Kenny Torrella
@KennyTorrella
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Writing @voxdotcom on factory farming and the future of meat, making music at
DC
Joined December 2021
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1/Some of the world’s largest environmental groups have thrown their weight behind meat and dairy greenwashing projects, including “climate-friendly” beef, “net-zero” dairy, the meteoric rise of regenerative ranching, and hyper “efficient” Frankenchickens.
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The argument that individual actions don’t matter in the climate change fight has gotten a lot of clout in recent years, and I tend to agree with it -- but not when it comes to meat and dairy production. I wrote about it for Earth Day:
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Another shot fired in the milk wars, this time from
@oatly
with full-page ads in NYT, LAT, and WaPo:
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The Colorado River, which provides water for 1 in 8 Americans, is running dry partly due to climate change. But at least half of the water goes to meat & dairy production (a driver of climate change). My thoughts on dietary adaptation on a warming planet:
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I've been working on this for the last couple months and now I get to share it: Meat/Less — a 5-part
@voxdotcom
newsletter to help people eat well & do good. Tips on what to eat/cook/buy, but also a detailed look into the impact of our food choices.
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Aubrey Plaza's "got milk?" ad asserts that only "real" milk is from cows. It's an odd argument for Big Dairy to stake its future on -- humans have made milk from plants for centuries, and 2/3 of people have difficulty digesting lactose. That's not all...
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A new study found that one out of every four land animals raised for food in 2019 wound up in the trash. That’s 18 billion animals total, or 2.4 for every human on earth. It’s incredibly bad in the US where it’s 7.1 animals wasted per person.
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Great to see NYT cover where most of the Colorado River's water goes -- feed for beef cattle and dairy cows -- and the need for dietary change.
For a (maybe too) deep dive into the issue check out my piece from April on the issue:
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Tyson Foods is now selling "climate-friendly" beef. The major entities involved on the project declined interview requests when I asked to see the math. The USDA said I'd need to file a FOIA request for the most basic info to verify the claim.
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Every state has an anti-cruelty statute, but most exempt “customary farming practices” -- as long as it's commonly used in the industry, it’s fine. The industry defines what's cruel and what isn't. A judge is now questioning that.
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US farmed animals consume more antibiotics than Americans, which is breeding bacteria resistant to antibiotics — a foundation of modern medicine. Yrs ago, FDA rules caused ag antibiotic sales to plummet, but now they're going back up. Where's the FDA now?
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Exclusive: Next week,
@CoryBooker
will introduce sweeping legislation to reform America’s meat industry for animals and workers. (Co-written by me and Marina Bolotnikova)
1/
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Great coverage of the Direct Action Everywhere rescue case by
@mbolotnikova
, who’s been meticulously reporting and tweeting the trial
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Happy Friday — I jammed a lot into today’s newsletter: land use policy, carbon opportunity cost, habitat protection, and desert tortoises.
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As the first year of
@voxdotcom
's dedicated coverage of animal welfare/the future of meat comes to a close, here's a recap of my 10 favorite articles -- pieces that started a conversation, brought a hidden issue to light, or explained old ideas in a fresh way.
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I wrote about how war has upended life for Ukraine’s animals, how for most of human history animals have been conscripted into war (and the ways in which they still are), and the efforts and ideas around how to protect them in conflict and emergencies.
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Elon Musk's Neuralink is reportedly under federal investigation for potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). It's one more reason many will loathe the guy. But Musk isn't a lone bad apple: The law is really weak and grossly under-enforced.
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What is an animal's life worth in a world that only values them commercially? That question, inspired by the recent
@DxEverywhere
trial in which piglets were valued at $42.20, set my mind whirling in a number of directions.
