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I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Robb Wolf for over a decade and over the course of that time and through our work together on Sacred Cow, we’ve had so many conversations that we wish we would have recorded. 

During these Fireside Chats, you’ll hear us talk about recent studies we find interesting, current events, complex food issues that need deep exploration, and other related hot topics that have captured our attention.

Join us for today’s chat as we discuss:

• How we met
• The structure of the book Sacred Cow and how it hits the three main points of controversy in a meat inclusive diet
• The reality of beef consumption in America
• The problem with profitability in Impossible Burger
• How sometimes the best use of land is grazing
• Well For Culture’s Instagram post about the importance of bison to Indigenous people
• The reality of humans trying to improve upon nature
• The study from India that attributes positive pregnancy outcomes solely to eating a vegetarian diet
• Historical lessons to be learned from demonizing meat consumption
• How being a proud meat-eater affects Diana’s social life
• The Indian Express article about the first ‘Climate Change’ diagnosis
• How the cause of wildfires should not only be attributed to climate change and how mismanagement is, in part, to blame. Don’t worry – we are not climate change deniers!

Resources:

• The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf
• The Dark Horse podcast
• UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 26)
• Global Food Justice Alliance
• Well For Culture
• The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann
• Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside by Nick Offerman
• Dr. Sylvia Karpagam’s article on India’s politics and ideology around food 

Connect with Robb:

Website: The Healthy Rebellion

Instagram: @dasrobbwolf

LinkedIn: Robb Wolf

Facebook: RobbWolf.com

Twitter: @robbwolf

YouTube: Robb Wolf

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Episode Credits:

Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Meg Chatham, and our editor is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.

A big thanks to Nakano Knives for their support of my work and the podcast. I’ve been using their knives for a couple of years now and I love them. They are beautiful, easy to hold, and a fantastic value. And just in time for the holidays, you can use my offer code DIANA for 10% off plus get a $25 voucher toward your next purchase. Who doesn’t love a new knife, right? 

This episode is also sponsored by Paleovalley, my go-to, grab-and-go source for products that prioritize nutrient density in an industry that prioritizes everything else. Their epic lineup of products includes Organic Supergreens, 100% Grass-Fed Beef Sticks, Grass-Fed Organ Complex, 100% Grass-Fed Bone Broth Protein, and low-sugar snack bars. Visit their website here and enter the code SUSTAINABLEDISH for 15% off your first order.

Quotes:

“Is it ethical to tell people who can’t have the privilege to push away nutrient-dense meat, who are dying to get it, that they shouldn’t eat it because you are uncomfortable with how animals are raised?”  – Diana Rodgers, RD

“People assume that Americans are eating these 72 ounce Tomahawk steaks every night, like Fred Flintstone. And that’s just not the reality. Beef consumption in the US is less than two ounces per person per day.”  – Diana Rodgers, RD

“An often overlooked piece of this whole story, which is what’s being suggested to traditional peoples,  is that you all are going to abandon all of your traditional food systems, and you’re going to eat exclusively of the output of the industrial row crop food system.”  –  Robb Wolf

“The assumption that we’re going to go in and do something that supersedes nature and improves upon it, with no deleterious side effects is just kind of ridiculous.”  – Robb Wolf

Transcript:

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Welcome to a new kind of podcast thing Robb and I are doing called “Fireside Chat” on my end. I don’t know what Robb, you’re gonna call this. But basically, we’re just killing two birds with one stone. Basically, it is how we’re doing it.

Robb Wolf   

Yes, we chat a lot anyway. And usually when we’re done chatting, we’re like, “damn, we should have recorded that.” Because we just, you know, bitch and pontificate and you know, yell, “get off my lawn” multiple times. So we figured why not record it and get dual purpose out of this. So normally, I have The Healthy Rebellion Radio and or the Salty Talks. And so this is from my side of the house kind of nesting under the Salty Talk banner, and we’re going to be looking a lot at kind of food, food policy, global food issues, it will bleed over into some other things also, because that’s just the way our world is. It’s a complex dynamic system and there is not a way to, to just Sesame Street this whole thing and make it super simple and apolitical. And all the rest of that. So yeah,

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Yeah. So maybe for folks that are listening to my podcast and don’t know who you are, can you just give a brief intro, and maybe I’ll do the same.

Robb Wolf  

The high watermark of my career is being the co-author of your book, Sacred Cow. And I’m a former research biochemist, have written a couple of New York Times bestselling books and have been active in and around this ancestral health scene for the better part of 20 years. And I guess you should do the same thing for although literally all of my folks know who you are. But we’ll… just in doing diligence, we’ll do the same. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. So, Robb, we met in like 2010 or so or something… long time ago, at the very first Ancestral Health Symposium conference through Mat Lalonde, our mutual friend, over at Harvard, and I was in the Nutritional Therapy Association program. I had to at the time, there was an assignment where I had to read a book and follow a diet prescription in it and write about my experience. And so I read this book called The Paleo Solution, decided to follow it. It made a remarkable improvement in my health, I was already gluten-free, because of a celiac diagnosis at age 26, that I had actually had my whole life, but finally found out then. But then shifting away from the higher carb kind of mostly vegetarian type diet that I was doing into, you know, more animal products, more animal fats, and kind of lower carb in general kind of steering away from rice and lentils and the other corn, the other grains that were giving me problems. Just, I mean, my life went from like black and white to color, Wizard of Oz level. 

