Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we turn to our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. Tens of billions of cows, pigs, and chickens are raised and slaughtered each year for food globally. What makes this a climate story? Well, their burps, manure, and the fertilizer used to grow their feed account for somewhere around 11% of global greenhouse emissions, according to the United Nations. Other studies say it's really more like 19%. We'll get into why those different numbers in a bit. Shifting to a more plant-based diet could mitigate some of the impacts of the climate crisis as many of you know.

In July, Oxford University published new research that showed that people who follow a plant-based diet account for 75% less in greenhouse gas emissions than those who eat more than 3.5 ounces of meat a day. A vegan diet, in particular, results in what Oxford calls significantly less harm to land, water, and biodiversity. For many Americans, the thought of going vegetarian or all the way to vegan might seem impossible, might be impossible. While Gallup reports 1 in 4 Americans want to cut back on meat, only 5% of adults are vegetarian or vegan, and most give up their diets at some point.

Joining us now to discuss how meat agriculture impacts climate and to explain how to incorporate this information into our lives in a sustainable and doable way, is Kenny Torrella, staff writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. He's also the author of Meat/Less. So it's meatless with a slash between the two words. Meat/Less, which is a Vox newsletter, designed to help readers incorporate more plant-based food into their diets. Kenny, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Kenny Torrella: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: The estimates vary, as I noted, but what's the best number that you have for what percentage of global climate warming emissions is caused by animal agriculture?

Kenny Torrella: Give or take around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions stem from the meat, dairy, and eggs that we eat. As you mentioned, some figures put it closer to 11%. Some put it closer to 20%, but regardless of which model we use, there's no doubt that animal agriculture is one of the largest drivers of climate change.

Brian Lehrer: Why is it so hard to measure the impact of agriculture on the climate? We're talking about one estimate like 20%. That's double the estimate of the other from a credible source, which is around 10%.

Kenny Torrella: It varies widely because well, for one, in the United States, we're not really monitoring emissions from agriculture. Agriculture is exempt from some of the key air quality monitoring laws federally.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

Kenny Torrella: Also, there's the issue that farming depends on a variety of factors, and so do the emissions. Depends on what you feed an animal, depends on the weather, how they're raised, and so a lot of the estimates that we get are simply models. The total figure that comes out at the end, can be different. One thing I point out, too, is that I believe the United Nations' figure, which is at 11%, I believe it's not been peer-reviewed yet.

Some climate scientists are skeptical about that figure because it's much lower than the 14.5% that the UN cited several years ago. Dairy production has increased pretty significantly since. One of the main reasons why there could be a discrepancy is that it could be the case that they're under-emphasizing methane, which come primarily from cattle and dairy cows.

Brian Lehrer: This is maybe a tangent, but do you know why dairy production would be significantly increasing these days?

Kenny Torrella: Just in general, globally, as countries climb out of poverty and their economies grow, people tend to consume more meat and dairy. Even in the United States, while consumption of fluid milk is going down, we're actually seeing an increase in consumption of dairy-based products like yogurt and cheese.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. All right. Here's another number from your reporting that's going to blow some people's minds. In October, you wrote about how "Almost half of the continental US is used for meat production." What? Where is all that land?

Kenny Torrella: That's right. You can think of it as a few buckets. One bucket is that the Midwest is really blanketed in corn and soy. A lot of that corn and soy doesn't go to feed us, it goes to feed livestock, so chickens, pigs, cows, and even fish who are farmed. Much of the US is devoted to growing food to feed the animals we then eat, but there are also large swaths of the United States, especially in the West that are devoted to cattle grazing. You have large plots of public land that are loaned out to cattle ranchers at really low rates so their cattle can graze. In that process, the cattle can trample on vegetation, and pollute rivers and streams.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned soy and corn, and yes, a lot of listeners probably do know that, but maybe a lot also don't realize that even though those are obviously plants, that they're being raised to feed the cows for the eventual goal of meat production. I even heard on NPR recently, how the Great Salt Lake in Utah is on the brink of collapse. In the reporting, they cited alfalfa farming as the cause. Alfalfa has to do with meat production, doesn't it?

