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“What to eat?” This is a question we ask ourselves several times a day.
The answer seems simple enough, but there are endless factors that drive this decision: your values, budget, time, mood, and last but not least – taste.
To answer this question, Martin Cohen, PhD, taps into philosophy. Dr. Cohen is a British philosopher who blends “psychological and social studies with philosophical theory” and aims to explain complex problems in easy-to-understand ways.
His latest book is I Think Therefore I Eat: The World’s Greatest Minds Tackle the Food Question. Throughout this book, Dr. Cohen uses the wisdom of philosophers to answer the question: “What to eat?”
During this conversation with James Connolly, my co-host, Martin discusses:
- Romanticizing the European view of food
- Why independent media isn’t that independent
- Pythagoras and vegetarianism
- Global diets are shifting away from fresh foods
- The end of small farms
- The politics of climate change
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 264: Martin Cohen, PhD
Resources:
Sustainable Dish Episode 191: Frédéric Leroy, PhD
I Think Therefore I Eat: The World’s Greatest Minds Tackle the Food Question
Connect with Martin:
Website: Martin Cohen, Writer and Philosopher
Twitter: @docmartincohen
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connolly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Global Food Justice Alliance members, and listeners.
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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 Connolly 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, onto our show.
Diana Rodgers, RD (Native Path ad)
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James Connolly
Good morning, good afternoon. This James Connolly for Sustainable Dish’s podcast. I found Dr. Martin Cohen because he ended up kind of showing up in a lot of academic papers that were by one of our sort of podcast favorites is Frédéric Leroy who we actually had in Sacred Cow, we went over to Belgium and interviewed him when he was over there. And Dr. Martin Cohen had shown up a lot in in papers that were kind of co-written. And he’s sort of, you know, in some ways kind of stayed tangentially, in this sort of conversation about food, and a lot of the transitions that are happening specifically in Europe. But he has a very unique perspective, because he’s actually looking at it through a lens of, you know, maybe 1000 years of view of food and agriculture, what we eat, what we decide is sort of taboo, you know, if you look at, say, the Old Testament, from the lens of like, purity, and different ideas of, of hygiene, there are so many different taboos that are in the Old Testament that talk about any number of different things associated with eating with cleanliness, with human health, you know, if you kind of took a 10,000 foot view of it from an anthropological perspective. So Dr. Martin Cohen had written a book called I Think, Therefore, I Eat: The World’s Greatest Minds Tackling the Food Questions. And he sort of describes it as like you kind of dip in and out of this book. It gives you kind of a perspective from the ancients. It gives you a perspective from the 19th century and how we ended up into this sort of 20th century in terms of a lot of the dietary hypotheses, ideas that kind of talk about the same degree of like purity, human health, perspectives, epidemiology, you know, the things that kind of lead up to it from an agricultural perspective, to a semi religious perspective. And so it’s a really interesting book, it’s one of the things my director and I actually talk a lot about, is sort of the historical implications of a lot of food taboos. And what we decide is, say, part of a food culture either independently and as a statewide in the west, in the east or anything like that. So I feel like it’s a valuable part of the conversation. Dr. Martin Cohen, he is a visiting research fellow in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. Did I say that correctly?
Martin Cohen, PhD
You said it correctly although, I’m not, you see. So perhaps we should… That’s the trouble with reading off the back of a book, it’s a capsule in time a book. Basically, we’ll go back to the plan A, which is I just say what I do, which is basically I’m a writer. I have taught and researched in academia, I’m a little bit of an academic skeptic. I’ve never really fitted in, but as time goes by, I get more and more fed up with them. Even people like Frédéric, who you mentioned who I think does this amazing job arguing things, but he does argue in this academic way, which ends up in a highly detailed minuti. And the big issues that are left undisturbed by this detailed argument, you have to with issues like food, you really have to have a broad narrative that speaks to the wide public, the ordinary public, the general public. So that’s where I am. I’m not really in academia. I write books, which I aim at the general public, which is a hard, surprisingly hard group to reach. It’s actually easier to reach niche groups. So I’m a writer basically.
James Connolly
Yeah. I hear you. There’s actually a sort of something that I was sort of rambling about in my mind when I was reading your book, some of it primarily centered around the idea of time. You know, the general public, especially in the United States, has some of the lowest vacation time in the world, works long hours, and doesn’t have the time to either cook at home or to do a lot of the investigations that are sort of necessary for supermarket market shopping today. And so you get this sort of like, sort of polarity that kind of happens between people who are working to live and you know, who wants something at the end of the day that’s highly satisfying. It’s going to sort of talk to their tastebuds more than long term human health. And so how do you reach that? The audience, how do you talk to them? You know, there is one of the questions that kind of want to ask this kind of start out is, is an annoying question. It’s a hard question as it’s like, Why? Why, like, how can we put somebody on the moon, but cannot figure out exactly what to eat.
Martin Cohen, PhD
This time thing is very relevant. I was just looking at a reference the other day to Walmart and Amazon. And they’ve gone to some trouble to get patents or not sure patents is the right word, but permission so that they can actually enter houses, into people’s houses and put food into their fridges, which are to the European mindset, this is extremely bizarre, though the European mindset is still a little bit romantic that you imagine people going to the marketplace, or to the special cheese shop and talking to the owner and really taking quite a long time shopping. And then of course, doing their own cooking, again, an elaborate process, it’s a little bit of a myth in Europe. Nonetheless, we do subscribe to it, but then in America, and increasingly, this is the reality as it spreads around the world, people are reducing food to something that will take them as little time as possible, including eating, it must take as little time as possible. And so this observed, it seems to me absurd idea that you’d not only no longer do your shopping, but the person enters the house and puts your thing in the fridge presumably you just be the kind of thing that you warm up as well in a microwave. But that’s actually the great economic force in food policy is about this kind of no one should spend any time on it. And in a way, the producers are the worst. They don’t want to spend any time producing the food either. So they want these ingredients which can be done in vast quantities and stored indefinitely, transported around the whole world. This is this thing about supply lines and things which is completely changed. So that food isn’t local, it might come from right around the world now.
James Connolly
Yeah. And you know, I remember Amazon got in trouble because they had purchased a company called Ring. That was… they were using as a data gathering device, you know, who was coming to your house. They had introduced a dog that was sort of a robot puppy that ended up following around new guests to see who they were, and trying to find out as much information. So the problem with technology nowadays is as much as people say that we’re on our phones, there’s a vast quantity and a vast amount of time that we’re not into that is those are data points that they’re just not getting. And so they’ve tried to find ways, I mean, maybe in the future, we’ll have a refrigerators out of doors, and you know, somebody will just drop off the food or something like that, you know, this is a dream of theirs.
Martin Cohen, PhD
I mean, yeah, I mean, it’s actually looking at it broadly, it says you cease to be an individual, you see you become just a cash machine. And that the thing that’s very particular about people, when the last remaining human things we do is eating, and gastronomy. And this is all of this is something that’s very dear to the French, and I’m based in France. And yeah, I see in France, France is the number two world base for McDonald’s. And there’s a reason for that is people actually actually like going to McDonald’s because the food will be exactly the same every time. And it involves no food preparation and it also costs about… to be relatively cheap. And so the country that supposedly represents a bastion of variety and loving different kinds of delicacies, and does… France does put a huge amount of effort into its food, has also embraced this new world. And I remember when I actually was in America, when I was a child, you know, one time when America and these things such as McDonald’s did seem to be the future and quit, to some extent that there is a kind of a sort of battle, not like a physical battle, but there will be an ideological battle between this worldview, which food is just part of the alternative worldview, which is local, environmental, I’m afraid the modern foods thing is totally hostile to the environment. But perhaps we should come on to that as a separate discussion, James.