And so we’ve been chatting a long time, and the sustainability food systems stuff has always been something we’ve chatted about. And so really excited to, you know, have the book under our belt. The paperback just came out for folks who don’t have the hardcover and want to read it. A lot of people think that, well, I saw the film so I didn’t, you know, didn’t want to read the book. But it’s so different than the film.

Robb Wolf  

Do you want to talk about that a little bit? I mean, the, or maybe I’ll launch in on that just really quickly. The book was our opportunity to… so in broad brushstrokes, both the book and the film address the ethical, environmental, and health considerations of a meat-inclusive food system. I think, is maybe a fair way to put that. And any one of those topics alone is probably deserving of a multi-volume treatment. And I think when we finished our rough outline, initially, for the book, it was nearly 600 pages. And to the credit of our publisher, we managed to get it down just a hair under 300 pages. And I still think it’s very, very good, probably much more accessible than it would have been initially. But there’s kind of a… when we’ve had debates, both online and in real life with the vegans, healthier promoters, you know, whatever. There’s a very predictable pattern that emerges. When we’re talking to folks, it’s like, well… and it’ll depend on where you jump in, whether it’s the health part or the environmental part or the ethical part. And then it just becomes this Whac- a-Mole game where you address one issue and then another thing pops up. 

And I have to give a real hat tip to Diana because early in the kind of formative process of writing the book, we were really going to tackle the ethical angle first. And but pretty quickly, you realize you’re like hey, if you can’t reasonably feed a human properly without animal foods, and if it that was one big thing that was a big aha. It’s like, so that would change the ethical story a lot. Because there’s a whole duality to the ethics there. And then if the environmental side of this thing is such that, oh you can’t actually have a food system goes on forever, without animal product inputs, because the whole thing grinds to a halt, because all the topsoil is gone at some point, and that it’s all it’s all for naught. That changes the, you know, the ethical considerations too. And so we end up addressing these topics, you know, including, you know, does cattle use huge amounts of water does make… use huge, you know, large amounts of land. And we end up kind of tackling these things in what has become a very predictable kind of sequential process. When people raise one question, and then we address that, then there’s a follow on piece. And in the book format, it’s very amenable to addressing that in a serial format. And I think people get an enormous amount out of that, because you have this logical flow of consciousness, that almost no matter where you drop in it, it’s going to bring them to this, hopefully, pretty satisfying conclusion. The film covers a lot of the same stuff, but it’s much more of a broad picture story addressing these topics, instead of kind of almost like a graduate thesis starting at one point, and then working its way forward. And then throw in whatever other thoughts you have in on that.

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Yeah, I was just gonna mention, you know, we have that sort of choose your own adventure, which I guess was trademarked, and we couldn’t use that term, but it’s basically, you know, concerned about this, you know, page 72, whatever. So we take all those common questions that I mean, over the last 10 years or longer, we’ve just seen as very predictable questions, you answer the methane, then it’s the water, then it’s the feed, or maybe they asked about the feed before the water, but they’re always gonna hit these certain things. We also toyed with, you know, environment first, but it’s like nutrition. It’s just black and white, but animal-sourced nutrients are essential for humans who are omnivores, period. And that ties into the ethics, as you mentioned, because is it ethical to then tell people who can’t have the privilege to push away nutrient-dense meat who are dying to get it, that they shouldn’t eat it because you are uncomfortable with how animals are raised? Right? 

Robb Wolf 

Beautifully said. Yeah. 

Diana Rodgers, RD   

And so basically, you can’t have a reasonable ethical debate with anybody unless they fully appreciate the nutritional contribution that animal source food makes to people, you know, especially in developing countries, but also in the US when we have this, you know, crisis of people who are over overfed, but undernourished. Right? So I would argue that you know, increasing… prioritizing protein for both malnourished and overfed people is useful, right. And that’s where, you know, meat period is healthy. And, and that ends up getting us in all kinds of trouble, because a lot of the grass-fed folks will say, “No, less meat, better meat.” And that’s not okay. Like, it’s ethically not okay. Right, from a public health perspective. And I have people who don’t understand the nutritional contribution of meat who don’t get that piece. Well, why… you know, we don’t have to eat meat. Well, yeah, we kind of there’s a lot of people that do need to eat meat or animal source foods. Maybe it’s, you know, I think… you know, you could make the case that a vegetarian who maybe gets enough eggs and dairy products can kind of be okay. You know, but most people do very well, when they prioritize protein and cut out ultra-processed foods, which are the real villains, and they’re the ones who are winning when we in-fight like this when we’re debating about, you know, less meat, better meats. Only grass-fed regenerative meat, you know. The whole food system is broken, we definitely need to be moving towards a more regenerative system. But that’s just not where we’re at right now. And even feedlot finished beef… This is going to cause all kinds of comments and stuff. But even feedlot finished beef, the majority of their life is spent on pasture. Only about 10% of their overall diet is grain. And, you know, animals can convert grain to protein at a pretty amazing rate. And so with cattle, it’s about 2.5 pounds of grain corn to one pound of beef. So as a dietitian, what’s more important? Do we want someone eating two and a half pounds of corn or do we want them eating one pound of beef?

