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ARTURO ELIZONDO: Food is emotional.
If I don't eat, you know, eggs, that means I can't have, you know,
the cookies that my grandma used to make when we were little.
WOMAN: Nobody enjoys the concept of less.
MARION NESTLE: People like eating meat.
RUSSEL KATEMAN: So how is it that eating less meat
will change the temperature of the world?
MICHELE SIMON: So it's not just a matter of, oh, I hear information,
and then I go make a change.
ETHAN BROWN: So what happens when people
that you really love and care about
just don't see this issue, right?
You know, do you dismiss them?
BRIAN KATEMAN: One of the reasons why I wanted to make
this documentary is that I'm confused.
I'm a guy who wants to end factory farming.
And I started a nonprofit organization to help make that happen.
And so many people
seem seriously pissed off about it.
I'm confused why it's so difficult to get people to eat less meat.
I mean, there are so many alarms going off from countless scientific bodies
about the problems with our food system, particularly factory farming,
and yet, meat consumption continues to climb.
BILL MCKIBBEN: So at the moment,
the extra carbon that we're trapping is the heat equivalent
every day of about 400,000 Hiroshima sized explosions.
That's enough extra heat that we've been able to melt
most of the summer sea ice in the Arctic.
That's enough extra heat that the world's coral reefs
are now dying at a stupendous rate.
It's enough heat that cities in tropical Asia
are becoming almost impossible to live in.
So, a fight is on to see
not if we can stop global warming, at this point
It's too late for that, but to see if we can stop it
short of the point where it takes out
the kind of civilizations we're used to having.
Global temperatures reached extreme highs this past week.
REPORTER 1: Sixteen rivers and North and South Carolina remain at major flood state.
REPORTER 2: Strongest storm to hit Puerto Rico in more than 80 years.
...now largest wildfire ever recorded in California.
REPORTER 3: More snow at the city's airport in a single day
since they started keeping records.
REPORTER 4: 20 to 30 million people
will become climate refugees in Bangladesh by 2015.
The greenies say raising beef contributes to global warming.
And what is the relationship between meat consumption
and anthropogenic climate change?
So... almost everything that a human being does in the course of a day...
burns some fossil fuel.
Uh, releases some carbon. I mean, from the moment you get up
and turn on the light or the radio or, you know, whatever it is.
But one of the things that produces a fair amount is livestock.
The latest estimates I've seen from the FAO
and others think that if you add up everything,
you may get 18-19% of the world's global warming emissions
coming out of agriculture, especially out of livestock.
So it's not as big, perhaps,
as the drivers were sort of used to talking about.
Power plants and cars and things but it's big,
and obviously it's one of those places where change is possible.
You know, you don't have to wait for someone to build an enormous wind turbine
next to you, you can change what you're having for dinner tonight.
BRIAN: I always cared about the environment
and that became especially true In college.
I was that guy on campus who told people
that they should recycle, walk instead of drive.
Use a refillable bottle of water instead of a plastic one.
And when I learned about the problems with factory farming, I was outraged.
I decided that the sensible thing to do was for me to go immediately vegetarian
with the aim to be fully vegan, and for the most part that worked out.
But there were some problems.
I remember one Thanksgiving in particular,
where my dad was kind of cajoling me to have a small piece of turkey.
And when I popped it in my mouth, my sister said,
"I thought you were a vegetarian, Brian."
They were kind of making fun of me even though I was the only person
at the table who was trying at all.
And I thought, "Well, maybe I'm not a vegetarian,"
but I still cared a lot about the problems.
And so, my friends and I came up with the concept "reducetarian",
wants to inspire as many people as possible
to cut back on animal products, especially people
who were never going to go vegan or vegetarian.
ANNOUNCER: Failure to do so could result in serious injury.
In case of an emergency,
listen for announcements and instructions from the group.
Please familiarize yourself with the location of life jackets on this ferry.
They are located... [CONTINUES INDISTINCTLY]
BRIAN: I love seeing my parents.
I have to practice patience. You know, it's always...
[LAUGHS] When you're different people,
it could be challenging sometimes,
but I love them, and I'm always glad to see them.
I just have to always, you know... Not too many religious debates,
maybe not too much politics and then everything is okay.
My dad is the happiest man alive.
I don't know who dropped him as a kid
or what happened, but he is just always happy.
No matter what's going on, he's happy.
He has faith things will work out.
Everything happens for a reason.
As a kid, whenever I was scared, he would say, "Fear is just acronym
for false evidence appearing real."
He loved to tell me that whenever I was scared.
But as far as, Isn't it hard to eat healthy and exercise?
RUSSEL: No... If my life depended on it,
if I, if I ate meat, a steak,
and if I thought that it would kill me right away, I would never have it.
The problem is, everything is a slow process.
You're having that one drink, doesn't kill you.
You're over eating one meal, doesn't kill you.
It's what you do on a routine basis,
day in and day out that kills you.
And stress is the number one, probably.
What about not what it does to our bodies,
but what it does to the planet,
what It does to other animals. What are...
Yeah, I am not as much a humanitarian as I should be.
I'm very concerned about you, you, my immediate family.
My daughter. You know, my immediate family,
I'm incredibly interested in and my own health,
I'm interested in. I talk to people every day, see a lot of patients.
So I feel like I'm doing my service there.
But people talk about the... What's it called?
What's it with the heat, uh...
-BRIAN: Oh, global warming? -Global warming.
-So-- -That pail out there.
Did it work? Did it work on you?
RUSSEL: I guess not. So I am not that concerned about global warming
to be honest. I shouldn't be saying this,
but I'm being honest with you.
Um, everyone has a certain number of hours in the day,
and, uh, I'm more concerned when I walk in the house,
the temperature of the house.
I'm not, I guess, a humanitarian.
Do you think it's arrogant to think that humans are changing
the temperature of the planet?
[LAUGHS] I don't recall though, which is it, today?
-BRIAN: That's global warming. -The world is getting hotter.
The summer has been very hot here, I don't know.
But the winter, I don't feel it's...
I think it's... a joke.
I don't think there's anything to it.
Why do you think that there's nothing to it?
The world has been going on for how many freakin' years?
And I guess 'cause we don't really see any proof to it.
-What, they put thermometers in places and they measure it? -You know like it hasn't...
-Because things are melting? -Like he said, the summers have gotten...
God is controlling everything.
I think, actually, the summer is the way the summer always is.
Some summers were hotter than other summers.
It's a worldwide situation. Not talking about Staten Island.
I'm not either.
What if I told you that most--
99% of scientists thought that global warming
was a real phenomenon, and it was happening, in part,
because of our actions on the planet?
-Do you think... -[LAUGHS] That's unbelievable.
