Plant-Based Climate Summit | April 1, 2021

i'm dr neil barnard i'd like to welcome you to the plant-based climate summit today we'll be hearing from experts who will address the impacts of animal agriculture on various aspects of the environment we'll hear about diet and greenhouse gas emissions water and air pollution land use and the emergence of infectious diseases and lots more for me this is a little bit personal i grew up in fargo north dakota and out on the edge of town if you look out as far as the eye could see corn plants row after row of beautiful identical genetically modified corn plants on this side of the highway it was soy as far as the eye could see beautiful all the plants were identical because they were genetically modified too no human being was going to eat any of that soy or any of that corn that's cattle feed chicken feed hog feed now to raise that many plants for animal feed you have to have fertilizer you need irrigation you need pesticides and as that irrigation carries the fertilizer into the streams and rivers the algae will overgrow and eventually die off and as it flushes down the mississippi below louisiana and texas there is now a dead zone in the gulf of mexico as big as the state of new jersey all to try to raise a huge number of plants to get a little bit of meat out of it and then we learned something else cows on dairy farms on meat farms belch methane and cause all kinds of problems that in turn can affect the environment for everybody well today we're going to tackle all of those problems and a lot more and most importantly we're going to learn what we can do about it let's go to dr leslie durham who is a professor of geography and environmental resources fulbright scholar and director of the environmental studies program at southern illinois university dr durham is also a food for life instructor who is passionate about educating others about food choices that have a positive impact on people and the earth hi i'm leslie durham i'm a professor of geography and environmental studies at southern illinois university carbondale i know you see the word professor and you're worried about a really boring dry lecture but no this is going to be exciting you're going to learn a lot but we have a lot to cover we're going to talk about climate change 101 plant-based eating for individual action so the earth's climate system is fascinating it is truly amazing right so our climate stability requires equal amounts of energy entering and leaving the system so for us to think about our near surface temperatures those are dependent on two factors solar energy or light reaching the surface of the earth and terrestrial energy or heat leaving the system both of these are impacted by both natural forces and human or anthropogenic factors the climate system is this super cool complex system of five different parts the atmosphere ice or all frozen water on the planet the hydrosphere land surfaces and vegetation and they all act together but they also interact with one another it's really amazing the greenhouse effect is good we need it we like it it's a good thing people often kind of get confused about oh well global warming the greenhouse no so in a normal situation with normal carbon dioxide methane and nitrous oxides those are the greenhouse gases with a normal setting the greenhouse effect is great because it allows a certain amount of solar radiation in it traps them to keep us nice and warm like a little blanket and then it lets some heat escape that's great as opposed to venus our neighbor closer to the sun it has too much of a blanket too thick of an atmosphere with different substances different gases so it's too hot mars doesn't have enough of that blanket so it's too cold so the earth is just right the problem is that humans are causing an intensified greenhouse effect and that means global warming and climate change so basically these greenhouse gases which are supposed to absorb and emit energy they have increased too much there's too much of these carbon dioxide nitrous oxides and methane in the atmosphere it's really amazing because these gases only make up like point zero percent of the whole atmosphere mostly it's it's nitrogen oxygen and argon but just that point zero four percent is such a delicate system we've really messed it up so we're trapping more heat than we should be we have really good data on this so this is historical co2 concentrations if you look at the chart the bottom line that's years before present and we have data through ice cores and other means that go back 10 000 years and you can see the purple line there kind of going into the blue line there's a little variation but not much but then when you get to the current era 1800 on especially 1880 and then that red line that's actually about 1950 on we've pulled that out to stretch that 1800 to 2000 in that little uh set offset box you can see this rapid increase this huge sudden increase really in co2 emissions and this is post industrialization post industrial food system etc so a lot of climate deniers like to say oh it's just a natural process the earth warms and cools and that's natural and climate scientists would say no because we have really good data looking backwards so this is actual data this isn't pretend this isn't assumptions this isn't oh what if this is real data so we have real data the bottom chart there if you look at the natural variability so volcan if a volcano goes off we have more particulate matter in the air so it would cool global temperatures solar flares that deniers like to talk oh solar flare so that's the little red line there i log that on that chart so natural variability does not explain how the earth's temperatures have changed from 1880 to 2020 okay you have to consider the human cause factors that are affecting global temperature that's that light blue line and what do you know when you actually look then at the observed global warming that's the red line on top that chart those are actual globe observed global warming temperatures those can only be explained when we include human caused factors that affect temperature so co2 methane nitrous oxide greenhouse gas emissions so climate modeling is amazing it's really really complex um climatologists like to do things like general circulation models this is an example of one here a three-dimensional numerical model of the whole climate system now let's think about that first we have our beautiful whole planet but then what do we do well we need to think deep down in the ocean on up to the mixed layer ocean and air on over to the continent up into the mountains up into the atmosphere so we're talking about a height right so latitude so not only the grids of latitude and longitude are you near the equator are you near the pole but also all these levels of from the ocean depths to the mountain mountaintops think about all that data it's really pretty cool and scientists are really good at this and in fact now i'm showing you how we can model forward so these are modeling scenarios based on human action what are we going to do projected temperature change by 2090 if co2 so if carbon dioxide emissions drop to zero by 2080 so if we start taking action right now to stop our greenhouse gas emissions and we get it down to zero by 2080 you can see the temperature there that we could keep it within two to three degrees of warming that is maybe manageable in terms of of mitigation in terms of adaptation in terms of what we can do uh to survive that but if you look at the bottom scenario that's when co2 emissions triple which is sort of like our our current path if we don't do anything we just continue then you see we're way up into those purples and pinks which is something like 9 or 10 degrees fahrenheit increase and that would to be honest be devastating so when we look at this and another way you can see 1950 to 2000 that's the gray line those are what we know about temperatures and then we can project it forward so if we take action we're smart humans start you know slowing or stopping our greenhouse gas emissions we could be in that purple phase there's still going to be warming just because we've set this path you know we're we've already got that the greenhouse gases those extra gases up there but at least we could level out by 2100 but if we continue along our current path that's the scenario 39 if you will that red line does not look good right that's a four degree celsius increase uh by the turn of the century you may have noticed i used a lot of ipcc uh data and charts here it's all free readily available i encourage you to go to ipcc on to their website this is the intergovernmental panel on climate change it was established in 1988 by the world meteorological associate organization and the united nations environmental program ipcc actually won a nobel peace prize in 2007 very important group so this un group has over 195 member countries basically almost every country in the world as a number and these ipc expert reports then are used by each country to develop their own climate policies so thousands of scientists and experts assess the science of climate change and come up with these reports uh they summarize thousands of research papers they look at the drivers what's what's causing climate change the impacts the risks to people animals plants places the mitigation so what can we do to stop this the adaptation what can we do to live with it if this happens this is an open review process objective reports are published i highly recommend looking at some of the ipcc uh documents here's just a an example i was joking the other day there are probably thousands of various charts but i just pulled these because i thought they were kind of a neat example so this is from one of the ipcc reports from 2013 and the top graph there shows land surface air temperature so that's pulling from four different data sets so maybe there's a european union data set a chinese data set an australia whatever various researchers doing various projects you can see still even with four different data sets those temperatures line up pretty closely so this is 2050 to 2010 and you're looking at land surface temperature there on the top the middle chart is actually six data sets looking at sea level rise and the bottom chart is summer arctic ci again looking with seven data sets so see this ipcc is able to just pull all of this data from each national or you know what every country's experts uh to to look at these factors and the ipcc said well you know how do we know people how do we know evidence for a warming world comes from multiple independent climate indicators from high up in the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans and i just thought this schematic was so cool so okay how do we know well the down arrows so glacier volume is going down snow cover is going down our measurements of sea ice area going down but all the others are going up so air temperature sea surface temperature sea level sea levels are rising land over overland temperatures etc so we we have data points all across the planet and we have experts looking at this and they're telling us what's going on so the ipcc likes to publish these statements in each of their reports and i just pulled a few of these that i think are really relevant for our discussion today first warming of the climate system is unequivocal and since the 1950s many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia secondly the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide methane and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800 000 years those are both pretty strong statements i have a little asterisk there because i want to now talk about carbon dioxide methane and nitrous oxides related to food so a quarter pound burger takes uh 460 gallons of water to produce it uses almost 65 square feet of land so just a quarter pound that little a lot of people eat bigger than that but in any case it not only takes but it gives back things that we don't want so a lot of methane methane is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide so it's really it doesn't stay and last in the atmosphere as long but it's extremely potent as a greenhouse gas so when we talk about that quarter pound of burger we kind of say that it causes four pounds of greenhouse gas emissions these are often given as co2e or co2 equivalent so basically that is one number that's combining the carbon dioxide which is the fossil fuel inputs the methane ch4 which is from manure and ruminant animals and uh the nitrous oxides from the fertilizer and manure we're kind of putting all of those those greenhouse gases together and giving it as a co2 equivalent and you can see one chart there um projecting scary right into the future of 2050 with increased growth but i like to think people will be smarter than this but still looking at 2005 you can see the red meat poultry eggs dairy if we could just get rid of all those from the light blue down and just focus on the staples fruits and veg we would be a lot better off in terms of our carbon footprint our co2e and going back to the ipcc we see that in a recent report they also talk about the importance of diet and our planet avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on earth meat and dairy provide just 18 of calories and 30 37 percent of protein but take up 83 of our farmland and impacts of the lowest impact dairy products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change and this is from 2019. fun facts so the top right there if cattle were a country they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions right behind china and very close to the united states on the left there the little car if for one year every person in the us ate no meat or cheese for just one day a week it would be like reduced it would be like taking 7.6 million cars off the road well let's just do it for seven days a week and then finally the bottom graph there is about methane emissions one cow produces about as much methane as 80 cars on the road so how how is this happening why is this happening well because we have an agricultural industrial system and so in industry the goal is profits for the shareholders the cheapest inputs with the highest outputs inputs like fossil fuels genetically modified seeds fertilizers etc and we're doing this uh by using concentrated animal feeding operations capos are defined by the epa as over 1000 head of cattle 2500 swine or 125 000 chickens concentrated in one operation there are about 20 000 in the us but to be honest there's no set number you should try and search this online because there is no really comprehensive database about how many and where these are located we do know they use about eighty percent of antibiotics in in the us and i want you to think about how in this scenario the environment is just another input it's like fossil fuels it's like in sex insecticides now let's think a little bit about the ethics of this agricultural system so first of all we're slaughtering billions of land animals each year that's an ethical issue for sure secondly only 55 of calories produced globally actually go to food for people the remainder go to food for biofuel and livestock this is a very inefficient system and that is unethical so the conversion efficiencies we talk about this in agriculture right calories of feed in to food produced dairy is 17 efficiency eggs 17 poultry 13 pork nine beef is only three percent efficient all the feed going in you get three percent of food produced in terms of calories if we grew food crops for direct human consumption we could increase food calories by 70 and feed 4 billion more people and here's a map that shows this it would be easier to feed the planet if more of the crops we grew ended up in human stomachs so on this graph on this map the green is actual food for people that's where food for people is being grown and the purple is food for fee for livestock basically right food for animals and fuel and as we all know there's terrible undernourishment and um across the planet something like 823 million people are estimated to be chronically undernourished this was from 2020. so people need to know this right this just seems so obvious agriculture is a huge component of our greenhouse gas emissions there are a lot of different estimates because it depends on you know people do this real narrow view oh i'm just going to look at the amount of energy it costs to take the cow to the market well no