Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Sustainable Dish Episode 224: Fireside Chat with James Connolly

I love catching up with friends to talk about current events and topics that need deep exploration.  And occasionally, those convos get recorded. So, it’s time for another fireside chat with my co-host James Connolly.

I’ve recently returned from COP27 in Egypt, and I wanted to fill him in on all the details – from the high security to the confusing layout. Plus, there are a couple of hot-button issues happening in the world right now that we needed to unpack. Listen in as we chat about:

  • My experience at COP27
  • Why cab ride conversations have the best outcomes
  • The controversy with Frank Mitloehner and other problems with today’s journalism
  • Effective Altruism: What it is and how it impacts the food industry

 

Resources:

United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27)

Dr. Frank Mitloehner

Dr. Adegbola Adesogan

Dr. Ty Beal

George Monbiot and Reboot Food

Podcast: Tech Won’t Save Us

Paper: The Food Barons

Plant-Based Treaty

Our World in Data

The Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock

Podcast: Climavores with Tamar Haspel and Mike Grunwald 

Dr. Michael Greger 

Effective Altruism

Peter Singer

The Open Philanthropy Project

The Good Food Institute

Article: The U.S. is Cow Country and Other Lessons from this Land Use Map

Article: Against Longtermism

Article: The Fourth Revolution

Sacred Cow

 

Connect with James:

Website: The Primate Kitchen

Instagram: @primatekitchen

Twitter: @jamescophoto

 

Episode Credits:

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

If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.

Thanks to our episode sponsor, Annmarie Skin Care, a company committed to creating the best natural skin care possible and doing it sustainably. While I’ve always been picky about what goes on my skin, this product goes beyond that, feeding the skin with high-performance seed oils, antioxidant-rich botanicals, and synergistic plant stem cells that deliver skin-supporting nutrients. My skin feels fantastic, and these products smell so good. 

For a limited time, you can receive 30% off your order at sustainabledish.com/skin with code DIANA30. 

 

 

Quotes:

“If it fits on a t-shirt, it’s probably wrong.” – James Connolly

“For every pound of plant-based protein, there are four pounds of fibrous waste that can either sit in a pile and emit greenhouse gases or be fed to a ruminant animal like a cow and upcycled into protein.” – Diana Rodgers, RD

“Just because an animal was finished on a feedlot doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t provide ecosystem services in the first place.” – Diana Rodgers, RD

“The industry needs to do better, but it can’t be regen ag or nothing. That lacks nuance.” – Diana Rodgers, RD

 

Transcript:

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show. 

(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD   

Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

 Welcome back to another I guess we’re calling these Fireside Chats just because they’re recurring between me and Robb, or me and James. And so today, I have with me James, the co-host of the Sustainable Dish podcast for a little catch up and chat on kind of what’s going on. So hi, James.

James Connolly  

Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for having me.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

So I thought we would just do a little catch up. There’s a few things in the news. I’m just back from COP. So I thought I’d do a little overview of that. I’ve done a blog post and some newsletters about it. So most people probably heard but thought I’d mentioned that. And then there’s some stuff going on that you want to talk about. So then we’ll launch into that as well. Sounds good?

James Connolly  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Give me so the juicy details. Was COP like I mean, it seemed to me, everybody was disappointed. Everybody… and everybody who went except for, I mean, even Coca Cola kind of get kicked out of it. Right. So the level to which COP has been sort of taken over by varied interest who have enormous amounts of power, and sort of made the whole thing kind of a joke at this point. But yeah, I’d love to hear the details on the ground, as you would say.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. Well, I mean, like outside of COP, I can just add, like, the security was really intense, like, you know, riding around in a cab. You couldn’t even enter like the gates to the airport, or the gates to a hotel or into COP without, you know, guys with heavily armed men, bomb searches, trunk searches, it was quite intimidating. And as you’re driving up, there are some big empty fields. I mean, this is like in the middle of the desert, right, in Sharm el-Sheikh, which is sort of a weird resort area in Egypt, known for a really good snorkeling, which I did not get to experience, but it was… it looks cool. But you know, there’s just these guys just standing all day with a little like, umbrella type thing over them, dressed in all black just like making sure that there’s no – I don’t know, someone running across the field, planting a bomb or something like that. So the actual event, it was just chaos, I think is the best word to describe it. It was extremely difficult to navigate, and confusing. The buildings all looked very, very similar. They had big words on the side like biodiversity, ecosystems, but then so you’re like, Oh, this is the biodiversity building. And then you turn around you look at every other building also has that word on it, two floors, no printed maps, or anything. And the COP app we were all told not to use because it had malware in it. So none of us actually had a very good sense of like, where we were. And so if you were to picture, these gigantic, temporary type buildings that were like the size of football fields, there’s maybe eight of them lined up. And so I never really quite knew even what building I was in because they all felt exactly the same to me. And there was weird, it was sort of like a gigantic trade show. And there was like, you know,  the Turkish pavilion, and then right next to that would be like Nucular for Climate and then right next to that would be Climate for Justice. And then right next to that might be Saudi Arabia or something. So it was just a strange mishmash of like countries/NGOs. Once you were in each individual pavilion, they had these talk areas, and meeting rooms, and some of them were glassed in and the glassed in ones were much easier to hear the speaker but if you were in an area that wasn’t glassed in, the sound of the speaker in the next pavilion over would overpower the speaker and your current one is really difficult to hear on top of everyone’s you know, everyone was pretty much presenting in English. But you know, accents were hard. It was difficult to figure out who was speaking when there wasn’t very good time between the end of one talk in the beginning of the next one, and you had to go through this maze to find the next talk and I just kept getting lost.

