In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook and Forbes journalist Chloe Sorvino discuss how the meat industry has consolidated over the years, creating problems for the environment and for farming communities in the U.S. and around the world.
Sorvino is the author of the new book “Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat.” It unravels a tangled web of bribery, deceit, and international corporate intrigue exploring the dark side of the modern industrialized meat industry.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Hi, I'm Ken Cook, and I'm having another episode. This is an especially exciting one because I have a journalist that is covering an issue that's near and dear to me. Something that takes me back to my childhood, on the one hand, and also takes me to some of the most difficult problems we face in industrial agriculture, the food system.
The prices of it, the quality of it, the safety of it, the impact on the environment, all these issues come together, and this is the author who has pulled them all together in a book called ‘Raw Deal, Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat.’ Chloe Sorvino, who, in her day job, is covering everything food and farming for Forbes, and she's been doing that since 20…15.
Chloe: So, 10 years.
Ken: And I'm thrilled you could join us today. This is really important to me. I mentioned before we started rolling that my summers and my school breaks were spent on my uncle's cow calf operations in south central Missouri. I know a lot about the sector, but I learned so much from your book. It's really amazing.
I think anyone who is at all curious about one of the big issues on our health, climate change, environment, concentration and the economic life of rural America, this is a great window into all of those questions. So what made you want to tell the story of modern agriculture through that lens?
Chloe: Yeah, absolutely, and I will share that, but I also, just to kind of go back to your initial intro here, ‘why I wanted to write this book’ is because I do think good meat can and should and needs to exist in the future. And, you know, the same reason why you guys in your ancestry picked cattle is because it was really rocky because of the way industrial agriculture and the pesticides and the chemicals that have been used on our croplands have degraded soil over time.
There really will be some soils that are so degraded that they won't ever be able to come back and produce food unless there are hooves, manure working the soil. And so I think, you know, and I think about solutions and how we, hopefully, all will be able to, like, face the climate crisis in dignity. I think meat and livestock and those has to exist.
Maybe it has to look completely differently. Factory farming needs to end, but it needs to exist.
Ken: We jumped right into the deep end and that's fine. I mean, I, in recent years, stopped eating most meat, red meat, pork and chicken. I still eat dairy and poultry, dairy and eggs and I eat fish, but I just kind of came to a moment where all those years, including slaughtering cattle, all those years being around livestock, all those years knowing full well, including visiting slaughterhouses way back in the 70s.
Somehow I just, in my adult life, I just thought, you know what, I want something different, but in making that decision, I also realized I'm doing that for me. I'm kind of, I'm doing my part, and you talk about it in the book, in a couple of places, quite a few places, you know, the individual commitment takes you so far, but then you, what you've provided here is an overview of why we have to do more than just change individual consumer habits.
I mean it. Just for starters, you have an extensive section on meat exports. Oh yeah, and so we could all, in the United States, go vegetarian, but that land out there still needs to earn revenue, and livestock, in many cases, is going to be the revenue source and so we'll export it, right?
So we just have to really face up to these realities and it felt like, as I was, you're a city girl, right? Yeah, it felt like you were peeling the onion, so to speak, again and again. As you were, you could sense your journey, your discovery.
Chloe: Yeah, I like to go deep, and that's really also why I really wanted to write this book.
I felt like being at Forbes, speaking with these billionaires who were, you know, kind of chomping at the bit, telling me about how they're so excited about how these exports are going. They're growing so much, and one literally told me, “You know, when it's raining gold outside, we're walking around with buckets.”
And, you know, that was one of those, like, eyeopening moments for me, and so I felt like there was something really to share there because when you think about exports and you think about how soils are getting completely degraded, waterways are getting polluted, the dead zone in the Gulf is getting worse, aside from a lot of other impacts. That’s all being done, what… just to export it?
So people who, you know, want to eat huge steaks can do that around the world and also incur the emissions from the travel or what have you, and so it's like those types of dichotomies like really stark what I was grappling with. And, you know, I think everyone comes to this from the question of what should I eat? How do I make myself healthy? How to feed my family? How do I source the best possible thing based on what I can afford?
And I feel like that was really coming to a head in 2020 when I decided to write this book because at the end of the day, I felt like I could really kind of bridge some of these gaps with why we've gotten here and also why it's so important to dig deeper and really, yeah, hold corporations accountable, but in a way that actually is doing something. Not just kind of in this kind of green rock washing type of realm.
Ken: Yeah, yeah. And I think of it as untying this incredibly large and very, at this point, very tight knot and where you start in the book, you know, talking about the concentration and consolidation in the meat world, that, to me, is what holds the knot so tight.
We want to undo something on climate, we want to undo something on health, we want to undo something on worker safety. Whatever it is, you come up against this incredible consolidation of control and power. So why do you start there? Is that because we have to take that on?
