The Corporatization of Food

Meat is the most nutrient-dense perfect food for humans. It just is. It's such an exhausting conversation. When you say that to people though, like you said, I think, you know, you're eating all that meat? Like what about your cholesterol? What about you, you got to have a heart attack? Yeah, and it's working its way into policy, which is really disturbing to me, like as a mother. Like New York City public schools, vegan on Fridays now, in addition to Meatless Mondays. So now you've got a school system where 70% of the kids are economically disadvantaged and might go home on the weekends. Like they need school lunch, right? And now you're flanking the weekends with nutrient poor, both Friday and Monday. And it's this ideologically driven thing that's based on this idea that if you eat less meat, it's better for the environment, like this thing that they say. And they also say for health purposes. Like, oh, the site, the China study. Like it's one fucking study. And like, no matter how much you say, like, hey, you need to read the rebuttals of the China study because they're pretty brutal. And it shows that it's a lot of biased evidence and that they really didn't do a good job of being objective about that. So there's one thing that's happening right now that's really interesting. So there's this thing called the global burden of disease. And this is published by the Lancet. And it's what most global food policy is set on. And between their report in 2017 and 2019, meat was 36 times more likely to kill you. And there were some researchers, some friends of mine that pushed back. They wrote a letter to the Lancet, which was blocked. The Lancet, it sounds like, is finally going to be publishing it like over the next couple days. Finally publishing this thing that says that meat is 36 more times. Oh, no, that's out. The 2019 global burden of disease is out. And I actually had a graphic on that just to show. What are you saying is going to be published? So some friends of mine. Right. Because these guys didn't provide any evidence at all as to why meat. So there's this theoretical minimum risk exposure level that is supposed to be the safe level of meat you can eat. And it went down to zero. According to these researchers, which is going to be global food policy, you can now eat zero red meat safely. So they said they did their own systematic review, but they didn't show any of the evidence, any of the papers they reviewed. And there's no research that's strong that's showing meat is... There's only one randomized control trial. They're not showing any evidence. They're not showing any papers. How is this science? Right. And so finally, the Landsat is going to publish this paper where my colleagues are questioning the results and where is the science. And the global burden of disease is the Landsat. So it's a really very big deal. So I don't understand. What is there... I always thought that with scientific papers, you had to cite sources and you had to... So up until about two years ago, that was pretty consistent. And then I think we've seen a loosening of standard time. Here's the difference between 2017 and 2019. So you can see the top part is what we're doing in excess. And you can see that diets high in red meat used to be a very small percentage of the cause of death globally, which is even a silly thing. But it used to be sodium was much higher. And now meat has gone up, do you see this, 36 times more likely to be the cause of death in two years. So this is the study. And this analysis when they're doing this, how are they coming to this conclusion? Right. Nobody knows. They just tell you? They're just saying it. They're just saying it. What is their motivation? We don't really know. I mean, a little tinfoil haddy. I think that there's a powerful desire to consolidate food production globally. And this is an amazing way to do it. As it is, I think that six or seven companies produce like 90% of the food that's consumed globally. What we've seen over time is just more consolidation, more consolidation. And there's this kind of weird interface between tech and venture capital and food. There have been some interesting pieces where folks are looking at food. They want it to be operated like IP, like software. They want you to be able to own the intellectual property. It's interesting you say that because Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the United States. Yeah. We looked at that up once. We looked at that, but then we looked at it and said he was. He wants to be. He owns a lot. He owns a lot. He's a shitload. Gates Foundation is one of the major sponsors of this study that I was just talking about. So it's fuckery. But the thing is he keeps saying that we've got to eat less meat and we've got to cut our consumption of meat out to be healthy and that we're going to get used to these meat alternatives. When a guy like that says that, I'm like, are you making money because of this? Why are you saying that? By the way, you look like shit. Because if you're eating those plant-based burgers or whatever the fuck you're doing, you're obese. A guy like that telling people about ... He's got these breasts and this gut and I'm like, this is crazy. You're one of the richest guys on earth. You have access to the best nutrients, the best ... You could have an amazing trainer. You could be in phenomenal shape and you're giving out public health advice. You're giving