Name: The Corporatization of Food
Uploaded: 2022-02-25T18:41:28.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Corporatization of Food' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Corporatization of Food' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-25. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan 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, are 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 70% of the kids are economically disadvantaged
and might go home on the weekends,
like they need school lunch, right?
And now you're flanking the weekends
with nutrient-poor both Friday and Monday.
- And it's this ideologically-driven thing
that's based on this idea that if you eat less meat,
it's better for the environment,
like this thing that they say.
And they also say for health purposes,
like oh, they'll cite the China study.
Like it's one fucking study,
and like no matter how much you say, like hey,
you need to read the rebuttals of the China study.
- Yeah. - Because they're pretty brutal,
and it shows that it's a lot of biased evidence,
and that they really didn't do a good job
of being objective about that.
- So there's one thing that's 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 Lancet,
and it's what most global food policy is set on.
And between their report in 2017 and 2019,
meat was 36 times more likely to kill you.
And there were some researchers, some friends of mine,
that pushed back.
They wrote a letter to The Lancet, which was blocked.
The Lancet, it sounds like,
is finally going to be publishing it
like over the next couple days.
- Finally publishing this thing that says
that meat is 36 more times?
- Oh, no, that's out.
The 2019 global burden of disease is out.
And I actually had a graphic on that just to show--
- So what are you saying is going to be published?
- So some friends of mine--
- For the bottle?
- Right, because these guys didn't provide
any evidence at all as to why meat.
So there's this theoretical minimum risk exposure level
that is supposed to be the safe level of meat you can eat,
and it went down to zero.
According to these researchers,
which is going to be global food policy,
you can now eat zero red meat safely with no--
so they said they did their own systematic review,
but they didn't show any of the evidence,
any of the papers they reviewed.
And there's no research that's strong
that's showing meat is--
there's only one randomized control trial.
If they're not showing any evidence,
they're not showing any papers,
how is this science?
- Right, and so finally,
the Lancet is going to publish this paper
where my colleagues are questioning the results
and where is the science.
And the Lancet, I mean,
the global burden of disease is the Lancet.
So this is a really very big deal.
- So I don't understand.
Like, what is their--
I always thought that with scientific papers,
you had to cite sources, and you had to--
- Mm-hmm.
- So up until about two years ago,
that was pretty consistent.
And then I think we've seen a loosening of standards on that.
- Here's the difference between 2017 and 2019.
So you can see the top part is what we're doing in excess.
And you can see that diets high in red meat used to be a very small percentage
of the cause of death globally, which is even a silly thing.
But it 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 in two years.
- So this is the study, this is--
and this analysis, when they're doing this,
how are they coming to this conclusion?
- Right.
- Nobody knows.
- Nobody knows.
- They just tell you?
They're just saying it.
- They're just saying it.
- So what is their motivation?
- We don't really know.
- I mean, a little tinfoil hattie.
I think that there's a powerful desire to consolidate food production globally.
And this is an amazing way to do it.
It's-- as it is, there's-- I think that six or seven companies produce,
like, 90% 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 intellectual property.
- It's interesting you say that, because Bill Gates is now the largest owner of
farmland
in the United States.
- Yeah.
- We looked at that up once, there was some sort of dispute about that,
but then we looked at it, it said he was, right?
- He wants to be.
- He owns a lot.
Put it that way.
- The Gates Foundation is one of the major sponsors of this study that I was
just talking about.
- So it's fuckery.
So, and, but the thing is that he keeps saying that we've got to eat less meat
and, you know,
we've got to cut our consumption of meat out to be healthy and that we're going
to get used to these meat alternatives.
When a guy like that says that, I'm like, are you making money because of this?
Like, why are you saying that?
And by the way, you look like shit, like, cause if you're eating those, those
plant-based burgers
or whatever the fuck 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 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 fuck are you talking about?
How are you giving any health advice when you look like that?
Your health is piss poor.
I'm not a doctor, but when you've got man boobs and a gut and you're walking
around,
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 processing something into a Beyond Burger.
There's a lot of profit to be made.
But those aren't even selling anymore.
Have you noticed that?
Yeah, they were kind of lucky in a way, like the consumers kind of got in and poked
around that and there was...
Forbes did an interesting piece where there was so much interest from the vegan
community around Impossible Burger and Impossible Foods.
And this Forbes piece was interesting.
It made the case that these people are usually very progressive and very anti-corporation.
We're like the biggest fans or, you know, promoters of this corporatization of
our food system, which is kind of where all this stuff is going.
They're getting duped.
They really are.
But, you know, on the one side there's this story that meat will cause cancer
and diabetes and all this stuff and it's going to destroy the planet because of
carbon emissions and it's using all the water and the land.
And it's a slick story.
It's an elevator pitch.
It's elegant.
It's like buttoned up, airtight.
And then when we start trying to unpack that, you have to dig into ecology and
non-equilibrium thermodynamics and it's not an elevator pitch and it's a lot of
work to unpack what those claims are.
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 I think 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.
Oh, they're tricky.
Hmm.
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 they're all wrong.
What is the message?
Uh, meat is bad for your health and the environment.
And they use these beautiful, simplistic infographics showing, you know,
livestock takes up three quarters of the land.
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, most of the water footprint for a cow
is actually in the grass.
Like it's called green water.
It's like water that's already in the environment, in rain, whether the cow is
there or not, it's going to happen.
Do we have that infographic?
Yeah, I have the water one.
If you want to talk about how much water a burger uses up, you better not be
eating almonds.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You better not be eating or you better shut your mouth if you're eating almonds.
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 water is
natural rain.
And then the blue water is like 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 these things?
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 there's 100 droplets on each side.
And two droplets from the grass-finished beef are lake streams and underground
water.
Three droplets from the typical beef.
And that's what everybody's concerned about.
What people are really concerned about is the draining of the lakes and streams
and the underground water.
So it's not drinking water.
Right.
And the rest of it, the entire graph, is natural rain, which is rain that
exists, moisture that exists in vegetable matter.
Yeah.
And I mean, it's going to fall on this land,
land, which is land that has been grasslands for eons.
Right.
And we can't use it for anything else.
When people say 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 Rome Free Bison Ranch in Montana.
They do both cattle and bison because the cattle don't go up these super steep
mountains.
And so, 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 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 this 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 remarkable profusion because it starts fixing.
If you fix all of the ecosystem issues, then these literal canary in the coal
mines end up getting addressed and we see more bird species come back.
Thank you.