Robb Wolf  

Right in the book you did the breakdown looking at the caloric inputs of you know if you want to hit a certain protein level, and this is still neglecting, like essential amino acids, cofactors like zinc and magnesium and iron, we ignore all that stuff. And we just look at protein, I think it was like close to 800 calories to have kind of been and rice approach to equal what you would get with 250 approximately calorie or less

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Less than that. Yeah. It was like about 180 to 200 calories worth of beef to about 750 to 800 calories worth of beans and rice. And, and who and, and they I mean, I do go out into the vitamins and minerals that you’re still not going to get with that much beans and rice. But that’s just to hit your protein threshold. And that’s overall protein. That’s not, as you said, amino acids, because we don’t have a protein requirement, we have amino acid requirements, which are the little things that make up protein.

Robb Wolf   

Tinkertoys that make up protein.

Diana Rodgers, RD    

So, when we look at just the nutritional inequity, of telling people that they need to eat less meat, and less than what? That’s the other thing, it’s like, you know, people assume that Americans are eating these 72 ounce Tomahawk steaks every night, like Fred Flintstone. And that’s just not the reality. Beef consumption in the US is less than two ounces per person per day. And so, you know, our chicken intake has gone way up. Chicken is about 30% less nutritious than beef. But we see it as a cleaner meat, probably because it’s white and has less bones. And it reminds us less of death. And it’s more socially acceptable to eat chicken. Because chickens look less like dogs, probably, you know. Anyway, so I could just go on and on.

Robb Wolf  

There’s a lot to unpack, you know, and I think that this is that, like, we just had this… this interesting thing ended up in my inbox this morning, where you know, talking about a diet, a health diagnosis of climate change, which we’ll dig into in a minute. But these topics are inherently super complex. And like, I’m a big fan of The Dark Horse, podcast, Bret and Heather. And they constantly talk about, you know, complex systems, like the challenges of understanding or navigating complex systems. And usually, more complexity doesn’t fix complex systems. And this is where things like Impossible Foods and whatnot are such a laughable solution to a global food policy. And fortunately, at least, in that case, we’re seeing the market speak around, you know, it’s not just the market, it’s their infrastructure like they can’t make this *bleep* profitable, because it’s massively energy-intensive, labor-intensive resource-intensive, versus what we’ve been talking about, which is sunlight, grass, arable land that is mainly usable for grasslands, and then the organisms that have co-evolved in that space. That’s a shockingly efficient system. 

Even when people piss and moan about like, well, you’re using a lot of lands, but what else are we going to use that land for? We’re going to turn it into strip malls. We can’t use it to raise other food like it’s not croppable. And so it evolved as grassland, it’s amenable as grassland. So we’re gonna use that. And that is, in fact, a remarkably efficient system. There are some screwy economics of it because of the consolidation of meat production and whatnot. But a… even doing a compare and contrast, like, why is Impossible Foods failing, and it’s not just like social stuff like they’ve had every, you know, from Arnold Schwarzenegger, to like every, you know, star you could possibly think of endorsing this stuff. And I think people diligently being interested in it, but it’s still twice the cost of pastured meat to buy something like Impossible Burger. And if they still can’t make this *bleep* profitable, and there’s a reason behind that, and this is some of the stuff that I think we’re hoping to dig into is, you know, some of these topical news pieces and things that are occurring. 

For me, I feel like a lot of this stuff is kind of obvious, but it’s not because you and I have been dealing with it for 10 years. And we just think about it all the time. So it’s clearly not obvious. And there are a lot of folks that are interested in it, but oftentimes don’t have a frame of reference for being able to unpack why some of this stuff is really silly and ultimately really injurious. Like if we make bad… if we make bad decisions around how we tackle climate change, in my mind, the best analogy I have, it’s like asking someone to be a neurosurgeon, but giving them oven mitts and a pair of virtually opaque sunglasses and it’s like, okay, go do your *bleep*, you know, it’s like you have no feedback. You have no real sense of reality here and oftentimes the real reality is unpleasant or counterintuitive. or not the way we would like things to be. But you know, when we throw a rock up in the air, it will come back down unless we launch it at 17,000 miles an hour so it can attain escape velocity, you know. There’s just certain parameters that define what the physical universe is going to give us. And I think that that’s at least in part, part of our goal of doing this is to be able to unpack some of that stuff and give some context around it.

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Yeah, and so COP 26 is just wrapping up. And I saw that…

Robb Wolf 

Tell folks what that is. Remind them…

Diana Rodgers, RD   

 So it’s being held currently in Glasgow, Scotland, and it’s, you know, all the member nations of the United Nations kind of coming together and tackling climate change. And I saw on Twitter, you know, there’s all these plant-based folks who are saying, you know, serving meat at a climate change conference is like, you know, handing out free cigarettes at a health conference or something like that, right. And, and then I saw a menu. There were three choices. You could have the beef, and then it showed, like a, like a gas bubble at like, 34, whatever, level 34. And then the plant-based options were like point six, you know. So shaming people for it was local beef from Scotland. And the amazing thing is, so I’ve been to Scotland, not a lot of vegetables can grow there because there’s hardly any sunlight ever. One of my best friends is from Scotland, and she lives in Massachusetts for the climate, because she was telling me that you can go a whole entire year without one fully sunny day, the whole day of sun. It’s really cold. When I was there, it was August, it was freezing. And I saw a lot of grain production. But I did not see a lot of crop production. I talked with farmers. No, we can’t grow… you just can’t, you know, maybe some root crops and some cabbage and stuff, but you can’t grow stuff. But what Scotland can do really well is grass. That’s the most sustainable use of their land is for grazing.