you need to think about the crops the fertilizer the agrochemicals gasoline machinery transportation feed lots slaughter refrigeration marketing and when you look at it that way agriculture is 25 to 30 percent of all human caused or anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and meat and dairy is especially high in greenhouse gas emissions why don't we label it why don't we have like a food like you know the usual nutrition label and then a carbon facts label here's a cheeseburger it doesn't look good the carbon to pr to product ratio is terrible right but people need to know this people need to know if you look at the infographic here on the right we can drastically change the way we use cropland if replacing beef with plant if we just replace beef with plants in the u.s we could reduce our amount of cropland by 90 going to the you know because we're just feeding livestock we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions we could reduce our nitrogen fertilizer use which also feeds in adds into greenhouse gas emissions well luckily there is increasing interest and increasing research on this and this was an article a few years ago in the economist check out that graph pretty interesting and they say quote absolute veganism unsurprisingly is the most environmentally friendly diet diehard leaf eaters can claim to have knocked off 85 percent off their carbon footprint and you can see the average american diet there over 2 000 kilograms of co2 equivalent per person per year and down at the very bottom is the vegan and some would argue we could also do away with the sugars and oils that would make it like what maybe 200 or 250 kilograms of co2 equivalent per year let's bring this back don't forget the the main theme here is uh climate change and so if we look at the trends we absolutely see that we are getting increasingly warmer and warmer so that zero line if you think of the the main line going across there that's the average temperature from 1951 to 1980. that's the line when you see the blue below those were years that were cooler average temperatures and then when you see the yellows and the oranges and the reds those are the years that are higher warmer than that mean warmer than that average this is data from over 6 000 meteorological stations on land at sea in the arctic and you need to know that earth's temperature has risen more than two degrees fahrenheit since the 1880s and here's a quote from one of the lead researchers the last seven years have been the warmest seven on record typifying the ongoing dramatic warming trend but he says we have to expect that these records will continue to be broken how have we been handling that create incentives for a non-meat diet how about tax credits for eating healthy subsidies for bean and veggie producers that would that makes perfect sense from a societal point of view we aren't doing that yet but we should so instead we have to take personal action and one key way to do this is to choose a plant-based diet one calorie of animal protein requires 11 times as much fossil fuel energy input as one calorie of plant protein we can mitigate climate change by choosing a plant-based diet of course pcrm knows this and we talk about the power plate all the time fruit grains veggies and legumes and i would also argue that we could think of the power plate as better for the people and better for the planet thanks so much for your time next we'll hear about how foods can help heal our bodies and the world from ocean robins who's the co-founder and ceo of the food revolution network he's the best-selling author of 31-day food revolution and has reached millions of people all over the world my name is ocean robbins i am ceo and co-founder of food revolution network i'm an author and a speaker and a lifelong activist and i am so grateful that you are here right now because we are talking about one of the most important topics that there is to talk about the survival of life on earth human well-being how we live in a good way on this planet how we can thrive we live in a toxic food culture all around us we see food a food system that has normalized consumption of food products on food like products that are statistically correlated in a profound way with increased risk of heart disease and cancer and type 2 diabetes and alzheimer's and obesity and all of the major chronic ailments of our times but they don't just affect us the food choices that we have adopted in the modern industrialized world are also a disaster for our planet animal agriculture in specific uses 83 of the world's agricultural land to produce 18 of the world's calories it's like a protein factory in reverse and it makes sense if you think about it when you go up the food chain you concentrate but you also have tremendous latency in the system you have loss because animals don't just turn what they eat into flesh or milk or or eggs they also turn it into hoof and hide and bones and feathers and fecal material and energy and body heat and all kinds of other things that do not contribute to the food chain so there's a tremendous loss in that process it takes about 12 pounds of grain or soy to produce one pound of feedlot beef in the united states today takes three to five pounds of feed to produce a pound of chicken or pork so essentially we're wasting all the rest and when livestock are grazing it's arguably even more inefficient because it takes so much land to produce enough grass to feed a cow and then that gets concentrated into flesh and we wind up with this enormous amount of waste so if just theoretically the entire world went vegan tomorrow which i know may may not happen but let's just just play with me here for a second if that just were to happen we would free up an area of land that is equal to the entirety of the united states china the european union and australia combined that's how much land would be saved by simply not cycling calories through livestock what could we do with an area of land equal to the u.s china european union and australia combined well we could plant forest we could grow organic food to feed a growing human population for future generations we could focus on the science of carbon sequestration so that we could plant crops in ways that would pull carbon out of the atmosphere into the soil and help to save our planet the modern industrialized food system has become a nightmare not just for the animals who are tortured in these factory farms that we've created but also for ecosystems for all of the wild creatures whose survival depends on their ecosystem and now today their forests are being chopped down burned devastated so that we can create enough land to feed our voracious appetite for meat the tropical rainforests are falling to create grazing land for cattle and to create agricultural land on which we grow what corn and soy who's eating most of the corn and so it's not going to tofu it's not going to you know tortillas it's going to livestock feed and we subsidize it in the united states we have a system we call the farm bill and we subsidize certain foods and it's great that we support our farmers our farmers deserve support they work hard and they deserve to be supportive but here's the problem we're subsidizing certain things and not other things and so we have tens of billions of dollars a year in subsidies that go towards essentially corn and soy and wheat and other so-called commodities crops and in effect we are driving down the price of factory farmed animal products high fructose corn syrup and white bread meanwhile competitively in the marketplace because we're not subsidizing fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and legumes and the things we should be eating more of we create a competitive disadvantage for healthy foods this essentially in effect condemns the poor to nutritional disasters so what can we do about it a lot and that's the good news we can change the way we eat so we choose to focus on more plant-based food choices and when we do we can save massive amounts of land water ecosystems climate impact with that one simple action every bite you take is a vote you're voting for the health you want and you're voting for the world you want and so let's make that a conscious healthy vote that stands for the the world that our children deserve and we can also change policies we can stop subsidizing junk food effectively now let's talk about the money side for a second the united states has the most expensive health care or disease symptom management system in the world we spend about 19 percent of our gross domestic product of the entire nation on medical treatment the vast majority of that medical treatment is going to treat chronic diseases which could be prevented with healthier diet and lifestyle so we're talking trillions of dollars here that could be saved and a whole lot of lives in the united states alone every year we lose more than 600 000 americans who die because of chronic diseases that could be prevented with healthier diet and lifestyle i'm not just making this up this comes from the institute of health metrics and evaluation they produce the global burden of disease report this is hundreds of scientists come together to create this report from all over the world they're looking at what's causing death and disease all over the world that's their conclusion 672 000 american deaths a year from lifestyle-induced chronic illness so that's more americans that are dying from that every year than died in world war one world war ii vietnam war both iraq wars the afghanistan war the korean war combined and it's all in one year every year but the enemy isn't guns or bombs it's our own knives and forks and and what we're doing with them so the good news is we can turn this around we can help to save our economy we can help to save our lives and we can help to save our planet i'd call that a win-win and i want to share a little bit about myself here just yeah a little bit of context here for where i'm coming from in this story my grandpa founded an ice cream company it was called baskin robbins 31 flavors and my dad john grew up with an ice cream cone-shaped swimming pool in the backyard and 31 flavors of ice cream in the freezer he was groomed from early childhood to one day join in running the family company but when he was in his early 20s he was offered that chance and he said no and he walked away from a path that was practically paved with gold and ice cream to follow his own rocky road he ended up moving with my mom to a little island off the coast of canada they grew most of their own food they practiced yogan meditation for several hours a day and they named their kid ocean they almost named me kale and this was before kale was cool but thankfully on behalf of my future social life they took the more conservative route when they named their son but we did eat a lot of kale and cabbage and carrots and other veggies from the garden and as i got older we moved to california and my dad ended up working on a book called diet for a new america that exposed the food industry and look at how our food choices impact our health our happiness and the future of life on earth it became this runaway bestseller people all over the world were super inspired the media called him the rebel without a cone and one of his readers ended up being my grandpa ervin robbins who was practically on death's door he'd lost his brother-in-law baskin his business partner to heart disease when my dad's uncle bert was 54 years old now my grandpa at around age 70 was practically on death straw with serious diabetes heart issues and weight issues he doctor his doctors told him he should read my dad's book and follow it his it's advice if he wanted to live my grandpa did he ended up giving up sugar giving up ice cream cutting way down on animal products and eating way more whole fruits and vegetables and he got results like massive results he reversed his diabetes he reversed his heart disease he lost 30 pounds he needed to lose his golf game improved seven strokes and he lived 19 more healthy years so we've really seen in our family that when we follow the standard american diet we get the standard american diseases so now we're calling for our food 3.0 which is governed by health health for our bodies and health for our planet and there's plenty of healthy profits in food 3.0 it's just that they come from healthy food so what are you going do are you gonna be part of the food revolution with us i hope you will every bite you take every dollar you spend is a vote it's a stand and it sends out ripples that impact the entire planet it affects how animals are treated how farm workers are treated what kind of world we're going to leave for future generations when you bring your food choices into alignment with your core values your life takes on an integrity a congruency a potency that moves the world so i thank you for your time and your attention your interest your participation and for all the steps you take to be a part of the food revolution in your life and on our planet now we'll hear from janae claiborne who you may know from sweet potato soul her popular blog cookbook and youtube channel about tips and tricks to make your diet more sustainable hi i'm janae claiborne from sweet potato soul i'm a vegan chef a blogger and a cookbook author i know a lot about vegan cooking and i happen to be very frugal and very eco-conscious minded so i'm going to give you guys some tips today for maintaining your plant-based diet but also helping to be more eco-friendly help to save the environment and of course to save money because all these things happen to be tied in with each other i found that going vegan was amazing in so many ways not just for my health and for the animals but also the environmental component as well and just the mindset component being vegan has helped me to think more about all of the actions that i take in my daily life especially when it comes to my consumption habits am i wasting food am i buying too much oops is this food going bad because i'm not storing it well so we are going to talk about all of my tips to make sure that you eat in a more eco-friendly way that's also good for your health good for the animals and also good for your budget because who doesn't want to save a little bit of money so just specifically focusing on the perishable items how do you make sure that they last longer and don't go bad so let's talk about that my first tip for making your produce last longer is storing it properly of course but more specifically when it comes to herbs and you can even use this tip for greens like kale spinach collard greens i like to store especially my herbs in a jar of water in the refrigerator and to make sure that that doesn't dry out and it stays nice and fresh and perky i cover the um jar or the herbs with a plastic bag now just a recycled plastic bag is fine a little ziploc bag is fine i don't go out and buy plastic bags but we all end up with plastic bags so save your plastic bags i also you know if anybody buys ezekiel bread they come in a plastic bag i even save them to reuse for this purpose so herbs in the jar just like you would a bouquet of flowers and cover that with a recycled plastic bag it will make your herbs last so much so much longer to the point where you can actually eat all the herbs and they're not going to go bad at all my second tip for making your produce last longer is making sure that you're storing it in the right drawers inside of your fridge so you have a high humidity drawer and a low humidity drawer now it really does matter what you put into each drawer for example i like to think of it as the vegetables that will wilt so leafy greens like spinach anything that's going to wilt that should be in the high humidity drawer anything hard can go in the low humidity drawer so carrots and beets do perfectly fine in that just make sure that you are thinking about this when you're putting your your groceries away when you get home from the grocery store the farmer's market because that will really help them last for longer so my next tip is to not store potatoes and onions together the gases that the onions give off or is it the potatoes basically together they do not mix well they will help each other ripen too quickly and you can't enjoy them if they've gone bad before you've even had a chance to eat them so store them separately they both like to be stored in cool dark dry places but just not together so this