Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #40 "the food system is fundamentally broken" with Jan Dutkiewicz

Transcript

Bad Idea #40 "the food system is fundamentally broken" with Jan Dutkiewicz · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

• 0:00
  The livestock industry does not believe in the free operation of
• 0:03
  the market and they never have right?
• 0:06
  The livestock industry in every country relies on government
• 0:09
  largess in many ways, be it subsidies, be it regulatory
• 0:13
  carve outs in the case of agricultural exceptionalism or
• 0:16
  now with this quite aggressive moves against both plant based
• 0:19
  and cellular agriculture on a regulatory pre empting of
• 0:22
  competition. Actually banning running
• 0:24
  cultivated meat in several states in the US before it's
• 0:27
  even been before it's even been developed.
• 0:30
  Welcome to saving the world from bad ideas.
• 0:32
  I'm Mark Linus and I've had a few bad ideas in my time.
• 0:36
  I used to go out in the night time to destroy GMO crops, and I
• 0:39
  also opposed nuclear power. But then when I looked at the
• 0:41
  science, I found I got it wrong. Oops.
• 0:44
  I've learned the hard way that none of us are right all the
• 0:46
  time. So now I'm here to challenge the
• 0:48
  assumptions that we all too often take for granted because
• 0:51
  the future depends on us getting it right.
• 0:54
  Hello, My guest today is Jan Dukovitz, who's assistant
• 0:57
  professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and a contributing
• 1:02
  editor at the New Republic. He's also co-author, with
• 1:06
  Gabriel Rosenberg, of a new book called Feed the People, Why
• 1:10
  Industrial Food is Good and How to Make It Even Better.
• 1:14
  Yeah. And welcome.
• 1:15
  Yeah, thanks for having me. Now your book suggests an
• 1:19
  immediate bad idea because on this show, we're all about
• 1:22
  saving the world from bad ideas. And so I just want to suggest
• 1:25
  and see whether you think this is a good bad idea.
• 1:28
  Industrial food is bad. Is that is that the bad idea
• 1:30
  that we can use to to headline this this episode?
• 1:33
  Industrial food is bad? Absolutely.
• 1:36
  OK, tell me why. Well, first we have to define
• 1:39
  what industrial food means. And I think that there's a
• 1:41
  common misconception where industrial is used as a synonym
• 1:45
  for bad or for ultra processed. And what Gabriel and I, my
• 1:51
  co-author and I do in the book is we take a step back and we
• 1:53
  say what exactly do we mean by industrial food?
• 1:55
  And by industrial food, we mean food that is produced using
• 1:58
  industrial principles of scale, standards and regulation in
• 2:05
  order to create abundance relatively cheaply, which is
• 2:11
  accessible to a large number of people.
• 2:13
  And we think that that describes many aspects of our current food
• 2:17
  system. And absolutely that does
• 2:18
  describe the sugary cereal on the shelves, but it also
• 2:21
  describes how we produce most fruit, most vegetables, most
• 2:26
  staples like grains. And we argue that on balance,
• 2:31
  that has made the world a better place, a healthier place, a more
• 2:35
  abundant place, a place where there's more varied access to a
• 2:38
  wide range of delicious foods. Yeah, because you so often hear
• 2:41
  that our food system is broken, right?
• 2:44
  I mean, obviously that's not your take and we'll dig into
• 2:48
  into why not a bit more deeply. But the, you know, the food
• 2:51
  system, I guess if you take a proper historical viewpoint of
• 2:54
  this, delivers incredible abundance at a scale and with
• 2:58
  the reliability never seen before in, in the whole of human
• 3:02
  history. You know, we do you think we're
• 3:04
  just getting a bit spoiled because, you know, we all eat
• 3:06
  like medieval kings now. And as a result, we're getting
• 3:09
  so fat that we have to take shots to decrease our appetite.
• 3:12
  And, you know, we've just forgotten what it's like to have
• 3:15
  food scarcity, at least on the kind of the general societal
• 3:19
  scale. I think that's exactly it.
• 3:21
  Most people living in, especially most people who are
• 3:24
  relatively affluent living in, broadly speaking, the global
• 3:26
  North, have no memory of food availability being the problem.
• 3:30
  That is to say, they're not being enough food to feed
• 3:33
  everyone. There are some access issues,
• 3:35
  but still, food insecurity, while unacceptably high, is
• 3:39
  still a minority, a vast minority of the population in
• 3:42
  the United States. The number is about 14% of
• 3:44
  Americans are food insecure. And in the book, we get into
• 3:47
  addressing food insecurity. But for the rest of us, we do,
• 3:51
  we, each of us can eat like, as you said, like a medieval king.
• 3:55
  And we've lost sight of that. And from that vantage point,
• 4:00
  it's easy to critique things like diseases of affluence,
• 4:04
  which are caused by eating too much of the wrong things
• 4:07
  whenever we want. It's relatively easy and I, and
• 4:11
  I think fair to critique some of the political economy of the
• 4:14
  food system. But I think critiquing the basis
• 4:18
  of the food system and what it has, what it has done, what it
• 4:21
  has allowed us to do as a society, which is for most
• 4:24
  people to not sort of work in drudgery in agriculture and live
• 4:31
  long and healthy lives, eating varied and very affordable
• 4:35
  diets, falls out. And I think from there we get
• 4:38
  these claims that whenever you identify as a problem with the
• 4:40
  food system, there's this leap to suggesting the food system
• 4:43
  itself is broken. And I'm happy to talk about why
• 4:47
  that doesn't even work as a descriptor of the idea, which is
• 4:50
  that the food system is a system, which is to say it's a
• 4:54
  complex array of relatively simple inputs or actors, right?
• 5:00
  So seeds, fields, farmers, commodity brokers,
• 5:05
  transportation companies, restaurants and so on that
• 5:10
  synergistically work together to achieve an outcome.
• 5:12
  So saying that that's broken is is the wrong term to describe
• 5:17
  what's wrong. It's like saying the example we
• 5:19
  use in the book. It's like saying that if you're
• 5:21
  at your house on a sweltering summer day and the air
• 5:24
  conditioner goes on the Fritz, it's like saying your house is
• 5:27
  broken. Well, your house isn't broken.
• 5:30
  You need to identify the specific problem that needs to
• 5:33
  be fixed, which is your air conditioner doesn't work.
• 5:35
  And if you fix your air conditioner, then your house is
• 5:36
  comfortable again. And so we think that approaching
• 5:39
  food system problems should be done like that, which is
• 5:43
  identifying specific problems and then seeking out specific
• 5:46
  solutions to those problems where those problems exist,
• 5:48
  rather than just throwing our hands up.
• 5:50
  Yeah, I want you mentioned about the food system being a complex
• 5:54
  system. And I wonder if the level of
• 5:56
  complexity is part of the reason for this critique is in that you
• 6:00
  can't almost by definition understand how a complex system
• 6:03
  works, right? I mean the it's almost an
• 6:06
  emergent property from all of this complexity that most people
• 6:08
  that most of the time get fed to quite a high level.
• 6:12
  But to most people, like, I guess the fact that it is so
• 6:16
  complex means that you can't directly affect it and you feel
• 6:20
  alienated perhaps and, and it, and it feels like the system is
• 6:23
  very vulnerable, whereas actually the complexity can, can
• 6:27
  also be a source of, of great resilience.
• 6:29
  So I mean, there's a whole study of complexity theory, which I
• 6:32
  know very little about, but I'm aware, I mean, the Earth system
• 6:35
  is also a complex system which you can't actually understand.
• 6:39
  You can sort of model it and you can understand the some of the
• 6:41
  dynamics that emerge from it, but you can't really produce and
• 6:44
  and change the system in in the same way you would say the
• 6:47
  Earth's system is broken like people say the food system is
• 6:49
  broken. Yeah.
• 6:50
  What do you think about that? Well, I mean, I think the Earth
• 6:52
  system is vastly more complex than a food system that we
• 6:55
  could, you know, that we could actually map out.
• 6:59
  But the food system is a highly complex system.
• 7:01
  And I think for that reason, few people understand every, in fact
• 7:06
  few people involved in the food system itself understand every
• 7:11
  complexity of every aspect of the system as it comes together.
• 7:14
  And I think that in the face of this, in the face of it being
• 7:18
  just so large, I think the average person both knows very
• 7:23
  little about how food works, how food gets on their plates, about
• 7:28
  food policy or about non food policies that actually affect
• 7:32
  the food system, affect the food they can eat.
• 7:34
  And then therefore, I think because food is so personal,
• 7:38
  it's so viscerally felt and so many people so personally and
• 7:41
  culturally important, it's easy to fall for simplifications,
• 7:46
  right? So it's easy to fall for
• 7:47
  scaremongering, be it about individual foods from sort of
• 7:51
  the diet gurus, or to fall for this claim that the food system
• 7:55
  is broken and needs to be sort of razed to the ground and
• 7:58
  rebuilt from scratch, which is what's offered by it a lot of
• 8:01
  food writers and a lot of people who influence public opinion on
• 8:03
  food. Yeah, let's talk about them a
• 8:05
  bit. I mean, it's not actually the
• 8:06
  food industry that you rail about quite so much as the food
• 8:09
  writing industry, as you call it.
• 8:11
  And these are all these people who are seeking to convince us
• 8:14
  that there's something terribly wrong and making a lot of money
• 8:17
  selling books, opening high end restaurants and, you know, going
• 8:21
  back to the land and becoming Wellness influencers and gurus
• 8:23
  and all the rest of it. I don't know if I'm doing them a
• 8:25
  disservice, but I mean, this is a, this is an enormous industry
• 8:29
  of quite successful people who who's staked a lot in telling us
• 8:32
  that the food system is, you know, quote, UN quote, broken.