Robb Wolf  

They’ve been doing that for a couple of 1000 years, and it hasn’t destroyed their environment. You’ve even made the case that they could probably be a little more regenerative in some of the practices that they use, but that you’ve visited some places that have a chain of custody that goes back 2000 years, is that right? Or…

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Yeah, and interestingly, they don’t really have as industrial-scale like we do in the US. They don’t have a ton of feedlots. There are some in England, but in Wales, I’m actually speaking later today for a Welsh meat conference. They’re largely pasture-based. Scotland is largely pasture-based, these cattle are old breeds. It is the best use of that land. And you’ve got all these folks in the UK that want to just rewild everything when there just aren’t natural predators. There’s, I mean… you… anyway. So I just get really frustrated, you know, you have to go around and cull things, or else they’re gonna overgraze. Things have to be managed because we don’t have the wild predators to manage them. So… 

Robb Wolf  

That was our point in Grass World in the book. It taught just kind of walking people through some really basic ecology. And I think in a pretty accessible way. We’ve had a fair amount of commentary that folks were like, Wow, that really, that opened my eyes to the need for, you know, complexity in these ecosystems. And if you remove some of the features like predator prey-interaction, then you’ve got to have something else or the whole thing craters.

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Which we can do with electric fencing. Oh, so circling back to the whole reason why we started this part of our conversation, is that, for those of you who have seen the film, I know it’s easier to watch a movie than it is to read the book. But the reason I made the film was because we were halfway through writing the book, and yet another vegan documentary had come out. And I was like, okay, I got to have something for these high school teachers to show when they’re showing… just to have a counterpoint so that the film is really aimed at bringing the farm to people to show them. Which is really fun. I’m starting to do on-farm workshops with farmers where, you know, we’re in the field, looking at, you know, a massively diverse pasture, and then we’re in the classroom later. We did that at White Oak. We’re going to be doing more of those next year. So the film is really just kind of showing you how these concepts work on the farm. But the book is very much laying out the argument. And so, you know, Thanksgiving’s, coming up. Everyone’s got that plant-based sister-in-law, who is going to be kind of feisty at the table. And if you want a crash course in, you know, how to intelligently rebuke every single point that a plant-based person might make. This is the book for you. And I should also mention before we finish talking about the book… but our publisher is the publisher of The China Study. They’re a vegan publisher. We thought that it was super interesting that they offered us a book deal. And who better to vet our arguments, than, you know, someone from the plant-based side, and they really… our environmental argument…

Robb Wolf 

Other large publishers had passed on it. And then ironically, this vegan-based publisher, which there’s kind of like the big five, and that was kind of like number six like they’re just right on the cusp of, you know… they’re a large scale publisher. But it was interesting that the folks who published the China Study feel so compelled by the environmental, the environmental piece that they’re like, people need to see this, They at least need to have the conversation around this topic. So yeah.

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Okay, moving on. Let’s talk about some of these current events. You pinged me this article, someone has been diagnosed with climate change.

Robb Wolf 

Did you… did that one go?

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Yeah, I put it right at the top of the doc.

Robb Wolf  

Indian Express. Yeah. And it looks like you have something from the ‘Gram also that you? Okay, well, maybe dig into that one next.

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Sure. Yeah, you want to talk about the Instagram one, I just thought it was interesting. So I re-grammed it today, but you know, you and I’ve been talking about just how just this idea of food sovereignty and how people should have the right to choose their own food systems in the most sustainable way that’s culturally appropriate to them, and how the anti-meat folks are really not taking that into consideration when they’re sort of running around demanding that everybody comply to their moral structure, when that might not be other people’s, you know, desires. And so especially when we’re talking about First Nations people, and social justice issues, which is why I started this group, the Global Food Justice Alliance, which is really just trying to point out the inequity of a food system that denies people access… the choice to animal source foods. So it’s like, cool if you want to choose a plant-based diet for yourself, that’s awesome. But don’t dictate that to other people who, you know, traditionally have eaten lots of animal source foods and don’t want to eat that way, may not thrive that way, may live in an area where only animal source foods do well, like most of the world.

Robb Wolf  

It’s, it’s maybe worth mentioning, the… you know, this is an often-overlooked piece of this whole story, which is what’s being suggested to traditional peoples, the developing world is that you all are going to abandon all of your traditional food systems, and you’re going to eat exclusively of the output of the industrial row crop food system. And you will be wholly dependent on basically the United States, Europe, and a few other players to make sure that the bulk of your food arrives there. Because you’re not going to produce it locally. Because there’s not the infrastructure there. This is what traditional food systems have done, whether it’s guinea pigs in South America, or you know what, whatever we’re talking about, and this is another part of this story that is just forgotten. It’s not just cattle. And you know, it’s the bigger picture of these traditional food systems that have served people quite well for a very, very long time. And I’m a little bit different in that, I’m not so weirded out about like an avocado going from Mexico to Canada in December if that’s what the economics kind of kind of dictate, but I do get prickly around the notion that local people should undo their systems in lieu of, you know, exclusively being, you know, tied to a row crop food system. So yeah, yeah. Do you want to mention a little bit? So this one is one that you reposted? Do you want to talk about that? And we’ll definitely make sure it ends up in both of our sets of show notes, too.