tip is super important especially if you like to meal prep like i do sometimes when i get home from the store i like to wash my greens especially my kale collard greens anything i'm going to use for salads or arugula and lettuce i like to wash it right away that way when i make my salad or when i use it throughout the week i don't have to wash it once you've washed your vegetables you'll find that it will go bad more quickly same with fruit so my usual tip would be to don't wash anything until you're ready to eat it because vegetables and fruit are covered with good bacteria and fungus that actually help it stay fresh for longer so when you wash that protective layer off it goes bad more quickly but if you're like me and you need a meal prep you need to prep all your greens then in order to keep them fresh for longer wash them store them in an airtight container so whatever glass plastic whatever container you have but here's a tip you need to put a paper towel or even just a kitchen towel small kitchen towel dry stick it in the bag or the container with those washed greens that the washed vegetables that way when your lettuce or the greens when they basically sweat and release moisture instead of sitting in their moisture and going bad more quickly the paper towel or the kitchen towel is going to absorb the excess moisture and keep them fresher for longer and then my last tip for keeping your vegetables fresher for longer this is another like meal preppy kind of tip so if you want to not only wash your vegetables before you use them but actually prep them chop them up and have them ready to go especially you know if you want to have them for snacks like celery carrots even apples you can do this with cut them up and store them in a jar or container and cover that with water the whole everything should be covered with water water is going to prevent those vegetables from spoiling quickly from oxidizing and it's going to keep them nice and crispy and fresh cover it with water you know if you're going to leave it for a long time like an entire week you might have to change the water out once in between but otherwise if you're just keeping it like that for a couple days while you're snacking on the carrots or celery then that is perfectly fine and trust me it will work it will keep your vegetables so crispy and so fresh my next one is to plan out your meals and be organized and have a plan and have a list really when you go grocery shopping or to the farmer's market having a list and having your meals planned out ahead of time will help you to buy exactly how much you need so that you will avoid it coming home with way more food than you can use i am guilty of this too often even though this is my tip and i know better i love going to the farmers market or the grocery store and just looking at all the produce and especially the farmers market because there's there's it seems like every time i go there's something that i've never seen before and i'm interested in it and i might buy it but i have no place for that on my grocery list or my meal prep for the week and so i end up it ends up like almost going bad and i cook at the last minute so don't be like me my last major tip really but this is important is to actually use up your scraps as much as possible there's so many things we think of as scraps as food waste that we actually throw out but that is so nutritious and so delicious too so we really shouldn't be throwing it out we're just we're very much throwing out good food when we do this so i have a list of things and i just want to remind you you can eat and if you've never heard of eating something like carrot tops then there are plenty of recipes on the internet for these things and to utilize them and like i said before the food scraps a lot of the things that we think of as being trash are perfectly good food and they're just as nutritious as the rest of the vegetable or fruit that we ate so the first thing i wanted to start with was broccoli stems same with cauliflower stems they are totally edible now they're not as delicious of course than the florets but you can eat them and my favorite way to eat raku stems or cauliflower stems is to just chop them up with the florets and steam them or bake them or roast them just like i would with the rest it's really for me changing my mindset around it like it's growing up i always like just eat the top of the broccoli and waste the bottom but i've been reminding myself over the years that no this is this is the whole food i'm going to eat the entire thing not just the top and i just use it in the same way that i use the rest of it but if you have a recipe like um cauliflower kung pao chicken then maybe you really just want to use the top so with the the stalks or the stems you can grate those up shred them up and use them in a coleslaw a vegan coleslaw or you can saute them you don't have to shred it by hand you can use the food processor because if you're like me and you don't want to be on that box grater for like 15 minutes stick it in the food processor let it shred it up and then put it to use it's really yummy my other favorite thing to make sure i do not throw out i never throw it out are mushroom stems i like to turn it into a delicious mushroom broth when it comes to the tops of root vegetables you know you can eat those right you can they're delicious carrot tops sweet potato greens not regular potatoes those are toxic their leaves are toxic but sweet potato leaves the tops are very nutritious and delicious carrot tops delicious nutritious beet greens amazing turnip tops those should be eaten as well if you ever buy greens or sorry if you ever buy beets and you throw away the leaves on top you just threw away 50 of the food that you bought fruit wastes not waste for example apple and pear cores those can be reused believe it or not i don't do this all the time most of the time i do just compost the core i just make sure to eat as much as i can around it but if i want to upcycle it i love to make a simple not a simple syrup but a syrup with the core so you basically boil the apple core or the pear core or both together boil that with some sugar and a little bit of water you put vanilla bean in there you can put cardamom cinnamon whatever else you want in there and reduce that down to an amazing syrup which you strain out and you can use that for pancakes waffles biscuits any way you would use maple syrup but this is a syrup that is in imparted with the flavor and essence and goodness of apples it's so yummy i also have a tip for upcycling orange peels and lemon peels as well so with the peels i like to save them and once i have usually about two to three to even four cups depending on the size of my container i will put them in a large container and cover that with just simple white vinegar let that sit for six weeks in just a cool dark place just forget about it for six weeks and then you come back to it you can strain it out and you'll be left with a cleaning product that is orange scented with all the power of vinegar of white vinegar for cleaning so it makes your white vinegar a lot more pleasant for cleaning and i use that for cleaning anything from the kitchen to the bathroom to the floors it smells great and it is a wonderful way to reuse orange peels pineapple corer so what i like to do is just chop it up and stick it in a smoothie it's easy as that and then lastly avocado pits if you boil them down they make a beautiful pink dye so you can dye anything with it it's a dye d-y-e so so you can put them in a smoothie and you can blend them up yeah you have to use a high speed blender for this or you can break them and cut them into little tiny pieces and eat them that way but they totally are edible and very very nutritious as well so those are my tips for being more eco-friendly with your vegan diet i've been vegan for 10 years and i'm constantly learning and everybody is constantly learning it's very important to just stay in that mindset of you know we don't know everything and we're continuing to learn and grow and share what you've learned with your friends and family because you know when people come on board then it makes it easier for all of us to do it as well so i hope you guys enjoyed it like i said my name is janae claiborne my vlog is sweet potato soul my cookbook is also called sweet potato soul i'm sweet potato soul anywhere so if you want to find me type in sweet potato soul i hope that was helpful thanks so much bye now we'll hear from dr joanne kong who's a faculty member at the university of richmond and as an author international speaker and musician she raises our awareness that our food choices have deep connections to the natural world and our sense of compassion this past year has certainly been a difficult and challenging one in dealing with the global health crisis and the resulting drastic changes to our daily lives but at the same time the coronavirus has brought us to an important point in humankind's development a point of evolution if you will with both the necessity and the opportunity to widen our paths to better health and a more sustainable planet what have we learned that our existence is deeply tied to the nature of our relationships to all other beings the coronavirus is a clear warning shot that humans must move away from animal exploitation at least 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases can be traced to animals as dr michael greger says every animal in a factory farm is like a test tube that can brew up the next plague so it would be a mistake to think we can all return to normal as if covert 19 was just a one-time occurrence it's a sign that we must question our current food systems for animal agriculture has reached its point of greatest damage both to global health and our planet while the impacts of the virus are assessed in concrete numbers of those infected and lives lost it's more difficult to objectively see in the immediacy of our daily lives the devastation to the environment and the rising threat of climate change both of which have root causes in the commodification of animals as a food source humans tend to perceive environmental impacts as slow-moving and less tangible like a long-term problem that can be put off but we're learning that in order to come out of the present crisis and ensure our survivability and that of future generations will have to make a clear paradigm shift in the ways we conduct our lives and how we view our place in the world this means pursuing proactive preventive courses of action through restoring and regenerating our precious resources and nourishing ourselves with healthy plant-sourced whole foods that strengthen our immune systems and prevent disease the health of our bodies and of the earth are one and the same as inger anderson executive director of the united nations environment program says nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic failing to take care of the planet means not taking care of ourselves and yes the actions society needs to take are large transformative ones transitioning to food practices that prioritize healthy diets on a global scale redirecting economic resources to scale up the production of plant foods improving agricultural practices putting an end to massive deforestation and the decimation of our oceans reducing food waste and world hunger addressing issues of food justice supporting the development of new food technologies and many others we need green houses instead of slaughterhouses in the midst of these challenges it can seem that we are powerless as if there is little we can do as individuals to make a difference but nothing could be further from the truth moving in the direction of and adopting a greener plant-based lifestyle is the single most powerful thing you can do for yourself and the earth and it's something you can do right now did you know by going vegan you'll not only improve your health but cut your carbon footprint in half vegans each use 1 18 of the land resources used by a typical meat consumer and in one month can save over 30 000 gallons of water 1 000 pounds of grain and 900 square feet of forest you have tremendous power as a consumer just look at the exploding market of plant-based foods and cruelty-free products in just the past five years while adopting a plant source lifestyle is beneficial to our physical existence it's so much more its significance goes deeper to our sense of identity it's about this defining question do we see ourselves in all others in looking over the past year mainstream media and public awareness rightly so have centered on how we move beyond the virus focusing on those who are ill ramping up our vaccination efforts and working towards economic recovery yet despite evidence pointing to an animal wet market as a possible origin of the pandemic society as a whole continues to hold an enormous blind spot a numbness to the mass violence and death committed against our kindred non-human animals every second of every day last spring millions of animals were killed as supply chains were disrupted yet the industry remained disconnected from this cruel reality refusing to acknowledge what it is instead calling it euthanasia culling or depopulation ultimately veganism is about healing our world it's about cultivating a greater sense of oneness with nature seeing ourselves in others and widening our capabilities of love sensitivity and kindness in order to lessen suffering it's about reawakening our greatest gifts our innate compassion and connecting with sentient beings all equally capable of feeling and suffering going plant-based elevates us to a higher level of caring and kinship veganism is a revolution of the heart next up we'll hear from naima muhammad who will be talking about the impact of hog farms in north carolina communities and her important work with the north carolina environmental justice network hello my name is naima mohammed and i am the organizing director for the north carolina environmental justice network the north carolina environmental justice network is an organization that was founded in 1998 um in as a part of regional organization to address environmental concerns that was impacting predominantly african-american native american latinx communities but was not a part of the conversation amongst the traditional environmental groups that was addressing environmental issues but never anything addressing the human impact of environmental harms and so the north carolina environment justice network came together to begin looking at these issues and to also engage these same communities in the conversation about environment of the environment because during that time back during the time we formed there was not a lot of conversation in the black and brown communities about environmental justice or any kind of concerns about the environment people knew something was changing in their communities but they didn't have any idea what it was and why it was and one of the largest things that we found to be a pro problem in our communities was the industrial agriculture as they call it um but it's where they are keeping animals confined into small spaces during the beginning of this time um we were talking about pigs and pigs only smithfield came to town and then smithfield came to town and began this industrialized agriculture um they the growth of the pigs was very rapid and they we went from you know a few pigs up to 10 million pigs in north carolina by mapping the permits we found that the 10 million pigs was mostly in eastern north carolina sitting in predominantly african-american communities native american and latinx communities and um we we deemed this environmental racism because we felt like these communities were intentionally targeted because of political being perceived to have very little political and economic power to fight off this this um company smithfield came to town they were billionaires and and industrialized agriculture has brought them huge profits in north carolina as a result of the way they raised these animals so these cup industrialized agriculture what it looks like is uh you can rise through any of the communities where these animals are and you see these um metal housing little metal houses and each metal house could have up to 5 000 pigs inside the house the space inside is very little space for that many animals and so they have confined to these little cages and it's very little room for the animals to move around and as a