George Monbiot, author, journalist, and environmental activist, joins The Plantbased Business Hour with host and CEO of VegTech Invest, Elysabeth Alfano, to discuss how to best fight for the planet and how to take no prisoners when it comes to taking on the meat industry and its lobby. He goes for the jugular and this is a do-not-miss interview.
Specifically, they discuss
- How does the big meat misinformation campaign differ from big tobacco and fossil fuels’ misinformation campaigns?
- What do we do against the misinformation campaign, especially if it is protected by certain government organizations? Is there a strategy for impact when we are woefully outspent?
- What is it going to take to move the needle? For people to be outraged? A health crisis? Another pandemic? Capitalism and free markets?
- The ills of big meat are many: air pollution, health crisis, climate crisis, deforestation & biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, food insecurity, workers’ rights, – which angle is the right angle to take and with whom: Governments? Industry? Consumers?
- Does George see any progress? If so, in what areas? Where does he find hope?
- George’s predictions for the next 3 years.
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from their long-form conversation. Podcast here.
Elysabeth: Author, journalist, environmental activist, George Monbiot. So what’s it going to take to move away from animal factories? Is it an outrage from the consumer? Is it governments finally caring about who’s going to own food and food insecurity? What’s it going to take?
George Monbiot: I think your analysis is exactly right. You know, governments won’t act until they’re faced with a massive load of costs, a massive load of political as well as economic costs caused by the industry which they support. In the case of livestock, I mean, those costs are enormous.
So are the immediate impacts on human health. So for example, livestock are the major incubator of zoonotic diseases, particularly of diseases which have great pandemic potential to spread through the human population. We could easily see a new variant of bird flu taking off, and if that does, it’ll almost certainly have something to do with intensive bird farming, chicken farming in particular. Or indeed it might pass through pigs before it jumps into the human population and again, those big industrial pig farms are just perfect breeding grounds for it.
As a result of the fact that disease spreads so fast amongst livestock populations when they’re all crammed together, farmers use a huge amount of antibiotics in order to prevent that disease from spreading. In fact, they use those antibiotics prophylactically. They dose their animals in antibiotics as a matter of cause, which is something no doctor is allowed to do. It would offend all medical protocols to just give people antibiotics before they fall ill.
They’ve found that dosing their animals with antibiotics actually speeds up their growth as well. So in some places they also use them as growth promoters. As a result of this, we have a massive antibiotic resistance crisis driven to a large extent by the livestock industry and if we lose some of our most crucial medicines- and frankly, modern medicine can’t operate without antibiotics. You can’t have safe childbirth, you can’t have safe surgery, you can’t have safe cancer treatment. All of those are totally dependent on antibiotics.
Without antibiotics, many of the deadly diseases of the past would come roaring back and we would find ourselves in the same situations we were in the 19th century where some new bacterial disease rips through the human population and kills a large percentage of that population. That is what will happen if we lose the efficacy of antibiotics. If we lose them, to a large extent, that will be down to the livestock industry.
Elysabeth Alfano is the CEO of VegTech™ Invest, the advisor to the VegTech™ Plant-based Innovation & Climate ETF, EATV. She is also the founder of Plant Powered Consulting and the Host of the Plantbased Business Hour.