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In early Aug. I published a story about a common pig farming practice called "feedback," in which breeding pigs are fed piglet intestines and feces in an effort to build piglet immunity to disease. Today I updated it w/some interesting developments 1/
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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that will decide the fate of millions of pigs. It might seem that the Court will rule in favor of big business, but animal welfare doesn't adhere to party lines as neatly as you’d think:
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Shifting diets to plant-based has long seemed impossible, but Germany shows it can be done: Meat consumption has declined 12 percent in the last decade. Other countries will need to follow suit if we're to have any hope in meeting global climate targets.
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Millions of chickens and turkeys in this bird flu outbreak have been killed via “ventilation shutdown” — when producers close air vents, causing temperatures to rise so the birds die by heat stroke.
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Starting next week, KFC will offer Beyond Fried Chicken at its 4,000 US locations — the biggest rollout of plant-based poultry yet. I had the chance to try it today — read on to see what me and my meat-loving neighbors thought of it:
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You probably haven't heard about the EATS Act, but it could blow up a lot of the progress made for farmed animals over the last few decades. It could also upend agricultural law more broadly.
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If you could be born at any point in history, today would be a smart bet. But for every other species, today would be the worst bet, as a lot of human prosperity has come at the expense of animal welfare. Maybe, one day, we'll be able to decouple the two.
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@dylanmatt
@manymanywords
My SAD peaks in early August because it's when I realize summer is running out and I didn't do enough summer things
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I really wish more news outlets covered animals (1) Readers are v interested! (2) So many good stories go untold, (3) There's always an animal angle -- animals intersect w/food, science, culture, climate, entertainment, economics, (geo)politics, tech, etc.
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Critical environmental, labor, and animal welfare laws exempt agriculture, and it’s led to widespread pollution, animal cruelty, and inhumane working conditions on farms. A lot of it has to do with the myths we tell ourselves about farming.
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Two years ago I launched Meat/Less, Vox's 5-part newsletter to help ppl incorporate more plant-based meals into their life. It's equal parts practical advice, recipes & cooking tips, and wonky blogs. We just did a big refresh for 2024 -- check it out!
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EU citizens support a cage ban, and EU policymakers agreed to see one through. Now, they might back out if it. This is the latest example of the anti-democratic leanings of agribusiness and its political allies (in the US, see Prop 12/EATS Act).
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The Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, the California law that requires pork sold in CA come from crate-free farms. It's a big win for the animal movement (and pigs). Such laws have gotten millions of animals out of cages and the case to overturn this one posed an existential threat.
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Another common argument is that plant-based alternatives are overly processed. Also an odd claim, given the dizzying complexity of modern-day meat & milk production. It's highly processed, as are plant-based alternatives, and that 's OK! Some processing is bad and some is good.
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This question has been rattling around in my head for years: Would reducing food waste reduce the number of animals bred for factory farms? I looked into it and... Some experts think it might, but aren't really sure. Definitely room for more examination.
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Here’s a midterm story you might’ve missed: The 16th largest pork producer in the US, Jim Pillen, will be the next governor of Nebraska. During his campaign he repeatedly railed against plant-based meat and agricultural regulation.
1/
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Brilliant piece by
@gnrosenberg
&
@jan_dutkiewicz
on the extremely warped thinking of the "meat-right":
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Nature recently published a big, beautiful (and sad) feature story on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and while I learned a lot, I was reminded of how often meat production evades journalistic scrutiny. A lil' thread... 1/
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One guy in Nebraska who lives near 48 Costco barns raising ~2 million chickens says the stench is so bad his friends gag, he can’t open his windows, that the smell "tries to get inside anything it can.” Others in the area have voiced similar complaints.
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A must-read by
@mbolotnikova
on how large veterinary organizations like the
@AVMAvets
uphold some of the cruelest factory farming practices.
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Temple Grandin & celebrity chef Tyler Florence held a SXSW talk to "contradict the notion that beef production is... a contributor to climate change."
Needless to say, no evidence was presented to defend the claim. This isn't just a matter of disagreement -- it's disinformation.
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Some light weekend reading: Everything you wanted to know about factory farm fires, in light of the deadliest cattle barn fire ever recorded earlier this week (18k cows), by
@mbolotnikova
@HASHTAGHASHTAGH
and I.