result they wind up with a lot of broken limbs and um you know a lot of aborted pigs and illnesses that take place inside these houses because because of the close proximity of the animals to each other so the industry's answer to that problem is to give these animals low doses of antibiotics and hormones on a daily basis they say the antibiotics is to prevent illnesses and the hormones we know will promote rapid growth in their rush to get these pigs to the market now it's just a matter of a few months that these animals go from babies to 350 pound animals to be taken slaughter at the marketplace um and smithfield only largest slaughterhouse in the country in the world really the world's largest slaughterhouse is in uh tar heel north carolina again that's a part of the southeastern part of the state they employ about 5 500 workers there slaughtering about 39 000 pigs per day the problem with this kind of industrialized agriculture is the waste management program that they have in north carolina they have a loon and spray field system and the lagoon we always say to people we're not talking about that blue lagoon that brook shields hung out in we're talking about a lagoon that's filled with nothing but feces and urine from all of these pigs and and these pigs these 10 million pigs are producing about 9 million tons of animal waste on an annual basis that's going into our rivers and streams and on the landmass in eastern north carolina and the lagoon is just where they dug a hole in the ground and decided that this would this would be sufficient to hold the waste from these animals and and then everything that the animals do inside the hog houses they have slacks in the floor for their waste to filter through and it falls through the cracks and then it go into the pipes and the pipes pipe it out to the lagoon and it sits out in the air openly until they decide to irrigate it so what they have to do is once those goons begin filling up they then irrigate this waste out around the fields and crops in the communities they call it fertilizer they call it organic fertilizer as a matter of fact they told the community there was no harm to it and that you know it was okay for them to be doing this but the problem with it with the way they handle this waste and the irrigating of it and sitting out in those open air lagoons is that it has all kinds of toxic chemicals and there's a lot of hydrogen sulfide that comes off of those lagoons because of the because of that waste sitting out there and it's making people in the community sit as an organizer i've been working with these communities um since the early 2000s and the things that i've heard people say is you know i it makes you sick you get very nauseated you throw up on you your eyes burn your nose run you get headaches and just you know angry and frustrated from having being forced to live like that and the odors are so noxious till you know people don't want to be outside anymore uh you know they say i don't want to go outside because it stinks so bad and i if i have things to do outside i get up in the morning i crack my door open just a little bit to see if it's thinking outside if it's not stinking then i rush out to do what i have to do so that i can get back in before the odor comes because once the odor comes you do not want to be outside and the thing that i've noticed in working in these communities you know children love to be outdoors they like playing outside and just being out but you ride through these communities anytime you could just pick a time on the hottest day in the summer time you can ride through you will not see children outside playing because of the odors and the flies that these animals bring into the community they bring it causes an old flux of flies mosquitoes snakes people report and that uh and i have witnessed buzzers sitting on it what they call dead boxes that these dead boxes look like a big trash dumpster that sit out at the highway in any community and the workers at these um hog houses when the animals die there they will take the dead animals from these hog houses and carry them to one of those dumpsters and they call them dead boxers and the dead boxers just sitting there and they're dumping the dead animals you can ride by their boxing anytime and see turkeys and chickens and pigs just piled up inside these zed boxes brothers are lurking because there's food for them and they're lurking around them and they um you know they sit there until they have trucks that come by from time to time to pick these animals up when the animals pile up there's no tops on them so they just sitting out there in the open but these are the kinds of things that the community have to live with and you know people have lost use of their property so they they they are not able to enjoy that problem well they've been forced off of their wells because of ground contamination because when they're spraying that waste you know it's seeping into the soil and and so the water the ground was becoming contaminated people began seeing that through changes in their well water some of the things they reported happening is that the the water began to look murky some of it looked milky but more than that the smells coming from their wells and the odors are just nazis and like i said it makes people sick i remember one teacher reporting that at the school she were they were having issues there because the children would go in their lunch room and get sick on the stomach trying to eat lunch because the odors was coming through this events at the school they have to buy bottled water in order to have enough water clean water to take care of their daily needs in 1997 there was a moratorium put in place by our general assembly um to slow down the growth of the pork industry into north carolina and so uh the moral tournaments five every two years so every two years they was automatically renewing that that uh moratorium but in the year 2000 we heard talk that they may not renew that moratorium which was coming up for renewal smithfield told the general assembly that these community members were lying and making up this stuff that there was no way that they were being um impacted in in the way that they were stating and so as a result um researchers not just in north carolina but from upstate began looking at the impacts of industrialized agriculture on humans you know on human life and as they did that a don wing in particular did a study called community health effect of industrialized car operations so what that in that research he looked at the impact of this energy on people living in close proximity to these animals and people were asked to sit outside twice a day for 10 minutes at a time once in the morning once in the evening and during 10-minute period we had designed a journal and the journal had questions in it that they would have to answer while sitting outside and we had listed all of the different symptoms that we had heard people talking about the running nose to burn the eyes the headaches the frustration the anger you know the nausea you know these things and we asked people to check off any symptoms that showed up in them during this 10-minute period that they were sitting outside once the 10 minutes were up people were asked to go back inside and once inside they had to check their blood pressure do a saliva sample they were also asked to breathe flow meter and as the results of that research showed that people had elevated blood pressures there was a lot of upper respiratory problems high rates of asthma in particular high rates of adam amongst children um and so you know there was all these kinds of things that that was um recognized from the research and we set up a mock hall farm and so we had these two little hog houses sitting out on the grounds and they were built by two of our community members and then we had the we bought two baby swimming pools and put them between the two hog houses and called them our lagoon that was our lagoon so once we set up our lagoon we had truck some organic fertilizer remember that word organic fertilizer we chucked in 40 gallons of organic fertilizer and as we were pouring our organic fertilizer into our lagoon the facilities manager for the state you know managing those grounds and that those facilities there that legislative housing came over us and asked us what were we doing and we answered that we were setting up our lagoon and he said well who told y'all to bring that waste out here we said nobody but then nobody tell us not to either so then he said well if i'll spill one drop on this lawn out here we're gonna have to find your organization's thousands of dollars clean up because we're going to have to call in halves and that because this is toxic waste we was like toxic waste really well we didn't know that because they told us it was organic fertilizer we only drove it 40 miles on the highway so we don't understand how it went from being organic to toxic in that short distance the industry kept telling the legislators it was organic fertilizer and that's why they felt they should be able to spread irrigated out on the crops around the community because they said it was not harming anybody but when it got to raleigh it was toxic waste so you know we already know what that meant anyway so that's you know what goes on in the community that's having to live with these animals so the end result of the 51-hour vision was that they did reinstate the moratorium because as late once we set up our mock call form as the legislators walked by they was like what is that smell and when we respond our response was it's it's 40 gallons of animal waste you know you ask in the community living with 19 million tons of this stuff every year you can't take 40 gallons what is the problem and so the moratorium is still in effect as i speak to you all today so um hopefully you know we they will find there is another way and a better way for them to handle the animal waste and smithfield entered into an agreement in 2000 with the state of north carolina where they agreed to put superior technology on the ground to do away with this outdated lagoon and faithful system um and this is 2021 and they have not done it yet and the state has not called their hand on or forced them or made them liberal to that agreement and thank you so much and again i would like to thank the physicians committee for responsible medicine it's been my pleasure and i hope that it's been used after hearing all of this great information you might be ready to put it into practice so let's go to registered dietitian maggie neola who will share a quick climate friendly recipe hi i'm maggie niola a dietitian at the physicians committee adding more plants to your plate is not only great for your health but also for the environment and today we're going to show you how to get started with adding more plants to your plate by making this recipe called yes you can black bean chili what's great about this recipe is that it features plant-based proteins like black beans and corn a recent study showed that swapping beef for beans could actually help the u.s reach its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and this recipe makes that exact swap not only is this bean based chili super healthy it's also delicious and really easy to make so gather your ingredients and let's get started yes you can black bean chili really is named appropriately because you can do it at home it only takes three ingredients and the cool thing about these ingredients is that you can keep them on hand at any time so let's say you came back from a vacation and you have no food in the house but you have these three and you're good to go for a quick meal that can be made in 10 minutes or less so what you want to do is start off with black beans these are really high in fiber and protein and you can drain them but keep that located just in case you want to have a little more soupy of a chili so we got one can there the next is the frozen corn you can use canned corn if you like i just prefer frozen so it's an entire bag of corn go ahead and put that in the pot there too nice medium pot will work this serves about four people and the last thing is the salsa be sure to pick your favorite kind of salsa because this is what adds a whole lot of flavor to your recipe so we've got one jar right in there and this is a pretty thick chili which is how i like it but if you want to thin it out go ahead and grab some of that black bean juice here and just add a little more liquid you don't have to use all of it so we're going to mix that together and what's really great about this is that it has three of the power plate food groups in there so you've got legumes grains and vegetables really gonna help you feel full longer now all you got to do is go ahead and put this on medium heat on your stove top for about 10 minutes until it's warm after 10 to 15 minutes it's hot and ready to be served let's grab a nice big bowl here and a ladle and dish yourself out a nice portion of this chili now you could eat quite a bit of this and feel free to as much as you want so that you feel full and ready to go with your day all right so we got this beautiful chili and let's finish it off just add a little bit more brightness with a squeeze of lime on top very delicious gonna make that flavor pop and a nice cilantro garnish of course you want to go ahead and put some hot sauce on there to make it spicy you could do that as well or even some baked tortilla chips or some crunch enjoy a nice bowl of yes you can black bean chili i hope you enjoyed making this recipe with me for more amazing plant-based recipes and videos sign up for our free 21 day vegan kickstart this month next we'll hear from emma finn who serves as friends of the earth's climate-friendly school food program associate where she works to make the k-12 food system healthier more climate-friendly and more equitable across communities good afternoon everyone my name is emma finn i work with friends of the earth on our climate friendly school food team friends of the earth is an environmental and social justice advocacy organization working on multiple environmental campaigns ranging from protecting organic agriculture and our oceans from fossil fuel projects to promoting clean energy solutions that are community controlled and to foster a regenerative economy we work to build long-term collective power to fight for a just systemic transformation today i'd like to present to you all the findings from our recent report highlighting the state of school lunch in california and key opportunities for change at the local state and federal levels to better understand the opportunities for improving the environmental and health profile of california's school meals we did a deep dive into california school lunch menus and usda foods purchasing first we analyzed over 1300 lunch entrees served at the 25 largest k-12 public school district in california during the month of october 2019. to identify the top menu items and relative frequency of meat and dairy-centric versus plant-based lunch entrees we also examined california's bulk food spending through the usda foods program and identify the companies that benefit the most from this taxpayer-funded program companies like tyson which is producing 100 percent industrial factory-farmed meat and poultry meaning massive polluting inhumane factory conditions that have huge negative health and environmental externalities we focused on the usda foods program because it is a major subsidy to school districts that largely determines what ends up on the menus we also calculated the carbon footprints of top lunch entrees and estimated greenhouse gas emissions associated with california's usda food bulk food purchasing and finally and perhaps most importantly we make policy recommendations to better align menus with public health recommendations and california's climate and sustainable food procurement goals we specifically focused on the amount of plant-based foods relative to meat-centric dishes since as you see in this slide virtually every public health organization urges greater consumption of plant-based foods and lower red and processed meat consumption for better health outcomes and most importantly for school food which operates under the u.s department of agriculture the usda's dietary guidelines also reference the importance of eating more plant-based foods the most recent 2020 guidelines point out that three-quarters of americans