James Connolly
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember having a conversation with a Malaysian farmer, we were at a conference and he was saying the farmer suicides were actually really high there. And because they had been brought into this commodity system, they were in essence farming for people that they would never see. A lot of the raw ingredients were in essence being exported to Northern Europe or to the Americas, repackaged, reprocessed, divided up into constituent ingredients and then resold back to them in their countries. You know, one of the things I find sort of interesting about Italy was a remember a few years back was at the turn of the century, they were saying Coca-Cola had this huge triumph they had, for years and years been trying to get people to, to drink Coca-Cola. And it was, it was either water or wine at meals, and it took them close to 30 years to in, you know, inculcate themselves into Italian culture. So that soda actually became something that was asked for during meals. And this is sort of commensurate with the birth of the slow food movement as well. Right?
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah. And that applies in France as well, where you have this this dying tradition of wine, which is still very sort of culturally cherished, but it’s not the reality. The reality is people are buying the mass produced Pepsi and Coca Cola has. And what’s more alarming is that they really don’t see any difference. And that’s what perhaps is so fascinating about food is it’s almost in a way people are very malleable, they can be made to eat or drink whatever the companies want.
James Connolly
Okay, so yeah, I mean, you know, some aspect of this, I find is sort of this move towards some sort of futuristic response, right? You know, this idea that we’re moving towards some sort of techno utopia, that is, has, in essence been sold to us, right? If you look at the early days of, say, social media and Facebook, either Instagram or any number of different things, it was meant as a means of, of connecting the world. We were going to build new bridges across divides, you’d talk to somebody, you know, you and I are communicating across 1000s of miles of distance. But I think that people are sort of finding that all of these technologies are used primarily as an advertising vehicle or a means of manipulating somebody’s worldview. O. Henry kind of talked about it in the early part of the 20th century. He said that a man in New York City, a banker in New York City, can now fill the mind of the farmer in Iowa with his ideas. You know, I wanted to your sort of wisdom on that.
Martin Cohen, PhD
The Twitter, what would you call it? Twitter battle or whatever that’s going on just recently has been revealing of that, because the claim was that it was a kind of neutral town square, where everyone was able to share their views and the algorithm would promote one in you know, just pick out the one that was trending and that will go round. But now this reality was it was always a sort of a vehicle for pushing certain establishment opinions. And particularly, you’ve got that in the Coronavirus period, where the we had to this formal process of banning people, dropping them from the platform if they said things that were against the so called “science,” and that when other people in the middle would have their tweet appended with official information on the virus. But if that happened with that one issue like the Coronavirus, it actually did reveal that everything in Twitter is a little bit of a manipulated discussion. The most obvious bits of the manipulation was the promotion of the people with blue ticks over the people without blue ticks. But the whole thing about this kind of modern sort of media is actually in a way I find that you see, I used to do freelance writing and things, it’s all got shut down on you. You’ve really got increasingly restricted public debate on a lot of issues. And we’ll take the third one because it’s our main focus on the food one. We had this whole thing for last couple of years about the new kinds of meats, that beyond meats and all that and that, that was covered in the mainstream media in a very critical way. I remember I wrote a piece for The Independent, which, as the name implies, seeks to be a neutral voice. That was anything but independent because I wrote the piece I actually wrote it with Frédéric. And then the editor insisted that it had to be made less anti the new meats and the new science. But the worst thing was that when they actually got printed in a very truncated form, they appended to it a long video having other journalists trying out these new alt-meats and saying how delicious they were. So an article that I’ve written with difficulty, which put just a few sort of skeptical points about these new biotech meats and said maybe they weren’t good for the environment, maybe they weren’t good for health that was shrunk into about a paragraph. Then a long piece by the journalists was added plus a video. And the whole thing was why is the media acting as a vehicle to promote these things, which actually a few years on their companies are going bust? Because they are so inappropriate. And so well, basically just, they’re not technic… they’re not a technology that has a place in the world. That they might one day have a place, but I doubt it, because of the fundamentals of nutrition are against them.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think that there was part of the reason why you had companies like Impossible Burger, were primarily working with restaurants. It was as soon as you open up that packaging, this smell was awful. And so you could cook a lot of the sort of off-gassing elements of it off in the restaurant. But serving it, if somebody just bought that package and brought it home, they probably just throw it in the trash. So there was a, you know, there was, I mean, to me, there was so much money being flooded into this, and so much positive media, that, you know, part of it to me is always like it’s a… I was listening to a podcast with a guy who had since the inception of Wired magazine had read every single issue over the course of a year. So I think Wired Magazine kind of came out in like the early 90s. So he read a monthly subscription every single year. He said up until the sort of Facebook, a lot of the Cambridge Analytica stuff, every single news story that came out of Wired magazine was positive – any new technology, any new idea, any new way of financing, every single thing was was to drive us to the sort of 21st century you know, utopian village. And, you know, they had to sort of reconcile themselves with the total absurdity of of it when Cambridge Analytica it came out. And he said, oh, all of this information that we’re uploading into the world is essentially being used to weaponize our worldview, to get people to vote a certain way, or to feel like somebody is taking something from them. And so I do feel like the media likes that stuff. They like the new thing, the new story that you don’t have to dive very deeply into, you know: chocolate is good for you, Snickers is good for you, you know, any number of different things that are kind of epidemiological studies that are paid for by those industries, you know.
Martin Cohen, PhD
And also, there’s just this thing about the advertising money, you put a relatively small, say it costs you a million dollars a week to run your paper. But if the advertiser offers you $1,000 for an advert, that paper that week will cover what the advertiser wants, and there’s a tiny amount of money can direct the media. And it’s quite clear that the agenda of lots of papers, has it has been just not in the public interest. And it’s not, it’s like almost like they got terribly lazy. I think in the old days, when I say the old days, I mean, like pre-internet days, papers were a little bit more rigorous. And I say I say this, as someone who’s been writing on and off, you know, for quite a few years now, you used to be able to talk to journalists who actually was specialists in their areas. So it was education. I’ve done a lot of writing on education. And I used to know, it’s a series of education editors, who were people who knew everything about the topic. And they were also very interested in debates and getting the facts straight. But now, if you talk to people, they’re terribly superficial. And I think this is a problem that the whole public debate is very superficial. And that means that the money people that the fakes are controlling the debate, and that’s particularly true in food.
James Connolly
Yeah. And, you know, I do believe that Aldous Huxley said this was warning us that we would be filled with just so much information that we wouldn’t be able to tell what the truth is anymore. I do feel like we’re constantly inundated with 24 hour news cycles. We can’t pull back and have a perspective on anything. Or just even see, the way the sort of past constantly repeats itself is new technologies are no different than Marconism, you know, or the radio or the television or any new technologies, even the printing press, the level to which things are fundamentally changed when you can get your sort of your ear worm into everybody’s head. It should always be viewed with some degree of skepticism. Twitter, I find is one of those places where, you know, you can’t tell the difference between something a really substantive story that will have a direct effect on you and your life, or something that is just pure clickbait. It just gets harder and harder to deal with, you know?