• 8:35
  Yeah, exactly. So, well, I would not say that
• 8:38
  we let the food industry off the hook.
• 8:40
  I think we're I think in the book, I'd like to talk about
• 8:42
  this more later. We're quite critical of the food
• 8:44
  industry. What?
• 8:45
  But but what we want to do, the first thing we want to do in the
• 8:47
  book is disabuse readers of this idea that the food system is
• 8:50
  broken and to sort of bust a few of these myths that have been
• 8:53
  propagated by these super influential writers.
• 8:57
  So obviously I'm sitting in the United States.
• 8:59
  So people like perhaps most notably Michael Pollan and and
• 9:04
  of course the much broader as opposed Galaxy of the diet
• 9:10
  influencers and the food influencers who now it bears
• 9:14
  noting. I mean, we're not talking about
• 9:15
  a bunch of cranks, right? We're talking about best selling
• 9:17
  authors and we're talking about people who now influence food
• 9:20
  policy at the highest levels in the United States, right?
• 9:24
  So we're talking. About people, I mean, I've said
• 9:27
  they're virtually hegemonic and I'm certainly.
• 9:30
  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, especially, especially
• 9:33
  in the cultural realm in terms of in terms of food discourse, I
• 9:36
  would say they're hegemonic and increasingly they're influencing
• 9:39
  policy. So, and I, and I think these
• 9:42
  people need to be critiqued for the basic reason that they often
• 9:47
  misrepresent research or don't rely on research at all about
• 9:51
  the food system. And this is whether we're
• 9:53
  talking about questions of nutrition.
• 9:56
  So what constitutes a healthy diet versus not a healthy diet
• 9:58
  in terms of the environmental impact of foods, perhaps most
• 10:02
  notably, and downplaying the environmental impact of
• 10:05
  livestock, but not exclusively. And also in sowing up, I mean,
• 10:10
  disinformation, sometimes this information, but often simply
• 10:12
  misinformation to the public about what's wrong with the food
• 10:15
  system, about what the public should eat, about what they
• 10:18
  should worry about, and about who's at fault, right, Sort of
• 10:20
  who the bad guys are in the story of food.
• 10:24
  So what we want to do is we want to change the narrative.
• 10:26
  We want to actually like many of these people who say that there
• 10:28
  are problems of the food system don't even define what a food
• 10:31
  system is, much less identify problems.
• 10:34
  And even if they identify problems in a way that's more or
• 10:38
  less convincing, they turn to solutions that are unviable, be
• 10:43
  it economically or literally, physically, or that can't scale.
• 10:47
  So to give you a concrete example, Michael Pollan, who
• 10:49
  wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma. Omnivore's Dilemma is a I'm sure
• 10:53
  your readers have heard of it. It's a just a runaway bestseller
• 10:58
  from 2006 that really put the question of thinking about the
• 11:03
  food system into the modern American zeitgeist.
• 11:08
  You know, and pollen points to the usual problems, right?
• 11:10
  Americans are obese, their environmental externalities,
• 11:13
  food production, food corporation have quite a bit of
• 11:15
  power. But then when he turns to
• 11:17
  solutions, he points to, you know, his sort of avatar of who
• 11:21
  constitutes a good farmer and what good farmers should look
• 11:24
  like as a small scale livestock farmer who is deeply opposed to
• 11:29
  scaling production, who is deeply opposed to the regulatory
• 11:32
  state, who's de facto libertarian right, and who
• 11:36
  produces hyperlocal food that's primarily based around a
• 11:39
  livestock system. And we just know from, you know,
• 11:43
  basic economics suggests that food that's so small, that's not
• 11:48
  produced at scale will be very expensive.
• 11:51
  It's simply not viable. In the United States, a country
• 11:54
  where about less than 1% of people actually work on farms.
• 11:57
  Most people work in cities. You need systems that can scale.
• 12:01
  Opposition to the regulatory state is obviously an awful
• 12:05
  idea. In large, complex economies.
• 12:07
  The role of the regulatory state is both the put guardrails on
• 12:11
  the function of capital and also to protect the public interest,
• 12:14
  be it around environmental externalities, be it around food
• 12:17
  health. In fact, I would argue that we
• 12:18
  need far more regulation of agriculture rather than far
• 12:22
  less. And then moreover, this leaves a
• 12:25
  lot of basic questions unanswered, like questions of
• 12:26
  Labor, this idea that, oh, all food will be produced by family
• 12:30
  farms. Well, we know that's not the
• 12:31
  case. Who will work on these farms?
• 12:33
  None of, but none of these questions are answered, right?
• 12:35
  These actual ants, these actual important questions that need
• 12:39
  answering, are replaced just by this persona of the righteous
• 12:43
  farmer, which of course, in the American National conscience
• 12:47
  goes back to the sort of Jeffersonian frontiersman,
• 12:51
  yeomer Yeoman farmer, sort of like a salt of the earth true
• 12:54
  American who's beyond being questioned all of.
• 12:56
  It all of it works in every country.
• 12:58
  I mean, the French ideal have their ideal peasant and sort of
• 13:01
  the Italians and so on, you know.
• 13:04
  Yeah. So it's it's a sort of myth
• 13:05
  making, right. And it's a myth making that's
• 13:07
  divorced from any consideration of real pragmatics of improving
• 13:11
  the diet of the average person and it's divorced from sort of
• 13:18
  non productive considerations of the food system, right.
• 13:20
  So how would you how would you link, for instance, this small
• 13:23
  farm to things like food aid programs like the SNAP program
• 13:27
  or food stamps in the United States?
• 13:28
  How would you link it to school lunches and so on and so forth.
• 13:31
  All of this falls out behind this romanticization of a non
• 13:36
  scalable small farming system. Yeah, and the patron St. of all
• 13:41
  these foodies and agrarian nostalgics, of course, is, is
• 13:44
  Wendell Berry, who sort of sparked a movement that's both
• 13:49
  kind of proudly Luddite and also very ahistorical.
• 13:53
  And perhaps because he was a poet, he could be a lot more
• 13:56
  eloquent and convincing in his narrative storytelling than all
• 13:59
  of us data-driven types. He's kind of like, in my mind,
• 14:02
  he's kind of like an anti Norman Borlaug in that he, you know,
• 14:05
  hates the Green revolution, looks back to a world of
• 14:08
  structural famine. And well, it obviously wouldn't
• 14:11
  say this, but this was a world where there was structural
• 14:13
  famine, high infant mortality and all these diseases of
• 14:16
  malnutrition. Like Goiter and Ricketts, as you
• 14:18
  write in your book and and and you know, Wendell Berry's
• 14:20
  saying, you know, that was better because at least it
• 14:23
  wasn't industrial. Yeah, absolutely.
• 14:25
  Well, so Wendell Berry is the godfather of this idea, and he's
• 14:28
  in fact, I think the godfather of this very idea that
• 14:30
  industrialism is somehow impure, right?
• 14:34
  Yeah, it's moral. There's a moral, there's an AB
• 14:37
  Sanctity isn't there with. Absolutely, absolutely.
• 14:39
  There's there's a very, there's very, very specific morality at
• 14:42
  play in people like Wendell Berry who see anything
• 14:46
  industrial. And as we note in the book, this
• 14:48
  applies to for Bury as much to agriculture as it does to sex,
• 14:51
  right? But anything modern is somehow
• 14:54
  sullied and impure. And so we need to return to this
• 14:58
  pre modernity while ignoring all of, as you said, that pre
• 15:01
  modernity is harms. So Barry is looking at a world
• 15:04
  where pre modern food science. So if we're talking about the
• 15:09
  turn of the 20th century, the United States is a place that is
• 15:12
  deeply unhealthy. Life expectancy is 47.
• 15:17
  And of course, that's brought down by Hyde.
• 15:19
  Hyde and mortality. It's not just a question, you
• 15:22
  know, Scurvy goiters, Ricketts, Merasmus, pellagra.
• 15:27
  Pellagra alone kills hundreds of thousands of people you know.
• 15:30
  No one will even, no one will even know what these diseases
• 15:32
  are so. Exactly because because they've
• 15:34
  been, because they've been forgotten, right?
• 15:36
  Because they've been, they've been banished to the dustbin of
• 15:38
  the past by an industrial, abandoned, excuse me, an
• 15:44
  industrial abundant food system. But so so he's looking back to
• 15:46
  that world. He's looking back to a world of
• 15:50
  these small family farms, many of which relied on child labor,
• 15:57
  were not necessarily environmentally sustainable.
• 15:59
  I would like to remind your listeners, especially those in
• 16:02
  the United States, that the Dust Bowl, which is perhaps the
• 16:05
  greatest ecological disaster in American history, was caused in
• 16:08
  large part by poor Land Management by small scale family
• 16:12
  farmers. It happened before American
• 16:16
  agriculture was truly industrialized.
• 16:18
  And Barry looks back to that world, and again, he's sort of
• 16:22
  blinded by this image of the Yeoman frontiersman farmer,
• 16:27
  which was so central that that image is so central to the
• 16:30
  American psyche that you can sort of push everything else
• 16:34
  aside. You push aside all the other
• 16:35
  downsides, and you focus on this sort of avatar of frontiersman
• 16:40
  American masculinity, if you will, and you fixate on that.
• 16:44
  And it's just a very poor basis for thinking about the better
• 16:48
  food system. And there's a reason, right?