These people actually study that.
The world is falling apart and they're worried about the temperature.
Or do they think it's going to affect everything?
I don't know. They're worried about the temperature.
Call me crazy, I think they're spending a lot of time
doing something that has not much validity.
In a few years from now, they'll be talking about
if everything is getting too cold.
God is taking care of everything.
He's in control. Leave it alone. Worry about what you do.
-[LAUGHS] -Eat less meat, don't worry about the...
How is it that eating less meat
will change the temperature of the world?
If everyone ate less meat...
What if no one ate meat? They produce less animals.
Then the temperature would change? I don't get this.
I gotta talk to one of these PhD scientists about this.
-Well, let me be the resident... -Spokespersons.
What would they say? So they would say that factory farming
is when you put lots of animals in these very intense environments.
And you have to have all these inputs.
You have to water the feed so that the feed grows.
You have to feed the animals.
This resource.
You have to butcher them, grow them.
You have to ship them far distances.
And through this process there are results,
and these results are greenhouse gas emissions
and these are gasses that go into the atmosphere.
And there's through this process, the planet heats up.
And so it is the same thing when you drive a car,
or you go on an airplane.
Everything that we do has some impact on the planet.
Well, I do think that the technology is getting out of hand,
that that the world is getting not better,
but worse because of all the technology.
But one of these technologies
is the way we raise animals for food, that we raise them with such efficiency,
and at such high volumes that were spewing all of these
-gases into the environment. -Then which is worse, driving cars or that?
Like, where do you pick?
All the fields, you try to help everything?
-Some-- -Amstel cans is a problem?
Some scientists have said that factory farming
produces more greenhouse gases than all of transportation combined.
-So if you're-- -Some scientists say that.
Some scientists say that, but all scientists agree that factory farming
has a major impact on climate change.
Do these scientists eat meat?
-Some do, some don't? -Some do, some don't.
What do you eat... what do you eat for breakfast?
For breakfast,
I either have a smoothie, which has banana, strawberries,
blueberries, or I'll have avocado toast.
Every millennial has avocado toast. You've had avocado toast?
-I never heard of it. -Do you like avocados?
I know what avocados are, but I never heard of avocado toast.
Have you ever had an avocado?
No.
-Have you ever had an avocado? -No.
Okay, I heard of it.
-Where do you go to eat? -Where do they sell this?
Everywhere.
Do you eat Mexican food ever?
-No. -No.
The color turns me off.
[CHUCKLES] So, green...
-Blue. -What colors do you like in food?
-I don't know. -Brown, like meat.
There's very little I can eat right now.
Can you take your finger like this?
I believe in you. We're gonna make history.
You're going to have guacamole for the first time.
Corn chips are right here.
I'll do it with you.
Please take your finger...
-take a scoop. -I'm not taking a scoop.
-You're doing something, we have to do this. -I'll take a speck.
Take a speck.
Take a speck of guacamole.
Oh, my goodness.
Are you ready?
Everybody-- Get some here. At the same time.
All right. One, two, three...
Interesting taste.
I don't like it particularly much, but it's okay.
-I don't like it. -RUSSEL: Corn chip, I like.
-This is good. -[BRIAN LAUGHS]
-Combination's okay. It kills the taste. -LINDA: Oh, God!
I think the way to think about it is,
if it came from the ground, it's healthy.
So a tomato is a little bit better than tomato juice.
-Unless it's just-- -We eat a lot of tomatoes.
RUSSEL: Apparently.
Well, we love tomatoes.
Actually, that's a fruit.
-I know pizza has tomato sauce on top. -We eat a lot of tomatoes.
Does not qualify.
Well, you get the good tomato sauce. The sauce is not good?
A small amount of tomato sauce at the expense of a lot of white flour and cheese.
They used to say pizza.
This is how things change.
They used to say pizza was very healthy.
-It's a whole food, it has everything in it. -Who said that?
-Scientists. -Scientists.
They said pizza was very healthy.
-It had everything. -It had the vitamin C from the sauce,
the tomatoes, and that the cheese...
And the bread, yeah, whole food, has everything.
And the bread but now we know that pizza is not healthy.
We know or believe?
We'll see what they say in ten years from now.
BRIAN: I left my parents' house feeling sad and frustrated.
I love them and they won't do what I think is important
for even their own health.
It's like watching a sinking ship.
And not being able to do anything about it.
But my parents are not alone.
Just about one in ten Americans gets the recommended amount
of fruits and vegetables in their diet.
The average American consumes over 200 pounds of meat each year.
We have some of the highest rates of diet related illnesses in the developed world.
How is this possible?
ERIC ADAMS: You get a reward.
You did a great job on your exam,
we're gonna give you a nice slice of pizza.
If you're good and finish up your chores,
we're going to give you two scoops of ice cream.
No one is saying, "Hey, Johnny, you got in A, so I'm gonna give you some broccoli.
NESTLE: One of the things we know is that physicians
talking to patients about changing their diet
is one of the most important motivators that there is.
If your doctor tells you, you need to change your diet,
you need to eat more healthfully and is specific
about how you're supposed to do that,
you're going to take that very seriously.
But doctors don't know anything about nutrition.
They're not taught in medical school.
They're not even taught how to refer patients
to dietitians or nutritionists to get advice about it.
AUDREY LAWSON-SANCHEZ: There are foods that are served in schools
that the American Academy of Pediatrics have labeled carcinogens.
67,000 pediatricians have come forward and said,
"Do not serve this to children."
Those are still on most menus multiple times a week.
WALTER WILLETT: There's a marketing lobbying
that is constantly conducted by the meat industry.
and that distorts what people hear about what people see.
So there's layer upon layer
where the meat industry does cause confusion.
Consumers hear misleading information.
The American public, does not get a balance.
view of the scientific evidence.
NESTLE: I mean, to explain why doctors don't know
anything about nutrition is really very simple.
The entire medical care system is set up to reimburse doctors
for what they do, not what they prevent.
I mean, if you want to look at it
from a really cynical standpoint, you can ask the question,
"Who would benefit if people ate more healthfully?"
What corporations, what industries, what money making operations would benefit
if people ate more healthfully?
DAVID KATZ: I have a morbid fantasy, Brian,
that that big food, big pharma,
you know, each one CEO smoking a big cigar
in a, you know, big smoky board room with the door closed
strike a deal.
Big food CEO's job is to make people sick and profit from it.
Big pharma CEO's job is to treat the unnecessary illness and profit from it.
They have a good laugh, shake hands.
All right, um, I mean, our culture runs
as if that deal were actually struck that way.
And, you know, if you were sort of
an extraterrestrial intelligence, you came down here
and you saw a place that runs on Dunkin',
you know, everybody's drinking Coca Cola.