James Connolly  

You were presenting as well. Right?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. So I presented on the first day with Frank Mitleohner and Adegbola who was in the film who’s so great. And those talks are going to be there. They were recorded, and they’ll be public. And basically, our talk was about the role of livestock in food security. So it was sort of a counter, we were part of the World Farmers Organization, the Iowa pavilion. And it was really the only livestock-friendly pavilion that I was aware of that was there. But it was just hard to even figure out what other talks, you know, other than that. The Secretary of Agriculture did come and talked about the importance of livestock to our food system, which was really good. But our talk really focused on the importance of livestock in solving… I presented mostly on Ty Beal’s work and just the prevalence of nutrient deficiencies worldwide: iron deficiency, B12, zinc, vitamin A, with the exception of folate, which is also best found in animal-source foods, but also can be found in foods like lentils. But with the exception of folate, all the rest are 100% best found in animal-source foods. And this is not just a problem that’s impacting low and middle-income countries. It’s happening here in the US, it’s happening in the UK. One in two women are micronutrient deficient in the UK. So we’ve got this problem, you know, where everyone’s saying eat less meat, we’re eating too much meat in high-income countries. But it’s actually that’s not true. There’s just this weird perception. I think one of the best conversations that I had out of COP was actually a cab ride that I shared with Patty Fung, who runs the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, who, you know, we were just chatting. We had about a 30-minute cab ride together back to our hotels. And she introduced me to the work that she’s doing. And I asked her if she ate meat. And she said, “Of course, I’m trying to cut down; it’s meat as a condiment, I’m trying to also reduce my carbs and eat more legumes.” And I tried to point out that those are two things actually counteract each other. But she just seemed to not know about nutrient deficiencies and the fact that even in the US were eating less meat than before.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And you know, to me, and obviously to you as well, the people being primarily affected by that are, you know, I’m in New York City. So we’re seeing a lot of young teenagers, dramatic reductions in meat consumption, the schools are all following a lot of those basic protocols. They moved away from red meat, primarily. Now it’s mostly just turkey or chicken. And so you see the demographics of people were following the overall narrative to reduce meat consumption, are the ones who are needing those nutrients the most, especially through early puberty and through, you know, this sort of developmental stages that are just so important.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

No, no. And so we exchanged cards. And, you know, most of the other talks that I went to, that were food-centered, definitely talked about a plant-forward, you know, Eat Lancet type diet, you know, definitely reducing meat because of climate change sitting in plastic leather chairs. It was just frustrating. I think the whole conference for me was I’m really glad that I had an opportunity to speak and I hope that made an impact. But it was also really hard to see it. It was hard to experience it and we’ll see if what change comes from it. I mean, even George Monbiot voiced his criticisms of COP. So if he wasn’t happy, and it’s funny, because he’s highly involved in a group called Reboot Food. Yeah, these forged COP27 flyers all over the food pavilion area, saying, “Why is food on the menu and not on the agenda?” And it said, you know, with official kind of COP letterhead, which is pretty sketchy. So…

James Connolly  

Yeah, I’ve actually gotten two versions of that on Twitter. One for what seemed to have been the menu for the higher-ups at COP, which was a range of different meat-centric dishes. And then this sort of other elements of it that showed pictures that were probably from you that were plant-forward on all of the food that was being served. So, like, was there a sort of hierarchical difference in terms of what was available to you, or?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Uh huh. Yeah, well, food in general was really hard to get at the event. There was, I mean, such a great opportunity of all these people that needs You’d need to drink. And it was even hard to get a bottle of water event. It was largely pastries everywhere I looked with no protein option at all. There were a few food trucks that were serving burgers. There was a regular burger. And then there were some plant-based burgers. The regular burgers were sold out, like a regular burger. So and then there were vegans kind of criticizing that the you know, the regular burger was even on the menu in the first place. But that’s because that’s what people want. Right. So that was COP. And yeah, took a long time to recover afterwards. It was a long, long flight and hectic event. And moving forward now to…

James Connolly  

Yeah, where’s the next one? The next one’s somewhere… I think it’s in Europe?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Dubai actually next year.