• 16:50
  There's a reason that this food revolution promised by Barry and
• 16:54
  by his acolytes, by the sort of Alice Waters of the world that
• 16:57
  Michael Pollan's The World has never happened because of what
• 17:00
  it's done is it's influenced how relatively affluent people think
• 17:05
  about food. And it may have influenced how
• 17:07
  relatively affluent people shop. So a certain tranche of people
• 17:11
  who, you know, go to the farmers market and get food from their
• 17:14
  local CSA and go to these farm to table restaurants.
• 17:17
  But it hasn't structurally changed the food system.
• 17:20
  And the question is why? And of course one question is a
• 17:23
  sort of institutional inertia and the interests of large scale
• 17:27
  food business. But the other reason it hasn't
• 17:29
  changed the food system is because it can't, because we
• 17:32
  can't have a food system that works at scale and provides
• 17:36
  affordable food that's based on those principles.
• 17:39
  I mean, it's hardly surprising given that what Wendell Berry's
• 17:43
  essentially saying is, is the kind of food Luddism.
• 17:46
  And I think he was a proud Luddite when it came to other
• 17:49
  forms of technology as well. I was just skimming through some
• 17:51
  of his quotes before we talked and there's a post from many
• 17:56
  years ago called Why I'm Not going to Buy a Computer and I
• 17:59
  wondered, well, how did this post end up online then?
• 18:03
  How does his not buying computer end up by posting stuff on the
• 18:06
  web? Anyway, he writes as a writer.
• 18:08
  I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.
• 18:12
  My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter and this,
• 18:16
  this is the process. So he he avoids the
• 18:18
  technological trap by having a new piece of technology called
• 18:20
  wife. And actually there's a lot of
• 18:23
  gender politics that come into into this agrarian fantasy,
• 18:27
  isn't there? Because, you know, if you if
• 18:29
  you're going to cook food from scratch or insist, that has to
• 18:32
  be the way that households are run.
• 18:33
  It's not that you're not a long way away from the kind of trad
• 18:36
  wives movement, are you? No, not at all.
• 18:38
  And and yet again, let's go to the data and not to, you know,
• 18:43
  not to moralize. And the simple fact of the
• 18:45
  matter is that statistically, most household work, and
• 18:47
  especially food preparation work, historically and
• 18:50
  contemporarily, is unpaid labor done by women in the household.
• 18:54
  So every call to produce everything from scratch or to
• 18:58
  type up your notes because you couldn't be bothered to write
• 19:00
  the on a typewriter yourself is implicitly a call for more
• 19:07
  unpaid labor by by women in the household.
• 19:09
  And similarly, the notion of the small family farm is an idea
• 19:14
  predicated on domestic labor often done by offspring.
• 19:18
  As we write about in the book when the earliest anti child
• 19:22
  labor crusaders in the United States really tried to pin down
• 19:26
  where most child labor was being done.
• 19:28
  Sure, some of it was being done in industry in a sort of like
• 19:31
  Dickensian British industrial revolution sense, but the vast
• 19:35
  majority of child labor was being done on family farms by
• 19:39
  the children of farmers. And so there's this, there's
• 19:42
  this whole notion of this farm is this sort of like stand alone
• 19:48
  economic unit that should be the basis of the sort of better and
• 19:53
  potentially healthier quote UN quote, healthier agrarian
• 19:55
  political economy, which is entirely predicated on unpaid
• 19:58
  family labor. Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:00
  And. You know, Barry's alternative to
• 20:03
  industrial eating is, you know, that you have to essentially you
• 20:06
  have to grow your own. So you need land.
• 20:09
  Fortunately, he, he inherits a farm, but most of us aren't in
• 20:12
  that position. You need a lot of time.
• 20:15
  So you need presumably to have enough income from elsewhere
• 20:18
  that you, you don't need to have an actual real job.
• 20:21
  You need labour, of course, and you need a lot of education
• 20:24
  because you need to learn all about why the food system's
• 20:26
  broken and all of that sort of stuff.
• 20:28
  And, you know, it just shows really how elitist the whole
• 20:31
  sort of program really is because, as you say, you've got
• 20:34
  to start by taking your kids out of school so they can actually
• 20:37
  work on a farm at harvest time or on planting time or whatever
• 20:40
  during, you know, which is exactly what happened during the
• 20:42
  good old days. That very romanticizes.
• 20:45
  And you also say in the book that the one place where child
• 20:47
  labor laws are currently exempted is in the farming
• 20:50
  system still. Yes.
• 20:51
  So this is a much bigger question that applies.
• 20:54
  I mean it applies globally, but it's it's very marked in the
• 20:57
  United States. So there's a broad concept
• 20:59
  called agricultural exceptionalism, which is a term
• 21:02
  used by people who study agricultural policy to refer to
• 21:05
  the broad range of carve outs and exemptions in laws and
• 21:10
  regulations for agriculture as compared to other industries.
• 21:14
  Which is to say that agriculture is treated as an industry apart
• 21:19
  with far more LAX regulation when it comes to virtually
• 21:21
  everything from zoning production facilities to the
• 21:28
  environmental harms of those facilities to questions of
• 21:32
  Labor. So just to give you an example,
• 21:33
  if you were to want to build, you know, something that
• 21:37
  produces a factory, that produces widgets that had, you
• 21:42
  know, certain uses of water and certain eutrophication effects
• 21:46
  on water, you would need to either filter or clean that
• 21:51
  water to some to some degree, right?
• 21:54
  And you certainly would need basic things like plumbing for
• 21:57
  the toilets for your employees. If you want to build a factory
• 21:59
  farm which has 10s of thousands of pigs individually confined in
• 22:04
  gestation crates, you can just literally dig a hole in the
• 22:07
  ground, line it and Chuck all the manure and all the other
• 22:14
  emissions from the factory farm into that pit.
• 22:17
  These things are called manure lagoons.
• 22:19
  So just so that's just one example of how something like
• 22:23
  factory farming exists by dint of an of an exception.
• 22:27
  And the same goes for all kinds of processes within that, right.
• 22:29
  So every things like artificial insemination of animals at a
• 22:32
  large scale in the United States, in over 30 states,
• 22:36
  artificial insemination needs specifically got legal carve
• 22:39
  outs from animal abuse legislation because it would
• 22:42
  count as animal abuse if you did it to your dog or cat in your
• 22:47
  household and the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 22:50
  So there are there are basically carve outs for artificial
• 22:55
  insemination because if if it was done to a household pet in a
• 22:58
  number of states in the US will be treated as bestiality, it
• 23:00
  will be treated as sexual abuse of animals.
• 23:02
  Wow. And of course, if you use a
• 23:03
  cattle problem, your dog because it's, you know.
• 23:06
  Yeah, because it's because it's because it's not moving to go
• 23:08
  for its walk or not moving to get inside from its dog.
• 23:10
  Yeah, that would also be. Jail, Yeah.
• 23:12
  That would also be animal abuse and and so this sort of filters
• 23:18
  all the way down right and it filters through to labor.
• 23:20
  So agriculture is left to agricultural minimum employment
• 23:25
  ages are often left to the states, which means that states
• 23:28
  where agriculture is an important part of the economy,
• 23:31
  or at least where agricultural interests have a lot of sway
• 23:34
  with policy makers, minimum aid, both absolute minimum ages tend
• 23:39
  to be lower. So, you know, there are states
• 23:41
  where children as young as 10 can be employed in seasonal
• 23:44
  harvest labor doing things like picking berries, but also the
• 23:47
  age for using a heavy and potentially hazardous machinery
• 23:51
  or working with hazardous machinery.
• 23:53
  So be it cleaning sharp blades at a meat, processing plants or
• 23:58
  driving a tractor or what have you is also lowered.
• 24:02
  And it's also no surprise that as we write in the book,
• 24:06
  agriculture far and away has the most injuries, but I mean both
• 24:10
  in general, but to underage laborers and has the most
• 24:14
  underage laborer deaths. And you have kids and flowery
• 24:17
  lagoons and awful things like that.
• 24:18
  Don't. You.
• 24:18
  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you have you have kids
• 24:21
  who work with diggers, who are crushed under diggers.
• 24:24
  There are multiple cases of kids drowning exactly in these manure
• 24:28
  lagoons that I just described. You've got multiple cases of
• 24:32
  children working long hours in the heat and dying of of heat
• 24:35
  stroke or exposure out in the fields.
• 24:38
  And so, yeah, And it's sort of this, it's an endemic problem
• 24:42
  that no one wants to talk about. So again, as we document in the
• 24:45
  book, there have been for decades, there have been
• 24:48
  opponents of child labor in Congress who have tried to pass
• 24:52
  bills to close his basic loophole.
• 24:55
  Right. They're not trying to say, you
• 24:57
  know, let's make agricultural work completely safe because
• 25:01
  it's impossible. Agricultural labor is very
• 25:03
  difficult, but let's at least normalize the minimum labor age.
• 25:07
  And these bills lose. They just cannot pass.
• 25:10
  It doesn't matter if the Democrats are in power or if the
• 25:13
  Republicans are in power. And they can't pass for two
• 25:15
  reasons #1 the pressure of agricultural lobby groups,
• 25:19
  including farmer groups, which is something I'd like to, if we
• 25:23
  have time, come back to right? This idea that we think of Agri
• 25:26
  business as bad, but farmers as noble and pure.
• 25:29
  Not, not the case. In fact, most farmers are.
• 25:33
  What would we should think about as Agri business, but I digress.