out health advice and you're sick. It's literally like a non-athlete trying to coach professionals. What the fuck are you talking about? How are you giving any health advice when you look like that? Your health is piss poor. I'm not a doctor. But when you've got man boobs and a gut and you're walking around and you have these toothpick arms, I'm like, hey buddy, you're not healthy. There's a lot of profit to be made in processing something into a Beyond Burger. There's a lot of profit to be made. But those aren't even selling anymore. Have you noticed that? We're lucky in a way. The consumers got in and poked around that and Forbes did an interesting piece where there was so much interest from the vegan community around Impossible Burger and Impossible Foods. Forbes piece was interesting. It made the case that these people are usually very progressive and very anti-corporation. We're like the biggest fans or promoters of this corporatization of our food system, which is kind of where all the stuff is going. They're getting duped. They really are. On the one side, there's this story that meat will cause cancer and diabetes and all this stuff and it's going to destroy the planet because of carbon emissions and it's using all the water and the land. It's a slick story. It's an elevator pitch. It's elegant. It's buttoned up airtight. Then when we start trying to unpack that, you have to dig into ecology and non-equilibrium thermodynamics and it's not an elevator pitch and it's a lot of work to unpack what those claims are. Even what is the motivation to do this, then we start getting into conspiracy theory land. It's like, well, there are people that want to control the food system and they want to turn food into intellectual property that they own. That really seems to be what's going on with this. I think they've realized consumers aren't going to just buy it in the grocery store. By the way, Beyond Burger is twice as expensive as organic grass-fed beef per pound. They sell it in half-pound packages right next to the pound packages. Why not just make it policy and indoctrinate these kids from kindergarten to age 12 with these messages? The Meatless Monday messages are all wrong. What is the message? Meat is bad for your health and the environment. They use these beautiful, simplistic infographics showing livestock takes up three-quarters of the land. It's not talking about the types of land or that your burger used 10 bathtubs full of water. But then we're not talking about, okay, most of the water footprint for a cow is actually in the grass. It's called green water. It's like water that's already in the environment, in rain. Whether the cow is there or not, it's going to happen. Do we have that infographic? Yeah, I have the water one. If you want to talk about how much water a burger uses up, you better not be eating almonds. Exactly. Yeah. You better not be eating. Or you better shut your mouth if you're eating almonds. Those things are ridiculous. Here's the water one. I've broken it down, land use, feed use, but this is just the water one. What most people don't get is that green water is natural rain and then the blue water is like when you look down on a map and see rivers and lakes. What we're looking at, folks, that are just listening is when you look at typical beef versus grass finished beef, it looks like there's probably like how many dots are on this list? A little different. We're at the bottom. I have the percentages. It's 94% green water for typical beef and 97% green water for average. This is average. In Vermont, it might be different than Nevada. They have it broken down to these droplets. These droplets, there's 100 droplets on each side and two droplets from the grass finished beef are lake streams and underground water, three droplets from the typical beef. That's what everybody's concerned about. People are really concerned about the draining of the lakes and streams and the underground water. It's not drinking water. The rest of it, the entire graph is natural rain, which is moisture that exists in vegetable matter. It's going to fall on this land, which is land that has been grasslands for eons. We can't use it for anything else. When people say we use all this land for cattle, bison are a good example. I'm good friends with the folks that own Roamfree Bison Ranch in Montana. They do both cattle and bison because the cattle don't go up these super steep mountains. They're these grassland mountains that the bison graze. If they don't graze it, then the whole ecosystem just collapses. The ecosystem has been this plant animal interaction for millions of years. This plant animal interaction is based on the animals manure, fertilizes the plants, the animals eat the plants. Dung beetles, insects, birds, all this stuff. It's not stealing land from anything. This is what grasslands do. It's not stealing water from anything. This is the rain, sleet, and snow that falls on the grasslands. These animals should be there because it's part of a healthy ecosystem like the Audubon Society in the last 10 years has been getting really involved in regenerative ag because one of the first things that they see when people start doing pasture-based meat is that the bird species come back and come back in remarkable perfusion because it starts fixing. If you fix all of the ecosystem issues, then these literal canary in the coal mines end up getting addressed and we see more bird species come back.