exceed recommendations for meat and poultry but don't get enough nuts seeds and soy products so after analyzing over 1300 menu items what did we find we found that the vast majority of school lunch entrees offered in california feature animal protein while just four percent of entrees were plant-based and of those animal proteins sixteen percent of entrees contain processed meat that's your pepperoni your hot dogs your deli meats on school lunch menus and processed meats are known carcinogens according to the world health organization meaning that sixteen percent of those entrees contain cancer-causing foods what you're looking at now are the top 10 entrees gleaned from california school district menus red meat dishes make up four of the 10 most frequently offered entrees with cheeseburgers beef crumble dishes hot dogs and meat pizzas offered most frequently the bean and cheese entrees are the only top entree in which any part of the protein requirement is fulfilled by a plant protein it is also important to point out that three of the most frequently offered menu items contain processed meats which is clearly out of alignment with all leading public health recommendations now what about the climate impact of these meals as you can see here the beef and cheese featured on school menus dominate climate impacts on school lunch menus in california beef represents only 16 of total menu offerings yet it accounts for over sixty percent of the carbon footprint meanwhile plant-based proteins such as beans tofu and lentils make up four percent of the entrees offered yet represent only one percent of the carbon footprint many districts provide vegetarian options but they use cheese to fulfill the meat meat alternate requirement however these cheese dishes are neither low carbon nor particularly healthy often being high in saturated fats and sodium this next figure here's the relative carbon footprint per serving of the top 10 entries i showed earlier beef entrees by far carry the largest carbon footprint and are also among the most frequently offered menu items beef items are typically 15 times more carbon intensive than the bean and cheese entrees in addition to the menu research as i mentioned before we looked at usda foods purchasing data in the state of california because usda foods really drives what is on the menu for example in 2014 a study found that 70 percent of usda commodity funds nationally were spent on just four types of foods raw beef mozzarella cheese cheddar cheese and chicken and these four types of food made up 88 of the usda foods sent for processing into foods like hamburgers pizza and chicken nuggets all of which appear frequently on california school food menus according to 2018-19 data we analyzed california school districts spent nearly three-quarters of their usda food dollars totaling 117 million annually on industrially produced animal products only two percent of purchases went to plant-based foods and beans and nut butter are the only plant-based sources of protein available through usda foods what is perhaps even more troubling is the fact that the largest meat and dairy conglomerates have monopolized the usda foods market for example tyson foods the biggest meat and poultry producer in the united states also recently in the news for exploiting workers during the pandemic supplies 44 of all poultry purchased in california schools through usda foods in each of these top four protein categories just three companies dominate 70 percent of the sales to california schools so rather than supporting independent local or organic producers and keeping these dollars flowing into our local economies this tax-funded program at usda foods is locking school districts into supporting corporate controlled highly concentrated polluting animal agriculture entities that are also dangerous and exploitative for workers we know that school districts function within extremely limited budgets and they are given dollars that can only be used for usda foods at below market rates which incentivizes these kinds of purchases and puts many food service directors who are doing the best they can with limited resources in a near impossible situation the good news is that we can change this and many school food service directors are already making important menu shifts many school districts across california are serving plant-based and plant-forward menu options and they're doing it successfully with menu items that students love and that save the district money here are some recent photos of climate-friendly food in california public schools even when facing a national pandemic and food supply shortages districts are making climate-friendly food a reality on the far left we have a food service staff member from ojai unified preparing cabbage this district has successfully eliminated all red meat from its menus and continues to do so the middle photo highlights the well-loved organic thai basil lentil burger from san luis coastal unified food service director aaron primer spoke during one of our recent school food webinars about how her organic lentil burger is praised by both vegetarians and meat eaters alike her plant forward meal kits at the start of the pandemic were so popular that they have now become the default option for all meal kits being sent home during cobia 19. the last photos from encinitas union showing paper bags that have been filled with fresh organic produce from the organic certified farm lab and milk for distance learners while we know that the school lunch program has been crucial to fighting food insecurity and meal quality has improved in recent years our research found significant misalignment with leading public health organizations recommendations around less meat and more plants as well as our state's climate goals i also want to emphasize that this analysis is not in any way intended to critique individuals or school districts most food service directors are doing everything they can to satisfy kids picky eating habits within tight budgets strict regulations challenging staffing situations and inadequate kitchen facilities and we know that despite these challenges schools have made remarkable progress toward serving healthier plant-based in organic food in public schools ultimately the focus of this report is to illuminate policy and structural changes needed to better align school lunch menus with leading public health guidance for healthy eating in climate science and if you find our website you can look at all of these policy recommendations that we've outlined at every level i hope we can inspire people to get more involved and to work with us especially this coming year as we have new opportunities to influence school food policy with a new administration in place at usda and the planned upcoming focus on child nutrition legislation in congress i also want to leave you on a positive note with the tangible way school districts can bring change and a path forward we call this image the burger swap this graphic shows that if all school districts in california swapped out one beef burger for one black bean burger just once a month it would save 220 million pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent the same as taking 22 000 cars off the road for a year growing 1.7 million tree seedlings for a period of time or converting 26 000 residential solar systems for a year and that is just one swap so i hope you all have learned something today thank you so much for having me we look forward to hearing from you please email us at climate friendly food friends of the earth dot org or visit our website at foe.org school food purchasing take care next we'll hear from dr michael greger a physician bestselling author and founder of nutritionfacts.org about the link between the environment emerging diseases and our diets and we'll hear about steps that we can take today to prevent the next pandemic from ever occurring over the last few decades hundreds of human pathogens have emerged at a rate unprecedented in human history say wait a second emerged from where i did most of my postgraduate medical training taking care of aids patients i remember thinking to myself when i was growing up there's no such thing as hiv aids from where do emerging diseases emerge mostly from animals the original source of nearly all major infectious diseases tuberculosis which continues to kill about a million people every year is thought to have been acquired through the domestication of goats measles also jumped from goats or sheep killing about 200 million people over the last 150 years and speaking of hundreds of millions dead smallpox which seems to have been a result of camel domestication we domesticated pigs and got whooping cough we domesticated chickens who got typhoid fever and domesticated ducks and got influenza leprosy came from water buffalo in the common cold from cattle or horses i mean how often did wild horses have the opportunity to sneeze into humanity's collective face until they were broken and bridled right until then the common cold was presumably only common to them in fact the reason european diseases wiped out the native americans and not vice versa is because there were no epidemic diseases in the americas no goats so no tb i mean the last ice age wiped out american camels so no smallpox buffalo but no domesticated buffalo so no measles humanity's biblical dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heaven and every little thing every living thing that moved over the earth has unleashed a veritable pandora's ark full of humanity's greatest killers but wait animals were domesticated thousands of years ago why all these new diseases now well we have changed the way animals live on a global scale the aids virus is blamed on the butchering of primates in the bush meat trade in africa mad cow disease was because we turned cows into natural herbivores like cows into kind of carnivores and cannibals sars in covenant 19 have been traced back to the exotic wild animal trade our last pandemic though swine flu in 2009 arose not from some backwater wet market in asia but was largely made in the usa on industrial pig operations in the united states thankfully swine flu only kills about a half million people the next time we might not be so lucky covet 19 may just be a dress rehearsal for an even greater threat waiting in the wings of chickens in 1997 a flu virus called h5n1 was discovered in chickens that would forever change your understanding of how bad pandemics could get so far it's remained largely a disease of poultry not people but of the hundreds of individuals that have become infected more than half have died a flu virus with a human case fatality rate exceeding 50 percent what if a virus like that were to mutate to acquire easy human to human transmissibility i mean the last time a bird flu virus jumped directly to humans and caused a pandemic it triggered the deadliest plague in human history the 1918 pandemic which killed 50 million people the deadliest plague in human history had a 2 death rate if we had a pandemic infecting billions where you know death was more like ebola a flip of a coin the coven 19 pandemic has been devastating but look food is still being restocked on grocery store shelves the intermittent internet may be slow but it's still up the lights are still on and safe drinking water is still flowing from the tap doctors and nurses are still showing up to work i mean if the predictions are correct and only you know a few hundred thousand americans die and that's that would be you know uh one in you know 2000 or so and pandemic of 1918 in which you know two percent of the cases succumbed one in every 150 americans died imagine if it was ten times as bad um as two percent with one in 15 die right or 25 times bandwidth one in six the good news is is there something we can do about it just as eliminating the exotic animal trade and live animal markets may go a long way towards preventing the next coronavirus pandemic reforming the way we raise domestic animals for food may help forestall the next killer flu the unprecedented merchants of h5n1 10 other bird flu viruses infecting people around the world newly infecting people has been blamed on industrial poultry production for example a quote from the united nations governments local authorities and international agencies need to take a greatly increased role in combating the role of factory farming which combined with live animal markets provide ideal conditions to the flu virus to spread and mutate into a more dangerous form unquote um and uh i'm happy to share with you um uh invited review i published in the critical reviews in microbiology where i talk about all the evidence in underlying evolutionary biological theory but basically the h5n1 virus started out like all bird flu viruses as a harmless waterborne intestinal infection of waterfowl but gained airborne transmission and the ramping up of extreme virulence within these massive intensive poultry production operations why because when we overcrowd tens of thousands of animals in these cramped filthy football field-sized sheds to like beat to beak atop their own waste it's just a breeding ground for a disease there's this year number of animals the the overcrowding the stress crippling their immune systems the ammonia from the decomposing waves burning their lungs lack of fresh air lack of sunlight put all these factors together we really have is kind of the perfect storm environment for the emergence and spread of so-called super strains of influenza currently the cdc considers the bird flu virus h7n9 to be our gravest threat with a case fatality rate of 40 percent killing about 600 of the first 1500 people it's infected a published estimate of what h7n9 pandemic might look like in the united states included millions of americans dead a pandemic with more than just a few percent mortality wouldn't just threaten financial markets but civilization itself as we know it how can we stop the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place if there was just one concept to draw on my work about preventing and reversing chronic diseases it's that whenever possible we should treat the cause the american public health association the largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world has called for a moratorium on factory farming maybe covet 19 is the dry run we needed the the fire drill to wake us out of our complacency and reform the food system before it's too late the pew commission on industrial fundamental protection production uh cites the human health risks as a reason to abolish gestation crates for pregnant pigs um the the the rise in stress hormone levels and created sows is thought to be the result of the interference with the expression of natural maternal behaviors like nest building which results in impaired immunity they produce lower levels of antibodies in response to an experimental challenge measures as simply as simple as providing straw bedding appears to decrease swine influenza rates presumably by eliminating the immunosuppressive stress of lying on bare concrete their whole lives yet the pigs are often denied even this modicum of mercy to their detriment and potentially to ours as well for chickens raised for me we can decrease stocking densities to give them more breathing room i'm they're the ones who could use a little social distancing right now researchers have demonstrated a 100 contact transmission rate of h5n1 between chickens housed at the standard stocking densities but the transmission rate was cut in half or even eliminated when bird's living space was doubled we could also push for slower growing breeds breeding for production traits like increased breast muscle and birds rates for meat or increased laying ability and egg breeds seems to necessarily mean breeding for decreased immune function studies show that old-fashioned slower growing chicken breeds have larger and and better developed antibody producing immune organs instead of being bred to transfer the bulk of resources to build breast meat while neglecting other needs these slower growing breeds have sufficient resources to foster a more functional antibody response let me share with you an editorial published in the journal of the american public health association that goes beyond just calling for reform and de-intensification to the poultry industry but instead questions the prudence of raising so many animals for food in the first place it is curious the