The Corporatization of Food

the jurgen experience 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 gonna 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 seventy percent of the kids are economically

disadvantaged and might go home on the weekends like they need school lunch right and now you're bet you're 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 right oh they'll cite the china study like it's one [ __ ] study and like no matter how much you say like hey you need to read the rebuttals of the china study

yes they're pretty brutal and it's 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 that's coming up 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 landsat 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 landsat which was blocked the landsat uh it sounds like it's 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 um 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 uh as to why meat so there's this theoretical minimum

risk exposure level that you know is supposed to be the safe level of meat you can eat and it went um down to zero according to these researchers which is going to be a global food policy you can now eat zero red meat safely with no so that they said they did their own systematic review but they were they didn't show any of the evidence any of the papers they reviewed and there aren't there's no research that's strong that's showing meat is there's only one randomized control trial if they're not showing evidence any evidence they're

not showing any papers how is this 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 landsat i mean the global burden of disease is the landsat this is a really very big deal so i don't understand like what is there i always thought that with scientific papers you had to cite sources and you had so up until about two years ago that was pretty consistent and then i think we've seen a loosening of standards 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 like the cause of death globally which is even a silly thing but it was 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 how's that in two years so this is the study this is and this analysis when when they're doing this

how are they coming to this conclusion right nobody knows nobody tell you they're just saying it they're just saying it so what is their motivation we don't really know um i mean a little tin foil hatty i i think that there's a powerful desire to consolidate food production globally and this is an amazing way to do it it's uh the as it is there's i think that six or seven companies produce like 90 percent of the food that's consumed globally but 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 like they want it to be operated like ip like software they want you to be able to own the 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 there was some sort of dispute about that but then we looked at it said he was is one of the major sponsors of the study that i was just talking about so

it's [ __ ] so and but the thing is that he keeps saying that we've gotta eat less meat and you know we've got to cut our consumption of meat out to be healthy and then 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 like why are you saying that and by the way you look like [ __ ] because if you're eating those those plant-based burgers or whatever the [ __ ] you're doing like you're obese like a guy

like that telling people about he's got these breasts and this 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 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 like literally like a non-athlete trying to coach professionals like what the [ __ ] 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 you have these like toothpick arms i'm like hey buddy you're not healthy there's a lot of profit to be made in in processing something into a beyond burger there's a lot of profit to me but those aren't even selling anymore have you noticed that yeah we're kind of lucky in a way like the the consumers kind of got in and poked around that and there was uh forbes did an interesting piece where they there was so much interest

from the vegan community around impossible burger and impossible foods and the swarps 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 or you know promoters of this corporatization of our food system which is kind of where all the stuff is going what we're duped they really are but you know it's on the one side there's a 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 and it's a it's a slick story it's a it's an elevator pitch it's elegant it's like buttoned up airtight and then when we start trying to unpack that i 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 to unpack what those claims are and then you know 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

you know turn food into intellectual property that they own but that really seems to be what's going on with this and and i think they're they're not they've realized consumers aren't going to just buy it in the grocery store and by the way it's twice as expensive like beyond burger is twice as expensive as organic grass-fed beef per pound wow but they sell it in half-pound packages right next to the pound packages and so they trick you but so why not just make it policy and indoctrinate these kids from kindergarten to age 12 with these

messages like the meatless monday messages are all wrong like where's the message uh meat is bad for your health and the environment and and they use these beautiful simplistic infographics showing you know livestock takes up three quarters of the land but but okay but it's not talking about the types of land you know or that your burger used 10 bathtubs full of water but then we're not talking about okay the the 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 you want to talk about how much water a burger uses up you better not be eating almonds exactly yeah you better not be you better shut your mouth if you're eating almonds right yeah those things are ridiculous so here's the water one and i've broken it down land use feed use but this is just the water one and so what most people don't get is that there's you know green waters natural rain and

then the blue water is like what when you look down on a map and see rivers and lakes so 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 a little different so we're at the bottom i have the percentages so it's 94 green water for typical beef and 97 green water for average and this is average like in vermont it might be different than nevada but so they have it broken down to these droplets and

these droplets 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 so and that's what everybody's concerned about what people are really concerned about that's concerned about the draining of the lakes and streams and so it's not drinking water right and the rest of it the entire graph is natural rain which is rain that exists with moisture that exists in vegetable matter yeah and i mean it's going to fall on this land which is land that has been grasslands for eons

and we can't use it for anything else when people say we we use all this land for cattle that's you know bison are a good example i'm good friends with the folks that own roam free bison ranch in montana they they do both cattle and bison because the cattle don't go up these super steep mountains and so the you know they're these grassland mountains that the bison graze and if they don't graze it then the whole ecosystem just collapses the the the ecosystem has been this plant animal interaction for millions of years and this plant

animal interaction is based on the animals manure fertilizes the plants the animals eat the plants dung beetles insects birds you know all the stuff so 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 and 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 in remarkable profusion because it starts fixing if you fix all of the ecosystem issues then these literal canary and the coal mines end up getting addressed and we see more bird species come back