• 25:36
  So farmer groups, industry groups have put so much pressure
• 25:40
  on lawmakers that this thing had that these sort of bills trying
• 25:43
  to increase the minimum age in agriculture have, have all been
• 25:47
  dead or arrival. And in fact, and, and I think
• 25:50
  and, and one thing I'll say is that this is the moment we're
• 25:52
  all, all of these sort of people who claim to care about the food
• 25:56
  movement. So all these sort of food
• 25:59
  writers and all these politicians who adhere to the
• 26:03
  sort of vision of making farmer, making farming better,
• 26:06
  healthier, etcetera, etcetera. Where were they?
• 26:09
  Where were these champions of agricultural justice when there
• 26:12
  was a call for common sense regulation which would take more
• 26:16
  kids out of dangerous agricultural labor and they were
• 26:19
  nowhere to be found? Well, maybe Wendell Berry's
• 26:22
  perspective, and I'm only being a bit facetious here.
• 26:24
  Maybe he maybe he thinks it's fine.
• 26:26
  Well, yeah, maybe they he thinks that the kids are at least, you
• 26:30
  know, connected to the land in some spiritual sense and, and
• 26:33
  now know where the food's coming from.
• 26:34
  Yeah, or they think of it as education, which is exactly how
• 26:37
  opponents to these talk to these laws have framed this right?
• 26:41
  Because the people trying to pass these laws have
• 26:43
  specifically said that this applies to large scale food
• 26:47
  production that is dangerous and that relies on wage child labor.
• 26:51
  So carve outs for children working on farms owned by their
• 26:55
  parents and carve outs for 4H clubs, which are these sort of
• 26:58
  American agricultural education clubs if your readers haven't,
• 27:01
  or CV if your listeners haven't heard of them.
• 27:03
  So there were clear carve outs, clear exemptions, and
• 27:07
  nonetheless all critics, so starting from Fox News to even
• 27:10
  Democratic state senators, all said that these anti child labor
• 27:15
  crusaders were trying to kill job opportunities and sort of
• 27:19
  job training and cultural training opportunities for the
• 27:22
  for the children of for the children of small farmers and
• 27:25
  for 4H clubs, which are specifically the things that
• 27:27
  were exempted. The idea was to not have kids,
• 27:31
  you know, cleaning slaughterhouses at night,
• 27:33
  working around the newer lagoons, picking apples and
• 27:36
  berries in the hot sun for multiple hours.
• 27:38
  But the two were conflated. And that's how these bills,
• 27:41
  that's how these bills died. Well, and that's the the danger
• 27:44
  of a growing romanticism in the real world, isn't it?
• 27:46
  It does, it just does so much damage.
• 27:48
  And I wonder, and I promise we'll move on in a bit, but I
• 27:50
  just want to dig into this because I do find it so
• 27:51
  fascinating. What why is it that these
• 27:54
  fantasies of a sort of pre industrial Garden of Eden are so
• 27:57
  hard to to shake off? And, and I think it's it's sort
• 28:01
  of a horseshoe theory of politics here.
• 28:02
  It affects the left and the right in in almost the same way
• 28:06
  with this kind of nostalgic impulses, I think because, you
• 28:09
  know, MAGA, of course, make American great, make America
• 28:12
  great again is this idea that it was great in the past and we
• 28:14
  need to go back to the past. And the same for Maha, you know,
• 28:17
  Robert F Kennedy's Junior's anti vaccine crusade, which is now
• 28:21
  running the US Department of Health all about making America
• 28:24
  healthy again. These were the times when you
• 28:25
  had all these diseases, malnutrition and the life
• 28:28
  expectancy expectancy was in the mid 40s.
• 28:30
  You know, that was of course a great time when everyone H
• 28:33
  organic and there was no such thing as autism.
• 28:35
  So you know what, where does this come from this this kind of
• 28:39
  this crazy shit? And why is it so universal?
• 28:44
  I mean, I, I think we've, I think we've touched on it.
• 28:46
  I think there's a real appeal for people who live in the
• 28:52
  modern West to feel a sort of enemy about their the state of
• 28:58
  the world that to try to and to try to seek something like like
• 29:02
  a moral clarity about different about different issues and to
• 29:06
  find it in the past, right. Like where, where do you look to
• 29:09
  for, for a better world? Where you look, you look to
• 29:12
  simplicity and where do you find simplicity and you find
• 29:16
  simplicity in the past. So I think it's, it's very easy
• 29:19
  to find, to find sort of like moral sucker in, in the purity
• 29:25
  of an imagined past, especially when you are so removed from
• 29:28
  that past that you can romanticize it, right?
• 29:31
  That you're sort of you're looking at a, you know, you're
• 29:33
  looking at like a like an American Gothic painting because
• 29:36
  you've never lived on a small Iowa farm in the 1930s.
• 29:40
  And I think, and I think that's the appeal, right?
• 29:41
  And I also think that many of the trappings of these fantasies
• 29:46
  are actually paradoxically made available by the modern systems
• 29:51
  that these people rail against, right.
• 29:53
  And So what I mean by this is, for instance, proponents of
• 29:55
  carnivore diets like RFK, you know, they say, well, people
• 30:00
  should just eat less junk and they should eat more meat.
• 30:03
  Well, the level of meat that they're suggesting people eat is
• 30:07
  only possible in a world of factory farms and animals on
• 30:12
  factory farms eating mass scale monocrop grains.
• 30:16
  Americans already eat 220 lbs, perhaps more of meat each every
• 30:21
  year. The new the new nutritional
• 30:23
  guidelines call for an increase in protein consumption,
• 30:26
  especially from animal based sources.
• 30:28
  So this idea that we know we should eat like our ancestors,
• 30:31
  but our ancestors and actually Gabriel Rosenberg and I have
• 30:33
  written about this for Fox, our ancestors, what our ancestors
• 30:37
  ate is a is a big question about our ancestors who dwell on farms
• 30:40
  a few generations ago certainly did not eat that much meat.
• 30:44
  In fact, they ate very, very diets because they didn't have
• 30:46
  access to mass produced animals. So animals were eaten seasonally
• 30:51
  or sparingly amidst other foods, amidst A narrow, relatively
• 30:55
  narrow range of other foods. But what I mean by this is this
• 30:58
  idea that like, you should eat more meat.
• 30:59
  Well, you can only eat more meat in a hyper modern system.
• 31:02
  In fact, you can only proselytize about eating more
• 31:04
  meat on the Internet as a result of modernity, right?
• 31:09
  And these very same people who urge you to eat like this.
• 31:12
  So you know, the sort of Andrew Huberman's and Joe Rogan's and
• 31:16
  the rest of them also, it just so happens that the very people
• 31:20
  who don't want you eating industrial junk are the same
• 31:22
  people who are peddling you food supplements, food supplements
• 31:25
  that are under regulated and that are produced in industrial
• 31:30
  settings that and that have few if any peer reviewed benefits,
• 31:34
  right. So they're benefiting from
• 31:36
  massive loopholes within sort of industrial modernity,
• 31:40
  communicating and selling these through the commercial channels
• 31:44
  and the information channels made possible by modernity,
• 31:46
  urging diets only made possible by modernity, but casting this
• 31:50
  totality as a sort of iconoclastic return to a past
• 31:54
  right, which is which is which is both ridiculous, but also but
• 31:58
  also quite paradoxical. But the fact that that's
• 32:01
  accepted, that's widely accepted and people are adherence to it,
• 32:05
  I think speaks to this, to this tension, right, where people are
• 32:09
  sort of want the benefits of modernity they have, but they
• 32:12
  they want ways to enact what they perceive as sort of a
• 32:16
  purity of action or morality from the past without thinking
• 32:19
  that they're not actually moving towards towards that past.
• 32:23
  They're not like Wendell Berry, right?
• 32:24
  They're not throwing out their computers and their smartphones
• 32:26
  and moving to the land and raising their own animals.
• 32:29
  They're just going to, you know, they're going to Costco and
• 32:32
  buying beef and not buying bread.
• 32:35
  Yeah, maybe it's a point of phrase they they want to have
• 32:37
  their cake and eat it and not get fat thanks to ozone pick,
• 32:40
  but there's. Yeah, exactly.
• 32:42
  But you, you, you, you actually vote a piece in the New York
• 32:46
  Times actually today at the point at the time of recording,
• 32:50
  which suggests that perhaps that things might be changing.
• 32:53
  I mean, the New York Times was really the kind of paragon in
• 32:56
  house journal of the of the sort of upper class foodies, you
• 32:59
  know, being the home of Michael Pollan and I think Mark Bittman
• 33:02
  too and others. And it's headlines why we
• 33:05
  shouldn't want to eat like our great, great grandparents, which
• 33:07
  is a nod to Michael Pollan's original phrase, wasn't it?
• 33:10
  In the Omnivore, I was saying don't eat.
• 33:12
  I think don't eat anything that your grand great great
• 33:14
  grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
• 33:16
  As food, Exactly. Right.
• 33:18
  And so, you know, things changing, you've you've had an
• 33:20
  op-ed in the New York Times, which is about as good as it
• 33:22
  gets. Does that tell us something?
• 33:24
  As much I think the pat myself on the back and say that my one
• 33:27
  op-ed in the New York Times is going to change the course of
• 33:29
  American food conversation, I think I'm cognizant of the fact
• 33:32
  that that's not going to happen. But I think people are hungry
• 33:35
  for I think people are hungry for a more honest conversation
• 33:39
  about food. I mean, I food is, I think
• 33:41
  always top of mind. It's especially top of mind now
• 33:43
  with, you know, these sorts of food influencers and Maha and
• 33:47
  the rise of Ozempic. And I think people are
• 33:51
  interested in an honest conversation about food and
• 33:53
  hearing different viewpoints. And the op-ed that I wrote with,
• 33:57
  again, with Gabriel Rosenberg, basically just says that rather
• 34:01
  than demonizing all aspects of the modern food system, we
• 34:05
  should take a slightly more nuanced approach, which is that,
• 34:08
  yes, we live in a food system where we are surrounded by junk
• 34:11
  and bad foods, but we can just as easily, most of us opt for
• 34:17
  healthier options or less environmentally impactful
• 34:19
  options. And we have to recognize that
• 34:21
  both the good and the bad come through the same value chains
• 34:25
  and are the result of the same system.