McDonald's sponsors the Olympics
and multi-colored marshmallows are part of a complete breakfast.
You know, you had basically conclude there's no intelligent life down here.
BRIAN: Our society gives value to cheap meat and junk food
in a way that I just can't understand.
So how did you get that way?
Did humans evolve eating vast amounts of meat?
So, we know that our earliest ancestors in Africa, let's say,
more than three million years ago had a diet that was probably like that
of the great apes today, largely vegetarian.
And then we get evidence about two and a half million years ago
of the butchery of mammal carcasses.
We find bones with cut marks on them.
Stone tools scattered around those, so we get evidence
of increasing amounts of meat eating.
If our ancestors, you know, a group of them or just one
were walking across the Savannah and then there would be, you know,
half eaten zebra, it was a great idea to eat it, right?
It was, you know, nutritious.
There was a lot of calories, fat in it.
So once they started trying, you know, somebody tried here and another person there,
they were like, "Hey, you know, it filled my stomach?
It was good and I didn't fall sick."
Most of them, at least. So, you know, it was food.
So that's basically why they started eating it.
And they soon learned
that it was caloric and nutritious and good for them.
And the assumption has been that meat eating
was a critical part of our evolution,
in that it gave us access
to a concentrated source of nutrients which freed up energy for us
to evolve a larger brain. Obviously were opportunistic,
they took what they could from there on.
And there was no single paleo diet.
It was a varied diet and at all times in the past,
certainly, it would have included for humans, probably some meat,
but often not a lot of meat and a lot of vegetable foods.
If you want to take a sort of a big picture
approach to this is to start with Native Americans
before Europeans ever settled in North America.
And, you know, what you found were hunting habits that were quite cyclical,
and the Native Americans would, in many ways,
form semi nomadic communities
that would follow game and certainly not hunt
more than they needed to hunt.
When the Europeans... ran out of land
or saw that their population was growing
to the point where
that just wasn't going to be enough land to raise enough food for everybody,
that was one of the incentives for the so-called "age of exploration."
That's what sent Europeans looking for new land.
And when they got here, they found--
Always difficult to figure out how to say this,
but they found an indigenous population who were kind of defenseless.
And they took advantage of that.
And one of the biggest genocides in history
happened as the Europeans took over this continent.
They were faced with the biggest, richest,
most naked patch of land that anyone had ever seen,
and they just started tearing it up and farming it like mad.
And the Europeans brought domesticated animals.
A, because they were not very good hunters,
they didn't know the environment very well,
and Europeans very strongly believed
that to domesticate an animal was a sign of cultural superiority.
It meant that you're in control, it meant that you had some stability in your life.
So you didn't have to go diving into the woods
every time you were hungry to shoot an animal.
They actually saw that as being a kind of mark of "savagery".
And back in Europe, hunting was a sport for the elite, it was a game.
Not something you wanted to be dependent on.
So they domesticated animals.
And did actually an extremely good job
of domesticating animals and breeding animals.
PAUL FREEDMAN: We have letters and memoirs from Italian immigrants
in the late 19th century.
One, I think, goes back to her village,
and the people think she's a liar
when she tells them that she eats meat four times a week.
You'd only have eaten the amount that the average
American person eats today, if you were very, very rich.
You know, Henry VIII probably would've exceeded
the average American meat consumption.
But if you're a middle class person,
no way would you be eating this amount.
MCWILLIAMS: Certainly until the early 20th century,
most Americans were both producers and consumers
of the food that they ate.
FREEDMAN: In 1900, something approaching half of the population,
still lived on farms and made their living off of agriculture.
By the end of the 20th century,
no more than 2% of the population lived on farms,
and I think now, in 2018, it's dipped under 1%.
MCWILLIAMS: And there's a lot of good reasons for that.
Farming is an extremely difficult,
unstable material way of living and making a living,
and a lot of Americans,
when they had an opportunity to leave the farm, left the farm.
FREEDMAN: What's different in increasing numbers in the 20th century
are people who haven't the faintest idea what a farm looks like,
except from the Interstate highway.
PETER SINGER: So if we do think about it,
we have this quite pleasant image of the traditional farm
that essentially is obsolete.
I mean, I'm not saying that those farms don't exist at all,
but they produce a tiny, tiny percentage
of the animal products that we eat.
So that's the disassociation I'm talking about
that either we don't think of the meat as an animal at all,
or if we do think of it as an animal,
we think of it as an animal that really largely comes
from a different era of animal production.
MAN: We had to cede authority over the production of food
to people we didn't know, to not just people, but institutions,
organizations, corporations that began to produce our food.
And that's when food kind of became categorized
with a lot of these other goods that were being mass produced,
where the emphasis was on, you know, producing the most
with the least amount of inputs and efficiency and that kind of thing.
MARYN MCKENNA: At about the same time,
for reasons that are kind of just serendipitous,
the early manufacturers of antibiotics
who who had gone after these drugs in order to solve
the worldwide ancient menace of infectious diseases,
discovered that if you gave antibiotics to animals that were not sick,
then it would affect them in kind of mysterious ways.
The first thing it did was it made them put on weight,
muscle weight, meat basically,
much faster than they would have otherwise.
And then they also figured out
that if they gave antibiotics to animals that already seemed to be healthy,
it would keep them healthy.
Even if you crowded a lot of animals in together.
So suddenly, here are these new drugs
that were just kind of new on the market,
promised a way to make meat more cheap.
I don't wanna say Americans began to care less necessarily about their food,
because, I mean, we're always concerned about our food,
particularly the safety of our food,
but it wasn't as ever present because we were not involved in the production of it,
so we were more likely to just kind of eat what was made available to to us.
MCKENNA: Giving antibiotics to animals
had created this whole entire new health threat,
which was antibiotic resistance arising not from the misuse of antibiotics and medicine,
but from misuse of antibiotics in animals that became meat.
A whole new sort of strand or channel or chain of a public health threat
flowing from agriculture in a way that no one had predicted.
We don't really have any sort of ethic. I mean, as a culture,
we don't have any sort of ethic to manage the way
we enter into this world of abundant, cheap food.
And so we have a kind of sense that we can, "A", eat whatever we want to eat
when we want to eat it, that the food should be cheap,
and that food should be safe.
And those are assumptions that for the most part we can get away with having
and most of the time, our food is safe.
Most of the time, Americans eat what they want when they want to eat it,
and most of the time it's cheap.
And that all sounds great until you look at the consequences on the other end.
So within about five years of the first growth promoters being trialed,
500,000 pounds of antibiotics
were being given to livestock in the United States.
In 2015, that number was 34 million pounds.
MAN: Factory farms are poisoning people's water,
they're polluting people's air, they're poisoning the ground.