James Connolly  

Okay. All right. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitely, you know, for me, I tried to stay away from a lot of the narrative that was coming around COP just because I feel like, you know, when you saw 900 private planes flying into this one section, you just knew that there were in Coca Cola sponsorship and all this other stuff, you just knew that what they were really doing was setting the guardrails of what was allowable to kind of talk about so it’s actually genuinely surprised that Frank and you were allowed to speak at all, you know, the sort of the guardrails of what is considered to be part of that, and so much of this stuff, is really set up by a large agribusiness. And you will see talks on places like Twitter saying that the meat industry was heavily involved in being there. But it pales in comparison to the petrochemical industry, the large agribusiness industry and a lot of the plant-based and multinational corporations that were really setting the agenda, you know, so it, I mean, it is very, very difficult to be able to kind of, like pull at all of the strings or, you know, as to like the decisions that are being made, as to what is allowable to kind of talk about. I don’t even know, if fossil fuels were necessarily even part of the conversation. Were they?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

It was hard for me to see even like a full list of all the different talks that were happening because it was just kind of this chaos, really.

James Connolly  

And my assumption is that most people would kind of come at it, they would just go to whatever is in the purview of the specific things that they’re actually interested in. Right, so you’re not going to go to aquaculture or you know, any number of different things, you’re going to end up because the time is limited, space is limited. And there’s so much competition for talking points and everything like that. I’m sure everybody who kind of went to your talk was somebody who already semi-affiliated or related, or at least, you know, sort of favors livestock in some sort of way. You know, it’s hard to kind of break out of those silos.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Somewhat. Or someone who’s very against it, and wanted to ask questions that were challenging it without really being open to actual information about it. There was a talk that I went to on circular economies where there was someone from talking about leather and the importance. I mean, that talk was really good, just, I mean, the amount I think it’s 115 million hides are being thrown out every year, because of the decrease in use of leather. And, I mean, that is… it’s the most eco-friendly piece of a car, right, like Tesla taking it out and saying that they’re more eco-friendly. And replacing it with plastic leather makes zero sense, especially when you know, people are going to eat meat, and we have this amazing, durable, wonderful product that we’re going to throw out and instead use plastic leather. No cows are grown for their leather, right. They’re for their meat, but then they also have all these other uses that we could be utilizing, instead of throwing out which has its own carbon footprint along with it. But one person was in that talk and raised his hand and he was a vegan activist and just you know, not asking questions or making statements. Well, livestock is the worst emitter of greenhouse gases that there is so how can you possibly defend this? And it’s wrong, but he wasn’t even looking for a dialogue. So you know, I think that those cab ride type situations where talk to someone one-on-one and make it less emotional and just more out of curiosity is definitely the best. Like we’re all on the same side. We all want a future that is sustainable. We want healthy people healthy planet, and you would think that there could be more opportunity for nuanced conversations, but not always.

James Connolly  

Yeah, and you know, that takes the 30-minute cab ride, right? I didn’t even break down some of the narratives because it’s so easy to say. I mean, you know, we even said this in the film, if it fits on a t-shirt, it’s probably wrong. Right? Yeah. And so I think that that is one of the bigger problems. I was just listening again to a podcast, the Tech Won’t Save Us. And it was specifically about a paper that was released relatively recently called The Food Barons. And so this is somebody who’s not, you know, within our silo of food and agriculture. But there’s somebody who, over the course of the last 30 years has really been primarily focused on understanding the corporatization of agriculture. And so you have, what is the sort of multinational companies who are dominating the space in terms of what is considered sustainable, but also not recognizing that smallholder farmers are still part of the solution or feeding, you know, 60% of the world is still coming from semi-localized farming communities. But this move towards this sort of technological innovation sustainability matrix that is kind of coming out, is really problematic because what it ends up doing is because everything is now measured, and algorithmic and sort of set up with this idea that AI will tell the farmer when to plant the seeds, what pesticides to use, setting up under contracts, that these are long-term contracts, that farmers will have to sort of pay the fees for, to get the information on how to farm into the future, really just shifts all of this money to what is already a consolidated field, which is large agribusiness companies. You know, so he’s talking about food sovereignty, he’s talking about seed sovereignty. And he’s talking about the ability for these farmers to not just become tenants on the land anymore. And so these larger form conversations are not something you can have and you know, to somebody raises their hand and says, animal agriculture, blah, blah, blah, right, like, I mean, the thing that really galls me about that, and I follow a lot of, like Plant-based Treaty, which is one of the ones on Instagram that constantly makes these inflated claims about animal agriculture, and started out with cow farts. And so at least now they’ve moved on to cow burps. So I feel like in some ways, they’re making progress in their vilification of it, but like, every single time they comment, it is a lack of nuance. It’s always the same media. I don’t know who writes their content, but none of it is educating their public. It’s always the same thing. And it’s a celebration of something that they don’t actually fundamentally understand. But it’s having an enormous effect. I mean, they’re going to mayors and cities are going and you know, sort of pushing this agenda, but they don’t even understand that the, like, even just the basic nuances of some of the seminal arguments about this stuff. So you can make those inflated claims like Cowspiracy did, right. 51% of all global greenhouse emissions are due to animal agriculture, then you have to work this back. It’s like a zombie meme. Right? That just you can’t walk it back in any sort of way. So I mean, it’s just so disappointing.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. But at the same time, though, as a, I didn’t run into any dietitians at this conference at all. And so the lack of nutritional nuance in this debate is also really frustrating to me, because currently regenerative agriculture is whatever, less than 1% right of our meat production. And so I’ve simultaneously been having a lot of pushback from the regen ag/grass-fed community, saying, “Well, factory farming is wrong, it’s evil.” And we definitely can’t support that. And I also really urge for nuance in that as well, because one, all cows for beef production start out on pasture. They’re not 100% raised in a feedlot situation. Two, even when on feedlots, they’re utilizing crop waste. So for every pound of plant-based protein, there are four pounds of fibrous waste that can either sit in a pile and emit greenhouse gases or be fed to a ruminant animal like a cow and upcycled into protein. And we’ve got this massive micronutrient deficiency going on. Meat is filling. It supplies bioavailable protein and micronutrients. And it’s certainly better than ultra-processed food. And so there’s nuance in that argument as well. Like, we’ve got this food system that is highly centralized, but what’s the best nutrition out of that? It’s still meat. And so it’s not like I’m advocating for animal torture in any way. But just because an animal was finished on a feedlot doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t provide ecosystem services in the first place. While it was pastured is still providing healthy food at an affordable price to people who don’t have access to this perfect grass-fed meat. So it’s not only, you know, only eat grass-fed, regenerative, you know, there’s just so much infighting within this livestock community with regenerative people really wanting to separate themselves apart and I get it. Like, if I were a regenerative producer, I would definitely want to promote the superiority of my agriculture practices. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge right now that typical produce meat still has a place nutritionally, and that we can still argue for improving this there, there is scale to it, and it’s still providing nutritious food for people who otherwise, what are we going to tell them to eat? Like? Just because it’s a vegetable doesn’t mean that that was grown in a regenerative way? Nor does it provide the essential nutrients that people need for cognitive growth? Right? There’s just multiple layers of gray and nuance to all of the conversation.

