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SHOW NOTES:
You may have seen a recent NYT op-ed piece “The End Of Meat Is Here.” It received a lot of airplay, but is thick on opinion, skinny on facts. Diana Rodgers and I went largely line by line through the piece and deconstructed the claims.
Opinion article in NYThttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-meat-vegetarianism.html
Transcript:
Download a copy of the transcript here (PDF)
Nicki: Welcome to The Healthy Rebellion Radio. This is an episode of Salty Talk. A deep dive into popular and relevant health and performance news pieces, mixed with the occasional salty conversation with movers and shakers in the world of research, performance, health and longevity. Healthy Rebellion Radio’s Salty Talk episodes are brought to you by Drink LMNT. The only electrolyte drink mix that’s salty enough to make a difference in how you look, feel, and perform. We co-founded this company to fill a void in the hydration space. We needed an electrolyte drink that actually met the sodium needs of active people, low carb, keto, and carnivore adherence, without any of the sugar, colors and fillers found in popular commercial products. Health rebels, this is Salty Talk.
Nicki: And now the thing our attorney advises. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. And given that this is Salty Talk, you should expect the occasional expletive.
Nicki: All right. We are rolling. Welcome back to another episode of Salty Talk.
Robb: How’s it going, wife?
Nicki: Going pretty good. How about you, hubs?
Robb: Just finishing some lunch.
Nicki: You were, you were.
Robb: Just barely done. Nicki was sitting here giving me the stink eye and I’m like, “I’m a chewer. Sorry. I chew.”
Nicki: He was having some macadamia nuts and just chewing like 100,000 times.
Robb: Damn me and my desire for good digestion.
Nicki: Yes. I know. I’m not faulting you it’s just… You know?
Robb: And now all the carnivore people are going to freak out because I was eating macadamia nuts. I defaulted on carnivore-hood.
Nicki: Well, you haven’t really been devout anyway.
Robb: That’s true enough.
Nicki: So today we actually have a pretty cool episode. You and Diana Rogers spent some time going through the article that kind of made some waves. It was a New York Times opinion piece titled The End of Meat is Here. And you guys went through, and kind of line-by-line went through the claims and…
Robb: Yeah, and I mean, we started off and we went over, what are our biases? What’s the bullshit that we’re bringing to the table? Just to try to and set an even keel on this stuff. And so we went through what our biases were. And we talked a little bit about the author’s background, but we didn’t turn it into a 20 minute dismissal, via ad hominem attack, straw man. We acknowledged that the guy’s a vegan. Well, he’s not even vegan, but-
Nicki: No, he eats meat occasionally.
Robb: He’s heavily vegetarian, vegan-friendly. He’s on the board of some sort of farm related website, whose stated goal is to remove animal husbandry from the food system. And we went, just like you said, we kind of went line-by-line through everything that he claims in there. And it’s so interesting in this age of COVID and everything else, it’s always fascinating to me when you see people make statements of fact with no error bars at all. And he did this on a host of things from-
Nicki: Meat causes climate change.
Robb: Climate change, bad for your health. And I mean, there was no wiggle room, no error bars in this thing, which at this point, hopefully folks start recognizing that whatever side of this equation folks are on, it’s not really even approaching a scientific or rational discussion if we’re doing anything beyond gravity or Newtonian physics. Those things are pretty fucking buttoned up. And you’ve got heavy predictive value there. But then beyond that, there’s things that we know, and then there’s a lot of gray area beyond that. Carbon has four bonds. It’s not going to have five, it’s not going to have three. It’s going to be happy with four bonds.
Nicki: I feel like carbon might just want to have six bonds though.
Robb: And there you go. There you go. And that’s a lot of the tenor of this piece, is that there’s just stuff’s stated with this certitude. And again, Diana and I tried to go through this thing kind of a line-by-line deal, and just say, “Hey, this is what the claim is. Here’s some stuff to kind of maybe consider as a counterpoint.” And we went through the whole piece on that. It’s a decently long podcast, but I think it’s pretty valuable. This thing was trending heavily on Twitter and the other social media outlets. And it’s interesting too, in the way that the guy tried to dovetail everything from climate change, to social justice warrior-ing, to morality and the pending implosion of the healthcare system.