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Yeah. Let me navigate back to the post. I posted it on my Global Food Justice page. So this was a post by Well For Culture, which I’m hoping… I’ve invited them on the podcast. I love this post. And they’re just talking about the importance of bison and how the bison were taken away from them, and how the genocide of wildlife populations and the destruction of biodiversity in the natural habitats is rooted in the food systems that they were keeping going forever before we came, annihilated the bison, and then plowed up the entire middle of the country, and planted row crops and destroyed biodiversity, right. And so this whole idea, they’re saying, you know, it’s audacious to be pushing this plant-based agenda on indigenous populations. And I was just really excited to see that because it was something that you and I brought up in the book specifically. And I’m really excited that there are other groups now, grabbing that idea and running with it. Because PETA and other plant-based anti-meat organizations have got to understand their privilege and their elitism, when it comes to their preaching of how killing animals is wrong, you know. I get that it seems that way. But when you don’t understand how food is produced, and that things are going to die, it’s you know, the only sustainable solution is to kind of go back to what the US looked like before white people came, basically.

Robb Wolf  

Right, right. Or at least put an eye towards, you know, what, what parts of that had been in existence for 10s of 1000s of years, at least, and had not destroyed the natural environment, had not destroyed the planet writ large, you know, via biogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and whatnot. And I get that we now have the, you know, the carbon footprint of fossil fuels to contend with. But this is another one of the things that we are challenged with unpacking is that when we take an overly simplistic view of greenhouse gases, then things like termite mounds and shellfish, and deer and moose end up getting a bad rap. And, and, you know, both their quantitative impact is, is a rounding error compared to everything else within like transportation and whatnot. But then the qualitative piece to this is that this is life, begetting life, which is kind of the goal here. And, and it’s funny when I’ve, when I’ve presented this stuff to kids, the kids get it immediately. They’re like, Oh, that totally makes sense. And it’s funny. Presenting this to adults is a non-trivial challenge. Like it takes a while for folks to get it, you know, and then I’ll bring up some of the, you know, the articles that I’ve seen, like, shellfish methane emissions are massive, and maybe we should eradicate shellfish and termite emissions are massive, and maybe we should do something, maybe we should be doing something to mitigate termites. And this, you know, with no thought about what are the knock-on consequences of doing things like this? So yeah,

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, there was even a Twitter feed called SciMoms as science moms. And, and I saw them posting, you know, the same kind of stuff. And their whole position is that you know, they dig deep into the science and, you know, really understand the complexities of everything. And I just pinged him and said, like, “Hey, I’m a mom, I’m a scientist, can I please have a dialogue with you about how you’re miss… grossly misinterpreting the science like nutritional, environmental?” I mean, it’s all about just misinterpretations of observational studies, or, you know, looking at what kind of water are we talking about? We’re talking about blue water or green water? Are we talking about, you know, naturally occurring water or irrigation? It’s all kind of the same story. It’s like, you have to just go a little bit deeper behind the headlines and really actually read things.

Robb Wolf   

And the reality is pretty unsexy. It’s fencing, cowboys, leather gloves, boots with cow *bleep* stuck to them. Like it’s, it’s not a lab that grows meat, magically, from nothing, as you know, we’re kind of being sold this bill of goods. So it’s interesting, it’s a, I think it’s almost kind of a letdown because people are so wanting this, like, better than nature process. And whether you think the earth is 6000 years old, or you know, a couple of billion years old, either way, nature has had a long time to tweak and fine-tune things. And if you’re in this kind of evolutionary biology, you know, kind of mindset, there’s been an enormous amount of A/B testing going on to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And the assumption that we’re going to go in and do something that supersedes nature and improves upon it, with no deleterious side effects is just kind of ridiculous. 

And you know, like the, we do break this down in the book and hopefully, I’m not getting too far afield here but like the application of synthetic fertilizer is kind of a miracle in some ways. It’s really slick. It’s really cool. We dug into the Haber-Bosch you know, process, and everything in the book. It’s really cool. But I see that being analogous and people think that that is the way that things can work long term, but it can’t. And the best analogy I have here is the Haber-Bosch process and synthetic chemical fertilizers are to food production what airplane flight is to gravity because an airplane can take off and fly, doesn’t mean the gravity doesn’t still apply. You haven’t, you haven’t nullified gravity. You’re imparting a huge amount of energy into this airplane and creating a moment of lift due to the difference in the speed of the air going over the top of the airplane wing versus the under it. And so the same lifts, but as soon as the energy runs out, that thing crashes. 

And this is a very similar story here in the crash that potentially awaits us on the industrial real crop food systems side is both the energetic side, like if we have a run on energy, then that’s going to be very problematic. But even more important than that, like if we developed fusion power tomorrow, and we had unlimited energy, there is still a reality that this type of process destroys our topsoil. And we talk about in the book, we don’t know how long exactly we have, for our topsoil to maintain, like, you know, there’s some kind of dubious claims out there. But when we look at the encroachment of desertification into different agricultural areas, and whatnot, it’s clear that this type of process won’t work won’t work over the long haul. It is not better than nature. And so we, I think that there is like this general kind of almost letdown, that it’s like, wow, a system that’s going to be sustainable, will on the surface look more much more like an early, you know, 1900s farm, but it may have some GPS signaling with it, some portable electric fencing, some solar panels to run all this stuff. So there’s some 21st technology woven into something that really isn’t that different than what you would have seen in the 1700s, or something as far as the operation of a farm. 