editorial reads given the pandemic threat that changing the way humans treat animals most basically ceasing to eat them or at least radically limiting the quantity of them that is eaten is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure such a change if sufficiently adopted or imposed could still reduce the chances of the much feared influenza epidemic it would be even more likely to prevent unknown future diseases that in the absence of this change may result from farming animals intensively and killing them for food yet humanity doesn't even consider this option unquote however thanks to food innovations this may be changing look at the dairy case these days some of america's largest dairy producers have filed for bankruptcy due to the constellation of new consumer choices and we're starting to see the same thing in the meat aisle no longer a kind of a niche market for vegetarians major meat producers tyson smithfield purdue hormel have already started to help innovate us out of this precarious situation by making hybrid or completely plant-based meats there are headlines like kfc to roll out cargill's plant-based chicken across china talk about a cultural revolution we're not talking about tofurkey right karkil is america's largest private corporation one of the biggest meat packers in the world and for those of you thinking you'll have to pry that pork chop out of my cold dead hand well i've got good news for you too you may be able to have your meat and eat it too by cultivating meat from muscle cells right you don't have to worry about intestinal bug e coli campylobacter salmonella if you're producing meat without intestines you don't have to cook the crap out of the meat if there's no crap to begin with just like you don't have to worry about brewing up new respiratory viruses if you're making meat without the lungs cultivated meat and even much of the plant-based meat isn't necessarily great for from a kind of a personal health standpoint but from a pandemic threat standpoint zero risk in this new age of emerging diseases there are now billions of feathered and curly-tailed test tubes or viruses to incubate and mutate within billions more spins and pandemic roulette we may be one bush meat meal away from the next hiv one pangolin plate away from the next killer coronavirus and one factory farm away from the next deadly flu along with human culpability though comes hope if changes in human behavior can cause new plagues well then maybe changes in human behavior may prevent them in the future though it may take a pandemic with a virus like h5n1 or h7n9 before the world realizes the true cost of cheap chicken now we'll hear from dr martin heller from the center of sustainable systems at the university of michigan who researches the sustainability of the food system um i want to start at a fairly high level and just consider a little bit why we might need to consider the planet uh in our eating what's what's the problem here um well to put it simply the bottom line is with a global population of 7.8 billion feeding all of those hungry mouths uh is really uh you know is is really putting an impact on the natural resources and environmental impact of our planet and this shows up in in things like upwards of 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions coming from food and agriculture as much as 90 percent of global fresh water consumption uh being consumed in in agricultural practices a 38 of ice-free land area is occupied by agriculture and that's not just the ice-free land area that we as humans occupy but across the whole planet so it also means that agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss and here we're seeing a little time lapse of of the disappearance of the amazonian rainforest by by agriculture and of course that has a big impact on biodiversity equally as dramatic is agriculture's contribution to nutrient enrichment in waterways and this plays out in ways like the dead zone in the gulf of mexico where agricultural practices throughout the mississippi river basin leach nutrients into the mississippi river they end up in the gulf of mexico which basically ends up depleting the oxygen in parts of the gulf to the point where nothing can live there so major impacts coming from agriculture and as we all know um we can we anticipate seeing continued population growth at least until uh the end of the century and along with that increased prosperity which often leads to an increased demand for animal-based foods this projection from fao suggests a 76 increase in meat demand by 2050. there's a growing recognition that in order for us to meet those future food demands within the limits of our little planet within what our planet can support it's really going to require more than just doing agriculture better this is most especially played out in differences between animal and plant-based foods which of course shows up um often in our typical protein sources we looked at these sort of um reduction scenarios in in a different light and what if we were able to by 2030 realize a 50 reduction in animal-based foods across the board so that includes meats that includes dairy it includes eggs it includes fish and seafood 50 reduction of all those substituting with plant-based equivalents and what we found is that's a huge reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions it it amounts to 47 and a half taking 47.5 million cars off the road for a year um just if we reduced our food by our animal-based foods by 50 um again if we put that in terms of the these reductions that we need to meet a climate change target um almost a quarter of of those reductions from this 50 reduction in our in our diets uh and if we took that a bit farther and said okay 50 reduction in all animal based foods but let's take our reduction of beef to 90 of our current uh intake and of course that would push it even farther and represent a reduction of 30 percent 36 percent of the necessary emission reductions to meet those those un um goals so um again you know the point here is we can make very significant impacts on some of these environmental um influences by what seem like fairly reasonable changes in our diet and as you all know um changes that would also likely be beneficial to our health i think that it's fair to say that here in the anthropocene food represents one of the greatest health and environmental challenges that we have over the next century right we we've really got to find a way to to do this right to figure it out and agriculture food production is having a big impact on our planet our on our environment we're expecting that to continue because of population growth because of ongoing um demand for for animal-based foods but we what we also see is that diet has important consequences on these environmental impacts that there are um there are ways of lessening our impact by um simply looking at change in our diet and i should add here that those of us in in um in developed world in the industrialized world that are already used to these very um rich diets very animal um based animal centric diets have a much larger role to play here when we consider it in in a global perspective but you know if we were to sum it all up i think that once again michael pollan kind of nailed it here right eat food not too much mostly plants that gets you most of the way there when we're talking about environmental impacts as well which is fortunate because we're seeing a lot of agreement right with what we what we see with um with health considerations as well so that's what i have for you today thank you so much for your attention i really appreciate you tuning in today now we're going to hear about sustainability through traditional native foods and practices from chef lois ellen frank who's a new mexico-based chef author native foods historian and founder of red mesa cuisine llc hi everyone my name is chef lois ellen frank and i am the chef owner of red mesa cuisine in santa fe new mexico and i'm just going to talk to you about the sacredness of some of the foods that we use and how that plays a role as a chef in what i do uh i work a lot with corn beans and squash uh this is called the three sisters and uh it's called the three sisters not only because of the nutrients that they provide but also how they grow and what's fascinating about these three is that corn needs nitrogen from the soil and beans give nitrogen and so together these two sisters uh really were sort of a gift to native people and many native communities believe this and beans need a pole to climb and so corn is that perfect pole and squash has big leaves and it shades the ground keeping moisture in and weeds out so these plants are like a family they have a relationship and the way they grow and the way they want to grow um is really important in uh need of cooking native american cuisine native ideology and so i worked a lot with the three sisters and you can actually see here that uh i have some corn a lot of the corn we use is is is a corn that's a native corn that grows and we use the whole kernel and we grind that into a powder we make a lot of dishes like corn mush and corn pudding and atole and breads and dumplings and when this corn is treated when we put it into ash it becomes this corn over here which is actually a treated corn some tribes call it lycorn some tribes know it as a harmony corn we actually know it here in new mexico as a pasole and that's a spanish word for a treated corn when you cook that corn it puffs and uh it's really nutritious it's really delicious and it's pretty amazing and then beans lots of beans here we have some that are drought tolerant uh they come in all shapes and sizes and colors i sort of think as beings like us they're seeds and we're all different my mom always said growing up that corn comes in four colors and those four colors are yellow white black and red those are the four colors on the medicine wheel those are the four races of man those are what makes up this this earth and so we're all earth people and one of the most fascinating things is uh the relationship we have not only the relationship with land but the relationship that we have with the food and for me personally as a chef uh i know every farmer that supplies food for me i know how they grow the food where their farm is the care that they take and they're all different some of the farmers that i work with supply me with heirloom tomatoes that i can every year and we're talking about hundreds of pounds i make jars in jars and jars so that i can use those tomatoes throughout the year and tamaya is my supplier for the corn that i use and ramona farms supplies some of the the beans that i use and the squash might come from matt romero at romero farms or jose gonzalez uh at gonzalez farm and so there's a relationship not only with the land but the food and as a chef for me this is really important i want to know where my food comes from i want to know how it was grown i want to know that it was grown without pesticides and without toxins i want to know that the earth is clean and i want to know that the farmer cares about the plants as much as i do and maybe he talks to them or maybe he sings to them and helps those crops to grow so i call this a foodscape and i think it's really important to contextualize why would someone come to new mexico when you could get these ingredients or you could order them online any anywhere because of that connection that we have to the land and the food and the actual soil the altitude the amount of rain uh the minerals and the ingredients in the soil influence how the food tastes so our chilies here have lots of flavor and i'm probably biased because i've lived in new mexico since the 80s but the reason it tastes so good is because the land and so this is a foodscape this is a way that we connect this is why people come here to experience the flavors of the land and to experience that connection to place and that's a really important part of what we do at red mesa i work with uh chef walter whitewater and you know we we want to leave all the negative at the door and we want to focus on the positive and we want to put love and care and a consciousness into the foods that we serve and that has to come from the time it's a seed to when it's planted and grown and then i get it and then i touch it and i make it into something and then i feed it to you and that for me is that cycle that connection that we all have to the land and the land is is vitally important here you know we can't be healthy people without healthy land it's impossible and a native way of looking at things is to think about the fact that everything is connected so if we have this circle and we have these four colors of corn if you do something it affects everything because it's a circle you can't do something to one component and not have it affect everything and that's really really important when we think about land and we think about food and we think about this need this important desire to tend to and take care of the land not only for our own health and wellness but for the generations that are yet to come this is a really important way of looking at how we live as earth people how we live on the land i think it's a vital part of who i am as a chef so one of the things that i've done and i uh you know i i teach on the college level and i always tell my students that we need to address a problem but i'm very solution oriented how do i make a difference every day every day what can i do and one of the things that i've done uh just in on the land where this kitchen is and where uh i live and where i work and we've planted what's called an edible landscape and so we took native indigenous plants uh one of which is chilled cherries and we planted them and they've spread and now just from the edible landscape in my front yard which is actually watered from the rain that we get every summer and chokecherry is very very important uh not only in my native lineage but to many native tribes and we harvest anywhere from 20 to 35 pounds of chokecherries and that includes leaving some for the plant to regenerate itself but also some for the animals the birds and the squirrels and the creatures that we share this earth with and so when you think about what can you do you can plant an edible landscape you can take what i call an acceptance garden what has nature given you and accept that and help those to grow and help those to propagate on their own so that we can feed butterflies and bees and birds and bunnies and everyone that we share the earth with and also take some of that food for ourself and our families and so this is also a way of being a way of being in the world a way of being on our own land in our own landscapes is to plant foods that plants that generate food and this is really important and a lot of this knowledge a lot of this information comes from the ancestors and so in all of our lineages in all of our indigenousness we can reindigenize who we are everybody's indigenous and everybody comes from somewhere and what did our ancestors do that made the world we live in and the land we live on sustainable what did they do and what can we do as individuals and i think the power of one is so underrated because we do have a lot of power and one can turn into 10 which can turn into 100 which can turn into a million which can turn into 100 million and so if we all take responsibility and we all do something to better the land and the food and the plants that we share this land with i think the world's going to be a better place and i think that's really important when we look towards the future and making sure that for the next seven generations our children and their children and their children have safe clean healthy plants to eat and for food i'm going to introduce chef walter whitewater and he's the chef i work with at uh red mesa cuisine and one of the things that we do together come on in walter is uh we bring in the element of song because songs are prayers and that element connects us not only to the land but to the class and the food that we serve and so uh walter's going to do a little song for us do you want to introduce yourself hi my name is arizona and this is one of the traditional ways that we use our language and we connect with the plants the plant base is uh that's the most sacred plant that we use to heal people with you know and respect the other parties so anyway i'm going to see a song here and end it with the