[inaudible conversations] okay. Good evening, everyone. Id like to welcome you to book court. We are here with Amy Lee Goodman this evening. Amy is an expert in Sustainable Food production and vegan cooking. She is cofounder of a company that prepares vegan plantbased food. She contributes monthly to vegan lifestyle magazine, ands she is the coauthor of rethink food 100plus doctors cant be wrong. And, most recently, the meat tie truth why our food is destroying our health and environment and who is responsible. So considering the title of the book, Greg Brockman is the perfect person to discuss her new work with her. He is the lead butcher at foragers. Hes been working there since 2011. Foragers has locations in dumbo and chelsea that focuses on providing new yorkers with produce, milk and dairy. So amys going to read a bit for us and then her and greg are going to have a discussion. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Amy Lee Goodman. [applause] hi, everyone, thank you so much for coming. Im excited to have a conversation about our health, our food and our environment which are things that matter to most of us. What we want to talk about with the meaty truth is a lot of the misconceptions and the hidden secrets of our Food Industry. Theres a lot of dirty Little Secrets that the Food Industry likes to perpetuate to keep us buying their products. And what the meaty truth seeks to uncover is why our Food Production today has put us in a state of a Health Crisis and an environmental crisis. So i want to start off with a quote by Elizabeth Hay again who is actually hagen who is actually the usda food safety director, and she has stated just to be honest, the average consumer probably has absolutely no idea how their food is produced. So what is the result of this . A lot of us today think that eating healthy is actually very expensive. Most of us think when we think about eating healthy we talk about organic food and Sustainable Food, and most of us when we walk into Grocery Stores and we look at a chicken breast thats 3. 50 or compared to apples by the pound which are 2. 49, it really looks like were getting the best bang for our buck when we go for meat because were told from industry and advertisements and even our doctors that protein is one of the most important things that we need to get. But, actually, meat and dairy is actually is not giving us the best bang for our buck. And heres why. The Meat Industry actually for every dollar of meat that is sold it generates 1. 70 in externalities. What i mean by this is it costs us in health and environment either directly or indirectly. We can actually eat healthier for just 1. 50 more per day. Now, to some people this might be prohibitive, but to others it opens up a whole world of possibilities which is what we seek to tell you about. The meaty truth discusses how americans are now consuming one million animals per hour. So in the entirety of this book talk, we can think about that, how one cow is killed every 12 seconds and how 27 billion animals are killed per year. And in order to keep up with this kind of mass production, our animals are now being raised in confined animalfeeding operations or what is commonly referred to as factory farms. But in order to keep up with this production, the industry likes to use a lot of what they call secret ingredients, and these can be anywhere from bleach to benzonite preservative which is actually used in bacon and hot dogs to keep the red color in it. Its called generally recognized as safe, but its also the main ingredient in fireworks. So theres a little cause for concern there. Other uningredients ingredients are antibiotics which 80 of all the antibiotics today produced in america are now being used in factory farms for the an animals to keep them well. This is because a chicken, for the entirety of its life, lives on this, the exact same side of an 8. 5x11 piece of paper. Chicken is the most widely consumed animal in america but 97 of chickens are contaminated with feces. Otherwise known as salmonella. So a lot of us will layoff off foodborne layoff laugh off foodborne illnesseses, but in actuality, youre eating manure. This is because animals are crowded together with no room to turn around. You can kind of liken it to a ghetto or badlyrun hospital where everybodys crowded together, theres no room to turn around, theres nobody there for cleanup, and waste just kind of gets everywhere. So when you go to the slaughtering house where if you think about it one cow slaughtered every 12 seconds, theres not a lot of time for cleanup. So a lot of this gets mixed into what were eating, and it gets packaged. Now, i know what youre saying, the usda puts stamps of approval on everything that we eat, but in actuality the usda never looks at the majority of the food that we eat. They are allowed to put the usda or fda stamp of approval on our food without actually inspecting it, and this is because they have a plan on paper. Now, we all know between plan and implementation theres a lot that happens in between that doesnt always work out so well. And this is why we are seeing such an epidemic today. We are theres actually been a study by the university of arizona which has said in an am any sores house that the toilet seat is cleaner than the Kitchen Table or the counter where you produce meat, and thats because the animals come in so contaminated that they actually contaminate the surface, and the bacteria can live there for up to 90 days. And e cola or salmonella e. Coli or salmonella cannot freeze to death it cannot burn to death. And you can actually if your child is sitting in the cart of a grocery a grocery cart, they can actually get salmonella poisoning because it can travel up to three feet. So something to think about. Theyve actually done studies on that. So where does this leave us today when we think about what were eating and where were going from here . So manying americans now consume so Many Americans now