MCWILLIAMS: Back to where it started here,
it's that when the consumer's so distant from the producer,
the producer makes sure that we see only what the producer wants us to see.
And it's generally a very sort of happy picture.
And, you know, I think one of the...
One of the first things anybody who starts to actually scratch the surface of the food system
realizes is that this is really not a happy picture at all.
I mean, we're kind of trapped in a food system
that is very, very bad for us,
and it happened so quickly, really,
that we're still sort of waking up to the consequences of it.
But this isn't exactly news to most people.
There have been undercover slaughterhouse videos,
lots of information about the pollution coming out of these farms,
serious questions about the health of the food they're producing,
for decades, and none of it has made any difference.
So I wanted to do what seemed practical,
and the basic premise of my approach was simple.
If we can get the average person
who's eating well over 200 pounds of meat each year,
most of which came from factory farms,
to cut back by even a small percentage,
that would make a much greater difference
in terms of number of animals spared for suffering,
environmental impacts, human health issues,
than getting a small number of highly committed people
to go fully vegetarian or vegan.
I thought I'd cracked it. Made perfect sense to me.
But when I spoke about it at an animal rights conference,
it didn't exactly go over well.
They compared me to Donald Trump.
They said it was inappropriate for me to be there,
that I was watering down their message,
even that I was there to co-op their interests on behalf of the meat industry.
Was I missing something?
I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
So the next year, I got a hotel room
and I went back to have some more conversations.
-Hey, Brian. -How you doing?
Thanks for taking the time to meet me.
I'm great. Thank you. If you could just take a seat right here.
I have found in my life that a lot of people simply don't want to go vegan,
and they tell me that they would never go vegan.
And where that's left me is in a position
where I want to tell them something
that's going to make some change in a positive direction.
So what I tell them is that meat consumption isn't an all-or-nothing premise.
If you're not willing to go vegan,
then you should simply cut back
on the amount of animal products that you consume.
And I'm wondering if you think that's an acceptable premise.
And if not, I'd love to know why.
I don't think it's an acceptable premise
to say that one should eat less meat.
Because when we go to slaughterhouses and see the victims,
the animal victims,
every individual matters, every single one.
Just like every human matters, like in a human rights,
And I think that we need to speak the truth.
Those individual animals do not want to die.
And I think there's a power in just saying that.
Animal rights activists are coming at this
from a very ethical perspective
that animals have a right to live.
And supporting any level of slaughter is wrong.
Even if the animals are hypothetically treated well up until that point,
there's an objection to the act of killing.
Right. Arguably, your dog is treated really well at home.
Would you feel comfortable slaughtering and eating your dog?
Well, the best way to understand
carnism is through sort of a thought experiment.
So just imagine you're a guest at a dinner party
and you're eating a delicious beef stew.
And so you decide to ask your host for the recipe,
and she tells you that the secret is in the meat.
You need to use three pounds of well marinated golden retriever.
So your response is an example of carnism.
Carnism is the invisible belief system or ideology
that conditions us to eat certain animals.
Carnism is why we find cows and pigs and chickens, for example, appetizing,
and the idea of eating dogs and cats
and other animals that we haven't been socialized to think of as edible,
as disgusting.
BRIAN: Part of the challenge is that people feel
somewhat removed from these systems.
And I know, I grew up in Staten Island, New York,
I never felt like when I walked into a supermarket,
when I was purchasing pork loin or a steak or drumstick,
that I was supporting violence.
For some people, that's a big leap.
Um, can you appreciate that?
Oh, you know, most of us grow up,
and we're unaware of the impacts of our actions,
and we are removed and I think it's intentional.
And so, in a sense, consumers are also disempowered
and were discouraged from thinking and paying attention.
And in fact, there are systems and laws, ag-gag laws,
so that we can't see what is happening.
I think I was charged for giving water to thirsty pigs
because the industry wanted us to go away.
We were getting a lot of attention
for doing this act of mercy, like the videos that we had of these incidents went viral.
And so the slaughterhouse industry
asked drivers to call the police
next time they see us giving water,
and most drivers were unwilling to do this.
But there was one driver, Jeff,
who decided to, you know, jump out of his cab and he said,
"Don't give them water." And I said, you know,
"Jesus said if someone is thirsty, give them water."
And then he said, "They're not humans, you dumb, frickin' broad."
And I said, you know, "If the pigs are thirsty, they'll get water."
And then he said, I'll call the police." And I said...
JEFF: What are you doing? 911.
"Call Jesus," and I continued to give water,
and he said he'd slap the bottle out of my hand,
and the pigs were still coming to us,
like, literally coming to the water bottle despite this confrontation,
and then he just drove off.
And then nothing happened for, like, six weeks.
And then a police officer came to my home and issued a summons
and with a charge of criminal mischief, interference with property.
And did you win?
In the end, the judge said that I didn't interfere with property
'cause the property still went to the slaughterhouse.
So there were no-- It wasn't a legal victory.
I mean, we were hoping that the judge would
make an progressive ruling on the fact that pigs are not property
and that they're persons, but that wasn't the case,
so my charges were dropped, but we did not make a legal--
There was no legal victory in terms of the pigs.
All of us in society have a duty to not look away
when someone's suffering but to come close and try to help.
So the purpose of the Save Movement
is to change the cultural norm
so that everyone sees it as natural
and their duty to bear witness.
And so, as in, I don't identify as an animal rights activist,
but you think it would be good for me if I participated in something like that?
-A vigil? -I think you would, um...
I think you would identify as an activist after you bear witness.
Is there an opportunity for me to go to one?
We have a vigil tonight, at Farmer John.
It's in downtown LA.
And they kill 4,000 pigs a day,
and I invite you to come and see what impact it has on you.
I'm nervous. I think it's scary.
And it's odd and weird in a way.
And it's hard to imagine myself doing that.
But I'd like to think about it, and maybe I'll come.
Think about the animals like, do you love animals?
-I do. -Okay.
So I think they want your compassionate eyes
to be there and they want your assistance.
Does it make a difference? Me being there?
You're gonna be a different person after you go there.
BRIAN: If you would have told me five years ago
that I would be witnessing pigs on their way to get slaughtered,
I would have thought you were absolutely insane.
WOMAN: [OVER PA] So how it works,
we have people in front of the slaughterhouse gate.
Those are our gatekeepers.
They're the ones responsible for stopping the trucks.
The drivers will stop when they see people standing in front of the gate.
Once the truck comes to a complete stop,
that's when we approach with our water bottles and water sprayers,
and our gentle, calm voices.
And we're looking for snouts.
Do not start spraying or pouring water inside the truck.
Look for a snout.
If you don't see a snout, it's not your turn to give water.