Martin Cohen, PhD
Well, I think for me, the thing about Twitter is, it’s not so much what’s written on there, but the fact that it offers you links all the time. And so the number of possible news sources or magazines or whatever, or blogs that I might consider looking at, if I didn’t go on Twitter, would be about 10. But if I’m using Twitter, I’m probably going to range over 1000s. And that means that, to me, Twitter is a very… it is a very effective information sharing source. It’s not in itself, it’s not authoritative, and it shouldn’t be. Take away the blue ticks. Because it’s not it’s not what people are saying it’s where the… where’s the source? Where’s the background?
James Connolly
Yeah, and I do find, if you follow it long enough, you will find there’s about 23 people on a, you know, yes to meat side, and 23 people on the, you know, plant-based side, and it’s just a constant argument between maybe 50 people a constant back and forth, you know, and everybody else is, you know, following a completely different string. But I kind of want to talk about, like, you know, one of the books that I had read over the summer, goes very deeply into the history of vegetarianism. It talks a lot about Pythagoras. It talks a lot about the sort of dissemination of different ideas that kind of came about, between what we would probably say now is the Silk Road. But this sort of, you know, the back and forth transfer of information and philosophies that were coming out of, say, India, in the Middle East, all the way through into the Mediterranean that functionally shifted the way that we thought about food, Pythagoras being probably one of the sort of seminal, like most ancient characters kind of associated with that. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the aspects of that idea and that philosophy?
Martin Cohen, PhD
Well, I’ll just say a little bit, which is that quite possibly, there wasn’t any one… there wasn’t actually a Pythagoras. But we have what you have is a kind of a mythical figure who represented a kind of worldview. And that worldview is really only influential because it was reflected by Plato writing quite a bit later. And Plato wrote his probably his most influential book, which was called the Republik, which is supposed to be the ideal way to run society, which is very relevant, because we still have people like George Monbiot creating these very similar kinds of descriptions of how society should be run. But Plato, despite being, you know, 2000 years back, he was arguing essentially, for the kind of vegetarianism, which came from Pythagoras. And sometimes Pipelight of such things tongue in cheek, he just reflecting other people’s opinions for dramatic effect, but I think probably he was actually leaning towards this kind of position, which was that you had to protect the environment, and you had to eat as little meat as possible. But you did actually allow you things that were dairy products. So it’s not quite a vegan picture. But the thing about that is that the whole Pythagorism is mixed up partly with factual elements and partly with things that have just been carried down, you know, little stories, myths. And I think what you have to understand it all as is a kind of a philosophy of that is timeless, but as it got political to this influence in the background right to the present day. So you’ve still got Pythagoreanism, reemerging in new forms, and there’s no harm in that you see, it’s got very positive elements in it. But as far as it’s rational, you’ve got on the other side. Again, it’s like two threads through history. So you’ve got the the ecologists, and the less meat people right back there, you know, two and a half thousand years ago, but you’ve got the the eat more meat people which are Aristotle and people. And they in fact, there’s a continual battle over the centuries between two philosophical groups and we’re still got it going. Aristotle, I particularly disliked because you find all his views are particularly awful. So he, for example, insisted that women not only are inferior to men, but they’re effectively they’re kind of like domestic cattle. and their only real role is that they carry babies. And he had other racist views. And you can bet on his science which people, particularly in philosophy circles always give too much credit for his science was almost entirely wrong. And as some commentators said, he, Aristotle probably held up human knowledge more than anyone else in history. So he was the worst possible person. But nonetheless, Aristotle represents this view about almost like the animal meat eating view, and banqueting and feasting. Says, you’ve got a very interesting sort of mixed philosophy, where the people who I think actually were right, and had the more thoughtful positions on things like food, or marginalized, not so much for that, but just in general, and the people who have the most outrageous and erroneous views have become central to our debate and in our culture. So the whole problem is that put it short is that the philosophical underpinnings and religious it’s all linked in with religion, obviously, of a society have led us astray on very practical things, which perhaps are pagans, and people who worship things like, you know, mythical gods that, you know, the earth god and things like this, they’re actually better on the food ideas, and to get a rational policy on food, and you would have to strip away all of these things, the philosophy and the sociology and the religion from our lives. Of course, you’re not going to do that.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, do you? One of the things I’m trying to sort of pull back on what you’re saying here is that to… do you, in your opinion, in history, has meat consumption always been associated with sort of a gluttonous you know, the sort of vegetarian side of it being an aesthetic, a denial of, you know, certain aspects of humanity, certain aspects of need and wants? Or do you find that there’s actually a kind of an intermixing between the two?
Martin Cohen, PhD
Well, is that in within what we call the Greek tradition, and immediately, you know, there’s this term Greek is all wrong. Because it’s not Greece. It might be North Africa, it might be Persia, you know, but let’s just call it the Greek tradition that you’ve got quite sophisticated, and, you know, thoughtful voices talking about food and environment and human health on one side, but they are considered cranky voices and marginal voices. And then you’ve got a very, very narrow and foolish, and often aggressive kind of minority who are pushing a much simpler narrative. And that way is the one that has dominated just as it dominated science. So to give you an example of the science, Aristotle insisted that the Earth didn’t move, it didn’t move at all. It didn’t rotate on its axis, it was literally fixed. The center of the universe is not a very sophisticated position. That what’s clever about the position is that it’s how we sort of feel if we go out in the garden or in the street, and you look around, everything does appear to be fixed. You haven’t the impression that you’re whizzing a million miles an hour around the center of the Milky Way, let alone certainly being the sun, you know, so this science, the science is it was all wrong, but it’s fitted in somehow politically. And that’s where we are today that I think we still tend to follow things that we think are scientific, which are actually more political.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to go too much into a tangent on that. But I think one of the things that I’ve been studying a lot over the past few years, is how a very obscure German monk by the name of Gregory Mendell became sort of a superstar in the late 90s search entry into the early 20th century. And a lot of it had to do with sort of what was called germ plasm at the time, that then became genetics today. And so when you look at it through the lens of the sort of the science that was ascendant at that time. You start to see that that the reason why Mendell was so popular was because there was such a poll to make sure that the right people were breeding with the right people. And so you get a lot into the sort of eugenics movement and the elevation of Mendell and genetics, which is they’ll still sits with us today. We make enormous extrapolations from genetic data that we don’t actually really know all that much about to determine, you know, the feasibility of, you know, dietary hypotheses to human health to breast cancer to all this other stuff. But when you studied the history long enough, you sort of realized that a lot of it was sort of built off of this idea that, you know, eugenics meaning, you know, good breeding, right.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah. And then do like, you have all these announcements about the human genome having been decoded. But when you actually look at the detail of it, it’s like at one level, it has been mapped. But within that map, there are vast areas, you know, 1000 times more that is unknown. Because it might even be impossible to know, because there might be an element of chaos in the whole system. You see, there’s feedback and things that are relevant that were that came in with the Coronavirus, where you had the idea that you knew enough about the DNA of people that you could cut and pasted a new section into the DNA, and that it would have a certain expected effect. And then a little bit later, as we know, the scientist said, but this is very curious, this actually had this unexpected side effect in certain people, not obviously in everyone. But it is part of this idea that you can treat the human beings as a computer like, like Elon Musk is treating Twitter, you know. It’s a physical computer program, actually computer programs themselves having done a tiny, tiny bit of programming myself is even they can become unpredictable because of feedback effects. So when by the time you’ve got something is very substantial computer program, you do actually have real unknowns, and you’re probably not going to iron them out ever, as a human being as if we treat human beings as a kind of vast computer program, which is how people do try to treat us. The fact is, we have only scratched the surface of what the program actually is.