We have to take on competition. We have to take on access to markets, all of those things.
Chloe: Yeah, I mean, I really think you can't talk about access and you can't. I couldn't really go to where I wanted to end the book, which is talking about how to feed a better future and how to do that with equity and dignity at the forefront of, kind of, facing the climate crisis.
I felt like I couldn't do that without, you know, framing it and talking about the through line, which is this consolidation, which impacts, you know, everything from, you know, the environmental desecration, but also the antibiotic resistance that's being felt in our waterways, and, you know, 99 percent of chicken in America comes from just two different breeders.
And I felt like we needed to really have a real understanding of how it got set up and how it had gotten set up so quickly. We think of, you know, the 80 percent control in the beef industry of just the top four. We think of the top 70 percent of pork producers as the top four, you know, being, having that much control and, you know, it really happened only in the past few decades.
It's been very quick. We think it's been here for a really long time, but it really hasn't, and one of the things I was so struck by was, you know, when Upton Sinclair actually wrote ‘The Jungle.’ It's obviously a fiction book, but it was based around this time when there was meatpacking really being broken up.
And the same level of consolidation back then is really, kind of, roughly what it still is today. They had to break everything up and then it all kind of came back.
Ken: Yeah. We don't work a lot on industry consolidation, except as we know, it's a backdrop. To be honest, it's hard to work on it. It's hard to know where the point of entry is.
So put yourself in an advocate's or an activist's shoes with the book learning, literally, that we have here. Where would you start to try and untie the control part of that knot, if it were up to you?
Chloe: Yeah, I mean, well, I think we all grew up playing the game Monopoly, right? And so we think about these monopolies as being the ‘where to start.’
But really, you know, I had a kind of another eye-opening experience when I was speaking with the meatpacking head of the UFCW union, which is the union that, you know, represents meat workers, and, you know, they said that you can't solve the monopoly problem until you also solve the monopsony problem, and that's why there are these pressures.
And that's why the meatpackers will also sometimes say, you know, “It's not my fault. It's Walmart's fault.” While that may be true, they still have the power to dictate price and drop things lower,and there's still a lot of power that meatpackers have when you talk about monopsony, right? It's like, what does that even mean?
Yeah, it means essentially, it's the same type of thing, but for the retail side, the buying side, who you're getting it to at the end of the day. And we talk about, like, the consolidation of Walmart having such a massive amount of control on our grocery sales. That's a big one, but something that's been optimistic.
I write in the book about how since the 1980s, the Robinson Patman Act hadn't been really enforced at all. It's an Act from 1936 that was really set up to create more competition among grocers and buyers and these, like, kinds of retail groups and to make sure that there was competition, right? Full stop.
And one of the more positive things is that, you know, I've been kind of talking about this for a while. It hasn't been enforced. That would be an easy way to start getting at this kind of unscrambling the eggs that have already been scrambled. And the FTC brought the first case with the Robinson Petman Act in mind.
It's not against meat. It was against Southern Glazer, the wine spirits distributor, but I think it's an interesting start and we'll see how that goes.
Ken: What's your sense to jump ahead to this administration?
Chloe: It's, I mean…
Ken: The Secretary of Agriculture is kind of a blank slate. She didn't have much background in, to say the least, agriculture.
Chloe: Sure. I think we're feeling it's like a time when the power grabs are happening, right? I think there's a vacuum, right? I think we're going to see how all of this shakes out, and it could be very messy for a very long time. I'm skeptical of subsidy reform, although I'd love to see it.
I think there's a lot of other policies across both aisles that actually still help to re-regionalize the food system. We can get to a place of health and access to better food.
Ken: Yeah. It's funny, in the early 2000s, late 1990s, early 2000s, during those Farm Bill cycles, there was a window during that period that we had made a pretty good run, but we ultimately… and here was the problem, that that has emerged since there was a time when there was bipartisan interest in reforming the subsidy programs and investing that money in a different way.
And part of it involved stricter limits on who was getting money so that you couldn't get, now with a good lawyer, pretty much unlimited money, no matter how big your farm is.
And maybe we would shift some of that money into different farming systems. More fruits and vegetables, more direct purchase kinds of things. But what happened is, over time, and this undid the whole dynamic for us, was Republicans increasingly, who were moderate, were no longer in Congress, and the ones who were there, all they wanted to do… they would have a fight with the Agriculture Committee about cutting the subsidies, but only if the money was returned to the Treasury.
And that made it hard for Democrats to come on and say, “Well, if I'm going to take this grief from my friends in the Midwest for monkeying with their subsidy programs, what do I get out of it?”
Chloe: It wasn’t it for me.
Ken: Yeah. And so, you know, we weren't adding incentives to SNAP for healthier eating at scale.