• 34:26
  And so our argument in the book is quite simply that we can't
• 34:30
  start from scratch. We can't go back to this
• 34:33
  identic, or actually not so identic, the sort of past full
• 34:37
  of malnutrition and child labor. We need to start where we are.
• 34:40
  And I think the best way to think about building a better
• 34:43
  food system is to use, well, sure, a little bit of consumer
• 34:48
  action, but also regulation to really lean into the good of the
• 34:53
  food system, which is abundance, a kind of scale, cheap prices,
• 34:58
  accessibility and away from the bad right, which I, which I
• 35:03
  think is, which is not, which I'm not saying is an easy lift,
• 35:06
  but ultimately that's what you want.
• 35:07
  Ultimately, what you should want from a complex food system is
• 35:11
  less harms. Less harms to labor, less harms
• 35:13
  to the environment, less harms to animals, and as much upside
• 35:17
  as you can. And the upside should be
• 35:21
  improving the quality and variety of the average diet for
• 35:25
  the average person. Yeah.
• 35:26
  And the industrial system is particularly, I'd say at its
• 35:29
  worst when it comes to meat and, and, and the livestock industry
• 35:32
  generally. Right.
• 35:33
  Absolutely. I mean you've mentioned about
• 35:35
  manure lagoons and so on, but I mean the sheer I guess the most,
• 35:40
  the more efficient there seems to be this trade off, the more
• 35:42
  efficient the animal system, animal production system is, the
• 35:46
  worse it tends to be for animal welfare.
• 35:49
  And I mean efficient in terms of feed.
• 35:51
  You can, you can raise a chicken and you know in a matter of
• 35:54
  weeks or a cow with a concentrated animal feeding
• 35:57
  operation much more quickly than having it out roaming and grass
• 36:00
  fed. But obviously the animal welfare
• 36:03
  implications of that are quite profound.
• 36:05
  And the environmental implications.
• 36:06
  But first, I'd like to, I'd actually like to stop you on
• 36:09
  that first point because when we talk about efficiency of animal
• 36:15
  production, we're talking on, on farm, we're talking about
• 36:20
  growing an animal with as effective feed conversion ratio
• 36:24
  of feeds to protein as quickly as possible and doing it at
• 36:28
  scale. And we can do that, we can
• 36:30
  produce a lot of animals, far more animals than we ever could.
• 36:33
  But as far as actual efficiency of that system delivering
• 36:36
  calories and protein, I mean that's very dubious, right?
• 36:40
  Because the feed conversion loss over the lifetime of any animal
• 36:46
  that's fed crops that are grown to be feed, they will lose.
• 36:51
  They will be fed far more calories and far more protein
• 36:53
  over their lifetimes than their flesh will actually yield.
• 36:57
  And we're talking about massive conversion loss.
• 36:59
  And I don't have the number off hand.
• 37:00
  I don't want to make them up, but I think probably the most
• 37:03
  efficient animal is chicken. And that's still something like
• 37:07
  an 80 something percent loss of net calories and protein.
• 37:10
  And it's far more for beef or larger animals that that live
• 37:13
  longer. And so ultimately, if we had
• 37:16
  just taken the land on which we're growing animal feed, which
• 37:20
  we can grow quite efficiently and grown food for humans rather
• 37:23
  than feed for animals, that would be a more efficient use of
• 37:26
  land. So I just want to, I want to put
• 37:28
  that little proviso in the in the efficiency question because
• 37:31
  it's actually not an efficient way of producing protein and
• 37:34
  calories. It's an efficient way of
• 37:35
  producing a lot of meat. And those are two, two different
• 37:38
  things. But of course, this system, what
• 37:40
  it does is it by virtue of increasing the number of animals
• 37:44
  that are grown quickly, primarily in enclosed spaces
• 37:48
  when we're talking about chickens.
• 37:50
  And if we're talking about pigs and in the in case of ruminants,
• 37:53
  you know, they're not factory farm per SE.
• 37:55
  So dairy cattle will be milked in industrial settings and a
• 37:59
  large number of beef cattle will be finished, which is to say fed
• 38:02
  to slaughter weight on industrial feedlots.
• 38:06
  So there's there are some differences, right?
• 38:08
  But these systems, especially the systems for chickens and
• 38:10
  pigs are massively inhumane, right?
• 38:14
  Because for a number of reasons which start with genetics, these
• 38:16
  are animals that are bred to four feet conversion ratio and
• 38:20
  to become saleable meat of the kind humans like as fast as
• 38:25
  possible and a lot is sacrificed there.
• 38:28
  You know, at the genetic level, we grow, we grow chickens that
• 38:30
  pass their slaughter weight. Their bones can't hold up the
• 38:34
  the mass of their bodies and muscle, which is why, you know,
• 38:37
  if you go to if you go to an animal sanctuary where they have
• 38:40
  animals that were rescued from industrial systems rather than
• 38:44
  non industrial systems, those animals leave lead hellish lives
• 38:48
  because they quite simply were they're not bred to live that
• 38:51
  long. But then of course, within
• 38:53
  within the systems themselves, you know, we're talking about
• 38:56
  cages that are highly constricting that prevent
• 38:59
  natural movement. They prevent, for instance,
• 39:01
  birds from rooting or even from stretching out their wings and
• 39:05
  turning around. When it comes to, and this is
• 39:08
  here, there may be some differences because European
• 39:11
  systems, if some of your listeners are in the UK and
• 39:14
  Europe, this animal production is slightly more regulated.
• 39:17
  But you know, in the United States, the use of gestational
• 39:20
  crates for pregnant sows is still extremely common.
• 39:23
  So that is to say that pregnant sows will spend 114 days at a
• 39:27
  time the length of their pregnancy locked into gauges
• 39:30
  that are 7 feet by two feet, unable to turn around or even
• 39:33
  lie down. And you know, I mean, like, I
• 39:35
  could give you more examples, but the point is that to achieve
• 39:38
  these systems where you have standardized economy scale
• 39:42
  production of meat, you need to remove much that is sort of
• 39:48
  inherent about animal behavior or animal welfare and treat the
• 39:51
  animals as much as possible as widgets.
• 39:54
  So the animal welfare impacts are are massive and, and very
• 39:58
  hard to change, right, Because you, you can make small changes
• 40:02
  within, within factory farmers, but ultimately you're talking
• 40:05
  about having thousands or 10s of thousands of animals in enclosed
• 40:08
  spaces with no access to the outdoors.
• 40:11
  And this is how we produce most need in the United States,
• 40:13
  right? Because most people.
• 40:14
  Free range, I mean free range will have access to the
• 40:16
  outdoors, but is that is that much better?
• 40:20
  It depends, right? Because these things, these are
• 40:23
  often sort of buzzwords that are not well regulated similarly to
• 40:26
  humane, right? There's in the United States,
• 40:27
  there's no federal animal welfare legislation other than
• 40:32
  the Human Methods of Slaughter Act, which applies to how
• 40:33
  animals are slaughtered and some legislation that comes to animal
• 40:36
  transport. But actual animal welfare, so
• 40:39
  animal treatment is legislated at the state level.
• 40:42
  And so, for instance, if someone makes claims about meat being
• 40:46
  humane, they're referring to some set of practices that they
• 40:51
  deem humane, but they're not referring to legislation, so.
• 40:55
  It could mean anything to anyone.
• 40:56
  So it so it could mean anything and the same.
• 40:58
  Goes I'm not sure there's a humane way to get slaughtered.
• 41:00
  I mean it's. No, I mean, there's, there
• 41:02
  isn't. Oh, absolutely, there's no
• 41:04
  humane way to get slaughtered. But what I'm saying is that even
• 41:06
  these basic terms like humane, humane or high welfare systems
• 41:10
  are, these aren't legal categories, right?
• 41:13
  These are ultimately, I mean, if you want to be cynical about it,
• 41:16
  they're just marketing categories.
• 41:18
  To get back to your initial question.
• 41:19
  And the second impact of producing animals at such a
• 41:22
  large scale is that you're increasing the externalities,
• 41:25
  right? So if you're producing more
• 41:27
  cows, you're of course generating more methane.
• 41:31
  I mean, I mean, the same goes for factory farms, right?
• 41:33
  If you're producing a lot of pigs, you quite simply have so
• 41:36
  much manure that you pump into those manure lagoons that when
• 41:38
  that breaks down, that's producing methane, but it's also
• 41:42
  leaching at the groundwater leading to eutrophication.
• 41:44
  So as soon as the sort of local environment can't sort of absorb
• 41:52
  effluent or absorb externalities, you're causing
• 41:55
  mass harms. And so anything that, so any
• 41:57
  scaled production of animals just far outstrips the capacity
• 42:00
  of natural systems to to absorb those externalities, right.
• 42:04
  And so across any metric you look at.
• 42:07
  So if you look at these basic metrics, which is, you know,
• 42:10
  emissions, land use, water use, eutrophication, impacts on
• 42:14
  biodiversity, by far the biggest impacts out of the entire modern
• 42:17
  food system are caused by livestock and especially quote
• 42:22
  UN quote industrialized livestock.