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, it’s the same nutritional ideology that came about with the birth of the steam engine, right, you know, and the car engine, so we started to treat calories is as you know, the burning of oil. And now the dominant paradigm is the computer. So it’s, you know, it’s information in and information out. One of the things I actually started thinking about with COVID was when I was reading your book you were you were talking about, so the a lot of the diet pills, that were kind of given out with like known really harmful side effects. And how a lot of the institutions that we would say are in charge of human health have essentially give greenlit a lot of these dietary pills that are, you know, part amphetamine part, you know, known to cause cardiovascular disease, any number of different things. And so after years and years of sort of like doing these large scale massive experiments on human populations, now, we during the coronavirus epidemic, they said, well, listen, trust us. We’re looking out for your best interest. And do you think that whatever capital they had in built up over over a long enough period of time, was essentially used up? And so the level of increased incredulity that they displayed when people lost trust or them so quickly, I thought it was actually somewhat absurd.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah. Well, actually go back to diets you see, sort of the little theme in “I Think Therefore I Eat” book, not that it’s really a dark book, but I just took it as a thing that a lot of people do think about and say, Why am I getting fat? We keep reading very simplistic things like you’re getting fat because you’ve increased the amount of calories you’re eating and reduced the amount of exercise. And that sounds superficially, very appealing. But the reality is, as anyone who’s done a diet is that for example, if you, if you eat a bit less and you slow down your digestion, then you actually get fatter because you’re burning the foods at the wrong rate. Secondly, you might affect the bacteria in your tummy, which is again, something that we haven’t got a clue really about the bacteria in our tummies. It’s just we haven’t really got much of a clue about the bacteria in all our body. Very easy to disturb that bacterial balance. And once you do that, it can have all sorts of effects and the least worrying probably is getting fat. And so there’s a whole raft of feedback effects in diet. What another one is, if you actually you actually go on a diet and you sort of reduce your energy. You don’t sleep well. I’m sure everyone who’s ever thought oh, so funny, I’m getting fat, actually, you might well not have been sleeping well anymore. You know, it might have nothing to do with what you’re eating at all. You’ve got to think outside the box all the time.
James Connolly
Yeah, there’s a… I’ll send this to you after the podcast. And maybe we can put it into the show notes. There’s a film archive agency in Britain called British Pathe. But if you go on their search, you actually find Pfizer, if you just Google Pfizer, on that website, you’ll find a late early 1950s, sort of the wonder of antibiotics. And so this is as early as the 50s. They knew it would cause enormous weight gain, because they were feeding it to livestock. And they knew that they because they were killing all the good bacteria, or, you know, any of the bacteria that were in there, there was no longer competition for calories in the digestive process. So we’ve known this for I mean, what are we going out 70 years now that overuse of antibiotics promotes, you know, obesity, but I you know, you wouldn’t hear that in the normal public.
Martin Cohen, PhD
And also, once you’ve upset, something as subtle as your bacterial balance, you lose energy, and then you’ll stop, you’ll put on fat. And you’ll also get ill just because you’re not functioning right. It’s I say it’s like a feed back that feeds back on itself. And that’s why you do end up looking at societies at large, you have got a very serious problem with obesity, which becomes a health critical thing not being or not just a nice aesthetic problem. And I must say, if you look at Britain, Americans are actually pretty bad at this, aren’t they? They’ve got one of the worst obesity rates?
James Connolly
Oh, yeah, no, we’re number one. Well, sort of, I think China has surpassed us into not in terms of population, percentage of population, just in terms of numbers, China and India, I think are actually higher.
Martin Cohen, PhD
And going back to Pythagoranism and things, a lot of the messages, they’re very simple. They’re about eats, it’s actually the Michael Pollan message: eat plants thing. But it’s true that people should eat greens, they should eat fruits. And if you do eat those things, you’re not eating other things, which are probably bad for you like this starchy things, and the cereals and indeed, oily, meaty things. But if you look at the way the Western diet, it has shifted. It’s always shifting away from fresh food. And that goes back to this thing about Amazon wanting access to your fridge. Because the fresh food is basically always going to be slightly more expensive to produce, than the things that you can make out of mass produced ingredients, like what you mentioned, the beginning and the soya bean. And these couple of reliable things, sugars, which can be made in vast piles, you know, mountains of them in agricultural terms, storage forever, and then there’s open with the products. So the fresh foods are out. Anyway, the point, James was it reminded me when you were talking was I actually visited China quite a few years ago, before it became a dictatorship, I might regret very much seeing this. But what I was struck by was how appalling the Chinese diet had become. And I visited a rural area where they still ate the traditional foods, which were wonderful, great range of things it is, does include meat and fish, but I included an awful lot of the herbs and vegetables and, and proper cooking was people all ate in the sort of village in a group, you know, and they all ate from the same dishes. So the bowls are put out on a big table communal table. So this kind of food tradition was there in China, it almost completely disappeared, and was being replaced in the cities by a monoculture diet, which was essentially meat and beef particularly, um, which would seem to be following the Americans with and at that point, it was already causing health problems. But if you look at China now I’m afraid it’s gotten a lot worse. And the food clearly relates to the other kinds of politics as well, which is sort of point that it’s in the way you know, we can look at maybe which is how the way a society is directly going to decide the way a society conducts its politics. And the diet which is more traditional, shall we say, involves lots of small producers and involves diversity, particularly brings about political diversity and more gentle politics. And data is based on a few producers force feeding you beef often is an authoritarian diet.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I remember, I was talking to one of the one of the producers on on Sacred Cow, Robb Wolf, who had done some work with the US military. And he was telling me a story, how the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the sort of the leadership of the US military, the Army, the Navy, and Marines, Air Force had all gotten together and looked at the obesity epidemic, just from recruitment rates, you know, can you fit into the tank type of situation. And, you know, looking at the food situation, they viewed this as a national security threat. And you can actually see that correlated with the rise of the drone program, the robotics program and everything like that. So they looked at the landscape of obesity in America and said, robots going forward, right, because they weren’t going to solve this problem. You know, but that said, you know, I mean, we can go back to Napoleon as sort of army moves on its stomach, you know, we have seen Julius Caesar, look at the Germanic tribes that he was trying to conquer, looking at their diet, and, you know, a lot of it was primarily meat based. They were over six foot two, you know, over six feet, strong men just, you know, beaten down by numbers and forces that were heavily aligned. But I do think that there is, for whatever reason, nowadays, we have a sort of a governmental system that views its populace only as a threat to their authority. And so the more that you can keep you sort of dependent upon pharmaceuticals, and you know, insulin and any number of different medications means that you don’t have a public that, you know, would say try to storm the Capitol on January 6. Badly.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Well, it’s hard to follow that one up, I think.