James Connolly  

Yeah, you know, and I think that one of the problems that I’ve had with the with the sustainability matrix is, what I think it’s actually done in many different ways the movement towards and you talk a lot about it, it’s a carbon tunnel vision, right? So you’re so heavily focused on these attributes that are single attributes of a very dynamic system, even CAFOs. Even factory farming is a very dynamic system, considering the inputs that are coming in a lot of the agricultural byproducts and wastes that are coming in: distillers grains, and any number of different things. Because they’ve been so heavily focused on methane, or the industry itself says, “Well listen, what we need to do is actually go and take all of that waste, and we’ll turn it into bio-digesters, and then we’ll produce energy from it.” And so now they’re saying, well, it would actually it’s more beneficial to house these animals as biological creatures, into places so that we can actually utilize their waste in a way that is, quote, unquote, sustainable. And I’m like, so because you’re so heavily focused on these single attribute things that you’re actually giving leverage to this sort of large corporate entities to go and just fundamentally, like, they’re sort of counter punching at any number of different things. Whereas I think regenerative ag is one of those things. It’s not easily defined carbon sequestration, biodiversity, any number of different things are going to mean something different for every single farmer, whether you’re in the Southwest, and you’re dealing with droughts, or if you’re in Colorado, or if you’re on the East Coast, regenerative ag is going to mean so many different things. And so it’s hard to quantify. That’s why I have such a huge problem with things like Our World in Data that will look at these individual land footprints, carbon footprints, or anything like that, and extrapolate that to make a graph that, in essence, doesn’t leverage any degree of nuance at all. And they’re impervious to any constructive criticism at all. And so it becomes this thing that becomes a graph that then tells the entire story. And we talked about this before with Meatless Mondays, right? These posters that were kind of put up in, in kids schools, creating a dialogue between students who were standing in line for their lunch, that would say that they will reduce all of these environmental measures, grossly manipulated…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

It helps your kidneys and prevent Type Two Diabetes, like all this information. Yeah. And it’s funny because so I think the best conference that I’ve attended all year was definitely the Dublin conference, the Societal Role of Meat. So for anyone who’s interested in that, the Dublin declaration, people can look that up the Dublin Declaration of Meat Scientists, everyone’s signing on saying, meat is essential for human health, pulling it away from people, and it is basically cultural and moral imperialism. There are better and worse ways to raise it. Of course, the industry needs to do better, but it can’t be Regener ag or nothing. That lacks nuances. Well, the nutritional importance of, of animal source foods has to be number one, in this whole conversation.