song there's always the gathering and so there's always the calling in the grandfather of the spirit as as we say and saying thank you at the end with the stronger and it's a heartbeat as they say one mind one heart you know one beat as the word knows so anyway here it goes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you and so the thought of the song the thought of this goes out and we all feel it and we live it and it connects us to the land and to our food and to our sacred plants [Music] well thank you so much chef lois thank you chef walter that's absolutely wonderful thank you to all of our presenters for tremendous presentations and now for those of you who have been participating this is your time to ask questions that you may have and to take your questions uh let me invite a panel of speakers dr joanne kong dr michael greger dr leslie durham and chef lois ellen frank and also emma finn if you'd please join us and thanks to all of you for being here i love what you had to to present thank you very much um so if you have a question please just ask them in the chat box and uh we'll get to as many as we can so go ahead you find the chat box there give us your questions all right um i'm seeing the first question here is for dr kong um dr kong linda is looking for a quick stat or two to include in an elevator pitch about a plant-based diet for the environment that she can quickly share with others so um dr kong what what would you include in an elevator elevator pitch so to speak hi linda that's a terrific question going plant gates is the single most powerful and effective thing that any of us can do to help save the environment and sustain future gun engagements our important role as we talk to others is to raise awareness that the current ways of producing food centered around the consumption of animals is the largest source of environmental devastation it truly is the single most destructive industry on earth it's the leading driver of climate change accounting for over 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions it's a leading cause of water and air pollution soil erosion and degradation deforestation and thus it is the number one cause of species and habitat loss by going plant-based we could save 70 to 80 percent of the land water and energy resources currently used for using animals as a food source and if you go vegan did you know you can cut your carbon footprint in half use 1 13 of the water and 1 18 of the land resources used by a typical meat consumer in a month you could save over 30 thousand gallons of water over a thousand pounds of grain and in one year save an acre of trees and realize this huge amounts of plant crops are consumed by livestock yet meat eaters receive only 30 percent of that plant's energy the other 70 is lost through the animals bodily functions waste and so on so why not just eat the plants directly and get all the fantastic nutritional benefits and also avoid the negative health impacts of eating animals one of my favorite quotes is by gary yourofsky animal advocate who used to say don't use the animal as a filter eat plants directly i love it thank you fantastic um i have a question for dr greger dr greger mark is asking if meat and dairy corporations are lobbying and fighting against the plant-based environmental messages and if so is there anything that we as individuals can do about that well that's a that's a great question that's not something that uh i've been uh had on my radar maybe someone else on the panel may be able to to chime in on that but certainly in the nutrition realm um there continues to be a cacophony of noise um from both the meat dairy egg and junk food industries to try to muddy the waters even though there's been a consensus as to the core tenets of healthy eating how they live and going back decades in the peer-reviewed scientific literature great well let me um ask if any of the other panelists wanted to weigh in on that very question i don't know if any of you are finding that you're fighting against the meat industry the dairy industry and if so do you have suggestions for things that we as individuals can do to fight back anybody want to jump in on that all right you're off the hook for now let me go to dr durham uh i have a question from liz um liz is wondering how faux meets like beyond beef beyond meat or the impossible burger how do they impact the environment uh are they better than me so maybe the short answer is yes i like to think of these as the beyond impossible products so they are possibly better as a stepping stone right they're better than beef lower greenhouse gases although there's some you know there's some question about that i think if you look on their websites for example they have some data on there 80 90 but i'm not sure about that methodology necessarily um but i think one they're kind of getting people to talk about plant-based diets so that's that's a plus um but in the long term we need bigger things than that you know worried about one burger here or there a fake product here or there um these products still are taking like 15 or 20 different ingredients from around the world they're super high in fat i know one of them is based on is soy and the other is a pea protein but they still have a lot of added fats and um very stabilizers and this sort of thing so you're still bringing all these these ingredients across the planet and producing them and manufacturing them right i mean it's a factory manufacturing and then packaging and then shipping them refrigerated shipping um and you know like why can't you just make a bean burger right beans and uh some spices and flour to hold it together my husband's bean burgers are great um so why not just do that i i don't understand but again as a stepping stone that's fine um but if we really as you know if you listen to my my talk there um we need big action to address greenhouse gas gas emissions and to do that plant-based diet um you know eating eating real food plant-based whole foods plant-based real foods that's the way we all need to go great terrific uh over to chef lois um jeff lois uh we have ev is wondering if you have tips for a cold climate uh it sounds like she's cooking with local fruits and vegetables but she's looking at the winter months she's in a colder climate and wanting to stop relying as much as possible on foods that have been shipped long distances what do you think uh it's i think that's a great question and i think that um eating seasonally is very very healthy uh so you know when we get into the spring we have our baby greens and we have uh some things and we get into the harvest all full harvest and then in the winter months that's when we would traditionally eat the dried chilies the dried corn the dried beans of course beans we can eat all year round because they last and i'm a big advocate for beans and i love the bean juice so i use that a lot when i cook uh but i think that uh eating seasonally the body adapts i know i definitely feel and want and crave heartier meals in the winter and lighter meals uh yesterday i wanted a salad and i uh i made a beautiful salad with microgreens and all the little spring foods uh and it was lovely so i did add a little bit of nuts and it was just a perfect salad so again um listen to your body and eat with the seasons uh eat uh and i think that's perfect for something when we talk about climate because that's traditionally how uh native people have uh followed and eaten uh um for millennia great perfect um let's see let me go to emma finn um amy is has a question for you and she asks if you have tips for how she can talk to her kids school about introducing plant-based options in their lunch program i'll bet you that is a question for so many people uh emma what do you think yeah well i definitely think the first step would be to ask what is needed for a food service director at a school district to make those changes each school district operates very differently you know there's different staffing there's different infrastructure challenges kitchen equipment and different reimbursement levels different budgets most school districts operate in the black or in the red so they don't have a lot of flexibility with their budget but i think asking you know is there a way to swap a beef burger for a veggie patty you know simple changes like that have a huge impact on the climate let alone your own personal health now understanding the landscape of where our food service director is operating is key in order to build in order to be able to support their program because ultimately you want to support them in their work in order for more students to be able to buy into the program because the more students that participate in the protein sorry in the program the more money that food service directors have in order to make big menu shifts um now while i've got you emma uh tell me about eating local from your standpoint um we're we're talking with chef lois about that uh what do you make of that and do you have some tips for people who would like to eat locally more yeah i mean eating local is is a huge way to not only reduce you know the the carbon footprint that's associated with transportation and food um but also supporting local farmers smaller producers i think it's really important to you know for people that don't have access to let's say a farmer's market or you know local produce in the grocery store we need to support legislation that will actually bring smaller producers into grocery stores like food hubs you know there's legislation in california that's up right now um and it's about calling your legislators to support opportunities for smaller producers by pock farmers farmers of color women farmers you know get that local food into the places that we can buy fantastic thank you um let me raise a question for dr kong again um this is from gina and i want to hear your answer to this dr kong she says would there really be enough plants to feed the global population if everybody switched to a plant-based diet what do you think yeah that's a real common question and first it's worth noting that at least 30 percent of the ice-free land on the planet is used for grazing and growing animal feed yet this produces only 18 of total global food calories now people will ask gee if the if the whole world went vegan doesn't it mean we're going to need way more land and resources to grow plant foods but realize that all this livestock they're consuming plants on average producing one pound of animal protein requires 15 pounds of plant protein and meat production uses about 16 times more land than plant-based food of roughly equivalent nutrition so if we made a global move to plant foods instead of diverting those crops to farmed animals we wouldn't have to grow as many crops and we could free up we could actually free up over 70 percent of global crop lands right now the world actually produces enough plant calories to feed 10 to 11 billion people but nearly half of these food crops go to farmed animals and in the u.s it's at least 70 percent warmed animals actually consumed five times the amount of grain as americans so this all factors in as a driving force behind world hunger too because you have crops that are being directed to animals rather than to the people who need them the most so our food revolution really needs to be focused on a global commitment to agricultural practices that produce a rich diversity of nutritious plant foods and we also have with our spirit of innovation there are so many exciting things happening with vertical farming hydroponics aeroponics where you can grow large quantities of plant foods in small areas with much much less resources so there are so many exciting possibilities for us to move towards plant-based eating okay that's great it sounds like not only are there would we be have plenty of plants to eat we would have no trouble with that but it sounds like we're actually going to be using fewer plants less land if we're not raising so much in the way of feed grains for livestock um i love it is that right did i get that right yes that's right and at this point we really uh humanity really is at a point now where we are placing the greatest amount of damage on the planet and our resources and we have to find ways to cut back on the amount of agricultural resources and now that we're using so that's why it's so highly critical that we center our policies and everything we do as consumers on moving the plant-based industries forward okay wonderful thank you let me bring dr greger back in dr greger i'll bet you hear this all the time i do people saying i read in a magazine about a ketogenic diet it sounds really cool i think maybe a hollywood celebrity might be doing it um is that better than plant-based what do you think and i guess i'm going to ask you if this is two ways one is environmentally one is um health-wise keto plant-based what do you think there's a softball question you've ever heard one of course so all ketogenic diet is really extremely high fat diet so if you were just you know i don't know chugging bottles of vegetable oil every day uh environmentally uh it might not be as impactful but we're talking but typically when people eat ketogenic diets these extremely high fat diets they're eating animal products meat dairy and eggs which have as we learning today some of the highest um environmental impacts and uh uh and i think the thought that ketogenic diets are somehow more environmentally friendly might be from there um skewing some of the uh um processed foods but uh that's nothing compared to animal products i mean if i could uh touch on the question that lois got i looked into the impossible and beyond um life cycle analyses that they commissioned from this from independent institutions i have a uh a bunch of videos on the environmental impacts of those on nutritionfacts.org and uh and indeed i mean and so they got i mean these are legit institute center for uh sustainable uh systems at the university of michigan did the beyond thing 90 less greenhouse gas 90 less land use 99 less water about half the energy used about the same thing with beyond they used they used qantas and so these are just night and day differences um whether you're talking about animal-based meat or plant-based meat but of course beans are healthier particularly um from a human health standpoint um but uh but i i don't wanna uh really kind of underestimate the the um the uh the the the great strides that are being made in the uh and plant-based meat and plant-based milk and plant-based egg space now in terms of dramatically like an order of magnitude lower environmental impact okay so you if i understand right you're saying the ketogenic diet not so good for the environment plant-based diet dramatically dramatically better even did i guess right even if it's not just some simple beans and vegetables and fruits but even if it's what you might call a processed vegan food even highly pre in fact um technically what beyond impossible makes these are ultra processed foods right bearing very little resemblance to anything one might typically use in kind of a traditional culinary setting yet still even the ultra processed even though all ingredients from all over the place 90 less greenhouse gases than actually raising the animals you can imagine how animal agriculture is just a black box of inefficiency you have all this feed energy protein going in but these animals have to live and respire and move around and create skeletons and other inedible parts and so when you actually get out at the end it's just a small fraction of both the resources that go in and the nutrition that goes in you get this mountain of nutrition going into these animals you get a tiny amount out you completely process out a process out a hundred percent of the fiber we've seen something like white rice or or white flour is processed because you know much of the fiber is removed how about taking those plants and removing a hundred percent of the fiber by processing them through animals animal products are the truly ultra processed foods in the supermarket because they're processed through a living factory okay amazing uh let me bring up dr durham uh this is from paula paula said okay this is an interesting question paula paula wants to know about soy can you talk about the environmental impact of of soy sure i don't know why people like to hate on soy soy is not a problem except that something like 80 85 of all soybeans