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A must-read new story by
@mbolotnikova
on how the
@USDA
and
@AVMAvets
are normalizing the horrifically cruel practice of roasting tens of millions of animals to death. Feat. some juicy details on Pennsylvania's dept. of ag:
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1/ New research in
@PLOSClimate
finds that eliminating global meat & dairy production over the next 15 years would prevent enough GHGs to effectively "cancel out" emissions from all other economic sectors for the next 30 to 50 years.
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It was my first year as a full-time writer and I learned a lot (from a great team). Here's a recap of my favs in no particular order, starting with 1. The hopeful story of how and why Germans are eating less meat each year
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Outside Atlanta, I spied ~25 broiler chicken barns, or around 750,000 chickens. (This was just one snapshot in time — I saw way, way more.)
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A rat infestation, bugs crawling in chicken feed, horrible injuries & deformities, feed & water deprivation, biosec. violations, & a Tyson Foods employee explaining the emptiness of "free-range" chicken labels. It's all there in a new Tyson investigation:
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Attention writers! Future Perfect is now accepting freelance pitches 🎉
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Farmed animals are routinely fed antibiotics to ward off disease in factory farms. But it's making antibiotics less effective in human medicine, and new data shows that after the problem improved for a few years, it's now getting worse. Where's the FDA?
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ICYMI amidst all the July 4 travel, I wrote a story earlier this month about how the media largely ignores meat's role in climate change:
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The Inflation Reduction Act gives me a lot of hope for the future. It’s too bad the $20B for ag doesn’t touch meat and dairy emissions — ag’s biggest emitters. But it also gives some insight into how to navigate the messy politics of meat moving fwd.
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The Inflation Reduction Act will spend $20 billion on agriculture, but it won't address ag's biggest emitters: meat and dairy production.
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Hundreds of cities — and even some states — have banned pet stores from selling dogs. Is it shutting down puppy mills? Data is spotty, but it appears these laws -- and state regs -- are having an effect.
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Over Thanksgiving weekend, the US set a new bird flu record: 52.4M birds dead in 2022 (~50.5M in 2015). ICYMI, right before Thanksgiving, I published two articles on it. First,
@CoryBooker
's plan to stop bailouts during disasters like bird flu outbreaks:
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The Netherlands produces 6% of EU's food with 1% of its farmland. How? Whole-of-govt. ag policy and innovation. But it's hyper-efficiency has led to a huge nitrogen pollution problem. Last month I visited for a story that's out today:
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It's the naturalistic fallacy, with a massive ad and lobbying budget (though to be fair, the plant-based companies and boosters fall prey to the fallacy too).
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If cell-cultivated meat is going to scale, it'll need government funding for R&D and more. Each year, billions go toward supporting animal agriculture, but alternative meat is slowly getting support too, per Julieta Cardenas for Vox (
@HASHTAGHASHTAGH
)
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This week I wrote an obituary for
@EstherThePig
and how giving a face to the problem of factory farming can help make people care:
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Last wk I wrote about something I hadn't before: SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. It's one of the most effective anti-poverty tools of govt.; now the House GOP is trying to weaken it. I also dug into what it means to be "food insecure" in the US:
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Fantastic piece by
@matthewhayek
/
@jan_dutkiewicz
: "The criticisms against the new wave of meatless meat appear to be more rooted in broad opposition to food technology rather than a true environmental accounting — and they muddy the waters in the search for climate solutions..."
Americans eat over 200 pounds of meat *each* per year, and it's accelerating the climate crisis.
One more sustainable alternative: Plant-based meat substitutes and tofu, made to appeal to meat lovers with little culinary finessing required.
Learn more:
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A new investigation into Jennie-O, 2nd largest turkey producer & supplier of this year's White House "pardoned" turkeys. Plus, what industry has done to to make turkeys grow 2x as big & fast as 1960s birds.