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Yeah, I was gonna mention exactly that point. It’s not like you’re a Luddite. And you know, there are amazing technologies out there that can help but it always comes back to how can we use that in a natural system. And for folks, you had mentioned to me Charles Mann’s book, The Wizard and the Prophet and, and actually, I just finished reading Nick Offerman’s book, and he kind of goes into this territory a little bit too. And I pinged him that book, which I think you got initially from Chris Kresser. So it’s this lovely chain here. But, you know, there’s, there’s beauty in both systems. And at the end of the day, it’s a marriage of the two but respecting the laws of nature, that is going to win. And so it’s amazing to me how bedazzled people are with this idea of lab meat. And we know you, we have a couple of articles in our shared doc here about, you know, people finally realizing, oh, maybe it’s never going to be cost-effective. It’s hugely energy-intensive. And it doesn’t even really dive as deeply as you and I did. And this was just our like, common sense. But they actually, you know, did the research into it. And but it doesn’t, it doesn’t go into this… like, you have to find some kind of chemical extractive row crop, you know, monocrop, in order to feed it into…, you know, you need, you can’t just grow something out of nothing. People still aren’t getting it. There’s a couple of newspapers that are like, I think it was the Financial Times… So Civil Eats did one. Oh, that was about the pork industry. I’ll get to that in a second. The Counter did one. But it also said, you know, but maybe this is better than hugely inefficient cattle. So it’s like they still weren’t understanding that, you know, the cattle are taking energy directly from the sun basically, and just converting that on land we can’t crop into.

Robb Wolf  

With food, we can’t eat and maintain that grassland and the way that it’s been maintained for the existence. Like, before cattle, there was some sort of a dinosaur that filled that ecological niche on grasslands. Yeah, it was probably multi gastric, and, you know, a similar deal. So it is funny, like when you say the cattle are inefficient, it’s like, well, compared to what, you know, exactly? 

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Compared to a lab.

Robb Wolf   

Yeah, compared to the lab, and we’re seeing that clearly, that is not the case. But this is going to be ongoing, kind of the battle that we face is… And folks will do this roundtable of, well, it uses a lot of land. Well, what else are we going to use that land for? You can’t crop with it. If you do crop with it, how are you going to crop it? Is it going to be, you know, synthetic chemical fertilizers that destroy the topsoil? Well, a better way of doing that is to actually have smart application of animal rotation and that whole story and then these giant lagoons of manure are utilized in a much more effective way, with what they are being now. But it is… I don’t know, maybe I am getting a little bit more hopeful about this. Like the more we jabber about this is like, No, we do have some really direct solutions here, we just have to kind of rejigger the way that the system works. But I will say one thing that’s kind of ironic is the system that we have been advocating for, is not super amenable to one or two multinationals owning all of it, owning the intellectual property, owning the physical property. You know, this is a system that really is best served by lots and lots of democratized individuals and collectives, working together, but taking care of their particular patch of dirt in the way that they best understand. Because the microclimate needs of one area versus an area five or 10 miles away may be shockingly different. So aggregating that under one giant banner isn’t really going to fix things. The way that you normalize, that at industrial scales is massive inputs of energy and chemical, you know, synthetic chemical fertilizers kind of normalize that. So even on that kind of democratize like Rage Against the Machine level. It’s ironic that the people who used to be very suspicious of late corporations and multinationals and whatnot, when they are decrying animal-centric food production in general, they’re by implication supporting this consolidation of our food into the hands of a very, very few people.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, I mean, if Bill Gates had his way, everyone would be eating a, you know, Microsoft branded fiber bar that has an iron tablet and sodium. You know, like, it would just be, you know, just buy my, my fiber bar that has, you know, your ration of protein, which I’ve deemed appropriate for you based on bad research. And interestingly, they do skew the research, there was a piece that came out, and I didn’t add that to this doc. But in India, they released the results of a study showing that vegetarian moms had better pregnancies, pregnancy outcomes, than women who ate meat in India. Now, what do we know about… I even talked about this in the last one with James, but it’s like, wow, how tone-deaf is that? And maybe, you know, I apologize to folks who maybe don’t get that right off the bat, but I’ve just been in this space for a really long time. You know, what do we know about people who have more access to health care, versus people who have more stressful, harder lives and just access to nutrients in general? You know, those tend to be the people who are of religions that eat meat versus the people who are claiming to be vegetarian, where apparently a lot of them lie about it. Sylvia Karpagam wrote a really great story for the Global Food Justice Alliance on our website about it. But it’s, it’s just not fair to just make these you know, it’s just like the blue zones. Just these, these observational… oh, must be the meat. When you’re not taking into account socioeconomic factors. You know, so many other things that contribute to health.

Robb Wolf  

And we, you know, I think early in our conversation here, I mentioned that our rough draft was almost 600 pages close to that, you know, and a big chunk of it was stuff like this. It was kind of religious-based stuff, some early stories about like the Nazi Party in Germany. And it was just too spicy for our publisher to deal with. And it was probably smart. It was probably smart, particularly…

Diana Rodgers, RD   

And I should just say before I forget, it was not pro-Nazi. Yeah, it was just pointing out how Hitler was able to raise himself beyond a political leader into more of a spiritual guru because he pulled in this sort of anti-meat cleanliness, sort of energy that we see mimicked today.