WOMAN 2: We need water over here.
OFFICER: Careful. Careful. That truck is not gonna stop.
-That truck is not gonna stop. -MAN 2: Don't step up.
WOMAN 3: Stay where you are.
BRIAN: The most painful part...
was making...
dead eye contact with one of the pigs.
I don't know why, but I feel like I'll never forget that look.
And it's just an indescribable feeling
of making eye contact with another being that is suffering.
And there's nothing you can do to help them.
And it's a very painful feeling.
And I think anyone who was here...
whether or not they're vegan or vegetarian,
just if they're a decent human being
would feel the same way, and it's not right.
It's not right.
It's a very lonely feeling.
And I think what I'm most worried about
is that I'll never be the same
for having gone through this experience and that...
it'll just be hard to connect with others in the same way
who haven't had this experience
because it's such a unique
disturbing experience that...
you know, I thought it would be similar
to like watching a factory farming video, but it's not.
There's something about being here,
the sounds of the pigs squealing are awful.
I mean, they're just so painful to hear and the smell,
it smells awful,
and it's just so pathetic, too.
I mean, these animals are putting out their snouts through these holes
just to find a little bit of water,
and the whole thing is just so pathetic.
It's sad. It's awful.
And I don't know what the answer is moving forward,
but I know that this is not the way.
This is not the way, it just doesn't make sense.
I mean, look at this. Look at this...
this smiling happy pig with a fucking baseball hat on.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
And where the trees, you know? Where... [SCOFFS]
We're in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Oh...
It's just... in the middle of nowhere.
And it's...
It's fucking audacious
because the slaughterhouse is right here,
and so to have this mural that depicts something that's so joyous and happy
is so devious and frustrating.
That experience definitely made me feel
a lot more sympathetic to the activists that protested me.
If everyone could see what I had seen here,
would that be enough to end factory farming?
SIMON: I think a mistake that a lot
of activists tend to make
is that it's just a simple matter of information.
That if people just knew,
you know, how animals were treated on factory farms
or how much, you know, excess beef production
is destroying the environment or even that saturated fat
is harmful for our hearts,
that people would just switch
from eating meats to plants.
It's that simple, provide information.
But what that fails to take into account
is the incredible, powerful role
that the environment and marketing plays
and that the environment that people live in every day
shapes their every day food choices.
NESTLE: There are problems with factory farms that
everybody knows about
but nobody's doing anything about them
because of the pressure to keep the cost of food
as low as possible.
So it's not just a matter of, oh, I hear information,
and then I go make a change,
if every single day,
the first thing they see when they walk out the door
is a McDonald's, or a Burger King,
or a Dunkin' Donuts, or a Baskin-Robbins.
Why wouldn't they eat there? It's right there.
It's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good.
And those are the three most powerful drivers of food choices.
Taste, price, and convenience.
Do I think factory farms are good thing?
No, I mean, I've seen them.
I don't want to eat that way.
I'm in a very privileged position
to be able to make that decision.
Not everybody is,
and I'm careful about what I advocate for.
Because if it raises the cost,
if eliminating factory farms raised the cost of food
beyond which most people in the country could afford,
um, that would not be a good thing.
There are trade-offs here that are complicated,
and I don't think the issues are black and white.
I think there's a lot of grays.
BRIAN: Do these food access issues affect
different populations differently?
Does it matter what race you are or wealth you have
in terms of access to fruits and vegetables?
I believe it does.
I believe, depending on where you live,
your zip code determines the quality
of fruits and vegetables you're going to receive.
Far too many
quality stores and supermarkets
really don't believe that inner city communities
would like that quality of food.
That's why you don't see
a Whole Foods in Brownsville.
You see it in Park Slope.
OLYMPIA AUSET: So 23.5 million Americans
live in what are called food deserts.
It means that you're about
two miles away from a supermarket,
and that's interesting statistic to hear,
but how that translates
is that the things that are around you
and available for you to eat most easily
are fast food places and liquor stores.
So these are environments where it's really hard to get
tomatoes and avocados like...
You and I may feel really...
It may feel natural for us to just, "Oh, I'm going to have an apple,"
or, "I'm going to make this smoothie
that includes bananas, et cetera."
But there are places where it's hard
to get the ingredients for a healthy life.
And there's usually triple the death rates
from preventable disease.
ADAMS: We cannot continue to allow
the affluent areas of our country
to have the best quality fresh fruits and vegetables,
and then in the inner cities,
we have just the opposite.
AUSET: In South LA, there are 1.3 million residents
and there are only 60 grocery stores.
So we are in South LA right now.
Um, if you're on the west side,
there are maybe 660,000 people
and there are 57 grocery stores.
Usually in a more affluent area,
there's double the amount of grocery stores as in a less affluent area.
The Brownsvilles,
the South Side of Chicago,
the Liberty City of Miami,
the Compton of California.
They should have the quality food,
just as some of the prestigious area of the country.
AUSET: So, the thing that we do is we make
fresh food affordable
in places where it's hard to find and hard to afford.
So every week we do pop-ups
of organic produce affordably.
We accept EBT And we do education
to show people how to use the food as well.
So, the big thing is just making fresh food affordable
to the people who need it most,
and the places that need it most.
If we don't do that, then we are using food
as an apartheid system.
That would not allow those inner cities
to have quality food.
They can't have junk food
while affluent areas have Whole Foods.
That is not the way America should be.
I'm a really creative person,
and there are a lot of things
that I think that I'm capable of doing.
And sometimes I get upset that this is even a problem.
I think something as simple as food--
It's kind of like, you know, I'm young,
like I'm 27 and you look around
at the planet you've inherited,
and you see some of the things going on and you're like,
"How did humans even mess this up?"
You know what I mean? Like, it's really simple.
Fruits and vegetables should be around.
We've been growing food for thousands of years.
How do we get to the point
where there's all these resources available to us,
and we're in a perfect position to be able to feed everyone,
and there's not food for people.
BRIAN: This is terrible.
Getting people to eat more veggies
and less meat seems impossible.
For all these forces at play that make the default choice,
a meaty one.
But what if we could provide an alternative meat?
One that doesn't come from a factory farm?
What options are out there?
Is there a meaningful difference between
a factory farm and an ideal farm
or, more generally, a non-factory farm?
There's a significant difference between a factory farm
and, a higher welfare certified farm.
And to be clear, higher welfare certified is a broad term,
and there's a spectrum underneath that.
And there are three certifications
that we believe are meaningful
and offer a significant improvement
for farm animals lives
above a factory farming situation.
Both because they set standards
that are appropriate for animals,
physical and natural and emotional needs,
but also because there's a level
of transparency and accountability
that just doesn't exist in factory farming.