Robb: And now granted, I’m guilty as charged on trying to take 50 different things from different venues and weave them all together. But it was some of what he does. And again, we mentioned this throughout the course of doing it. It’s so wacky some of the shit that the guy throws out there. It’s just kind of like this virtue signaling, and pandering. And of course this is our flawed bias. Clearly Diane and I are being paid off by big meat. We’re just rolling in the dough. That’s why her film didn’t receive $1 million in less than a day in a Crowdfunder, like What the Health did. And it’s been an absolute fucking trench warfare shit show to get that thing funded, so clearly we’re just flush with cash from big meat. Not to divert this too far, but this is one of the interesting things, we’re really advocating for regenerative agriculture, which is a significant departure from the industrial food system, including the industrial animal husbandry part of this stuff.
Robb: And so the different pieces of the food production system, whether regenerative or more mainstream, are completely at odds with one another. And they look down their noses at one another. Like one of our friends, Maggie, who runs one of the local meat outfits here was talking about how, when she’s at the Pearl Farmer’s Market down in San Antonio, she’ll get some old codger who starts giving her kind of a rash and a shit about like, “You can’t grass finish meat.” And she’s like, “Yeah, we do it all the time.” And then as she pokes and prods, then he’s on the industrial ag side of this stuff. And so it’s like this pissing match and dick measuring contest, and this competition going on. All the while the vegans are doing a fantastic divide and conquer, and everything from training reporters, and infiltrating school lunch systems, to just really having control of what does and doesn’t get passed on YouTube and other social media outlets. So, yeah, I don’t know.
Nicki: It’s a heavy topic.
Robb: It’s a salty topic.
Nicki: It’s a salty topic. There we go. Well, let’s dig into this. And of course, folks we’ll post the link to this article if you haven’t seen it yet in the show notes.
Robb: Howdy Diana. What’s going on?
Diana: Oh, well, it’s a little warm here today in Boston. It’s about 85 or 90, I don’t know, and 100% humidity. So I just stood in the walk in for a little bit to try to cool down before we recorded here.
Robb: Good times. Texas is not that bad yet, but on the days where it’s both cloudy and warm, it’s a gut check. It’s no joke.
Diana: Yeah.
Robb: So, hey, let’s see here. How do we want to tackle this? We’re going to discuss this article that appeared in the New York Times, The End of Meat is Here. This is by a guy, Johnathan Foer. And me averting my gaze at you is because I’m looking at my other monitor, not because I’m trying to be rude or anything. But God, there’s so many different ways to dig into this thing. And part of, I think what we’re going to hopefully try to do kind of a critique and analysis on the commentary, the content, the tone, a bunch of different angles on it. But there’s really no discussion of this guy’s biases and background. You have to kind of dig into that to get to it. So I think that’s a good place for us to start. What are our biases and backgrounds? And let’s go ahead and start with you.
Robb: I just think that that’s valuable in this day and age. It’s almost like the professional disclosure thing before you do a talk. It’s like, “Oh, I have investments in this company and whatever.” But what are our biases? Clearly you are paid off by big meat and are rolling in the dough because you’re advocating for them, right?
Diana: Yeah. And it’s really interesting. I mean, I think all scientists should be disclosing their personal dietary habits. The position statement of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics on vegetarian and vegan diets was written by 100% vegans and vegetarians, but that was not disclosed. And so I think everybody eats and what you eat largely influences your opinions on the food system and what’s appropriate. And so us coming from a more paleo type background, where we believe that the issues with our modern health decline is largely the processed food industry and big ag. I personally have been living on an organic farm for the last 18 years. We started as a vegetable farm, but realized that we needed animals in order for our fertility cycle to be sustainable and regenerative. And so we slowly started raising meat in a very responsible way.
Diana: And so I currently live, it’s still primarily a organic vegetable farm, but we do raise pigs, chickens for eggs, goats and sheep. We only don’t raise beef because we don’t have the land for it, where we just don’t have… You need a little more land than what we have. We’ve never had a busier year. We were booked out for all of 2020 at the slaughterhouse, and with our meat and vegetable program. And you and I have this book coming out about the benefits of animal products, and raising cattle for both our health and the environment.
Robb: Right. Yeah. I forget how long the initial manuscript was that we turned in, but it was pretty enormous because we’re unpacking the environmental, ethical and health considerations of a meat inclusive diet. And we really have to tackle it in that fashion because a game of what I call vegan whack-a-mole happens where if you address one thing, then this other question pops up. And what was interesting, and we’ll see how good of a job that we did tying this together, but what was very interesting is the solutions in one area had insight about solutions in another area. And there was actually this kind of consistency that fruits and vegetables, large ruminants, grasslands, nutritious, ethical, sustainable. And that was very consistent, at least from our perspective. And this seems to be exactly the antithesis of say what Jonathan Foer is putting forward with his piece.