we grow in the world are fed to animals so yeah there's a problem because we're tearing down rainforests for example you may have seen oh i don't think it was in this in this lecture i gave today but i have a nice map showing terrible destruction still to even recently and um in the amazon rainforest tearing down rainforest to plant soybeans for livestock feed um so yeah if if we just simply grew enough soybeans i i think it's something like five or seven percent of soybeans that we grow right now are actually used for human consumption so soy milk tofu tempeh um if we just grew soy beans for human consumption not a problem beans are great soybeans garbanzos pintos we love beans we all need beans the problem is that we're growing a lot of soybeans for livestock feed and for oils a bit for biofuel but but really the the main problem is over doing it producing too many soybeans so that we can feed them again as others have said through an animal a very inefficient process to get out a small amount of meat so again any sort of international policies to try and address climate change to keep us below that two degrees celsius we need big actions we need big changes um and absolutely trying to reduce those soy that soybean production that's going right to animals right to livestock that's that's going to be an important step okay so the problem with soybeans is that we're not eating them the problem with soybeans is we're feeding them to chickens exactly i got it that's great all right thank you uh let me bring up chef lois um chef lois i've got an interesting question here that i don't have a clue about but you're going to know this is from laxmi she wants to move away from eggs and she's looking for ways of making scrambles or quote omelets something that's egg like like an egg but not an egg um what can lakshmi do well that's an interesting question there you know when you do baking you can make a flax egg but that's not something you can do a scramble with uh you can do a scramble with tofu and i think tofu scrambles are really really good but uh one of my favorite things to do is to shift away from the traditional thought process of what an omelet is or a scrambled egg texturally and use other vegetables so i love to use uh squash or sweet potatoes they will start to get sort of soft uh and some of my favorite things to add to that would be mushrooms or kale or green onions and so when you think about a scramble shift your brain to think that it's really about a saute it's really about sauteing some of your favorite ingredients what what's going to bring out flavors what's going to make you feel full and just shifting texturally to think it's not going to be like an egg it's going to be different and it's going to be better it's going to be more nutritious and more delicious and and as a chef that's one of the the biggest things that i like to do okay um by the way um can you jump in on the question that was asked earlier about eating more locally because i know this has been something that you have have given a lot of thought to yeah um you know i love to be solution orientated and i love to feel individually that i make a difference and so uh some of the things that we can do as individuals is to plant an edible landscape i know here in new mexico we uh just in my yard or at land around i i looked and said what was indigenous i helped those indigenous plants we have wolfberries we have wild currants we have pine nuts we have wild spinach we have a form of uh um a wild amaranth um and then i planted foods that i knew would do well wildly uh uh edible landscape is what i called it we have choked cherries we have my favorite weed of all purslane and so you know rather than using pesticides or chemicals look at your land and look at what might have grown there ancestrally and what can you do just in your little area to eat plants and what plants don't spray those dandelions they're amazing those dandelions have nutrition they're delicious and then buy local we like to push buying native uh some of the small vendors i know uh covid has uh popped up these grandmas that are now selling culinary ash uh and we can support them we can support entire families um doing what they've always done uh and i think that's that's makes a big difference i feel like i'm contributing to something much larger when i do that i think it's really important great thank you lois uh let me bring up emma finn um emma i've we've got a question here that i think has your name on it um how can we get diet into the mainstream conversation about climate change uh it seems like policy makers and environmental groups touch on everything else when it comes to the environment but they don't touch on the diet um how can we change the source of it's a source of frustration for me and my colleagues i'll tell you that um i think it can get into the mainstream conversation when people talk about climate change to also start talking about what other people can do you know we talk about solutions telling people to unplug their computers at night turn off your monitors you know drive electric electric vehicles i think you know changing conversations with our peers but also in curriculum right with students we start young i took environmental studies um starting in high school uh you know bring the diet into that conversation is so key bring textbooks in that kind of realm so i think the way that we eat the way that we produce our food these are arguably the most important shifts we as an individual and in society need to do to combat climate change so i also think it's about calling our representatives uh the question you know kind of said how policymakers aren't aren't really touching on this issue um at the state and federal levels we need to demand that they address these issues you know a big thing about my team is why hasn't the biden administration you know kind of put this forward as one of their focal points you know their build back better plan um doesn't do a lot of diet shifting or you know stuff at usda foods program that could really make huge shifts in the way that we spend our money at the government level and also nationally okay beautiful um let's hope that that happens because it's so long overdue um if you don't mind i would like to bring up the whole panel um and i've got two questions for everybody my first question is are we getting anywhere are we making progress um there has been a plant-based movement for a long time but you know going way back to diet for a small planet francis moore lepay people and through john robbins and others we've been really pushing so my question is are we getting anywhere and a related question somebody chatted in the question um what if i do it one one meal a day does that make a difference am i going to get anywhere with that um uh let me start with dr konk uh a are we getting anywhere be one meal a day does it help or not yeah i'll start with a second question obviously anything you can do to lessen urban support eliminate your meat consumption is going to help the environment i did want to create this one statistic the other day that said that in the us if we skip it would be like taking 300 000 cars off the road so yes i think we're all moving in the right direction but not and i want everybody who's watched today to realize the immense power you have as a consumer to continue driving the planet-based movement forward it's all about bringing into mainstream awareness that we cannot address climate change without making a major transformation in our food systems shifting to a new paradigm of health from the focus on treating illness to preventing disease from happening in the first place reorientationally from a profit growth mindset to one of preserving life in our resources taking on the role as a planetary caretaker and then the last thing i want to say is that a part of this whole conversation is about deepening our most precious gift that of complication it's not only about the physical it's about what we're doing for these animals because society as a whole has a huge blind spot where animals are concerned writer and activist jim mason calls it self anesthetization we've become so numb to the exploitation of animals which is the most violent and full act taking place on the planet today so i call it veganism a revolution of the heart fantastic thank you uh over to you dr greger uh same questions are we getting anywhere and what about one meal a day you know anyone who asks are we getting anywhere i mean i can imagine some young folks just starting into this movement being frustrated by the rate of progress but for those of us who've been doing this decades um it is just this remarkable explosion in progress in terms of the constellation of new consumer choices like looking at the dairy case these days and now you know why major dairy corporations are simply going out of business um but uh but we don't need anecdote we actually have data the meat industry's big survey just came out um on the 29th so just a few days ago found that compared to 2019 those who consider the in the us those who who label themselves as meat eaters dropped um from 2019 in 2019 it was 85 71 in 2021 um and similarly flexitarianism those who are trying to cut down on meat um uh grew uh from nearly double 2019 it was 19 for um we went from 10 up to 20 21 19 um and i think that is um a tremendous sign of progress is the people that are cutting down on these animal products um that are making the biggest impact so for not just one meal a day even one major meal a week these meatless monday programs can have tremendous impacts when instituted on an institutional level so when the you know la unified school district instituted a meatless monday plan you can imagine how many meals that is same thing happened in new york city some of the biggest school systems on the planet are offering as the default option the healthy option both for the planet and for human health not only from a chronic disease standpoint like heart disease diabetes high blood pressure but from a pandemic risk standpoint to protect us against future infectious disease threats okay wonderful thank you dr greger uh dr durham same question to you are we getting anywhere oh that's such a great question so i i i meet a lot of young people right i teach at a university so i'm i'm fairly optimistic and they always joke with me well you're a very optimistic person but getting the word out you know just just having even the concept plant-based people pretty much know what that means now which i you know i i went vegan like 10 years ago vegetarian 20 some years ago and people didn't even really know what that meant so i i'm optimistic that more younger diverse people are understanding and taking action and and they're interested in these issues now we definitely need national leadership international climate change agreements to limit our greenhouse gas emissions we absolutely need to take those actions but we as individuals can take action to eat smart for the planet and vote smart for the planet so that we get leaders who will take those broader actions so in environmental studies i see i i'm very optimistic i see students who are really really interested in this um and i'm just hopeful that things like this bringing together i think that's the key right bringing together issues of deforestation bringing together issues of environmental injustice bringing to health issues climate change of um greenhouse gas emissions so the science the social science the people the environment we've got to bring this all together we all need to work together join forces and push for change i love it uh chef lois ellen frank let me bring you back up um are we getting anywhere i know that you have taken really the long view uh in the studies that you have done uh tell me are we making progress or are we going in some other direction oh absolutely we're totally making progress and i think you know as a chef one of my biggest things is um getting people to taste and to experiment with plants and to realize that uh as you start to taste how delicious you can make a plant-based meal and a plant-based soup and a plant-based dish it's not only salads there's so many dishes that you're not going to miss the meat and we're going to convert you because plant-based is healthier there's so much flavor and i'm just a big advocate my next cookbook is going to be completely plant-based so as a chef i'm moving uh into uh making these plants taste amazing and letting everybody taste them and realize how good they are oh that's wonderful thank you lois um last let me bring up emma finn um let me get your perspective on this are we getting anywhere are we making progress um and also do partial steps like one meal a day does that help yeah uh thanks i'd say yes and no i i'm cautiously optimistic no i am optimistic uh i'm happily aware of the data trends showing how americans increasingly want to eat more plant-based and plant forward reducing the amount of meat and dairy in their diet and that people are starting to care more about where their food comes from on the flip side i am concerned by the large increase in retail sales that big industrial meat producers have scored during the pandemic and i'm slightly concerned to buy some of the corporate takeover of plant-based protein alternatives kind of dominating the social narrative about what it means to be on a plant-based diet you know and as my my colleagues on the panel mentioned you know when the resources the indigenous and traditional knowledge of eating whole plant-based proteins such as beans legumes tofu and tempeh are available better for our bodies and for the environment i'd like to see more of that be uplifted in the conversation and just to shoot out some some numbers so we run numbers around school district uh lunch menus and we have seen how important one one shift can can make a difference so for example our most recent report the state of school lunch in california we show how if all school districts in california just swapped out a beef burger for a black bean burger one day per month one day per month if it's a friday you know first fridays or whatever it would save 220 million pounds of co2 equivalent in one year that's the same as taking 22 000 cars off the road for a year or the electric electricity for 26 000 residential solar systems for one year you know in general a cheeseburger we found was 15 times more carbon intensive than a plant-based offering on the school lunch menu so yes one meal does matter wonderful well thank you thanks to the whole panel we enjoyed so much your presentations thank you for answering all these extra questions um so everyone is participating a round of applause for our panelists thank you this is all the time that we have today and i want to say a huge thank you also to those of you who have been tuning in today to all these presentations and if you like what you heard and if you'd like to learn a lot more and if you'd like to get involved in the process of change let me ask you to join the physicians committee at the physicians committee we do a lot of work to educate people we do important research studies we're changing how research is done we'd love to have you as part of the team you'll see more information if you just go on the web to pcrm.org join and if you're thinking okay it's time for me to change my own diet i have a tip for you that i'd like to invite you to take advantage of it's called our 21 day vegan kickstart on your iphone on your android just go to wherever you get apps and you can download the 21 day vegan kickstart for free menus recipes cooking videos it's all there for you and on the web if you'd like to have a look there just type in 21daykickstart.org that's 21daykickstart.org and you'll get lots and lots and lots of information there um all right that's all the time we have thank you so much again to all of our panelists thank you to all the participants thank you to donna and laura behind the scenes for making everything come together thanks very much and uh the conversation is to be continued thanks so much everyone

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 53,846

Rating: 4.8388925 out of 5

Keywords: vegan, plant-based, environment, health, climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, animal agriculture, sustainability, global warming, pollution, diet

Id: dxzSfiFz3fo

Length: 157min 36sec (9456 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021