Kenny Torrella: It does, yes. It's a primary feed crop for beef cattle and for dairy cows. This one figure really blew my mind during my reporting. I read that 68% of the available water in Utah is going to just grow alfalfa for livestock feed, but it's less than 1% of the state's income. That led me to write a headline saying that we're essentially draining the Colorado River for meat and dairy production.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has a question for our guest, Kenny Torrella from Vox, who writes their Meat/Less newsletter. How do you say it when you say it? Do you just say meatless?

Kenny Torrella: I say meat and then I pause for a moment and say less, so Meat/Less.

Brian Lehrer: This could be for those of you who tried to eat less meat and had trouble with it because that's the personal side of this as we talk about the impact of meat on the climate. 212-433-WNYC on our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday. 212-433-9692 with your stories of trying to go vegetarian or vegan, or your questions about methane and other emissions that are coming directly or indirectly from meat production. 212-433-WNYC, or any of the politics involved, which we're about to get to. 212-433-9692 call or text. Yes, this is also a political story as these things always are. You write, "Meat giant Tyson Foods, spends a much bigger share of its revenue than Exxon Mobil lobbying Congress to stop climate policy." Tell us about that.

Kenny Torrella: That's right. We may often think of the tobacco lobby in its heyday, or today, the oil and gas lobbyists, some of them as powerful forces in Washington, and they certainly are. Right up there with them is the meat industry and their lobbies. We've seen that over the last decade, the meat lobby has become increasingly concerned about its climate and environmental impact and is trying to get ahead of regulation as we're now seeing oil and gas being further regulated.

From the meat and dairy sector, we've seen a ratcheting up of what I would consider greenwashing. They're using a similar playbook as big oil did in the early 2000s of really downplaying their emissions and pollution and saying that, "Look, we'll make tweaks here and there to clean up the industry and then everything will be fine. We don't need to be regulated, we can just take voluntary measures to clean up the worst actors." One of the most recent and most startling examples of this actually comes from Tyson Foods. They're the country's largest meat producer. The company recently launched what it's calling climate-friendly beef. Which is odd because beef is far and away the highest carbon-emitting food available. When I asked Tyson, and also I asked the United States Department of Agriculture about what exactly makes Tyson's beef climate-friendly if they could share data to prove this, Tyson said they would not open their environmental accounting ledger. The USDA said I would've to file a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about how the USDA thought through approving this label.

Brian Lehrer: It's not just the lobbyists, you're right about how US environmental groups haven't really addressed the issue. You think they haven't?

Kenny Torrella: Yes. By and large the environmental movement has shied away from going up against big Ag. I think there are a couple legitimate reasons to that. One being that ultimately I think some groups feel like they need to stay focused on the energy sector, which is the largest source of emissions. I also think there's some fear around going up against big Ag and saying we need to regulate meat, that the US and the global North should reduce its meat and dairy production and consumption because that's not a politically popular message. People really like to eat meat and they want it cheap and fast.

It's not very popular to say, "Look, we need to more heavily regulate this industry and we need to shift the American diet so it's not so lopsided towards meat."

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts this question says, "Every segment I've heard on this show about meat eaters and/or vegetarianism and veganism and the environment leaves out grass-fed beef or pasture-raised animals in general like chicken and pigs. Can you please have the guest address pasture-raised, grass-fed, and finished meat, and how that would change the meat industry's impact on our environment?"

Kenny Torrella: That's a great question. One thing I'll point out is that the vast, vast majority of animals raised for food about 99% are raised in so-called factory farms. The pasture-raised grass-fed organic sector is very, very small. That said there are some environmental benefits to raising animals outside of factory farms. If managed right, it can potentially reduce pollution. Of course, animal welfare is higher on these farms which is a major positive. There are also some drawbacks. One of them is that grass-fed beef or pasture-raised animals require more land.

The drawback of that is that if you require more land to produce the same amount of meat, then it has a higher carbon footprint which can be counterintuitive. Scientists call this the carbon opportunity cost of meat. For example, let's say you have a patch of land if you just let it be, let it be wild, it can sequester large amounts of carbon but if you convert it to use it for agriculture, you forego that opportunity to sequester carbon so in some ways--

Brian Lehrer: I guess the comparison comes down to how much in terms of emissions is saved because they're not using land to grow all that soy and corn and alfalfa to feed the cows, right? Versus whatever the cost is from using all that pasture.