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Bird flu has killed 500M farmed chickens and turkeys. It's also become a major killer of wild birds -- possibly millions -- including some endangered species.
One ecologist: "Bird flu sucks, blame chicken nuggets.”
Great overview by
@BenjiSJones
:
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In a popular new regenerative farming documentary,
@sixinchessoil
, viewers are told a cattle farm is carbon-neutral.
@GeorgeMonbiot
inquired, and turned out it was actually just modeling, and filmmakers edited that bit out.
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Looking to 2022, my newsletter to help people eat less meat and more plants — Meat/Less — launches on Jan. 3. Sign up here:
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1/ Big Food is increasingly setting pledges to sell more vegan meat & dairy. Burger King UK and Panera Bread want to make their menus 50% plant-based, while Unilever and Tesco want to significantly increase plant-based food sales.
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The Frenchie is America's most popular dog, but 90% have respiratory restriction. It's hard to breathe year-round, but this heat is making it worse -- so, is it time to stop breeding them (and other flat-faced dogs)?
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Gordon Ramsay made jokes about putting lambs in an oven and got flak. His joke, and the response it garnered, are both great examples of "the meat paradox" at play, which I think provides a lot of insight into why our relationship to meat is so fraught.
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Must-read by
@mbolotnikova
. The wool and other "natural fiber" industries have marketed a false, sustainable, and cozy image that couldn't be further from the reality.
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Each year, the egg industry grinds up billions of day-old male chicks. New technology, which is off to a promising and in some ways shaky start, could change that.
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NY AG Letitia James is taking a big swing against meat industry greenwashing:
I'm suing
@JBSFoodsUSA
, the world's largest beef producer, for misleading the public about its environmental impact.
The beef industry is one of the largest contributors to climate change, and JBS has falsely advertised its commitment to sustainability and endangered our planet.
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This is bad. Bird flu is back as wild bird migration begins. A few hundred thousand turkeys & chickens have been affected (killed) in Oct. and Iowa just reported 1.1 million. We'll likely see many more killed in the next 7 mos., and in rather brutal ways.
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A new investigation by
@AnimalOutlook
into a
@TysonFoods
' chicken supplier reveals horrible injuries, feed/water deprivation. But the most revealing finding came from a Tyson rep candidly discussing how the "free-range" label is essentially meaningless:
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In a recent experiment, bees tolerated exposure to heat in order to access better food. It suggests they aren’t just mindless automata responding to stimuli but rather that they can experience pain and engage in complex decision-making.
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Vegan Reese's peanut butter cups is the plant-based innovation I've been waiting for. Do vegan peanut butter M&M's next please.
The confectionery giant will begin selling Reese’s Plant Based Peanut Butter Cups in March and Hershey’s Plant Based Extra Creamy with Almonds and Sea Salt bars, both made with oats, in April.
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10 years ago, major beef companies promised to stop purchasing cattle that had been raised on deforested land in the Amazon. Many are still getting away with it, thanks to the sketchy, complex beef supply chain. Check out
@BenjiSJones
' great explainer:
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1/ Environmental racism underpins much of America’s meat industry. In eastern North Carolina (and elsewhere), polluting "pork and poultry production is highly concentrated in poverty-stricken counties with high Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations."
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Great story from
@clintrainey
on the origins of the plant-based meat smear campaign of the last couple years:
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Sri Lanka’s organic farming disaster, explained — along with the hard trade offs in agriculture and what can be done to reduce dependence on agrochemicals
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If you went back to 2001, when I was watching Family Guy on the couch with my cat Clover, that I'd write about pet ownership and Seth MacFarlane would share it...