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James Connolly  

Yeah, and you know, the growth of any movement. I think, if you would look at the organics of movement through the 70s and 80s. You say, Well, listen, it’s, you know, it’s only 1% of production. And I obviously have problems with how it decided to grow. But any movement, it starts out with a small percentage, you know, regenerative agriculture is in that sort of, sort of toddler element now where it’s sort of going out into the world and trying different experimentations with how to be more sustainable and to act and react to biodiversity losses and any number of different factors that are kind of part of it. Is this always a worry, especially, same with the organics movement where you get large industries that will come in that will define regenerative agriculture? My big rants was Lucky Charms and Cornflakes for arguing over who was more regenerative. That came out a few years ago. Yeah, you know, these false arguments. So I do think it’s incumbent upon regenerative agriculture to be as inclusive as possible. These smaller movements, the way that they end up falling apart very often is infighting, ya know, and we witnessed that. I think when we went to host a conference at Stone Barns, you know, you have these theory elements of it, you have all of these different disparate groups that are now sort of trying to, but they’re kind of not really communicating very well with each other. You know, sometimes there’s rivalries that have existed for a long time that, you know, you can’t necessarily even get rid of. And, you know, so you have these small, like, real, you know, like hefty movements thing, that I think people can actually really get behind. Like the casual consumer, the person who is going out and buying meat, you really like getting them involved in buying stuff that has a signification on the packaging, that makes them feel good about the purchases that they’re buying, that makes them feel good about nourishing their families in a way that is sustainable, or, you know, stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean, I’ve always had a problem with the outliers who come in, who can be kind of critical of the thing, but like, I want that healthy debate, that kind of happens.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Well, I was… I don’t know, we have other stuff to talk about. But you know, two things you brought up. One was, you brought up the organic movement, and I think it really opens people’s eyes when I say, you know, no one would have said, well, you can’t scale organic when it was way back, like, yes, you can, and it has been done. It did get kind of co-opted, you’re right. Like, I don’t know, Cheerios, they’re not organic yet. But there’s some kind of you know, there’s big scale organic, and it really is not in the same spirit that the organic movement started in initially. But at least we’re not spraying, right. I mean, there is some good like, at least, it’s better than it was before. But no nutrition expert could ethically ever say to a client, only eat organic broccoli, or don’t eat broccoli, or you have to eat less vegetables, only organic, or only from your local farmer’s market that is only open on Saturdays between 10 and 1130, or whatever, you know. And that’s the same position I take with meat. So you know, buy the best meat you can afford, but do not tell other people that they have to buy the meat that you have the privilege of accessing, because it’s not currently available at that scale. And we need to shift even the big meat producers to be… if I can shift large meat companies to be 5% better, that’s still a lot more work than or a lot more good than, you know, adding three more small producers in my state that are going to grow 50 sheep apiece, right? So I was recently criticized for working for big meat because I went to a large meat company and presented to them on how to be more sustainable. And they paid me for that talk. And I was then told that I couldn’t present at a conference coming up because I now work for big meat. And you know, that really pissed me off because this person who was criticizing me sells cheese, makes cheese. He makes really expensive grass-fed cheese. But if he were to sell it to Walmart, does that mean he works for Walmart now, you know, that’s ridiculous. So he’s, I would say congratulations, you’re making this available to the masses. But I think there’s this element of elitism in the grass-fed/regenerative movement that, you know, once your product become accessible to the average person, or accessible at scale, then all of a sudden you’ve sold out, you know, so his product is cheese, my product is information. As a scientist, I’m not going to shift my information just based on who’s hiring me to give them the presentation. So it’s um, it’s really frustrating.

James Connolly  

Yeah, and you know, one of the things that gets my gall up – a 1950s word. But like one of the things are really actually really pisses me off is like, we have to be perfect. And that’s one of the things that you know, there was a recent two-pronged article that kind of came out in it. Can we talk about this a little bit, this sort of New York Times/Greenpeace article, written primarily through Greenpeace. Somebody works at one of their desks at Greenpeace, kind of talking talking about Frank Mitloehner and talking about how he had received money from two different industries, the American feedlot Association, and I don’t know if it was the Cattleman’s Association or beef… Sorry, I don’t necessarily remember. But it was what was… he has declared for years. It is not it is

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And this was not just an article. This was front page of The New York Times.

James Connolly  

Front page of The New York Times. Yes. And thank God, there were a number of different journalists – Mike Grunwald, you know, people I’ve never agreed with practically anything that Tamar Haspel and Grunwald have said about meat. I actually really enjoy them. They’re willing to engage. I’ve listened to their podcast many times. But they came out and they said, “Listen, this is bad journalism. This is bad journalism all throughout.” This is specifically going after Frank and not going after his science, but they’re saying there’s a conflict of interest here. And Frank will say, like, listen, you know, my entire industry is to make them more sustainable. All of the things that I teach, and all of the things that I study is to make the beef industry, specifically more sustainable livestock industry. And now you told me I’m not allowed to talk to them, or at least kind of like have a relationship with them. But the interesting part about it to me, and if you dug very deeply into this, Greenpeace has a very specific modality since 2015. This within the same year that they got a large grant from Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation to the tune of about $2 million. They had decided – the leadership at Greenpeace had decided that one of their main movements was to reduce animal consumption globally. So 2014 is when Cowspiracy comes out. DiCaprio gives $2 million to Greenpeace. Lo and behold, now they’re an anti-livestock. Sort of, they wanted to reduce meat consumption dramatically by 2030. And so you can actually extrapolate those two things, put them together and say, Listen, this is somebody… this is an organization taking $2 million, specifically, you know, with one goal in mind, and they get none of that. If you’re advocating for livestock, you have to be perfect all the time. But they get to play these games. And it just really pisses me off. Because it didn’t take me that long, it took maybe 20 minutes to find a conflict of interest on their side. You know, and I don’t know who Zack is. It’s very difficult to find a digital footprint of who he is. His Twitter profile is a Ferris Bueller’s picture. You know, I don’t know who this guy is, or where it came from. He seemed to have been writing articles years ago on like, just real sort of clickbait junk.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