We weren't doing enough to support, you know, farm to school. All these ideas where we thought and supported local farmers, local slaughterhouses, all those ideas were percolating up in the late 90s, early 2000s. But we couldn't close the deal because of the broader shifts that were happening in the electorate and the Congress.
Chloe: Absolutely. I mean, it was quite the time to be looking at that, but, you know, I don't know. I'm still baffled by just, like, the simple concept that you can get so many subsidies these days without even having any environmental or social reporting or accountability lever at all. I mean that.
Ken: Yeah. I mean, it's not rocket science.
I know, right here, we've tried. I know. Yeah, maybe as much as anybody. But it's interesting that as you've, you know, gone into the depths of the meat economy that you came to these same conclusions. I mean, we came up at it as I said, not from understanding competitiveness and all of that, but just, you know, really thinking there's gotta be a better way to invest this money that would be better for taxpayers, better for the environment, ultimately really better for farmers.
Because it's not really any more supporting family farms per se. It's just the biggest farms get bigger, they get paid by the government to get bigger, they buy out their neighbors with government money in effect often
Chloe: Taking, you know, like one sided deals or, you know, take it all - leave it all deals.
Ken: Yeah, yeah, and any little piece of land that comes up in the countryside now. If someone's got a few hundred acres and they want to expand it, they're bidding against somebody who already has 5,000 acres, and they just gobble up that quarter section.
Chloe: I think that also, that's, like, the type of, like, business and economic dynamic which is why I wanted to write this, right?
Because I mean, I feel like, and this is kind of the main point of my book, really, but I feel like we've all been beaten over our heads with this concept that voting with our dollars is the ‘be all, end all,’ but it's such an individualistic look and we really need to be thinking collectively because, you know, it's like these billionaires and a few corporations are the people who can outbid you for the land.
They're the ones who have, you know, are dictating what we have access to in the first place. And like, once you realize that. You know, voting with your dollars becomes almost like a false messiah, right? And there's almost like a bit of empowerment and freedom in realizing that. Because then when you are thinking about, okay, even though I don't have as much, you know, purchasing power as that billionaire, I do have my one dollar and how do I make sure that makes a difference?
And, you know, that's a tangled web and I try to undo it and explain how you can really figure out how to purchase for yourself because of how all these crazy systems are set up. And, you know, I think that's where you can really find, like, the hope and try to start actually investing that money in community supported organizations, networks, regional networks that, like, will be there for you at the end of the day when the climate crisis is getting worse because…
Ken: And they could maybe even endure changes in administrations and all the rest.
Chloe: Yeah, I mean, the main point, like, what I've learned from talking to all these billionaires… I'm doing their valuations on these lists for years and years now.
Like the billionaires aren't going to be there to save us, like they're in their bunkers and they're exporting the meat to China and they're beautiful.
Ken: Bunkers?
Chloe: Oh yeah, I would, that's what I would love to see. I've worked really hard to get into slaughterhouses. I've spent years, like, whittling people down to get myself into these slaughterhouses, but I've never been into a climate crisis bunker, and that's my new goal.
Ken: Well, we're all paying for them. We ought to be able to at least have a video tour on Zillow someday. So give me some of the ‘aha’ moments that you, as you're reporting these things, and the book is starting to come together and you're seeing the trajectory of it, the organization of it.
Were there some moments where you thought, “Oh my God. This is… I'm on the right track or, or maybe I'm on the wrong track. I've got to widen the lens or I've got to look at some other component.” What, what were some of those moments for you, Chloe?
Chloe: Yeah, well, you know, to have corruption and in big words, like greed and the title, you know, I feel like I had to really be comprehensive and how I was looking at how I was sharing all this information so I could, you know, arm people with it.Yeah, the real truth.
And at my first slaughterhouse that I ever went to, it's in the book in a chapter at greater Omaha packing, where, spoiler alert, I had to, you know, toss my ankle boots out at the end of the day because they were just covered in blood guts and God knows what else. But that was actually where I first heard about this kind of crazy corruption saga of JBS and the two brothers from Brazil who became billionaires.
No one has been writing about this. My book is the most comprehensive telling of how they did what they did and how they shopped. It's crazy. And so, I won't give too much away, but I mean, in short, this company, you know, entrepreneurial family owned, typically, like a lot of other companies I've written about over the years at Forbes, and these brothers, Wesley and Wesley, took over their family meatpacker and had a bunch of folks in the government of Brazil on their kickback bribery kind of ring, you know, just different things.
And I was getting all these documents, translating them, you know, from Portuguese, going through the testimonies. Looking, finding these like crazy YouTube videos that were secretly online from the, you know, the inspectors, and getting those then translated and figuring, piecing all this together, and The Saga is really how these brothers had this network of bribes.