Robb: So really quickly, I’m sure that most of the folks that listen to show know what my biases are. Former research biochemist, wrote what was the first popular book in this paleo diet genre, definitely more low carb, paleo-centric. Got into all this stuff due to a health crisis from eating a vegan diet, which maybe a vegan diet will work better for some other people, but it certainly didn’t work particularly well for me. So I mean, what else should I disclose? I was a cancer researcher. What are my other… Although it’s funny because I appreciate low-carb diets. I’m not a religious zealot. And so when I wrote a piece about how low-carb diets may not be the best thing for athletic performance, then people said that I was bought off by big sweet potato.
Diana: Right. And so I think what you and I tried to do with our book is constantly test our hypothesis, right? And we even went with a vegan publisher to seal that deal. And so who better to vet our book then the publisher of the China study.
Robb: Right. Right.
Diana: And so one thing that we really harp on a lot is that you can’t have an ethical argument about whether or not you should eat meat without considering the nutritional and environmental ramifications of what a food system without meat looks like. And we also came to some really interesting social justice questions in there about people coming from a position of privilege to be able to push away a nutrient dense food, then imposing their moral stance on others who may not have that privilege. And so that was the real trigger for me in this article, and I think for you too. Was claiming that people who are food insecure or poor should definitely be vegan because of his ethical perspective. And so we really have to dig into that one, I think really hard. So maybe we should just start though, by talking about his background.
Robb: Right. Right. Let’s see here. So he’s the author of Eating Animals and We Are the Weather. He’s a medical school dropout, mostly a fiction writer, lives in DC, graduated from Princeton with a degree in philosophy, board member of Farm Forward, which we’ll talk about Farm Forward here later. It’s one of the outlets that he cites in kind of the way that one would cite something coming from PubMed, or the CDC, or something like that, which is kind of ironic because Farm Forward is this pro-vegan, try to remove animals from the food system, organization.
Diana: And largely seems to be an organization founded by the need to promote his work.
Robb: Right. They don’t encourage regenerative agriculture, they just criticize industrial ag as the bad guy. What else do we have kind of with Foer’s background?
Diana: And he’s not a vegetarian 100%, which I think is really interesting too. So I wonder who his allies are in this space, because when I looked at the board members of this Farm Forward, it wasn’t your typical guys like Neal Barnard, and the PETA folks. So I’m curious who his circle is.
Robb: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to unpack on that. And again, I don’t want this to launch in as like a straw man deal, by discrediting him out of hand because of his background or whatever. But again, I think it’s worth having a discussion around, okay, what’s this guy’s kind of credentials and background? And again, I’m one of these people that I really don’t give two shits what the person’s formalized education is, unless they’re doing surgery or building a bridge. There are certain things that… Like technical understanding is clearly important, but beyond that, if we’re talking about just general information, and thinking about systems, and stuff like that, I’m okay with somebody having no steeping in a particular topic, but then becoming an expert on it because there’s things like the internet, and Ted Talks, and Khan Academy, and stuff like that. So the goal there isn’t to try to discredit him outright because of his background, but just to put a little bit of perspective about where this guy’s coming from.
Diana: Yeah. And I should mention that I do have a medical degree in nutrition. I’m a registered dietician, in case anyone watching this doesn’t know that
Robb: I do not. So you are more credentialed than I am. Do you want me to dig in and start kind of reading out of the main body of what he has? Or do you want to go kind of with the bullet points that we’ve pulled up?
Diana: Yeah. It might be helpful just to read most of it, and then to just kind of… You and I have a lot of notes on this, so maybe if it gets too laborious in his wording, we can just kind of cut to the chase. I mean, basically he’s critiquing the meat industry, and saying that we should not eat meat because of industrial ag and how farm workers, slaughterhouse workers and animals are treated, which I akin to saying, “Well, we shouldn’t wear clothing because of sweatshops.”
Robb: So flesh that out. I think that that’s a really fantastic analogy there. So we can, and should, probably, be concerned about the welfare of animals, the welfare of workers, the conditions that they’re in, some thought around sustainability. And this can apply to food and this can apply to clothing. But in this situation, if we were to use the same analogy that he uses with clothing, we would run around naked, which isn’t necessarily the worst thing, unless you live in Boston in the winter.
Diana: Right. So can you survive without clothes? Just like he’s saying, “Can you survive without meat?” Do we need clothes? I guess not, right? If we wanted to live and heat our houses really high, and never go outside in the winter, and things like that. Yeah, I suppose. But is there a way that you can actually improve the system and make it better for the people that are working there instead of just boycotting the system? And is it possible the people who have the same concerns actually came to a different conclusion and perhaps a deeper, more nuanced solution? Yeah. So that’s where you and I are coming from in general, against this article.