• 42:24
  And most of the time the supposed solution to us is to
• 42:27
  give up industrial meat and to by, you know, organic or free
• 42:31
  range or whatever the label happens to be.
• 42:34
  But I mean, not only is that not better, I was certainly not
• 42:36
  better once the happy pigs catch a catch wind of the
• 42:39
  slaughterhouse. But at the same time, it's not
• 42:41
  that much better in terms of the environmental metrics either
• 42:43
  when you consider things like land use and so on.
• 42:45
  Yeah, it's actually on a on a per unit basis, especially for
• 42:49
  for ruminants on on a per unit basis, the impact of a, you
• 42:53
  know, free ranging, lifelong free ranging grass grazing.
• 42:58
  I was going to say grass fed, but grass fed is actually one of
• 43:00
  these one of these marketing terms, right?
• 43:02
  Because you could have an animal out of feed lot who is fed grass
• 43:07
  that's brought in and you could call that grass fed, but
• 43:09
  obviously it's not an animal munching on grass, right?
• 43:11
  But I digress. So free ranging animals, free
• 43:16
  ranging ruminants on a per unit basis actually have higher
• 43:20
  impacts, right? Because #1 they graze, they
• 43:23
  require a lot of land. Number 2, they live longer, so
• 43:26
  they emit more methane over the course of their lifetimes.
• 43:30
  But small farms of the types that raise these animals do have
• 43:34
  lower aggregate environmental impact.
• 43:38
  But that's not because on a per unit basis, they're more
• 43:41
  environmentally benign. On a per unit basis, they could
• 43:43
  be environmentally worse. Their total environmental impact
• 43:46
  is lower just because they have far fewer animals, right?
• 43:49
  And it's very easy to say so, you know, the sort of the
• 43:51
  average person, and certainly, you know, the Michael Pollans of
• 43:56
  the world would say, well, of course, of course I hate factory
• 43:59
  farms, right? It's sort of this first line of
• 44:01
  defense against any critique of animal agriculture.
• 44:05
  And that's great that they hate them.
• 44:06
  But we have to accept the implication of what would happen
• 44:10
  if we did away with factory farms, which I think we should.
• 44:12
  But that means 99% in the United States.
• 44:15
  It means 99% less chickens produced.
• 44:18
  It means about 97% less pork if we get out, if we do away with
• 44:21
  industrial feedlots, that's about 67% less beef.
• 44:25
  So we'd all be de facto vegetarian or vegan overnight
• 44:28
  just because of this supply side intervention.
• 44:30
  And so I'm, I would love to have a conversation about the impacts
• 44:35
  of animal agriculture in a world where there are no factory
• 44:37
  farms, right? The average American is needing
• 44:40
  220 lbs of meat every year. They're eating under 100 lbs of
• 44:44
  meat. There is no factory farming.
• 44:46
  And then we can start having this conversation about how to
• 44:50
  regulate and how to address small scale farming.
• 44:54
  But we're not in that world. Small scale farming.
• 44:56
  That's going back to a world of scarcity, which is what we're
• 44:58
  trying to get away from. Here exactly and that's but
• 45:00
  exactly but and that is going back to the world of scarcity.
• 45:01
  And so that's and that's sort of the problem, right.
• 45:04
  And so in a sense, the small farm, the sort of this idea of
• 45:07
  the small farm as a foil for the factory farm is, is a real
• 45:12
  problem. Because what it does is it
• 45:13
  suggests that that's possible at scale.
• 45:15
  It's suggests that every piece of chicken eaten in the United
• 45:17
  States could come from a farm like that.
• 45:19
  And it quite simply can't. And so you've got this, you've
• 45:22
  got these systems that create more expensive food with more
• 45:26
  per unit environmental impact and which you can't scale.
• 45:29
  So it's the worst of it's the worst of all three worlds, if
• 45:32
  you will. Yeah, I, I remember my friend
• 45:35
  George Mumbio doing some doing the figures on, on beef
• 45:39
  production from a rewilding estate here in the UK.
• 45:42
  And I'm going to misquote him here, but it was something like
• 45:44
  one steak per person every four years or something because the
• 45:47
  productivity for the land is so low.
• 45:50
  Because actually what you're trying to do there is rewild,
• 45:52
  which really means removing all farming altogether.
• 45:55
  And certainly all actual livestock production for meat,
• 45:59
  but you know, a certain bit of surplus which you want because
• 46:02
  it's ecologically better or something.
• 46:04
  But exactly, you know, in terms of, in terms of what's better
• 46:07
  ecologically, you know, we need to, to look at serious large
• 46:11
  scale land sparing, which you can only get if you really
• 46:13
  tackle the, the livestock issue head on.
• 46:15
  Absolutely. So the only way around this and
• 46:17
  we got, I had a really good episode of the show where we
• 46:21
  talked to Bruce Friedrich from the Good Food Institute who just
• 46:23
  published a book called Meat. It is to move to plant based
• 46:28
  diets and meat alternatives with cell cultivation and so on.
• 46:33
  Because just insisting, as you suggested, that the world turn
• 46:36
  vegan or that Americans turn vegan or whatever.
• 46:38
  I mean, I, I eat meat and I know all of I know all of this and I
• 46:41
  still eat meat. Not, not not a huge amount, but
• 46:44
  enough that I feel bad about it. And you know, for me, it's a bit
• 46:47
  like being an alcoholic and constantly falling off the
• 46:49
  wagon. I mean, I've tried being vegan
• 46:51
  and I just just can't sustain it.
• 46:52
  So I love meat alternatives, the more kind of chewy and protein
• 46:56
  the better. And I'm really excited to see
• 46:59
  this, this whole kind of revolution develop.
• 47:03
  And you, you give us some examples in the book.
• 47:04
  I think you have cultivated chicken and cultivated salmon
• 47:06
  and things, but they seem to be taking an awful long time to
• 47:09
  reach the market. Cellular agriculture is is a
• 47:11
  tricky 1 to talk about, I'm sure.
• 47:14
  I'm sure Bruce gave you a lot of this if you've already if you've
• 47:18
  already spoken to him. But cellular agriculture is a
• 47:21
  very promissory technology. I mean, it's a technology that's
• 47:24
  not there yet. And I think that sort of hanging
• 47:27
  our hopes just on cellular agriculture is perhaps foolhardy
• 47:32
  or at the very least a long term bet.
• 47:35
  And the primary reason for this is because cellular agriculture
• 47:38
  emerged, unlike a lot of technologies, the a lot of the
• 47:42
  basic science wasn't quite done because it just wasn't funding
• 47:45
  for it. So sort of synthetic biology for
• 47:49
  food applications. And so while many of the early
• 47:51
  prototypes came out of government funded programs at
• 47:54
  universities, such as, you know, Mark Post's first burger, which
• 47:58
  was made at Maestricht University, the need for money
• 48:03
  to do the basic research really drove the industry towards
• 48:08
  towards venture capital. Venture capital as a source of
• 48:10
  money for doing basic science, which is just an awful way of
• 48:13
  doing basic science because venture capital wants returns on
• 48:16
  investment in the short or medium term.
• 48:20
  And so a lot of these, so hence all of these promises, hence,
• 48:24
  you know, we'll be having lab grown chicken by 2020, by 2022.
• 48:30
  And these prototypes come out and they're quite good, but
• 48:32
  they're not perfected and there are deadlines.
• 48:34
  And then there's this sort of, you know, through of
• 48:36
  disillusionment. And a lot of it has to do with
• 48:38
  the funding structures for science.
• 48:40
  I think it's a technology that was that was commercialized very
• 48:43
  prematurely. And I think now actually what
• 48:46
  we're what we're seeing is we're seeing a return to funding at
• 48:50
  universities. In a sense, you needed this
• 48:51
  first wave to show the viability of the product in order to
• 48:54
  convince funders to fund the the university research, right?
• 49:00
  And so now a lot of universities are picking this back up.
• 49:02
  This is in, you know, in China's agricultural development
• 49:05
  program. And so I think cellular
• 49:07
  agriculture, I think the basic science of, I mean all aspects
• 49:13
  of it, right from how to design bioreactors to growth media to
• 49:18
  scaffolds, all of this still has to be figured out.
• 49:21
  I think the technology is very promising.
• 49:22
  I think writing it off is foolhardy.
• 49:24
  I actually have pretty high hopes that it will succeed.
• 49:28
  But we're talking in the medium term.
• 49:29
  So I think if we're talk, but if I think if we're talking about
• 49:32
  dietary change and especially convincing meat eaters to eat
• 49:36
  less meat, other than just beating the drum of the
• 49:38
  environmental and ethical impacts and urging people to eat
• 49:40
  more plants, I think plant based meat alternatives is really
• 49:45
  where we need to focus. And really developing plant
• 49:48
  based meat alternatives that, you know, that really hit these
• 49:52
  notes of taste of mouthfeel, really giving consumers
• 49:57
  something as close as possible to what they need and doing it
• 49:59
  at an affordable price point. Will that solve everything?
• 50:02
  No, there are a lot of intangibles, including
• 50:06
  technophobia, including cultural attachments to meat, including
• 50:09
  sort of cultural opposition to plant based eating that I think
• 50:12
  have to be overcome. But I think within the the sort
• 50:16
  of range of tools needed to achieve dietary change away from
• 50:19
  meat, I think really good plant based alternatives have to be
• 50:22
  part of that, have to be part of that toolbox.
• 50:24
  Well, you're not wrong about the cultural opposition in Europe.