If you went back to the 19th century to tell people that some practices they embraced would be condemned in the future, you’d be met with resistance. Things that seem normal to us may be considered wrong in 50 or 100 years. Here’s a possible candidate:
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Meat prices have risen far above inflation (and grocery inflation, too), leading some antitrust experts to allege the industry of price-gouging. Meanwhile, most plant-based staples have risen slower than grocery inflation. More in my article up today:
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15 years ago, the false promise of tweaking coal production to make "clean coal" helped the industry tamp down enviro concerns & buy time to continue to pollute. The meat industry is now having its "clean cow" moment, argues
@jan_dutkiewicz
:
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(1) ICYMI, over the weekend I published a piece on the Supreme Court's case regarding Prop 12, the California law that bans the sale of pork from intensively confined pigs:
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When should global livestock emissions peak and what's the most effective way to reduce them?
@HHarwatt
(and her coauthors) posed these questions (and more) to 210 climate scientists & I wrote up the findings (w/charts!). It's much sooner than you'd think.
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Zoos claim to be leaders in conservation, but is it true? And are their conservation gains worth keeping almost 800k animals in captivity annually? I explore that question in a new story today:
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Most people assume that factory farming is just a problem for animals -- but it's a human problem, too. The
@voxdotcom
video team produced a 3-part series called "The Human Cost of Meat" to explain this, and they just wrapped the series w/this video:
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The Smell of Money (
@smellofmoneydoc
) is the most powerful film on how factory farms can wreck the lives of the people unfortunate enough to live near them. And it's now available on all the platforms to rent/buy:
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In addition to
@BeyondMeat
chicken launching in 4,000 US KFCs today, Pizza Hut has permanently put Beyond sausage on its Canadian menus. This is all part of a larger agreement between Beyond Meat and Yum! Brands -- the parent company of KFC and Pizza Hut.
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Republicans are trying to roll back child labor laws, but they've always been weak for agriculture, which plays by a different set of employment rules. I spoke w/ a former child farm worker and
@RepRaulRuizMD
, who intro'ed a bill to improve protections:
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In San Diego's recently updated climate action plan, the city council pledged to reduce the city’s meat- and dairy-related emissions, and water footprint, by 20 percent after lobbying from
@defaultveg
and other groups.
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Thanks to
@deepafern
&
@hereandnow
for having me on to talk about meat's role in climate change and what consumers, policymakers, and corporations can do about it:
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100 yrs ago, a mere clerical error launched the now $30B chicken industry. A series of advances in science & food -- and policy choices -- over the last century helped it dominate the meat market. Read all about it (w/lots of archival photos & new charts!)
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"Golf courses are destroying [the javelinas'] habitat, not the other way around."
#TeamJavelina
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More than you ever wanted to know about the bird flu that's causing egg prices to reach an all-time high:
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.
@SigalSamuel
is one of the best writers on our relationship with other animals. I really enjoyed her review of Martha Nussbaum’s new book which is so much more than just a book review:
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ICYMI, I covered the allegations that Elon Musk's company, Neuralink, violated the Animal Welfare Act. But IMO the bigger story -- which I get into (maybe *too* into?) -- is how the USDA under-enforces the already weak law.
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The Supreme Court upheld California's Proposition 12, the country's -- really, the world's -- strongest farm animal welfare law. How will it actually be enforced? I dug into it here:
California has the country’s strongest farm animal welfare law. But a law is only as good as its enforcement.
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Bezos Earth Fund announces a $60M grant to establish R&D centers for alternative protein:
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Two-thirds of the food at
#COP28
will be plant-based! But eating less meat -- something rich & many middle-income countries must do to keep warming under 1.5C -- will get little to no attn where it matters most: in COP28 negotiations. A deep-ish dive:
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I'm excited to share that I got an honorable mention in this year's National Press Club (
@PressClubDC
) awards for my coverage of alternative protein:
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This is brilliant and very depressing
There are 1.6 billion factory-farmed chickens in the US at any one time. I think a lot of people miss just how crazy this number is so I made a webpage with 1.6 billion dots (this only took a few minutes thanks to the copy cell function)
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USDA confirms bird flu in a Michigan dairy herd that had recently received cows from Texas. There are also "presumptive positive test results" for additional herds in New Mexico, Idaho, Ohio and Texas:
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