Kenny Torrella: Right. There was one analysis into just one farm. This is not a representative example but it found that this one farm, I believe in Georgia used much more organic and holistic farming practices was able to sequester carbon on its land, but it actually required two and a half times more land than a conventional factory operation. That's one thing I often raise in this issue is that agriculture is just full of trade-offs and you're really trying to balance a lot of factors at once. It's not so simple as say just comparing solar energy to coal.

Brian Lehrer: Jason in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jason.

Jason: Hi, thanks very much. Just two quick questions. I started substituting avocado in my salad for chickens because as far as I know, avocados are not able to suffer. Now avocados as I understand it are grown not in the United States for the most part. There's a lot of carbon footprint associated with raising avocados and transporting. I wanted to ask your guest about those calculations about the transporting of plant-based foods. Also, the other thing is lab-grown meat which I know sounds weird but it's all cultivated meat.

There's an organization called the Good Food Institute which is funding a lot of initiatives to develop I think it's from stem cells or something. Which may sound creepy but there's nothing natural about slaughterhouses so maybe someday the best thing for New Yorkers if most of the food that we eat is grown in a lab in the Bronx or Queens. Just wondered if your guests wanted to comment on any of that.

Brian Lehrer: Jason, thanks for asking both parts of that question. I will know, Kenny, that the most common question that we're getting on the phones and a lot of text messages has to do with the fake meat, impossible burgers and things like that.

Kenny Torrella: I'll go with the question around avocados versus chicken first. I think it's a misunderstanding that local food is inherently more sustainable than food that comes from maybe the other side of the country or even an entirely different country. That's because the transportation energy required to produce our food is just a tiny percent of food's overall carbon footprint. Really it's under 10% so this is why I often tell people, it matters much more what you're eating rather than where it came from. A veggie burger shipped halfway around the world is probably going to have a lower carbon footprint than a hamburger raised at a feedlot 50 miles from your home.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I should probably clarify at this point that an impossible burger, which I cited in my question, that's plant-based. That's what you were just talking about. That's different than lab-grown meat.

Kenny Torrella: That's right. As Jason mentioned, there is a whole brave new world around the future of meat, and people are trying to figure out how to make lab-grown meat, or what they call cell cultivated meat in which you take animal cells, you take a biopsy from an animal, and then you grow those cells, you feed them a mix of different nutrients, and after several weeks you can then harvest those cells. Essentially it's biologically identical to meat. However, right now the industry is still in its infancy. It's incredibly expensive to produce this stuff. It has received regulatory approval in the United States, but it's only been sold at two restaurants in very small quantities.

It's still an open question as to whether we'll ever be able to really economically scale cell-cultivated or lab-grown meat. Then there's this other second category of the future of meat which is just plant-based meat. The Impossible Burger, it's the Beyond Burger which are really just better versions of the veggie burgers that listeners may have tried in the early 2000s which are designed to taste more like meat than their predecessors. There was a bump, I would say in the late 2010s in which there was a lot of attention around these products but in recent years their sales have declined. It's again, an open question as to whether consumers will really take up these products and embrace them.

Brian Lehrer: We have a few minutes left with Kenny Torrella, staff writer for Vox's Future Perfect section with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. He's the author as well of the Meat/Less Vox newsletter, designed to help readers incorporate more plant-based foods into their diets. We're doing this in the context of our climate story of the week. Jen, on line five, Jen on line five, Jen is on line five and she's in Randolph, New Jersey. You're on WNYC. Hi, Jen.

Jen: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. I was just telling your screener that my husband and I went vegan over five years ago now along with our daughter after watching two documentaries. I wanted to recommend them perhaps to your readers on the health benefits of going vegan. I'd always been curious about it because I'm an animal lover but was taught in school growing up the food pyramid and that's what you need to be healthy. The two documentaries we watched were the Game Changers and Forks Over Knives. We went vegan the day after watching them over five years ago and haven't looked back. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Is there a hardest part for you, for people? Because part of the premise of this segment in the first place is there are a lot of people who really would like to be more vegetarian or more vegan than they are, but they find it really daunting. Do you have any tips for converting or going whatever degree down that path?

Jen: We started at first with a meal prep kit called Purple Carrot, and I got a lot of great recipes through that. We got delivery like three days a week and it really taught me how to cook vegan with a lot of different variety of meals that they had. I've gotten a lot of recipes from that and that helped us, I think, with the transition.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much.