In fact, it characterizes factory farming
to have nobody looking at these animals
and to have the complete freedom to do whatever they want.
So, for example, Thanksgiving is coming up
and I've been wrestling with this discomfort
because on the one hand I would prefer
it'd be a plant based meal.
And on the other hand, I don't believe
I can force people to do exactly what I want.
And it hadn't even occurred to me
that I could perhaps
work with that person or even provide a turkey
that did not come from a factory farm
but came from another source.
You got to get to White Oak. [CHUCKLES]
What's White Oak?
White Oak Farms
is a pretty incredible farm down in Bluffton, Georgia,
where they raise at least seven species out on pasture.
They are certified humane Global Animal Partnership stepped five, I believe,
and Animal Welfare Approved.
They have every certification under the sun.
And, while it still involves an animal dying,
if there's going to be a turkey on the table,
I believe it's very important, especially around the holiday,
when people are really thinking carefully
about the food to center that meal on,
you know, certainly plant based food
to the extent that you can
but also on animals that lived a decent life.
While there's still time,
we may have to turn this into a Portlandiaepisode
-where I go visit White Oaks Farm. -Yeah. [LAUGHS]
When you're a 63-year-old Southern rancher,
you talk like this.
People put you in a box.
-Politically and socially. -Hm.
And you know, I don't fit in the box.
I'm a Second Amendment guy
with a gay dog that you better not fuck with.
Absolutely not in general.
But especially with those in the background.
[LAUGHS] I won't.
So today White Oak Pastures, my farm,
is focused on animal welfare,
regenerative land management
and the rural revival of this little community.
And you can't have one without the other.
I was very successful financially
raising cattle industrially.
We live very comfortably.
We have no debt.
And we pay taxes every year.
My view on animal welfare during that era
was if you keep the animal well fed,
plenty of good, clean water
with a comfortable temperature range,
is safe from predation,
and you don't intentionally
inflict pain and suffering on it.
That's good. I'm all for it.
You can't do any better than that.
Except it's not.
During the era
that we industrialized animal production...
By "we", I mean my father's generation and mine.
We were so focused on efficiency,
lowering cost of production
that we came to ignore the fact
that animals need to be able
to express instinctive behavior.
You know, chickens need to scratch and pick.
Cows need to roam and graze.
Hogs need to root and wallow.
You see it's inbuilt.
BRIAN: And so you think of their lives
as being net positive.
They're living happy.
HARRIS: They are able to express instinctive behavior.
And yes, that's what's important.
We feed them, there's feed
those feeders a Non-GMO grain mix.
We feed Non-GMO grain to our pigs and poultry.
We do not feed grain at all to our ruminants
that's cows, sheep, and goats.
They forage only.
Do they each have different personalities?
Can you kind of sense that in them?
Well, you know, we probably got 2,000 pigs.
-Okay. -So I don't-- You know--
It would be disingenuous for me to say that
I know all of them and they have names.
That's not-- We manage.
You see that he has not been castrated.
See his testicles in the back.
No physical alterations.
You know, we don't cut teeth or claws.
I tell people, we used to castrate everything born on this farm
that wasn't named Harris.
-[BRIAN CHUCKLES] -HARRIS: Now we don't cut anything.
You know, I have the peer reviewed third party,
uh, ecological work done on this farm
showing that my holistic management system
using animal impact has actually benefited
this land dramatically over the last 20 years.
In terms of organic matter.
In terms of water holding capacity.
In terms of microbial activity.
BRIAN: And they seem happy.
I think of my dog, Toby.
We live in a somewhat small apartment.
Toby spends most of her life in the apartment.
We take her for walks,
but here, you know,
the pigs get to be free...
That's interesting, that's interesting.
-I 'm glad you brought that up. -Tell me.
HARRIS: So your exposure to animal relationships
-is limited to-- What's that dog's name? -Toby.
Toby. That one relation with Toby.
Or who ever came before Toby and who ever comes after Toby.
When you think about animals and people,
you think about you and Toby.
For me, my relationship with animals is so complex,
I have livestock like these pigs
and I love them in a certain way.
I have work animals like my horse
and my guardian dogs,
and my herding dogs. I love them in a different way.
I got a companion dog Judge who you met earlier.
I love him like you love Toby.
Same relationship.
I got wildlife on this farm
that I love in a very different way.
These microbes in the soil
I love in a very different way.
So I am unapologetic about the fact
that I allow these animals to breed naturally.
We grow them in amount of that is, uh, very humane.
It allows them to express all their instinctive behavior.
And we choose when to slaughter them.
But when we do slaughter them,
we do it ourselves in our own farm plant.
You know, these animals have never been hauled anywhere.
They walk. They're really well bred.
They walk right up there to be slaughtered in that plant.
Dr. Temple Grandin.
-You know that name? -BRIAN: I do.
-HARRIS: Temple Grandin. -BRIAN: Tell us about her.
Doc Grandin, who I know personally,
is the inarguable expert internationally
on humane animal handling and slaughter.
We differ in some little points,
but she knows more than I do.
And she designed that plant to be as humane as possible.
And I've been with--
Unfortunately, been with people when they died...
of old age.
Or malady or injury.
Uh, I'm happy to take you up there and let you see
these animals being slaughtered.
When I go, I hope I go like that.
I believe that my animals
lose their life in a much more humane way
than anything I've ever seen die outside this farm.
And that was one hard part for me
was I have been outside of a slaughterhouse.
We were waiting for pigs that were in trucks
and I think they had to come from a very far distance.
And I was with animal activists who were spraying water
-into the trucks because-- -They needed it.
They needed it and they're thirsty.
And so, uh,
that's currently my only reference for...
Well, let's go in there now.
You can film in here anywhere
except the actual slaughter.
You can go in there.
But, you know, we just It's just not respectful
to animal to... film that.
-But you can see it. Anybody can see it. -Sure.
But you can film anything except that.
-That's the only area... -[BRIAN LAUGHS]
HARRIS: ...where there's not full transparency.
And there's transparency there's just not... Not, you know...
It just doesn't seem right to me.
BRIAN: I understand.
You know, I don't want you to film me when I'm defecating.
And neither do I--
I'm not a pretty person when that happens either.
-So, I can appreciate that. -[HARRIS CHUCKLES] Yeah.
HARRIS: Just everybody deserves a little bit of dignity and respect.
HARRIS: How you doing?
BRIAN: Truthfully, I wasn't entirely comfortable
with all that I had seen in the slaughterhouse,
but I have to hand it to Will
for even letting me take a camera in there.
Still, I had a bigger question.
In the same country that eats one 110 billion dollars
worth of fast food each year,
we're one in eight people eat fast food every single day
and where most people buy factory farm meat in supermarkets.