It’s yeah, it’s really it… I fully support Frank. We’re not going to be able to make the industry better unless we have people like him that are doing research on how to make the industry better. And he’s never like, tried to hide that, where’s funding comes from and there was no expose. It was just nothing. And so I’m glad that people like Tamar pointed that out. And you know, and it goes both ways. I actually was denied funding for the film because there was a region ag funding group that told me that I can’t criticize Meatless Mondays because the people who fund Meatless Mondays, the foundation that funds it is also a funder of one of their projects. And so I can’t criticize Meatless Mondays because this one group is behind it. And I said, No, it’s wrong. It’s not evidence-based. We can’t be promoting Meatless Mondays in schools. And now we’ve got Lifestyle Medicine taking over the hospital system in New York City, and people really getting behind that. So they’re taking meat away from hospital patients who have an increased protein demand, increased micronutrient need in hospitals and you take away the most bioavailable source of protein and micronutrients in the name of climate and health. And again, not evidence-based at all. It’s just wrong. And Mayor Adams is behind that one as well. And the Seventh Day Adventists and all the rest of that so…

James Connolly  

Oh, yeah. I mean, I’ve been documented so, New York is where I was born and raised. I live in New York, Eric Adams, his story is just it’s so appalling to me. Prior to his run, he had had a number of different health-related problems. There’s an old New York Times article where it kind of talks about him, you know, developing… he had some sight loss, and he was developing type two diabetes and he had a number of different health-related issues. He clearly quotes in there I lived off of salt and sugar. You know, it was the way that he got through his day, but somehow he ended up becoming a plant-based advocate. He is not vegan. He wouldn’t have told you that except he was discovered many times… every single time he went out to a restaurant eating fish or something like that. When they did a tour of his apartment, they found chicken in his fridge. He said it was his son’s, you know, who knows what this guy actually believes in, but he… I have had conversations with one of his special assistants who is an ethical vegan. She’s also part of a movement that we’re going to talk about called ethical altruism. And it is part of this larger form movement that is co-opted by, or at least tangentially involved with a lot of the vegan activist movement. Eric Adams is good friends, and so is his special assistant. They go on vacation together with Dr. Michael Greger. Every single time I see her, you know, on weekends, she goes up to…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Let people know who Michael Greger is. 

James Connolly  

I’m sorry, Dr. Michael Greger of nutritionfacts.org. He has a sort of a weird history. And I would love to go a little bit deeper into it. But he’s a huge vegan activist, him and Neil Barnard, who is a psychiatrist, have all been part of these sort of animal activist groups for a very long time. But what they’ve been able to do is, in essence, kind of take their animal activism and sort of transform it into a sort of play in the nutrition field. And so they’re heavily funded by animal activist groups they have for a very long, long time. And so they utilize what is a lot of epidemiology and sort of flawed nutritional science in order to sort of push an agenda. Dr. Greger has his own supplements line, you know, he’s always sort of pushing this stuff. He’s about the same age as me. So you know, doesn’t look too healthy. But it’s sort of an interesting character. But you know, when Eric Adams came out with his cookbook, and his whole health journey, these are all the people that he talked to. These are the podcasts that he went on. These are the people who were fundamental in their New York City’s Vegan Friday’s movement. And so you had Meatless Mondays, now you have Vegan Fridays. And you know, I would talk to the special assistant, and she’s like, well, these kids get enough meat in general. And I’m like, no, they don’t. I was like, 10 years I worked in the nonprofit sector, these kids are not getting, they’re not getting the proper nutrition. And it’s what you’re going to fill that plate with when it’s not meat. So Vegan Fridays, you can look at the pictures of when it first came out, it was potato chips. It was just junk food. It was just wrapped like, no stuff that…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Processed like burrito. 1000 ingredients. Yeah.

James Connolly  

Yeah. I mean, just terrible things. But it all has that healthy halo of plant-based and all of that stuff that marketing terms. You know that ethical altruism movement it to me, and we can kind of jump into this because this is yeah,

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And unfortunately, we only have about 10 minutes to do that. 

James Connolly  

All right, I can do it fast. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Maybe we extend it to another time when we dive into it more or less. Let’s see how much we can get into it.

James Connolly  

Okay, so I get 10 minutes to get to make this.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Ethical altruism. 

James Connolly  

Yes. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Or I’m sorry. No Effective Altruism. Sorry.