Jen: Also the-

Brian Lehrer: Also what? I'm sorry.

Jen: -restaurants.

Brian Lehrer: Also what?

Jen: So many great vegan restaurants in New York.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, are out there now.

Jen: PLANTA Queen, shout out to them. They're one of our favorites.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Another vegan, but more on the politics, Bill in Berkeley Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Hi. I just wanted to say thank you for doing this again. I've been vegan now for almost nine years. Like a previous caller, I watched those two, Game Changers, Forks Over Knives. What really did it to me was Earthlings which is narrated by Joaquin Phoenix. Getting back to trying to provide this information to everyone out there in the world, it's a little-known secret. No one realizes what animal agriculture and the devastating effects it has on our planet. Not to mention, of course, what's going on with global warming? It does more damage than the fossil fuel industry. I try to bring this up to my friends and they go and continue to eat their burgers and steaks while I'm doing my plant-based thing.

Honestly, it wasn't just because of becoming healthier, it was really a moral and ethical situation for me and after watching Earthlings, that's really what did it for me. Becoming a vegan, I just, real quick I don't know where we go when we go up against the lobbyists. If your guy can tell us how to go about-- I sign off on all those and still we're not getting anywhere.

Brian Lehrer: Bill, thank you. One other fact that we haven't mentioned yet, pertinent to the success of the lobbyists is that agriculture is one of the most subsidized industries in the United States. According to one government website that we saw in 2022, the federal government provided farms with more than $15 billion in subsidies. What do you say to the caller, Kenny?

Kenny Torrella: I think we go to the grocery store and we see an abundance of meat, dairy, and egg products and they're incredibly cheap, but those prices don't really reflect the true cost. That's because for decades, agricultural policy has exempted farms primarily from clean water laws and clean air laws, and also animal welfare laws. The price of meat and the abundance of meat has been shaped through food policy, through corporate policy. There's a lot we can do to reform it. One, yes, we could reform subsidies so that they're shifted more towards plant-based more sustainable foods. I think there could be a lot more done to regulate factory farms for water pollution and air pollution.

Farms are the leading source of water pollution in the United States, and most of that is coming from fertilizer runoff from the farms that grow corn and soy and also the animal manure itself. Then there's also a lot that I think corporations can do to try to incentivize consumers to eat more plant-based foods, whether that's making their product lines feature more plant-based foods to make them taste better. While a lot of times this conversation falls on the individual to change their diet, there's so much that policymakers, elected officials, agencies, and corporations as well could do to reshape our food system to be more healthy and more sustainable.

Brian Lehrer: Listener text, "I tell people getting off meat, salt, and sugar takes between three months and two years. We still eat red meat and fish every 10 days, but I personally could easily say goodbye to these products. My girls do crave red meat though." There's a little advice from a listener about how to go gradual. We're just about out of time, there's so much more that we could talk about. I know you've written about President Biden's landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, and that it included $20 billion for what they call climate-smart farming. We could give people more advice on making a transition.

You wrote about how protein is usually actually not an issue, but maybe Vitamin B12 is, but there are ways to compensate. Let me ask you about this as a closing question. You've made the case that people should cut out meat from their diets as much as possible, but how should people think, in your opinion, about cheese and eggs? Say if someone is buying free-range organic eggs or cabbage cheese made by family farms in New York and Vermont regionally, is that impacting the climate significantly?

Kenny Torrella: Yes, so it varies what factors you're looking at. Maybe let's look at eggs first. When just looking at emissions, eggs are a pretty low-carbon food. At the same time, poultry production is a major source of water pollution, so there are trade-offs there. When it comes to dairy, whether dairy cows are raised on a conventional factory farm or on a more organic style farm, they are still major drivers of climate change. Globally, just the dairy industry has a higher carbon footprint than the aviation industry. Whether dairy is being sourced from say a smaller family-owned farm or from a large corporation, it's still going to have that high carbon footprint.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it for our climate story of the week for this week. Kenny Torrella is a staff writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. He is also the author of the Vox newsletter, Meat/Less which is designed to help readers incorporate more plant-based food into their diets with specific tips and pieces of advice. Kenny, this has been great. We've ranged really wide here. Thank you so much for coming on.

Kenny Torrella: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

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