• 50:28
  We've got this ridiculous proposal in the European
• 50:32
  Parliament and and also from the Commission to remove any meaty
• 50:37
  terms from plant based labour. So sausage burger, I mean, so
• 50:42
  you wouldn't even be able to say not chicken or you know, chick
• 50:45
  star and anything which even implies a relationship to
• 50:48
  animals because supposedly consumers are terribly confused
• 50:51
  about all. Of course we know that's not the
• 50:52
  case at all. This is the livestock industry
• 50:54
  trying to make it more harder and harder for plant based
• 50:57
  alternatives to compete. Absolutely, because the
• 51:00
  livestock industry does not believe in the free operation of
• 51:03
  the market and they never have. Right.
• 51:06
  The livestock industry in every country relies on on government
• 51:11
  largess in many ways, be it be it subsidies, be it regulatory
• 51:16
  carve outs in the case of agricultural exceptionalism or
• 51:19
  now with this quite quite aggressive moves against both
• 51:22
  plant based and cellular agriculture on a regulatory pre
• 51:25
  empting of competition. Actually banning banning
• 51:28
  cultivated meat in several states in the US before it's
• 51:31
  even, before it's even the divan of isn't.
• 51:33
  It exactly right and all of which is a handout to to farming
• 51:37
  interests and to ranching groups.
• 51:39
  And I mean, but the same thing goes for Europe, right.
• 51:41
  So you have these, you know, in in Italy, the big Farmers Union
• 51:47
  called RETI, as far as we know is the primary actor pushed
• 51:50
  which pushed for the ban on the sale of cellular agriculture,
• 51:53
  which is currently not available anywhere in Europe, as far as I
• 51:56
  know on a band of its sale in Italy strictly to protect the
• 52:01
  business interests of livestock producers, right.
• 52:04
  And so, and in fact, since since we're on this topic, I think one
• 52:09
  thing which should be absolutely painfully obvious to everyone
• 52:12
  but somehow isn't when you talk about food, is that ultimately
• 52:14
  we need to think of all food producers as just businesses.
• 52:17
  Businesses pursuing their bottom line, which sometimes can lead
• 52:22
  to good outcomes such as a bounty of fresh produce and
• 52:28
  plants at your supermarket, and sometimes can lead to awful
• 52:31
  outcomes such as Craven special interests lobbying lawmakers to,
• 52:37
  you know, stymie the development of promising new technologies.
• 52:40
  And I think that. And you were sorry just to cut
• 52:42
  in, but you were defending the regulatory state.
• 52:45
  And one of the ways in which the incumbents can actually defend
• 52:49
  against innovation is through having this very burdensome
• 52:51
  regulation, which is why we don't get Impossible burgers in
• 52:54
  the UK or in or in the EU, because they're tied up in all
• 52:56
  of this regulation, particularly about the GMO nonsense as well.
• 53:00
  Absolutely right. But again, I mean the term the
• 53:02
  regulation is not a is not a neutral term, I think.
• 53:06
  I think regulation should be thought of as the result of
• 53:09
  legislation that is carried out in the public good.
• 53:11
  But as we well know, the public good is not always top of mind
• 53:14
  when when it comes to legislation, often because of
• 53:17
  lobbying by business interests. So when I say regulation the
• 53:21
  public good, I mean things like increasing minimum labor age on
• 53:26
  farms, I think doing away with maneuver lagoons, tightening
• 53:31
  animal welfare laws. But yeah, but absolutely
• 53:34
  incumbents can use regulation to do things like prevent fair
• 53:37
  competition, such as change language or interfere in the
• 53:41
  capacity of businesses to use language to communicate what
• 53:43
  product they're selling to to their consumers.
• 53:45
  And that's, and that's a real problem.
• 53:47
  And again, I think agriculture and farmer groups often punch
• 53:49
  far above their weight when it comes to political influence.
• 53:54
  And I think part of that has to do with this, again, with this
• 53:57
  quite universal notion that farming groups sort of
• 54:00
  represent, you know, the true whatever the true Italian, the
• 54:04
  true Brit, the true American. And so if you look at any
• 54:09
  developed Western democracy, agriculture is a very small,
• 54:13
  small piece of the GDP, right? And yet agricultural lobby
• 54:18
  groups often punch very, very much above their above their
• 54:23
  weight. And I think it has partially to
• 54:25
  do with this and partially to do with the fact that they're very,
• 54:30
  I hesitate to say this with, you know, with full confidence, but
• 54:35
  just from what we, from what we've seen, you know, we know
• 54:37
  this is the case in Eastern Europe, certainly the case in
• 54:39
  Italy. Agricultural groups make very
• 54:42
  easy allies for sort of an for populist movements and sort of
• 54:45
  an emergent populist rights right, which both will try to
• 54:50
  pass legislation in their interest, but also leads
• 54:54
  opposition politicians to pass legislation to placate these
• 54:56
  groups, lest they, you know, just sort of get them on side,
• 55:00
  lest they sort of lest they jump ship entirely to the populist
• 55:03
  right. And, and the interests who
• 55:05
  nobody seems to be fighting for, neither the farmer groups nor
• 55:08
  the high culture food is, is the interests of the very poorly
• 55:11
  paid agricultural workers, servers and fast food
• 55:14
  restaurants and so on. And you you give them a lot of
• 55:17
  space in the book, which I think is really, really different and
• 55:19
  also really a really important missing part of this whole kind
• 55:22
  of food system debate. Tell us why you, you know, why
• 55:26
  you decided to, to really focus on that.
• 55:28
  I mean, obviously it's, it's, it's such an important justice
• 55:30
  issue, but I'm trying to figure out why it is that that all of
• 55:35
  these liberal, liberal foodies don't seem to care how little
• 55:38
  people are paid in the food sector.
• 55:39
  Well, so I we decided to focus on it in the book because the
• 55:44
  aim of the book is to present an analysis of the food system, but
• 55:48
  also a vision for a better food system.
• 55:49
  And so we break the book down by thinking about food
• 55:52
  availability. So what food is produced in what
• 55:56
  quantities, how by whom? We then think about the
• 55:59
  sustainability of that production in the 2nd chapter.
• 56:01
  And then we turn to the question of access.
• 56:04
  So food access and food insecurity.
• 56:06
  And then we turn to the question of Labor because obviously labor
• 56:10
  is an absolutely central part of the entire food system.
• 56:13
  Oh, and then we turn to questions of nutrition last or
• 56:16
  food utilization. But I think labor is, is often
• 56:20
  overlooked if one views the food system through a very simplistic
• 56:24
  lens of sort of this magically for short value chain of farmer,
• 56:31
  the consumer, right, or sort of farmer intermediary consumer.
• 56:34
  But the fact of the matter is that you need labor to both
• 56:37
  produce and process and sell food.
• 56:40
  In the United States, you've got over 20 million people who work
• 56:43
  in food. Over half of those work in food
• 56:46
  service. So these are the sort of people
• 56:47
  who are making your burger or making your waffle at the Waffle
• 56:50
  House. You've got about 3 million
• 56:52
  people who work selling food in various forms, be it a grocery
• 56:56
  stores or a convenience stores, and you've got about 3 million
• 57:00
  people on farms. Among all those people, 8 out of
• 57:02
  the 10 worst paid jobs in the United States are in food.
• 57:05
  And the question is why? And there are two answers to
• 57:08
  this. One is basic economics.
• 57:10
  These are mostly jobs that, while highly skilled in the
• 57:14
  literal sense, are considered economically to be low skilled
• 57:17
  because a lot of people can do them.
• 57:20
  So employers can. I have a huge labor pool to
• 57:24
  choose from. It's very much a buyer's market.
• 57:26
  So they can depress wages, right?
• 57:28
  So there's a very high, there's a high the sort of supply of
• 57:32
  potential laborers. Yeah, I can.
• 57:33
  I can illustrate this. I'm paid a lot more now to sit
• 57:36
  around waffling on podcasts all day than I was when I used to
• 57:38
  work in McDonald's when I was 17 years old.
• 57:40
  Yeah, I mean similarly with me as a as a professor rather than
• 57:43
  someone who works in a bike shop in neighborhood.
• 57:46
  And so, so that's the first reason is the economics, but the
• 57:49
  second reason is legislation and the, especially in the United
• 57:54
  States, a very long term concerted effort by employers
• 58:00
  across industries, but especially the restaurant
• 58:04
  industry and the food service industry to depress wages in
• 58:08
  food service work. And so this means both
• 58:10
  agricultural work, but also serving work.
• 58:12
  And so you've got this. So you've got these millions of
• 58:15
  people who are really caught and this really unfortunate sort of
• 58:19
  confluence of 22 regressive currents, which is #1 the
• 58:24
  economics of the industry don't work for them and #2 legislators
• 58:28
  don't work for them. And So what we focus on in the
• 58:32
  book rather than just bemoaning the situation is how to address
• 58:36
  the situation. And very often it is not, you
• 58:38
  know, it's not the sort of liberal do bitters or certainly
• 58:41
  not liberal foodie writers who are championing not not just not
• 58:45
  championing this cause, but who aren't, who are getting results
• 58:48
  for these people? Who's getting results for food
• 58:51
  system workers or the food system workers themselves?
• 58:55
  And if you look at where people are organizing, I mean,
• 58:57
  historically people of course organized on on farms, right?
• 59:03
  Sort of, you know, people sort of know this movement of, you
• 59:06
  know, Cesar Chavez organizing farm workers, often migrant farm
• 59:10
  workers in California. But if you look at wins in other
• 59:13
  sectors, if you look at, for instance, fast food workers, the
• 59:16
  fight for 15 started with workers in New York City.