James Connolly
I know, right? Yeah, I mean, I think… so we can kind of pivot a little bit to say some of the elements of what I think is actually happening with the rapid deployment, industrialization that the sort of forcing of farming in China as they moved into the 20-21st century, we can actually see a lot of correlates between that in the 19th century, the sort of rise of vegetarianism in in some ways in Britain, but also in the United States as well. A lot of the sects that kind of came out of that, that were heavily vegetarian, were primarily because we had sort of moved off of the farm and started to move large droves of people into the cities. And so the more that people became divorced from where their food was coming from, the easier it was to kind of push in an ideological sort of, you know, semi-religious narrative around the optimal human diet. What was the Garden of Eden diet? I don’t know, if you studied a lot of the Seventh Day Adventists or even just some of the early sects of Mormonism. And Millerites. Who was his name? Sylvester Graham, the Grahammites, that actually led a lot to Emerson. Emerson was a big devotee, although I don’t think he actually belong to the sect, but this sort of Grahammite sect.
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Martin Cohen, PhD
Just on the Chinese and the food links to politics, the Chinese actually have some weird, a new technological plan, or some, let me just say, was it I can’t remember which group it is. Anyway. It was a company in China. And the whole point was they used facial recognition. And we all know that the poor Chinese everywhere they go, they’re being tracked by cameras and huge facial recognition that they wanted to use the facial recognition on the animals as well. So that for example, if you had a chicken, the chicken will have been photographed and tagged at the farm. And then it would be tracked to the place it would be killed, and then out up to the supermarket or to your house or whatever. But it’s track the whole way, using facial recognition. And it’s presented as a positive idea that you see in China. And the idea being that you would be sure what, where exactly your chicken had been come from. But it is, of course, part and parcel of a totalitarian surveillance society, and it’s not got anything to do with what you’d want for food.
James Connolly
Yeah, I think we’re seeing so much more of that. The New York Times just had a disturbing article about surveillance. It was in their op ed section where they were kind of talking about how this was a good thing in terms of deforestation and conservation. You know, I find that highly problematic just because the level of scrutiny. You know, the even just the stuff with Edward Snowden, we have, in essence sort of moved into a Hobbsian worldview that seeks more and more control over people.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Bentham. Jeremy Bentham – the Panopticon where everyone is watching all the time.
James Connolly
Yeah, but the strangest part about the Panopticon to me was that you didn’t know if you were being watched at that moment.
Martin Cohen, PhD
That’s right. But you thought you were. You assumed it was in the way it was just the limitations of the technology was that it wasn’t like ideologically, it was better that you should be not watched all the time. It was just it’s not practical to watch people, unfortunately. Thanks to technology getting there.
James Connolly
Yeah. But like, you know, I looked at… you were talking about how problematic or how poorly designed a lot of the algorithms are for even just the purchasing economy. You know, we have had just a number of horror stories with people who say, took a pregnancy test with their Target credit card, and then had a miscarriage. And Target would, you know, nine months later tried to sell them diapers and nine months later tried to sell them formula, and then just continuously ongoing basis, even though this person didn’t have a child or lost a child, you know, constant reminders of all of that, because the algorithm itself doesn’t really understand any of you know, any of the sort of compassionate elements of that are, you know, work particularly well right now. So I’m wondering if we can kind of talk a little bit about the you had a passage in here, which I thought was actually kind of, sort of profound. It was a food activist who said, “Monoculture produces almost everything that we eat, and is practically all you can buy a big supermarkets like Costco or Safeway, but monoculture isn’t farming, it’s strip mining, it’s violent. The meat we ate is produced in factory farms, and most cow milk comes from farms, fruits and vegetables are grown in large tracts of land, with no regard to damage to the environment.” So I’d love to have you kind of expand on that, because I think that that is, you know, for most people is, you know, it’s so it’s so part of our environment now that we actually just consider that normative, you know,
Martin Cohen, PhD
Well, monoculture?
James Connolly
Yeah. I mean, monoculture, just in terms of so much of the aspects of, you know, even just modern day society, right. You know, our film, our entertainment, you know, the violence of monoculture. And how, you know, some of the sustainability and efficiency arguments are really about sort of fulfilling some of the aspects of, you know, create a monocultural world.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Well, I mean, there’s just, the economic forces are there, they’re always pushing down reducing choice. So that, for example, you go into your supermarket, there always appears to be a choice. Actually, this is a curious thing about supermarkets, you have this, on the surface, you have the wonderful range of things. But the way they actually make a profit is they try to reduce how many things you can buy? That’s why they tend to, if you did, but no, they have only got products from about two to very large food corporations like Mondelez International. But there’s all the little producers have been squashed out. So this sort of its capitalist things to reduce choices and more profit, if you can get everyone to buy just one product that maximizes the profit. And that’s the impetus. Is that what you’re getting at?
James Connolly
Yeah, I do think that there is, you know, a lot of the pushback from from people who were advocating for farming and for farmers who are trying to work independently of this have, in essence been drowned out of the argument, the sort of global argument of who feeds whom, you know, the numbers are somewhere between 60 and 70%, of smallholder farmers that feed the world. But the illusion is that it’s the large, multinational corporate agronomy, that is doing everything to reduce all of the costs and to sort of feed the world. You know, we have since the 70s been able to feed a growing population in totality if you just looked at calories, but we’re constantly reminded of the fact that we need to increase in build more monoculture to do so.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah. And it’s that old thing about fields, like the small farmer will have hedgerows, it may be a little watercourse, though, there’ll be insects, there’ll be birds, foxes, all of that living living there in the countryside or wherever. And they also… there’ll be part of the community, the small farmers, so they’re recycling resources and money with In the community, and then the big farm, which is all over the world, it’s the big farms take over from the little farms. The big farm is 1000 acres, the hedges have all gone, it’s done with large machinery, done with a huge amount of fertilizer, which goes into watercourses kills everything, they spray a lot of poison. So you’ve got this thing, this mismatch that the ideology is clearly that it’s better to have the small farmer but the small farmer gets this hostile political and deep public treatment, whether considered in some way, they’re considered to be a drain on on the other people in society, the procedures be backward. And the large farms are considered to be modern and the forward looking and scientific and all the rest of it, to the extent that this whole narrative of the bio foods fitted in very well, because they rely on these crops produced by big producers, and then destroying the livelihoods of the little farms. And if we take light in the Netherlands, I think just last month, the government just by edict, declared that something like 3000 small farms would shut that they were forced to close. And that it was produced, you see with a spurious moral veneer, which was that somehow the small farms were bad for the environment, which is, you know, they were using up land that could be used for something else. Producing methane, which was heating up the atmosphere and all these sorts of very poorly based scientific claims, but are increasingly accepted by the general public. And that means that the government’s are almost unleashed now. To shut down the whole of the rural farming communities, it’s a real, I think it is probably the big social change that we’ll see in the next 20 years. And it probably would need to have a little bit of a not exactly a battle, but certainly civil unrest to stop it. But I don’t think that will happen. I think there’s enormous complacency amongst all the city dwellers about where their food comes from. And the management of the countryside, which they just assume, is basically runs itself. It doesn’t run itself. And so a lot of it has to do with farmers.