Would it really work to replace those industrial farms
with farms like this?
Would people pay more?
Maybe if we are really to end factory farming,
we'll need an easier solution.
People like eating meat.
I mean, one of the things that fascinates me
about the vegan world
is how much the vegan world
wants artificial meats.
They miss it.
That's weird to me.
I don't understand that.
You know, I think you can eat a perfectly adequate diet
and never eat meat at all.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
But why have to have artificial meats.
I don't understand it.
BROWN: So, we did this study with the University of Michigan.
They did a life cycle analysis of our entire production process
including supply-chain then came back with some
actually startling statistics about the environmental impact
of what we're doing better than I thought they would be.
And so water is a great example.
We use 99% less water than a conventional beef burger.
That just shocked me, you know. And then 93% less land.
And this is where I got to pause for a second, because when you think about
the American farmer and you think about, they have lets say 100 acres.
If they can produce the same amount of burgers,
right, with only seven acres,
they have 93% of their land or 93 additional acres
to do something else with their own income, right.
But then you look at climate, you know the emissions
that we're producing are 90% less
in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than the emissions
from a conventional burger and, lastly, energy.
We spent half the amount of energy, so it's pretty impactful.
MIYOKO SCHINNER: This is going to be the biggest
extinction in history.
We're going to be losing all sorts of species over the next 50 years.
It's absolutely frightening.
And so we have to start thinking about that.
We have to become responsible as leaders in the food industry.
We have to start taking responsibility for our actions,
for the food that we put out and the food that we create
has to invite people, entice people, inspire people to eat a better diet.
ELIZONDO: Food is emotional.
It's so tied to culture, you know. I'm Mexican.
You know, we grew up eating very iconic dishes, right.
Often times you have cheese or eggs
or meat as a core part of that dish.
So it's very... I think it's difficult for most people
because when you tell them to eat something differently,
it's like they're making a tradeoff, right? Okay, if I don't eat,
you know, eggs, that means I can't have,
you know, the cookies that my grandma used to make
when we were little and when we were growing up.
So in the same way that brewers use yeast
to convert sugar into alcohol to make beer and wine,
or the way that bakers use yeast to convert sugar into carbon dioxide
to leaven bread, yeast can also convert
that same sugar but into protein.
And so we are able to produce proteins, like egg proteins,
to be able to replace eggs and other ingredients in those kinds of products.
Because meat is so intricate, the process of building it
from plants is pretty complex.
You know, it starts with a canvas.
And that canvas for us is the structure of the protein.
And so we create that platform or that canvas
by stitching together the protein that we get from plants
into the structure of muscle, roughly from the human centric perspective.
And so we begin with that canvas, which is, uh,
the structure of the protein, and then you think about,
how do I make the flavor and aroma of meat,
which is so intimate to humans and our relationship with meat.
It's so familiar to us. And once we identify those,
we then try to match those implants, we try to find
analogous molecules in plants and then bring them together
in a way that with heating,
and with the release of aroma and the release of flavor,
they communicate to the human sensory experience
in the same way that those molecules would in animal protein.
So what do you think about plant based meats
or, increasingly, the idea of cultured meat?
Lab based artificial meats are off my radar.
They're artificial.
And I'm not interested.
I'd rather eat meat from an animal that was raised under conditions--
Under the best possible conditions.
And that meat is available to somebody like me
who has enough money to pay for it.
As a public health physician whose job has always been human health,
I've reached the conclusion that if we don't deal with the impact
we're having on the planet,
every other aspect of human health is moot.
There are no healthy people on an uninhabitable planet.
Is there a difference between cell-based meat and conventional meat?
At the cell level, when you look at it, it will be the same.
Except that, since we control everything
about the environment that the cell is in, we can make it better.
So there's only so much that you can manipulate an animal
to give you a better tasting meat,
because an animal hasn't evolved
to give you tasty meat, it's evolved to keep us all healthy
and to proliferate its own genes.
In our case, we're able to control the entire environment
the cell is in.
So the pH, the dissolved oxygen, the temperature, et cetera.
We control all the amino acids, fatty acids, salts, minerals, things like that.
They go into the cell and then everything that comes out the cell,
which means we can make the food, the cell taste better
and be healthier than anything that's already out there.
And of course it will be more sustainable as well.
BRIAN: What is that?
So this is the flask where the cells are on.
You can't see them with your naked eye,
but there's a ton of cells in the bottom of this.
And this is the media here. This red liquid is all the nutrients
that the cells need to grow to proliferate, to move around.
And this flask is just a surface room to grow on.
SPEARS: Last July we went and visited a pig in Marin
which is just north of San Francisco.
And we took a very small biopsy from the pig, live pig.
She ran off into the farm yard.
So we came back here to Indiebio where our labs are.
And we take those cells and we begin to multiply them.
So we proliferate the cells.
And so that took a few weeks.
And then you have a certain mass of cells,
and then you separate them and you induce them into muscle and fat.
And then at that point, you can combine them together
and you essentially have ground meat.
In our case, ground pork or minced pork.
And then we took that and we made sausages with them.
I don't think people are used
to thinking about meat in terms of eating cells.
So yeah, I think, actually, if you ask people,
"What do think about chemicals?"
Right? They think chemicals are bad.
But everything is chemicals, right? You, me, the air.
-Right. -Food is chemicals.
Like, if it's not chemicals, it's not matter.
-[LAUGHS] -So the same thing with a lot of cells, right?
People might think cells are bad, but we're made of cells.
Our food is made of cells. Apples, meats...
Most of anything we eat is made of cells.
BRIAN: I know some people are skeptical about
cell-based fish, in that to them,
it resonates as a processed food.
-Hm. -I mean, you can understand.
"Do we really want to have our food come from a lab," they might say.
I used to be a beer seller, it's like a sommelier,
but for beers it's called a cicerone.
And I've been on a million brewery tours,
and on an any given brewery tour,
you can find somewhere in the brewery a place where you've got scientists
in white lab coats doing experiments.
And what they're doing is like, figuring out new flavors,
and new ways to make different types of beer.
But then, that beer is produced in a brewery
and that's not called lab-grown beer.
Our process is similar, we do our research in a laboratory
and then our production in a facility.
And so, if we're like "lab-grown fish", they're lab-grown beer.
And in fact, most snacks anybody eats are tested and prototyped
in a lab and then produced in a facility.
So if, you know, like, chips aren't lab-grown chips,
we're not lab-gown anything either.
The insulin protein used to come from pigs.
In order for a diabetic to get their insulin,
you had to kill a pig, extract the insulin from the pancreas,
purify it and inject it into people.
And that's how every diabetic got their insulin protein from prior to the 1980s'.