James Connolly  

Yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah, Effective Altruism. It’s a weird movement. I can’t necessarily say how it reached the point where it reached as quickly as it did. It kind of started in 2009 with a number of different people who are kind of Oxford students, and people who were sort of part of this idea that was suddenly founded by a paper that was released in the 70s, by Peter Singer. Peter Singer wrote Animal Liberation. He is a professor, he’s sort of a utilitarian. I find him one of the most disturbing people in the vegan movement in general. You can find articles in the New Yorker on him. The stuff that he says, I find is actually really disturbing. He seems to get a buy because they say he’s a little bit on the spectrum. I don’t think that’s acceptable. But it was a paper that came out in the 70s, it was sort of based on this idea that you should… it’s based on your argument, iif you were going to a job interview, and you got dressed up, and you were walking past upon where a toddler was drowning, you know, would you ruin your suit that you’re supposed to go to this job interview to save this child? And if you would, in that you consider that an unethical act to go and try to save this child? Well, you should extrapolate that to the greater world. So any type of work that you do should be towards the greater good. And so it sounds really nice, right? You should be thinking about poverty as a global issue, you should be thinking about all this other stuff. And so ethical altruism sort of based on that, based on this idea that what they wanted to do was, in essence, kind of give away 70% of everything that they make, devote it to specific causes. And then we’re going to create this movement that is sort of an aesthetic movement that we’re like, you live for other people. And so it’s sort of it started out that way. And then it kind of morphs into this really strange sort of phenomenon where they’re like, Well, what if we made a lot of money, you know, and we could give away more money. And so they’re like, well, what if we had to work with petrochemical companies, or like with the fossil fuel industry, but we could actually give away a lot of money if we made a ton of money. And so it started to filter into this like larger movement that then started to garner and bring in people who were part of the tech industry, specifically cryptocurrency and all this stuff and sort of gave this overall veil of like these, almost like St. Francis of Assisi giving away everything kind of like golden movement where they were going to usher us into this techno utopian future, where everybody is thinking about everybody else. And so at the height of it, this is actually fairly recently after 2000. So 2009, they really started to move very, very quickly into the place where they had garnered the respect and the leverage of a lot of these billionaires estimates at its height, right before this crash that just happened recently, the estimates were at $46 billion. This is how much they had. A lot of it was cryptocurrency. NFT, which was FTX. Sorry, FTX was the cryptocurrency company that…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Exclusively?

James Connolly  

So it was yeah, it was a cryptocurrency. They were out of the Bahamas because they didn’t want to pay taxes because their tax money was not going to go to the causes that they believed in. And so Sam Bankman-Fried was an effective altruist who kind of moved into this space. Then you have Dustin, Dustin Moskovitz. And his wife, Cari Tuna, I think her name, is who is one of the Facebook co-founders. He’s worth billions of dollars. And so what you had was this huge influx of cash and capital that we’re now used to deploy into the outside world in ways that they considered altruistic and philanthropic. A lot of that money now went to places that we’ve actually been investigating for a long time. The Open Philanthropy Project was started by Dustin Moskovitz. They were giving millions of dollars to the Guardian specifically to write about animal agriculture, or against animal agriculture. The Good Food Institute was heavily invested in the early stages. Good Food Institute, I think has about $18 million under deployment. And if you look down the list, Sentientism received gifts, they were supposed to deploy upwards of about $7 million to Our World in Data. You know, which, if you’re on Twitter, or you’re seeing a lot of these graphs about the land use and greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture, a lot of that money was starting to get funneled into that which in essence, kind of focus on animal agriculture.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Misleading Graphs, by the way, if anyone wants to look at the Our World in Data, I’ll have Emily put this in the show notes, but they’ve got that one graph. I’m sure some of you have seen this, where it’s the entire United States, and then it shows this gigantic yellow square in the middle. And it says pasture/rangeland/cattle. And then of course, people assume that that means cows take up this gigantic piece of land in the middle of the US without any kind of context of this is uncroppable. This is marginal land. This is anyway, it’s that chart drives me bananas.

James Connolly  

Yeah, yeah. And you know, I think, I mean, the other element of that is, is really Bill Gates and his foundation who have been funding Our World in Data for a very long time. So there are so many elements of this. So FTX, as of like a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, was worth somewhere in the range of about $30 billion over the course of like five days gone, absolutely gone. There was a run on it. It’s actually people were starting to use this – I said is this kind of the Vegan Madoff because in some ways he is… it was a Ponzi scheme, like as much money was flowing into it. They could give the illusion that they had a lot of liquidity and capital. All of it was cryptocurrency, a lot of it is in nevermind, like cryptocurrency is just an enormous energy drain. You can’t talk about sustainability when you have something that is a technological innovation that pulls the same energy versus resources as Sweden every year, just like an entire country in order to mine all of this crypto. So you have this Effective Altruism movement. What they’re doing is they’re being able to leverage all of this capital and this philanthropic endeavor to kind of go out into the world to get into places like the UN and that they’re focused on the future. To Will McCaskill who’s like one of the cofounders of Effective Altruism had just released a book If this was supposed to be his glory year, he was gonna go out and like tell the world about it. There were articles in the New Yorker, The New York Times, like every Guardian… he was going to become the face of this organization because he’s like an affable looking guy, who was, you know, wants to give it all away. Gone, all of this money gone. You know, Dustin Moskovitz, is trying to figure out exactly how he feels about the whole thing. Turns out Sam Bankman-Fried who was the founder of FTX, with one of his partners, there’s so many different elements of this that we can kind of break down. He never really cared about Effective Altruism. He had a conversation with Vox, which is an Effective Altruism kind of movement that now kind of deploys its news, newsmaking device to kind of push a lot of vegan agendas. They had a conversation, they actually release the DMSs where he was like, I didn’t never cared about this anyway. It was just a way for me to look good while I was just getting tons of money from people. And so you have this huge movement that was funding this huge fear of things that we were kind of saying, well, where’s all this money coming from? Why are they able to leverage themselves into all of these different places? Talking about plant-based talking about meat-based alternatives. Why are they constantly going on to say Vox’s podcast to talk about the effects of animal agriculture, but you never hear the other side of that equation? Now, it’s all starting to make sense. So now we have, you know, vegan mayors of New York City who were like run by Effective Altruism, then you start to have like, the UN is taking on their talking points, and to… How much time you have left?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Three minutes.

