Podcasts, almost, almost programming because there's so
1:02:33
many bad ideas out there. Look, we'll, we'll, we'll wind
1:02:36
up. But you have a nice.
1:02:38
Little section in your book which has to recap, and I'm
1:02:40
going to read this out because it's a it's a really useful
1:02:42
summary. It's to recap biofuels and
1:02:44
biomass power. Supposedly climate saviours are
1:02:47
climate disasters. Carbon farming and vertical
1:02:50
farming are wildly overhyped. Plant based meat has floundered
1:02:54
in the market, while cultivated meat hasn't even made it to
1:02:56
market. Genetically modified and edited
1:02:58
crops and livestock still face all kinds of political and
1:03:01
cultural obstacles and a slew of other promising solutions.
1:03:05
Methane suppressing feed additives, nitrogen controlling
1:03:07
biofertilizers, High tech fish farms, high yield pongamia.
1:03:12
Is that right Are struggling to scale.
1:03:14
Yeah. So, you know, there's just so
1:03:16
much information packed into this book and I would really
1:03:20
recommend everyone who's interested in the subject to to
1:03:22
go and read it. It's called we are eating the
1:03:24
Earth and it's out of July. So Mike, thanks so much for for
1:03:28
joining us. I've I've learned a huge amount
1:03:30
and I you know, I'd love love to have you back have you back
1:03:33
soon. And in the meantime, keep
1:03:35
enjoying the well. So non organic beef?
1:03:39
No, no, no. What's that again?
1:03:40
You eat chicken, right? I eat chicken and pork, Yeah.
1:03:44
You've enjoyed lentils. I really, I really appreciate
1:03:47
it, Mark. You've done, you've done God's
1:03:48
work on this stuff and, and it's been, it's been a pleasure
1:03:51
talking to you. Thanks so much, Mike.
1:03:56
Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World.
1:03:58
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1:04:01
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