And you needed over 51,000 pigs to make one kilo of insulin.
So it was incredibly inefficient technology
to make this very functional, useful protein for the world.
Fast forward to today, almost all insulin is made using fermentation.
SELDEN: Basically anything you can think of or find online
about like 3D printing organs, that also is applicable to this field.
Because, basically what we're doing is 3D printing organs
just instead of trying to get more and more detailed
to make something more and more functional.
We just need it to be much cheaper and much faster.
It strikes me as I'm speaking to you that we're talking so much
about how the products are made,
but when I think about convectional animal products,
I never really thought about how those are made,
and when I think about it, I'm not particularly happy.
And I don't think most consumers really understand how we go from a cow
to let's say, a steak.
It may just be that if these products exist, and they're delicious,
and they're affordable that people will just eat them,
and they're not going to even bother to care about what feels like fancy words to me,
like, a bio-reactor, or a scaffolding, or cell lines and so on.
Yeah, you know, I really agree with that.
We're not gonna take, you know, any effort to conceal what we're doing.
We're not going to hide it. We really want it to be available,
but it doesn't seem like people are that interested in how their food is made.
And so I don't think we're gonna lean on this as messaging
when we, you know, bring this to the public.
It's interesting, like, we're, you know, often asked, like,
exactly how this process works and people really, really want to know,
but they never seem to ask how their actual food right now is made.
And they really don't seem very interested in that.
I feel like if we have all this, you know, in-depth coverage
of exactly what we do, why do they have ag-gag laws?
Why are we not allowed to film inside of the places that they actually produce food?
It seems like an unequal playing field.
I've seen conflicting data around the environmental footprint of cell-based meat.
Why is there so much confusion about that?
And is there really a confusion?
Are you referring to the very recent study that came out this week?
So that study in particular looked
at the environmental effect of cell culture meat on climate change
on a 1,000 year horizon.
One thousand years.
Our method of producing meat is very highly reliant on energy,
and they use an energy system which is reliant on fossil fuels.
So in their study, they say energy comes from fossil fuels
which emits a tremendous amount of CO2.
All of human society right now is predicated on the idea that we'll be off
of fossil fuels within a decade or two.
And so, a lot of the cell-based meat industry,
in terms of it being good for the environment
is very much predicated on the idea that we're going to be
off of fossil fuels.
But what's great about it is that it's giving us the potential to do that,
'cause right now, especially with land animals like cows,
there isn't a method.
So if you're using them, we can try and reduce,
but we're never a actually going to hit a point
where we can just use clean energy to power a cow, whereas this, you can.
BRIAN: More people have gone to...
-JONES: The moon. -BRIAN: The moon than have tried this.
Amazing.
-It tastes just like chicken. -Yeah.
I love everybody's first reaction to it.
There's like a little bit of a surprise shock
on how good it actually tastes.
We're always still trying to work on it.
Texturally, we still think we can continue to improve it,
but the flavor profile is fantastic.
It tastes really good, and I know it's very simple
to say that it just tastes like chicken but it really does.
JONES: That's the best complement we can get.
That means we're doing it.
BROWN: You will see the quick-serve restaurant industry
transition in this direction in a way that's really significant.
You're seeing it with Car's Jr. and they've been an amazing partner.
And A&W in Canada, they've been absolutely outstanding.
Their businesses are booming with respect to these sales.
So they're are seeing that. And you'll see
the rest of the industry come along.
I think that there's very little reason
to continue to use animal protein in a fast-food setting.
I mean, it's really about the whole experience.
And we can provide plant-based meat
that provides every bit of satisfaction to the consumers in those settings.
What I'm hearing is a theme of meeting people where they are
because, you know, I would love it if my parents, for example,
-ate a vegetable on occasion. -Right.
But if they're going to be making a decision around meat,
I would rather them have a plant-based meat, like "Beyond Meat"
than have meat from a factory farm.
And that's the sense that I'm getting from you.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's all about...
So what happens when people that you really love and care about
just don't see this issue, right?
You know, do you dismiss them?
You know, do you circle the wagons and say,
"I'm only gonna hang out with people who think just like me,"
or do you, as you say, meet people where they are?
BRIAN: Not long after this, something I had never expected to happen happened.
So I feel like a lot has changed since the last time
we were at a table and talked about our diets.
Forty-five pounds have vanished into thin air,
that's one thing. It really is amazing.
How did it happen?
The whole key is health.
People should be concerned about their own health.
It's critical, especially as you get older.
When you're younger, you can get away with it.
-So what would you say to someone-- -Don't be a schmuck.
-But you were a schmuck a couple of years ago. -Absolutely.
That's amazing. I feel very hopeful for the first time.
-It's incredible. -That's funny.
So how do you get people to change?
I thought I was in good health. That's the amazing thing.
That's what I don't understand. How could you think that? You were slightly overweight,
-you had Type 2 diabetes. -A person could think they're rich
and then they win the lottery.
You get used to a certain thing.
I guess I was healthier than a lot of my friends.
I still felt okay.
-Okay. -But I was 40 pounds overweight.
And looking back, I used to get tired. I thought it was normal,
as you get older that you get tired.
I feel better now at 67, almost 68,
-than I did at 40. -But what did you do?
What's happened since? You look thinner.
First of all, when you're thinner, you have more energy.
It's like carrying around the bowling ball.
I don't know how I did it all those years.
But you get used to it. You don't know the difference.
-I even think clearer. -But what happened?
A change in my diet changed my life.
What did you do?
So I gradually ate less meat. That's the essence of it.
And when you eat less meat, you eat more vegetables.
It was a process.
I'd say the first time I tried a bowl of broccoli, it seemed--
Maybe it's the green part-- It seemed boring.
But then I got to look forward to it.
You have to be ready for things, I think.
And once you get small results, it's really energizing.
Then you do more and more. It's really cool.
BRIAN: I don't know if we'll end factory farming.
There're a lot of smart people who have come up with some good solutions,
but each one seems to have its own pros and cons.
Plant-based meat doesn't yet taste exactly like animal-based meat.
Cell-based meat is at least a couple of years away from being on the market,
let alone at a price the average consumer can afford.
And there're a lot of questions about regenerative agriculture.
And whether it can live up to its environmental promise while meeting current demands.
What I do know is that just about everybody agrees
that we should be eating far more plants.
And in order for there to be a world without factory farms,
there needs to be less demand for meat.
Way less.
Anyone who can, must make an honest effort to cut back
on the amount of animal product that they consume.
We can't give up on the possibility
that we can make things better
even when it feels agonizingly slow.
I mean, if my dad can make a shift in this direction,
anybody can.
We're running out of time.
And I believe that every effort, no matter how small,
will count in the end.