Robb Wolf  

It was really leveling like the kosher laws as being subhuman and what barbaric, barbaric, and whatnot. Yeah, and I think it’s important historical lessons to be learned to just look at so that, you know, maybe we can make sure that we don’t head down that path. But it is interesting that within India, Hindu nationalism is a big deal. And so, we are just coming off of the past year where we had a ton of outcry around different treatment of folks within you know, Western to society and whatnot. And lots of legitimacy to all of that. But when we look over it, like, if you want to find an example of literally state-sanctioned discrimination, it’s hard to find a better example than in India in this example. And so the people who do consume meat, whether they’re Muslim, or Christian, or even some of the other, you know, side wings of Hinduism. Those folks are not treated well. And so, you know, there’s a lot of this is, again, where we’ve got the surface-level news piece, but then if you spend a little bit of time digging into it, there’s possibly a lot more to the story. And immediately, you get to a spot where it’s very uncomfortable stuff, like, super uncomfortable, very difficult to talk about, difficult to talk about in a direct reasonable manner. And even just in the process of like – can we ask some questions about it’s not that we’ve necessarily arrived at a decision, but is the possibility that the state-sanctioned discrimination within India around kind of the Hindu nationalistic, you know, kind of movement, could that have a negative impact on me consuming women and the health care that they receive? That’s a big mouthful, and we’ll probably get canceled for even throwing that out there. But you know, it’s, it’s another one of these things that, like, if we’re really going to tackle this, like adults, like grown, you know, functioning people, maybe our assumption around there, even the questions of being invalid, maybe that’s not the direction that you look at. But it might be helpful to at least take that one off the list with some analysis versus just taking the first pass of a… you know, a news piece like that.

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Well, I mean, I see it too, here in the US. If you eat meat in my town, it’s very, you know, highly educated, everyone cares about the environment, nobody’s eating meat. Even, you know, so… so for folks that don’t know, I’m now single, and I look on these dating apps. And someone who might see that I eat meat on there, because I kind of make that clear. They’re not going to, they’re not going to like, talk to me, because, you know, I can’t possibly be somebody who thinks deeply about things and cares about the environment, and then all my other values. It’s like, it’s driving me crazy socially. Yeah, anyway.

Robb Wolf  

Well, I mean… and again, I think one of the cautionary tales around all this stuff is on a host of different levels. We have so many features of our modern world that are dividing us and recognizing us and I don’t know how to quite say this, but uh, it’s not globalization, I don’t want to call it that. But I remember Carl Sagan saying something to the effect that one of the main things that defined civilization, you know, modern civilization somewhat differently than the past is that although we still have differences, this kind of thread of modern civilization, we have a sense of similarity that is sufficient that we don’t kill each other in mass. And every turn, whether you’re talking about COVID, or your perspective on climate change, or social justice topics, or what have you. They’re so polarizing, and then you when you layer in social media, which optimizes for, you know, outrage, we’re in a position where we can, you know, separate and vulcanize to such a point that it… the goal of warfare is to dehumanize the opponent in such a way that anything that we do to that person, it doesn’t affect us. We have no empathetic, you know, connection to that person because they’re subhuman and on a host of different levels, like we’re really good at doing that. And this has been one of the alarm bells I’ve been ringing for a long time is that we’re on this it feels like a car on an icy road and it’s starting to spin there’s no control and you see either a chasm on one side, a row of trees on the other and it’s like I don’t know which one we’re gonna get. But feel really pretty powerless to do all that much about affecting it, which I think is you know, for me one of my goals of having these conversations and there’s not a, a non-trivial risk to us talking about this stuff like be really easy to just stick exclusively to you know, eat some protein, make the protein whatever you want, just hit these macro levels show transformation, you know, stories of folks and just stay out of this fray. But for whatever reason, we are just like moths to a flame to try to do something about this stuff.

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Yeah, right when you were describing the icy road I was remembering when I came out this summer with Anson and the tire blew off the Jeep we rented. But just the day before we drove up to the peak of Glacier, and we were on a road just like that where there was… It could have happened on that road.

Robb Wolf   

A 1000 foot drop-off one way or the other. Yeah, yeah,

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Crazy. Well, we’ve wasted an entire hour and probably didn’t even hit any of the bullet points that we intended to. Is there anything else you wanted to toss in here?

Robb Wolf  

Let me tackle this, this piece from the Indian Express actually. Where it… the title is “In Canada, the World’s First Patient Diagnosed with, ‘Climate Change.” Since June, hundreds of people have died in the heatwave that broke Canadian heat records. And God, where do I want to get into this? Basically, the takeaway… we’ll put this in the show notes,  is that a woman arrived in the hospital and she had all kinds of different health problems. She had asthma and all kinds of problems breathing. And this had been exacerbated by poor air quality because of wildfires. And so this doctor diagnosed her with climate change. And this is such a gut kind of emotional level wrongness for me that it’s kind of hard to articulate in an intellectual way. Like it’s, you know, it’s like flat earth stuff. It’s kind of like, I don’t even know exactly where to start with this. But Diana and I kind of like off-air have talked about how social justice, COVID, climate change have all been mixed together in a stew where they’re kind of inseparable. And this is a really powerful tool, if you want to bludgeon people and keep them quiet, and kind of corral them in a path that you want to get them going in. But it’s very disingenuous. And it’s actually a terrible way to look at this stuff if you really want to do something about it. So it’s citing like these wildfires and whatnot. And I don’t want to go super deep into this. But there have been fantastic analyses that, you know, our current state of problems with wildfires, particularly in the North American West, is wholly an outgrowth of poor management. There was a time, there was a time when forests were clear, cut, and destroyed. That was dumb. And now we’re at a part where far too many forests are left to nature. People just want them left alone. And then they overgrow and burn. And that is dumb that, you know, there’s usually some middle ground there that the unnatural processes which have included human interaction for… 

Diana Rodgers, RD   

And animals grazing the kindling and eating it, and they’re gone now.