Robb: Let me read some of what he has here. Hopefully folks will read it themselves, but if not, if you’re listening this only as a podcast. “So is any panic more primitive than the one prompted by the thought of an empty grocery store shelf? Is any relief more primitive than the one provided by comfort food? Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision…” Which he has a link to that, “… to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers, has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.”
Robb: So there’s a little background on that too, which I don’t want to get too far out in the weeds, but it’s already been well-recognized that, although we likely… I don’t want to impact COVID a ton, but we probably needed some sort of economic stimulus to keep the wheels on the wagon and not have to everything implode. But it’s also crystal clear that the unemployment benefits are so generous that people are opting to be fired and unemployed because it pays better to be home than to go to work. So there’s multiple layers to this. Not just the fact that some of these people are legitimately working in an environment that fosters the transmission of this airborne disease. But there’s also the reality that we have a system which has incentivized, “Hey man, I’d rather stay home. Catch you in six months.”
Diana: Right.
Robb: Let’s see here. Is there anything else in that one that’s super important? He talks about the Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa. It had 730 cases of coronavirus, nearly 60% of its employees. And another Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa. There were 1,031 reported cases among 2,800 workers. So pretty big deal. On Joe Rogan, Joel Salatin made the case that these mega facilities are perfectly designed for disease transmission, like this. They’re cool, they have recirculated air, people work cheek to jowl on top of each other, the dormitory sleeping arrangements for what are oftentimes migrant workers are super tight. They would literally be better off being outdoors in tents if we were to just think about communicable disease transmission.
Diana: Yeah. And they’re often shouting at each other, so the particles are going more quickly.
Robb: Because of the noise, and the environment, and…
Diana: They’re highly stressed, so their immune systems are likely much more compromised. They don’t have the privilege to be working from home. All of those things. Likely aren’t eating the best diet, things like that.
Robb: I’m kind of liking this. There was a time, gosh, I’ll go ahead and go into this, where feminists were regaining the word cunt. They were like, “We’re going to take ownership of this and make it a non-bad thing.” And the term privilege has given me a red ass for a long time, but I’m kind of liking we’re taking this thing back. So Joel Salatin made this point, that these industrial systems are effectively a monopoly.
Robb: This is not the way that it needs to be done. Instead of having a few facilities, I think like 100, 150 facilities around the US. He’s advocating for tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of decentralized facilities where it’s more open air, it’s lower throughput, much better working environment, higher wages for these people. It’s a more skilled process instead of kind of a factory line operation. Again, this is one, just an interesting feature of a piece like this. It is a black and white thing. There’s either industrial ag or plant into the vegans and there’s nothing presented in between. In fact, without naming regenerative ag, they dismiss it later in the piece in a very offhand fashion.
Diana: Yeah. And I should mention too, that one of the small slaughter houses that we work with in Rhode Island that just opened, actually it’s in Southern Massachusetts called Meatworks. They just sent us an email this morning saying that they’re now booking out 18 months. So we already have the dates for our animals now, and now we have to book dates for the animals that aren’t even born yet.
Robb: Oh, wow.
Diana: Yeah.
Robb: Which that’s a logistical-
Diana: We’ve got a huge problem with the slaughter industry and especially for those of us who want ethical slaughter. It’s a big problem.
Robb: Right. And this is again, mainly because the way that the consolidation has occurred, there are very few players. Like you’ve told the stories of where some of these slaughterhouses may be empty, but they are basically booked because the big players are like, “Yeah, none of you piss ants are going to get in here.” So it’s actually worthwhile for them to… It’s kind of like a receptor site blocking. Like you guys can’t dock there, so you guys go out of business and this is the way that these things just keep on getting bigger and more consolidated.
Diana: Yeah. Especially in the West, that’s really happening a lot.
Robb: Okay. Let’s see here. You mentioned the entitlement perspective. We have a mixture of notes and also the main body. These people, I think to your point, they don’t necessarily have the privilege of going home and working from home. This is true of lots of people, power line workers and what not, but it is hard to imagine an environment that isn’t more amenable for transmitting an airborne pneumonia based disease. You mentioned the meat industry has been allowed to get out totally out of control. That’s not steak’s fault. That’s bad policy, not controlling monopolies, allowing corporate influence over policy.
Diana: Well, and it’s the same thing. We see the same poor treatment of workers in restaurants. In back of house restaurants, dishwashers. I mean, that’s really just starting to come to light too. There’s some restaurants that are starting to pay living wages an
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