• 59:20
  You're. Fighting is what for 15?
• 59:22
  Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Yeah, sorry for your.
• 59:25
  This is very much the the book, the book center is on the United
• 59:28
  States. So a lot of I sort of just
• 59:30
  assume that listeners are in the United States and I apologize.
• 59:33
  So the fight for 15, for those unfamiliar, is a movement that
• 59:37
  started in the mid 20 teens calling for a minimum wage of
• 59:42
  $15, which was more than double the federal minimum wage.
• 59:46
  The federal minimum wage was 725, and I'm sure if you're
• 59:51
  sitting at home, you can just do the math.
• 59:53
  Getting paid 725 and living in a city like New York City, the
• 59:59
  numbers just don't work right. The numbers don't work for rent.
• 1:00:03
  The numbers don't work for food. There's a reason that so many
• 1:00:05
  people who work in food are also food insecure and rely on food
• 1:00:07
  stamps. And so the fight for 15 was
• 1:00:11
  organized by fast food workers. Basically calling for a $15
• 1:00:15
  minimum wage. You know, people don't remember
• 1:00:18
  it now, but there was a time in the mid 20 teens, the United
• 1:00:20
  States where major cities were ground to a halt by fast food
• 1:00:24
  workers protesting. And see, these people were
• 1:00:26
  getting dragged off the street. There were marches shutting down
• 1:00:29
  streets. And what these people wanted was
• 1:00:33
  dignity. They wanted a dignified life,
• 1:00:35
  right? They didn't say we don't want to
• 1:00:37
  work in fast food because it's somehow below us.
• 1:00:40
  They said we want to work in fast food if we get a food.
• 1:00:42
  System's broken. If we, they didn't say the food
• 1:00:44
  system's broken. They didn't say raise the, you
• 1:00:46
  know, raise the Waffle House to the ground.
• 1:00:48
  They said we want dignified work within the food system.
• 1:00:52
  And what's remarkable about the fight for 15 is how successful
• 1:00:56
  it has been, at least in some places, right?
• 1:00:59
  So for instance, when the fight for 15 started, Cuomo, who was
• 1:01:03
  governor of New York State, said it was an absolute non starter.
• 1:01:06
  Within a few years, he was the one phasing in a $15 minimum
• 1:01:10
  wage, right? Just because these people had
• 1:01:14
  their message is so clear, which is calling for dignified labor
• 1:01:17
  within the food system. They got progressive legislators
• 1:01:20
  on side, they got other social movements on side and they got
• 1:01:24
  the public on side, right. The other person might not think
• 1:01:28
  about how the person serving them at McDonald's burger is
• 1:01:30
  paid. But if that person confronts
• 1:01:32
  them and says, look, I'm getting paid like garbage to serve you
• 1:01:35
  that burger, do you think I should be paid better?
• 1:01:36
  The average person says, yes. So the fight for 15 was has been
• 1:01:40
  tremendously successful. Of course, it's not a pro
• 1:01:43
  unionization effort. It's a call for increasing
• 1:01:47
  minimum wages. So also in the United States
• 1:01:50
  we're we've been seeing, I think most visibly the drive to
• 1:01:53
  unionize Starbucks, which is a massive effort because it's just
• 1:01:58
  because of the nature of Starbucks franchises and the
• 1:02:00
  nature of the National Labor Relations Board in the US.
• 1:02:03
  We're talking about store by store organizing to.
• 1:02:08
  And Starbucks has fought back massively.
• 1:02:09
  Starbucks has spent more on lawyers than they would have
• 1:02:12
  spent in wages had they just had they just increased wages and
• 1:02:15
  allowed people to unionize, right.
• 1:02:17
  And they're also closing stores as allegedly as push back
• 1:02:23
  against unionization. But the, sorry, I, I could just
• 1:02:27
  sort of keep talking about these examples, but what I'm saying is
• 1:02:30
  that we need to look to workers themselves who are organizing
• 1:02:35
  for better working conditions, safer working conditions, more
• 1:02:38
  dignified working conditions, better wages, and let them lead,
• 1:02:43
  right? Because they're sort of the
• 1:02:44
  vanguard of improving the food system.
• 1:02:46
  A huge part of improving the food system is improving the lot
• 1:02:49
  of the people who work within it and the people who are doing
• 1:02:52
  that, you know, are not are not liberal food writers.
• 1:02:56
  You know, they're not liberal professors sitting at
• 1:02:59
  universities. They're the food workers
• 1:03:01
  themselves. And there are tremendous witness
• 1:03:03
  to be to be talked about here, right like the the book is not
• 1:03:06
  all doom and gloom because we point to particular when such as
• 1:03:10
  the massive increase in minimum wages.
• 1:03:13
  But, and I think, and I think people should support,
• 1:03:18
  especially in the United States should, should support this more
• 1:03:21
  more broadly, right, including things like doing away with the
• 1:03:24
  tip minimum wage. We talk about tip minimum wage.
• 1:03:26
  I think this is a little bit insider baseball so people can
• 1:03:29
  read about it in the book. And the last part of this I do
• 1:03:32
  want to mention is also the organizing by delivery riders,
• 1:03:35
  right? New York City alone has over
• 1:03:37
  60,000 food delivery riders. So people delivering for Uber
• 1:03:42
  Eats and Grubhub and what have you, whatever the the analogs
• 1:03:46
  are in the UK who are placed by these apps in this terrible
• 1:03:53
  situation where they're not employees, right?
• 1:03:56
  They're legally not employees. They're treated as independent
• 1:03:59
  contractors with the app as basically an intermediary
• 1:04:02
  between them and customers, which puts them in this really
• 1:04:05
  unenviable position of having to get all the gear they need.
• 1:04:09
  So they have to buy their E bike, rechargeable batteries,
• 1:04:12
  foul weather gear, and then they have to meet the very exacting
• 1:04:17
  timing standards and performance standards demanded by the apps
• 1:04:22
  in order to even keep their job right.
• 1:04:24
  So if you, if you missed, if you have late deliveries, if you get
• 1:04:27
  bad ratings, not just bad ratings from customers, but bad
• 1:04:29
  ratings from the app itself, you get less work.
• 1:04:33
  So many of these people find it hard never, never mind making
• 1:04:36
  the living wage, but just to recoup the costs of doing the
• 1:04:40
  delivery work and, and never mind the fact that these apps
• 1:04:44
  have also been caught, you know, stealing tips and so on and so
• 1:04:47
  forth. And so, and who was championing
• 1:04:50
  these people's interests? No one.
• 1:04:52
  And so in New York City, they organized, they, they made a
• 1:04:54
  group called Deliveristas Unidos, which means delivery
• 1:04:57
  drivers united. And they basically said, look,
• 1:05:00
  during COVID, the city would have starved without us.
• 1:05:02
  There were more delivery drivers than cars out on the streets of
• 1:05:05
  Manhattan. And they organized basically
• 1:05:08
  calling for a minimum wage, even though they were independent
• 1:05:11
  contractors, and other benefits such as less onerous and less
• 1:05:15
  dangerous delivery schedules. And they won, right?
• 1:05:19
  They haven't won everywhere this has been tabled, but in New York
• 1:05:22
  City, they won by getting legislators on side.
• 1:05:24
  And so these are all winnable. These are all winnable fights,
• 1:05:28
  right? And I think what we should want
• 1:05:29
  as citizens and as eaters is for the people who not just produce
• 1:05:33
  our food, but deliver us our food and sell our food and make
• 1:05:36
  our coffees, to be paid a dignified wage and to be paid
• 1:05:40
  living waved. I don't think it's, uh, you
• 1:05:42
  know, I don't think it's too much to ask, and neither do
• 1:05:44
  they. Well, I think that's a, that's a
• 1:05:46
  good stopping point and a real really important lesson.
• 1:05:49
  And I think if anything that people can take away from this
• 1:05:53
  is perhaps to talk a bit less about consumer health and
• 1:05:56
  Wellness and, and all of this stuff.
• 1:05:58
  And talk, think a bit more about, about the, the pay and
• 1:06:02
  the labour standards within people who for people who work
• 1:06:05
  within, within the food system. And of course, and of course the
• 1:06:07
  animals who provide the meat and the welfare issues that that
• 1:06:11
  come with the livestock industry too.
• 1:06:13
  But yeah. And I just want to say thank you
• 1:06:15
  so much. Just to remind people, the book
• 1:06:18
  is called Feed the People, Why Industrial food is good and how
• 1:06:21
  to make it even better, and I think it's out now.
• 1:06:23
  Is that right? It's out on February 17th.
• 1:06:27
  All right. Well, thanks again, Jan, for
• 1:06:29
  joining us on saving the world from bad ideas.
• 1:06:31
  I hope it goes very well with the book and best of luck with
• 1:06:33
  the rest of your work. Yeah.
• 1:06:35
  Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.
• 1:06:40
  Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World from Bad Ideas,
• 1:06:42
  a Weplanet podcast. Weplanet's a movement of
• 1:06:45
  citizens and scientists dedicated to defending the
• 1:06:47
  science and solutions we need to save the world.
• 1:06:50
  Please do subscribe and share a nice review.
• 1:06:52
  It helps us spread the message. We'd also love to hear your
• 1:06:54
  feedback and suggestions at our e-mail podcast at weplanet.org.
• 1:06:58
  Please also join our podcast mailing list and we'll let you
• 1:07:01
  know when a new episode drops. Just go to Saving the World from
• 1:07:04
  badideas.org or weplanet.org/podcast right now.
• 1:07:08
  See you next time.