Robb Wolf   

Yeah, yeah, I mean, all the animals are gone, the soil is oftentimes sterilized down a couple of feet deep because you know, there’s almost a classification of the earth due to the temperature and the intensity of the fires. It’s a… the case has been made, that there is more kind of like, dry kindling, there is more fuel ready to be burned than it literally any other time in history. And it’s because there has been some degree of management and small fires and not, you know, crown fires and whatnot. And so it’s an interesting article, and I encourage people to give it a read. But this is one of the things where climate change is going to be injected into health more and more and more. And we’ve seen this already on the front of just kind of animal husbandry and being able to choose the food that you want to be able to eat. Because the implications of oh, you know, cows and methane, you know, greenhouse gases, animals and food consumption. We’re reallocating resources to animals that we shouldn’t reallocate. And we’re able to kind of go through all that stuff. But when you start putting climate change into some chronic health issues, like asthma. Like there was no discussion in this paper of what was this individual’s baseline diet. like. What was their vitamin D status?

Diana Rodgers, RD   

 Are they a smoker? 

Robb Wolf   

Were they a smoker? There’s none of that. There’s, there’s none of that. And so we’re attributing all this stuff to climate change. And I guess my main point to this is that the danger of where this could go and I don’t know that we want to turn this thing into like a COVID discussion topic. People are all over the board on that, but I think it’s worth it or a reasonably defensible position to say that COVID has changed the way that medicine, public health, and kind of freedom is approached. Like, you know, there are some things that if let’s say in 2016 when Donald Trump was the president of the United States if there was some health scare that caused the type of lockdown mandates and whatnot that we’re seeing today people would have perhaps rightfully lost their minds. Folks aren’t really, you know, some people are kind of losing their minds about like, this is very dangerous and very problematic, and other people that are completely signed up on this. And, you know, so long as it saves one life we’re all in. And these are the stories that, you know, kind of totalitarian entities thrive upon. And this weaving together of basic health care and health issues with this notion of climate change. I’m doing my, my rabbit ear, finger quotes in the air for people who don’t see the video.

Diana Rodgers, RD    

And this doesn’t mean you’re a denier of climate change. And I just want to… I just want to save you a little bit from the wrath that you’re about to get from that rant, is that all we’re all you’re trying to say, everybody, is that we need to have conversations. We need… we need lots of information from lots of different sources. And we can’t have blanket canceling of people who have opinions or have counterpoints to be made to issues that are now assumed that if you don’t 100 percent agree, then you must be a racist bigot, evil person. So that’s…

Robb Wolf  

That’s the realm of this wildfire topic there. Let’s say there are two hypotheses out there. One is that it is solely a consequence of climate change. And then maybe there’s another one that this may be mainly due to mismanagement. You know, that the forests and both grasslands in forested areas should be managed in different ways so that we don’t create a situation that is amenable for these massive types of wildfires. And maybe there’s some mix of the two, that is where the ultimate reality lies. But if we focus exclusively on this notion that the only solution to wildfires is doing whatever we can to fight climate change, then we’re literally doing nothing to maybe addressing the underlying problems, such as mismanagement of these forested areas. And then when you extend this to health care, if a whole swath of health issues is now being labeled due to climate change, and we’re gonna wait around for climate change mitigation practices to address these underlying health issues, it’s never going to happen. We’re not going to help people, we’re not going to save people. We’re actually not going to be doing things that are effective and helpful for the environment or addressing climate change. So thank you for pulling my neck out of that noose. I… when you get used to talking with and to folks that are maybe steeped in this stuff, and kind of reasonable and then you know it… but it is worth mentioning that just any suggestion that there may be more to this climate change story, and we should really pay attention to it, just saying that then makes me a climate change denier ultimately. So yeah, I guess we’ll see all that plays.

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Right. Okay.

Robb Wolf 

Aren’t you glad we did this?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I’m so glad. We’ll see if we still are even allowed to be on social media after you air this.

Robb Wolf   

Well, we may be 100% podcast and Substack here really soon. We’ll see. Anything else? You want to remind people where to track you down on the interwebs?

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, check out Global Food Justice Alliance, where I’m making the nutritional, environmental, and equity case for why people should have the choice to have animal source foods. We’re going around in meat trucks, handing out meat, talking to people. And largely, you know, I have to say from that experience we did in New York City, during the United Nations Food System Summit. We didn’t have any protesters. Everyone was super psyched we were there. You know, I think that the anti-meat movement is extremely loud, but also very small. We just need more people fighting back. And I believe I’m one of the only if not the only non-industry person that’s really just trying to point all the stuff out. So it’s Global Food Justice, online and on Instagram as my new passion and otherwise, I’m on Sustainable Dish and have a lot of fun stuff coming out in the next year. And hopefully, we won’t be off air by that time and you and I will be able to have another conversation about that stuff in the future.

Robb Wolf  

We’ll see how it goes. Yeah, probably next show because we kind of laid some foundation here will be a much more dive in and get the topical news pieces going and whatnot just so folks are kind of aware of the future format.

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Yeah, give us another chance.

Robb Wolf   

Yeah. Yep, okay, cool. And y’all can track me down at Robb Wolf dot come. That’s where most links to anything important can be found. And Diana, take care, and can’t wait for you to come back out to the great state of Montana to hang out with us. 

Diana Rodgers, RD   

Better car next time. 

Robb Wolf   

Yeah. 

Diana Rodgers, RD   

All right thanks a lot. 

Robb Wolf   

Bye