consume animal protein. And what were seeing is a rise in chronic diseases. Four off the the ten lead out of the ten leading chronic killers today are all lifestyle related. This means that we can actually make a difference in our health. Heart disease is one of the number one examples that we can point to. Heart disease is directly related to saturated fat which is found in meat, dairy and now processed foods. Cheese is 70 saturated fats. And Heart Disease actually be reversed. So studies have shown that when you eliminate meat and dairy from your indictment, you can actually reverse from your diet, you can actually reverse Heart Disease or the hardening of your arteries which is now appearing in children as young as 11. One in two people now have Heart Disease, one in eight women are diagnosed with breast cancer, and one in three people now born in the United States today are expected to have diabetes. A hundred years ago we never had this problem but a hundred years ago people didnt eat the way that they have today. Meat consumption has doubled and dairy consumption has a nearly quadrupled just since the 1950s. In the 1970s what most americans dont know is nixon actually commissioned a study that said why are americans so unhealthy . This was around the same time that factory farms just started to get going. And the Mcgovern Commission came back and said, well, americans are eating what were telling them to eat which is cheap meat and dairy products. 90 of what we eat comes from factory farms. And when the Mcgovern Commission came out with this the entire commission was fired because they were lobbied by agribusiness, and the american mix was never know never knew about this study or its result. Corporate influence on our food policies has a direct result of what we are eating today. And theyre also extremely influential. Im just going to give you one statistic. Mcdonalds has a 9 billion grocery bill. This is more than the United States militarys food budget. That just shows you how much buying Power One Corporation has. And this has a direct result on what were told is healthy for us. This has a direct result on the type of production that we have. Right now we are valuing cheap and convenience instead of valuing quality and health. And what we can do is we can actually make very simple changes. A recent study came out by the union of concerned scientists that said if we just substitute t half a cup of fruits and vegetables per day for what we would eat in terms of meat and dairy, we can save 126,000 lives and save 2. 7 billion in health care costs. If we just reduce our Meat Consumption by 44 , we can save 26 billion in medicaid and medicare costs because thats how much were paying. So while you go to the Grocery Store and your bill might look like its really great when you look at the meat and dairy, youre actually paying an external cost, youre paying in your health and youre paying in environmental costs. Our environment really is in a crisis right now. We are already in water wars. And manure from factory farms is one of the main components. It has destroyed 100,000 miles of waterways in america. Manure now when the bp oil spill happened, how many news cameras covered the story . But these spills happened last year 300,000 gallons of manure spilled into three wisconsin waterways, and not one news station covered it. In philadelphia a playground had to close down because it was so contaminated with salmonella from a manure spill. When these spills happened in North Carolina in 1995, nobody knew about it, and it wasnt publicized, but there were still citizens swimming in the river and they were still swimming there when the e. Coli got to them. So what we really need to do, the first step, is we believe education. Its about telling the public that what they see is not actually what theyre getting. What the industry tellings us and the tells us is the perception of the happy cow on the farm is not exactly what were eating. And we need to take a little bit of initiative, we need to become empowered, and we can actually take back our health because they do listen. When the pink slime epidemic happened three of the four plants had to close down because the citizens were absolutely disgusted at what they were learning. And the media tells that too. They tell us so much more that pink slime is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what were eating on a daily basis. But simple changes like half a cup of vegetables a day actually change your life, and it can change our environment as well. Thank you so much. [applause] hey. Hey. So i guess we should just get into it, right . Yeah go right quick. [laughter] cool. So i just wanted to read the whole book and kind of want to get into what we do at foragers and things that we agree on. One of the first things we get, especially [inaudible] is how expensive our products are. And, you know, we have this line basically that it costs three times as much as you get from a supermarket which means you should really buy it three times less and enjoy it three times more. Thats something we truly believe and recommend to everybody, to eat less meat. Especially factory farm stuff which is just truly atrocious. So my first question given the wealth of books and documentaries that have come out in the past decade regarding you know, food inc. And all the rest of it, what made you want to write this book in particular . So at first actually it inspired me to get into this, it was my little sister. And i did come to in this from a Health Perspective in the beginning. My younger sister was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis when she was 9 and the doctors told my parents that this was it. By the time my sister was 14, she would most likely be in a wheelchair. And my mom was never one to kind of take any information lying down. She also has that investigative streak in her. And after many years of researching, she found the china study. And by this time