James Connolly  

Three minutes. Alright. So, Effective Altruism, in essence became a it morphed into this other thing, that then has become part of this larger movement, which is what they don’t talk about when they write the books when they talk about what they talk about. Right. So they have the one that is the public speaking sphere of it, which is very much about this idea of like philanthropy and giving to the world and everything like that. The other part of it is called longtermism. And it’s this morphed ideology that, in essence is like we what we need to do is ensure that human beings – we can’t worry about the crisis of our time, we need to make sure that over the long enough period of time humanity’s around to sort of panspermia populate the universe to spread our consciousness out into the universe. And so happiness today doesn’t matter as much as happiness in the future because then we’ll have trillions of people out into the future. And so they what they worked out was a sort of algorithmic, you know, statistical matrix by which to think about how they were going to deploy capital going forward into the future. And you can see how Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and a lot of the guys who are involved in this, are using that so they won’t pay taxes. They don’t believe in socialism, they believe in hoarding capital. They don’t believe that the global south actually really matters all that much. Because what they’re trying to do is concentrate enough wealth within people who can deploy it, to bring us into this techno utopian future. So it doesn’t necessarily matter what is happening on the ground today, with people, hunger, poverty, all this other stuff. What really matters is this forward outlook that looks into this 1000 year, 10,000 year, 100,000 year, 10 billion year future. This is the inner monologue that kind of happens within the groups that they’re talking about. And so now, it’s all just like, who knows what’s going to happen with it. But there have been a number of people: Emil Torres, Xriskology, who is on Twitter, who has been screaming about this for the longest time, and they’re genuine problems with this movement. I mean, look, I mean, they’re all white guys. You know, they’re all Oxford educated, they’re all like, they live in these holes, they, you know, garner all of this attention, and they push each other up, and they’ve somehow infiltrated into huge elements of our governmental entities that are pushing this agenda. And they’re not telling the outward outside world what they’re doing. And that’s why we’re seeing all these articles. That’s why we’re seeing these movements. That’s why we’re seeing plant-based food, you know, what, why we’re seeing this sort of the Fourth Industrial Age, you know, any number of different things to kind of talking about that. You know, and it really means more consolidation of power, more consolidation of food sovereignty, and then just sovereignty in general. Again, it’s like, we have to be perfect. They get to play with $46 billion dollars.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. Well, I’ll be sure to include that article that you sent me on longtermism. I’ll have to go back and look but that was really good article and then I don’t know if you read the one I texted you the Fourth Revolution that was forwarded to me. People should know that this is what James and I text about, like, all the time, like, this isn’t just… this is how your brain works at all times.

James Connolly  

Yeah, unfortunately.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

So let’s we’ll get back into this. Maybe in another podcast and I’m sure as more stuff comes out, right, it’s this is just the beginning of this news. 

James Connolly  

Yeah, it’s a developing story. So I don’t even necessarily know how much of this stuff is is speculation at this point, but it is… look at New York magazine just said Sam Bankman-Fried is on the front cover of it. There was an article in there about how he was selling cryptocurrency to Sub-Saharan Africa. Like for him, like Madoff at least went after rich people. Sam Bankman-Fried just went after anybody can get his hands on. These are really, I mean, like, these are horrible people. But just like, to me, it’s the notion that they have this understanding of altruism, that the none of us can necessarily understand and that they’re going to, you know, lie to us and tell us that this is the way forward into the future. And the amount of money, you can look at EA funds, Effective Altruism funds, and specifically on there is a list of all of the money that was deployed specifically in animal agriculture. And you’re talking to the tune of millions of dollars a year at this point that was being effectively deployed. Yeah. So that’s the sort of basic like cliffnotes version of it. I think so much is going to come out on it. But yeah, and I don’t know what will happen. Because you and I are focused on food. So much of the work that’s kind of coming out on the journalistic aspects isn’t really focused on it. And so I think it’s incumbent upon us in the food and agriculture space to really start to deploy our knowledge of that, to be able to at least have that be part of the conversation. You know, yeah, that’s it. Fireside Chat.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Quickfire, Fireside Chat. Ah, well, um, cool. I’m glad we got this conversation in, and let’s keep on. Please keep you updated on all this stuff. And let’s do a follow-up as we get more information about the stories. Thank you. 

James Connolly  

Cool. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

All right. Have a great day, James. Thank you. 

James Connolly  

Okay. Bye, Diana. 

Diana Rodgers, RD 

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