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think you told the story about the lockdowns in France that I actually hadn’t ever heard. And wonder if you could tell about some of the lengths to which somebody had to go through and even just to go out and purchase, you know, consumer goods or, ya know, food to feed their families.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Well, so a couple of years ago, there was life as normal. And then the President gave an announcement on the television in the tried and tested style of all mad dictators. It was a special message, looked at the cameras, they very earnestly said, I have to tell you, the people of France very sad news, there’s a terrible virus. From tomorrow, you are not allowed to leave your houses. And that’s what they did. They introduced this rule over the whole country. No one could leave their houses. You’ve heard about China, who does it to cities mostly, which is appalling. In fact, they did to the whole country in France, that partly due to the whole country because they said politically, it’s difficult to lock up one bit and not another bit. So for example, I was in a relatively rural bit of France, where they had during the entire two years of the Coronavirus, they had negligible literally negligible Coronavirus cases. And nonetheless, I was treated the same as people living in the most infected areas of Paris or something. We were all obliged from that day to stay in our house and you could only leave if you printed out a form on the government website and the form said who you were, your date of birth all this kind of see private information government’s cherish and you had to tick a box which said I’m going to the nearest shop. I will only go for as long as it requires and then I will return to my house yet but the time – on time you’re leaving your house and the police would stop you as you were going and they would check this form and if you didn’t have it then they would produce some enormous fine and if you didn’t pay your fines and they would put you in prison. It was a very very severe and it went on for two years on and off. They released them, you know, they relaxed the rules in the summer but then come the autumn they put them back on again – achieved absolutely nothing but it did achieve some very big sociological changes which are with all the little businesses went bust. So a small town, small town France, with there’s a bar and a cafe and they lost all their customers. They couldn’t cope, no one was allowed to go out the supermarkets, however you were allowed to the supermarket because otherwise you’d have died, you see. So you were allowed to go to the supermarket and load up on food. And so the supermarkets, actually their profits or massively increased. And that’s why I’m thinking it’s got to be very cynical about governments, that they take these decisions, ostensibly on public health grounds, and then you look at where the money’s going. And literally, trillions of dollars in Europe went to these big companies that it was sucked out from all the small producers, the independence, and you couldn’t have done that in any other way, except by claiming it was an emergency, or health emergency.
James Connolly
I think, you know, we saw a lot of the, I mean, as much as the US actually gave anything to small businesses to help them survive, you had to go through, you know, this labyrinthian, you know, methodology in order to get any money to sort of save your business, which already gave a leg up to people who had automatic access to banks, to people who, because essentially gave it the banks to loan out. And so if you already had an established relationships with larger companies already do, then you were immediately getting money, and they just so you had, you know, these, you know, enormous companies getting huge windfalls. Some of them were shamed to give it back, but a lot of them kind of got away with it. You know, and so all of the small businesses essentially just, you know, all shut down. You know, it I, you know, part of me was wonders, like, you know, that was just a test to see how far they could kind of push people under, say, new climate lock downs, or, you know, any number of different sort of elements to kind of get them to see what how far you could push society before it would kind of crack. You know, and it was a, you know, the level of complicity, I think, not complicity. But I think a lot of Americans that what I noticed was a lot of Americans actually did apply, you know, they stayed at home. They did exactly what they were supposed to do. You know, but there’s just a finite limit to that.
Martin Cohen, PhD
But in France and in the UK, people didn’t stay at home because they were, in some sense voluntarily doing it. They stayed at home because they were forced to. And this is the extraordinary thing that these there’s this very much it was the Chinese model was successfully transported and applied to countries which you think are the great bastions of democracy, like France and the UK. In the UK, I remember do lots of little things like people, you were allowed out, again, in France, to just have a piece of paper with you saying I’m taking my daily walk, it will not be more than I think it was 500 meters, you weren’t allowed 500 meters from your house. You were allowed to take one walk per day. In Britain, they had drones, the infamous drones by the police who used drones, and then they would talk to people as they were walking and they would say, you are not allowed to walk here. You’re too far from your residence. Go back to your house. So the extent to which it just went in, you know, there’s lots of different examples, I myself was stopped by police and told to produce my piece of paper in France and things. I noticed as usual, a lot of the time it was black people, colored people who were stopped, you know, but anyway, was a terrible thing. And there’s been no real reexamination of this period. If anything, governments have congratulated themselves. We’re all still alive. It’s thanks to our quick action. It wasn’t even quicker.
James Connolly
Yeah. And okay, you know, I consider myself like left of left very liberal, but the level of complicity that kind of that happened between people that I admire, and they’re sort of ponying up in uncritical thinking behind getting and relaying the message of large multinational pharmaceutical companies was just so abhorrent to Me. You know, I found it particularly difficult to defend that idea. I mean, these are these are companies that are, you know, Pfizer, what it initially it had had no relationship with actually producing the vaccine. All they did was have the capacity to be able to manufacture it on mass. And so they ended up with a contract for it, and they wanted to charge $100 per dose. That was what they were initially going to the government’s in thing like this, this will cost you and the the level of profit that they’ve made the the things that they were trying to institute, which was they wanted college kids, if they wanted to go back to school would have to get a booster every six months or so. Yeah, you know. And just like it was just a never ending cycle of like, we need more of this more of this. And I just think that and then they’re now asking for amnesty. Through the fog of war we’re, you know, we didn’t necessarily know what was going on. I’m like, Come on people.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah. I think the left/right thing is quite curious, if you take left as progressive, which isn’t really true, but if we temporarily say the left to normally the progressive politics, you’ve got that thing that they will clearly on the authoritarian side on the Coronavirus. It was the left said no, we must clamp down early. You must clamp down hard and you must prevent people doing everything. And you had these these right wing talk hosts who were disputing it and it’s getting you know, but actually getting some very serious – I don’t follow them normally, but I did watch some of them talking about the Coronavirus and they started to look at it quite carefully. You know, they were talking about the science they were talking and the left weren’t looking at it carefully at all. They were doing knee jerk things and silly, silly little recycled politic political slogans. But also, the same sort of odd left right thing applies to the food thing where somehow these alt meets with sort of considered as left wing and the people who, for example, saying traditional small farming where you haven’t maybe you know, you’ve got to local cheese, special cheeses. Oh, no, that’s terribly reactionary sort of stuff you don’t want to be involved in.