my sister was on chemotherapy, she was taking injections twice a day, and she was not getting any better. And in the china study, my participants or my mom read that animal products are inflammatory and lead to autoimmune conditions such as arthritis. And this is because meat and dairy by nature can also be proinflammatory. So while in the meaty truth we talk about toxins and awshts, meat with actually have an inflammatory can produce chronic lowgrade inflammation in the body. So my mom read this and when she did, she took my sister off all animal products, and within three months my for was completely arthritis tfree. Which was amazing to see. She totally regained everything in her life and i started to become really interested. And i thought huh like, thats really fascinating. And at the same time i actually started out as a ghost writer for my coauthor, and i was researching the political side of food politics. I studied Political Science at wellesley, and i started to put two and two together, and i started to realize that while there is as you say a lot of information, if you walked out onto the street and asked the average consumer if they knew where their food came from or whats this their food or, you know, kind of the toxins that are in there, they would look at you blankly and say, well, isnt meat good for you or isnt, you know, is that really in there . I dont know. And the environmental side of it is is also something im very passionate about because things are interrelated. You know our food, health and environment. And even though there is information, there isnt much change right now. And i think a big part of that has to come from the Younger Generation speaking up. As you can see when you read the book, its not there are studies in it but its also written in laymans terms, so anybody can understand it. And its also more sassy so that it can hopefully, keep people entertained as well as informed and provide them with steps to actually take action. We want to empower consumers. Okay, cool. So one of the can i borrow that . The Health Benefits or, for lack thereafter as you claim in Chapter Three particularly came across a few inconsistencies that like, i wanted to address sure. Because the goal is for education. So you claim that a mere threeounce steak can increase our risk of dying by 13 , and you said in your times article if you go back and look at that article, what it actually says is a daily increase of three ounces of red meat was associated with 12 greater or risk of dying overall and that study was done over, like, the course of 26 years. Yes. So thats like 28,470 ounces of stack. And so if the goal is to educate people and like, not go with, youre right this misinformation of the government sponsorship and so on and so forth, so if the goal is misinformation is to, you know, get rid of misinformation right. How do you kind of justify that and explain that inconsistency . So in our first book rethink food, we actually spoke with over 100 doctors from around the world who had studies that link who looked at, looked at studies and they also talked about the relationship between diet and disease. So a little bit different than this book um, but what they show is that theres actual scientific proof that eating meat is directly related to many of our chronic conditions today. And this has been a wide known fact for over 15 years, that when you do eat meat you start inflammation, and it can stiffen the arteries, and by the time your body actually combats that inflammation so inflammation happens pretty much our body likes to stay in a ph balance and when you eat meat and dairy, theyre very acidic, and so it can actually throw the ph balance out of whack. And our body cant take time to say, well, im going to deal with that later, so they have to deal with that right now, and it can take up to four hours for your body to actually reacclimate. But by that time its time for lunch, and so you kind of reabuse that again and you start this lowgrade inflammation which can take time. So what we are saying is that there have been a lot of studies from harvard to cornell that have said that meat can actually up increase your risk of dying. For sure. And, like, im not debate aing that. Yeah. I think theres a lot of good science on it. Again, you want to eat more vegetables. A bunch of people put that out. Yeah. My specific question is if the science is so strong, there are a few other kind of points in these two chapters specifically Chapter Three says [inaudible] and four which is eating [inaudible] scary stuff in your food. Right, exactly. They have these facts and you dont necessarily need to support this argument that like, a lot of omnivores or vegan or whatever would agree with. Its just like america to my mind, like the real issue and the one thats affecting all of us the most is the insane amounts of environmental destruction that were going to all have to pay for. Yes. Discussing lagoons of [inaudible] yeah. Which is something thats in the book a lot. Youll see. But with the like, sort of spurious health facts it seems as if were counteracting your argument in the sense that like, you know, you bring up ag laws which are insane and basically, are illegal to speak out against certain food businesses because of libel concerns. Yes. Its like, again, this is just an article you quoted in your book and so its like isnt it surely the kind of reasons these ag laws have traction . Is that, like, theres a disconnect between what is being put out there and, like, the truth . And the truth is already kind of scary and horrible . Okay. So youre talking about the ag ag laws . Why the willful representation of this one article would occur when were talking about, you know actually educating folks. Right. About food safety and three ounces of steak is not going to increase your risk of dying by 13 . 26,000 28,000 over the course of 26 years certainly will which is like, we can all agree i think, on that. Im just w