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I don’t… I genuinely don’t understand that. You know, I don’t understand the notion of sort of pushing that said, you know, I worked for close to a decade, I founded a nonprofit. And we were mainly working in inner city schools, very Jamie Oliver-esque. Working in inner city schools to kind of, you know, improve nutritional standards and, you know, teach kids about food and gardening. And one of the things I found was somewhat absurd was a lot of the, we had Nutrition and Dietetics students coming from some of the most renowned institutions in New York City. And why you, Columbia, Hunter College, all coming out sort of pushing a lot of sort of vegetable oils and plant based and most of them were vegetarians. They had a horrible relationship with food. They didn’t like to touch meat at all. But there seemed to have been this sort of push to sort of, you know, move everybody towards this plant-based thing agenda, for the most part. Our mayor now is quote, unquote, vegan. He’s, you know, he’s spending a lot of time with effective altruists. Peter Singer, any number of different people I don’t know if you’re familiar with Dr. Michael Greger. These are the nutritional sort of ideologists and activists who were sort of pushing this agenda, taking away meat from kids who are already, you know, marginalized in terms of the choices that they get to make. And so we had kids who are getting 60% of their meals from the DOE. And that can be nutritious, it could be really wholesome food, or it could be total junk. And the plant-based meat was just ultra processed, just total junk food. And so I don’t understand why the left sort of moved into this progressive thing. I don’t think that the tech industry is left. I don’t think they are. I don’t think they care about any of that stuff. I think it’s about profits, and sort of aligning with certain agendas that make them look like they’re progressive, the same amount of money that comes from, say, Google or Alphabet or their mother company goes as much to the left and to the right as possible. So, but it is disappointing. You know, I don’t necessarily know how to sort of reconcile myself with that to say, I don’t necessarily want to walk away from all the good that I think that they’re doing. But yeah, the sort of meat debate is really polarized in weird ways.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah. It’s really like the climate change thing where there isn’t actually a debate. You have two camps. Well, I think that’s a bit unfair. Actually. I’ll take that back. I think on the right there is some debate. This is the thing that’s striking. On the right, you see people looking at the facts and in the research but on the left you don’t you just see people is a knee jerk thing is you’re on the wrong side, you are a bad person. And that’s the way the way they push the whole climate change thing. And actually it always annoyed me. Long before the all these foods debate, I remember writing about energy and climate policy. And that was interesting to see that it actually started with acid rain, which you might not remember acid rain, of course, whole acid rain thing was a battle between the Scandinavia and Germany. The Scandinavians accused Germany of the power stations, their coal power stations, dropping sulfur particles on them and causing the rivers to die. And actually, it probably not true you see, it probably wasn’t actually true, any of that, but very, very successful. They’ve managed to get everyone to agree that from now on, they were going to the very minimum. They would have filters on all the power stations, and remove these particles from the atmosphere. And indeed, you don’t have acid rain over Scandinavia anymore. But the thing was that it was done as a kind of a new kind of politics, where you have a sort of a consensus, scientific consensus. And then you have a policy which everyone is obliged to follow. And the consensus is arrived at really by political manipulation, rather than anything resembling real science. Same actually with the ozone hole, go back to the ozone hole, UFC, and all of these you see people just accept it, they just accept the science. And actually, the thing about science is you don’t just accept that you always look at it, you evaluate it, you challenge it, and you might follow it, but you follow it rational, you know, it’s active thinking way, not a passive political side. You know, it’s my bad show. I’ve got to follow this policy, because it’s on my, on the left one or the right.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I was… I always try to whenever I’m having conversations to say that ultimately, the sort of, you know, if you just wanted to talk about the meat versus plant divide, I just think it’s a false dichotomy. It’s monoculture and, versus something that can be regenerative. You know, if you can mechanically produce and reproduce almonds, and then somehow convince people that it’s nutritionally superior food, then you can build entire monocultures. In California, there’s essentially one billionaire who owns most of the water rights. They’re most of the water rights for all of California, with these people, the Resnicks, who became sort of very wealthy off of selling like, really horrible, horribly made, like ceramic sculptures on like, shopping channels, like the QVC. They got heavily involved in agricultural land ownership, and they’re part of the reason why we actually consider almonds to be super healthy. They’re heavily involved in the pistachio movements to sort of push that selling it on the Super Bowl, the you know, multibillionaires, but they own most of the water and you just look at that level of monoculture and what it’s doing the pollinators to bees, and you just like, how is plant-based in any way superior to, you know, anything that we’re doing? And we’re see that with palm oil, we’ve seen that the second leading cause of deforestation in the world, you know. So what we’re doing is building these false dichotomies in these ecosystems that, in essence, allow what you said in the debate on Veganuary, or allowing these sort of multinational processors to sort of get away with murder. You’re not even really part of the equation, except for when they’re sort of allowed in is the people kind of governing how we’re talking about what is sustainable.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah. It’s a bleak, bleak picture.
James Connolly
Yeah. I mean, you know, look, I mean, people are angry, even if we could direct some of those resources to getting people to understand what’s going on, I do see a young movement of people who don’t want to work in cities, who want to, like build something, you know, who are rejecting a lot of the sort of common tropes of the 21st century, who want to be outdoors, who want to work in the soil, you know, we have to incentivize government to allow that to happen. Most of our farmers are between 50 and 60 years old. So we have a generational gap that’s sort of happening now. That needs to be fulfilled. So, look, I think your book is actually really profound because it kind of gives you like a 10,000 foot perspective on that. I think we agree on a lot of the stuff that’s had have happened in the 20th century, in terms of these sort of monocultures that have become ubiquitous, right? Like, depending on who you’re looking at 6% of the calories actually come from soybean oil in the US diet. Yeah, like that is absolutely insane.
Martin Cohen, PhD
And the health consequences are there, you know, people getting sick and die.
James Connolly
Yeah, you know, nutritional Twitter will tell you otherwise. But I think it’s it’s somewhat difficult because, you know, in the same day you were talking about the nutritional dark matter, the stuff that we don’t know about what happens when food enters our body is just so absolute, like anybody who’s spouting knowledge on this stuff, or at least an idea that they have the answer is you should run away from.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah, well, what we can say it’s complicated. What’s the explanation is, but we can say there is a real health problem. And that is linked in some way to the food system. And where it’s not enough just to say, well carry on as you’ve seen people who’ve been running it, so Well, that’s fine. You just do what you think. Because we can see it’s like leading everyone into right off the cliff. Yeah, yeah. real trouble, I think is that, as I say, with the certainly the same with the climate change is that debate really has been corralled into just a small area where it’s not going to go. You’re not going to get the real issues discussed.
James Connolly
Yeah. And I think the, you know, it’s the wrong leadership. You know, I find George Monbiot to be highly problematic, and just so important to the idea that he should get pushback at all. He finds it absolutely abhorrent. And really 90% of his pushback are actually from farmers and nutritionists. But he doesn’t seem to care.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Yeah, but I mean, he’s like a sort of, in a way, he’s, like a very right wing fanatical pundit. But he, in the political spectrum, he’s sitting there as I’m in the middle as Mr. Moderation. And I’m just telling you what the science is, or something, but you know, that’s the extent to which the debate has been skewed. Is that someone like that can exist?
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I’ve read his book, Regenesis. And he has two stories in there, you know, two farmers who are doing it right. One who has never made a profit on his farm, I think. And then secondary guy who works 363 days of the year takes two days off a year. You know, this is not the farming future that I think anybody would want. And then his other alternative is sort of, you know, this microbial goo, that we’re supposed to all make into pancakes, or french fries, or whatever, you know, it just it’s so dystopian. It’s so ugly, no, you know, just say, I don’t know. I don’t even know how to engage with it.
Martin Cohen, PhD
I was just slightly dishonest because it’s these veggie burgers that people, journalists, again, I’m a bit disgusted with, the journalist would eat these veggie burgers, make an article out of it. And then it turns out the veggie burger cost maybe $1 million.
James Connolly
The lab-grown meat one?
Martin Cohen, PhD
Completely inefficient and impossible to ever get down to a scalable, you know, so it’s a pretense it’s a fake pretense that the strategy could go anywhere.
James Connolly
Yeah, and, you know, I think one of the things that I find highly problematic about is that because this is considered a moral argument, from their perspective, it’s hard to, you know, sort of reconcile their idea that they’re driving us to a sort of a moral future. Paul Shapiro, who was one of the big lab grown meat advocates was really, he was kind of caught up in the Me Too scandal, like multiple allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, and creating a toxic work environment for a lot of the people who work there. The Good Food Institute as well was sort of implicated in creating this toxic work environments. There were… women aren’t even allowed to be part of it. You know, I don’t necessarily know like, you put yourself up there as sort of a marvel, moral arbiter. But like your day to day basis, and in reality is treating people like…
Martin Cohen, PhD
As we say, you see, that’s part of the whole thing is, in a way, it’s a very censorious and suppresses other viewpoints. And that’s the only way that the program or the strategy can go forward as soon as any debate or examination is allowed. It falls to pieces. It doesn’t make sense of have to, has to be the censorious people behind it.
James Connolly
So how would I mean, do you see a sort of Vision of Hope? Are you cautiously optimistic?
Martin Cohen, PhD
Quite the opposite. I really, I mean, I’m biased here, as I say, in rural France, and you still see very small farms, you know, basically a couple of fields and a few cows, and the cows are happy They’re producing milk which is made into these quite carefully produced speciality cheeses and it’s hanging on. But really the big picture is clear that the process is the the vast amounts of money are pushing the changes and then they come in from central government just like with Coronavirus, they will say to the farmers you are not allowed to do X. And they’re doing these things. You know, they’ll say like, right you can just knows what exactly they’ll do. But that the whole process with I think we’ve all lost control both of our governments and our food policy. So we Yes, food policy is heading a certain way. I don’t like the way it’s heading. I don’t think we’ve actually got the democratic structures anymore to oppose it. So I’d be rather pessimistic about the future.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I do think that the I’d see some degree of the, this the same level of like, institutional governmental ineptitude that this sort of gave rise to. The, you know, 1920s, let’s just say the 1920s is a rise of authoritarian peoples who kind of came in and said, Listen, I’m going to give you very simple solutions to problems. And I’m going to take control of that, like Mussolini loved FDR. You know, FDR, I don’t think actually had a problem with Mussolini’s governmental policies. That’s what some of the things that actually worried me is, because we’re getting so many conflicts from so many different sides, telling the world that the world is changing, and not in ways that we can predict. We’re looking for people who are saying, very simplistic messaging, it’s kind of coming. I don’t know how much you’re following what’s happening in Italy at the moment. But it’s definitely very worrying. But it should have been predicted, right? I think, you know, this level of totalitarianism is a natural outgrowth of institutions that don’t allow push back,
Martin Cohen, PhD
I’m not following Italy very well. But I’m not quite as worried about Italy, as perhaps you are. But I actually think the total Italian politics is probably misunderstood, even since Mussolini, who, although he was a fascist, he was not a Nazi. And that’s an important distinction. But the thing, the thing is, we are looking at totalitarianism. You so… you’ve got, you have got a totalitarian streak in Italy. But you’ve got it there in places like you say, in France, as well. And the UK. In fact, the UK, in a way is a little bit more liberal. That’s hard to explain how, but it’s partly to do with carefully, you know, split systems of power in the UK. But in countries like France, you’ve really got a very centralized state. And this is terrible. And I do think you’ve got, again, you’ve got a sort of split in the US, haven’t you? I mean, you’ve got sort of very obvious split in political power. But you’ve got a tendency there, which is alarming, which is for the Central State to take more and more control, to extend what it’s sphere of influence is, and this is where I think the real debate is. It’s not the party politics. It’s not like this new Italian person is from the far right. And I don’t think they’re from the far right. What is more worrying is the general picture of all politicians are extending their control. They’re giving the the police forces more powers, it’s using surveillance in unprecedented ways. And that those global No, not even person I think the politicians themselves are not in control. It’s like forces. The forces are there as technology is actually in a way driving it.
James Connolly
Yeah, I remember even just during the Coronavirus lockdowns, one of the things that, for me became a real sort of visual representation of some semblance of how much the sort of police state had arrived, was the level to which riot gear had sort of become ubiquitous. Right. I mean, whether you’re in Sweden or Norway, or, you know, France or anywhere, Hong Kong, you had these people, everybody showing up in this sort of, like, Kevlar face shield. You know, like, somebody had decided at some point that this is going to be sort of instituted globally.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Where it’s like, it’s normal, you know, yeah, normal to have this kind of a paramilitary police dealing with a group of demonstrators.
James Connolly
Yeah, and, you know, in the farmers protests as well, in India and in the Netherlands. And, you know, the people who showed up that day, were not people carrying you know, this, these are automatic weapons, these are tear gas. This is any number of different things that had to have been part of a budgetary allowance that was brought in saying, we were going to anticipate any number of different lockdowns. But when have you ever hired at a conversation like that or on in the news media, right? Who did an investigation of that? So I don’t want to take up too much more of your time. I think it’s conversations been wonderful. I really appreciate the fact that we just like ranged all over, you know, these are the things that I think about before I go to bed at night. But thank you so much. I really appreciate this. How will people find you if they’re if they’re looking for you, if you want people to reach out?
Martin Cohen, PhD
Find me by putting my name into the search engines, possibly add the word philosopher. Because it just as a lot of Martin Cohens – rather surprisingly common name. But yeah, the thing I have a little website, but I have a couple of websites, actually. But the best thing is to try and track me down through my books. That’s what I do. I’m interested in the book. So it’s really nice to find a reader like yourself changes who’d taken such an interest in that. But I think, increasingly, people aren’t reading books. I’m not criticizing the general population, because I don’t do it myself. I’ve stopped reading a lot of books. But that is a shame because you can actually put a lot more thought into a book, than you can intercept in a blog post or indeed, even a podcast. And we’re doing our best here. But a book is something that you can spend, say 100 hours on one paragraph, and that means the paragraph normally is quite well written ideally. So yeah, it’s great to find a reader.
James Connolly
And yeah, don’t be like Sam Bankman-Fried who said he’s never read a book and he has no interest in reading a book. He thinks they all should be distilled down to blog posts.
Martin Cohen, PhD
Like to see traditional farming and traditional reading that sort.
James Connolly
Well, thank you so much. I’m gonna sign off right here.
Diana Rodgers, RD (Sustainavore Ad)
If you’re looking for a guide to help you get your diet back on track to help you feel your very best, and to learn more about meat’s role in a healthy, and sustainable, and ethical food system, then I highly recommend you take my Sustainavore course. I’ve condensed all of my knowledge in human nutrition and agriculture and have made it accessible to everyone in eight easy modules. There are quizzes, tips, and motivational emails to keep you on your journey. It also comes with a free cookbook and other great bonuses. So, eat for your health, the planet, and your values. Head to sustainavore.com today and check it out.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening today and for following my work. If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. Visit sustainabledish.com/join and become a sustaining member today. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join. And thank you.