They used those bribes to get preferential access to loans and funding with the Brazil state government. And through that, they also then, kind of, got ensnared in this massive scheme to buy the 2014 elections of Brazil. Joesley, in my book, I talk about three different instances of him personally giving cash and different bribes to three of Brazil's sitting presidents.
They're like…
Ken: Bags of money, kind of bags of…
Chloe: Money, briefcases, you know, having cell phones for…
Ken: A briefcase.
Chloe: Yeah. There was actually a video of him giving a briefcase in exchange and talking about how people were at that point. We're starting to, kind of, give other people up so they didn't get jail time.
And so he was like, “Oh, we might have to kill that guy,” essentially is what he says when he's, like, literally handing. Yeah, it's crazy.
Ken: Um, but that would be an eye opening moment.
Chloe: So, these funds. They didn't get to the part that's about America, right? Like the bribery, these kickbacks, these corrupt funds.
They were, then, used to acquire a bunch of really iconic American meatpacking assets and infrastructure that we like need, you know, going forward, really. And these were distressed assets. Assets that, you know, had a lot of debt or were about to go bankrupt, and they were able to come in with, you know, fuel by these bribe-gotten funds, ill-gotten gains and acquire and take over the American meatpacking industry.
And I said earlier, you know, one of the quotes in my book is about, you know, how you can't really unscramble the eggs that have already been scrambled, and we're kind of in this place now where JBS is the second largest meatpacker in all of America.
They control a huge amount of beef, pork, chicken.
Ken: So, I'm going to the grocery store.
Chloe: Yeah.
Ken: Very good chance that item I'm picking.
Chloe: Oh yeah. It's definitely, I mean, JBS is… it's proliferated. It's everywhere. I mean, Pilgrim's Pride.
Ken: But now do you see JBS on the packages? No, no. That's the other thing about meat that's kind of interesting, right?
Chloe: Sometimes you see it, cause JBS is also the largest grass fed supplier in the U.S. And so, if you're buying grass fed often, it's also from these, like, feed lots. The cattle are eating grass pellets or grass pills. Not really even grass, right? But they're able to have these labels or they're bringing a lot from Brazil and then selling it in America, which is also, then, hurting American farmers if you're in the supermarket or you're at fast food.
Cisco was one of the big food distributors that sued them eventually. It's really kind of crazy. So as just an example for you, Pilgrim's Pride, the second largest chicken producer in all of America from1947 in Texas. It's been around for a really long time.
It's, like, really the beginning of the chicken industry in America. And when they were able to acquire that with, you know, some of these, like, you know, bribery fueled funds. They even had like a U.S. bank account with 55 million in it sitting there for the, you know, finance minister who'd helped them, you know, get the financing for this.
And there was all these, like, very interesting ways that U.S. assets, like an apartment in Manhattan for one of 1.5 million in value was used as a trade.
Another one of the brothers, like helicopters, like an Augusta helicopter was used as a trade at one point. But yeah, I mean, it's serious and Pilgrim's Pride is a publicly traded company they own. JBS owns like 80 percent of it, and so shareholders have been, you know, really duped in the process and there've been lawsuits around this because the brothers, Josley, had to wear a wire to indicate and when the president Temer, right?
And then they still ended up having to go to jail because they couldn't stop bribing people.
But that's another part of the story, but, you know, they were wearing a wire and they were still, you know, being re-nominated to the board of Pilgrim's Pride for the next round in the, you know, the public documents for the public shareholders. And It came out eventually in like the SEC, you know, cease and desist documents and everything when they eventually did get fines.
Pilgrim's Pride's accounts, it’s publicly traded company's accounts, were pretty much used as a slush fund for the Batistas as they were doing a lot of these deals, and the accounting is like still, you know, kind of being sorted through.
Ken: Amazing. So you told me earlier on that you went to a facility where literally the end of the line, the back end of it all, you know, comes back to the land.
Tell us a little bit about what happens at the end of a process where you ended up standing on a giant balloon. Yes, full of the waste.
Chloe: Yes. So I worked pretty hard to get into some of these facilities. You kind of use my access to bring more knowledge because these facilities really are shrouded in secrecy.
That's by design. They don't want us to know what's happening there. And when I had first heard about NAACP complaints around the communities around production in North Carolina.
Ken: Yeah, we did. We've done a fair amount of work there.
Chloe: Yeah, for sure. I mean, these are historically Black and Latino communities, and they were getting horrible health issues like asthma, because these farms were…
Ken: Moving in these giant hog farms there, chicken farms and other parts of California.
Chloe: Yeah, but it wasn't just the farms themselves. It was the fact that because these are such concentrated and consolidated spaces with so many animals, like, smushed together in one place.
Ken: Farms in quotes.
Chloe: Right. They have to go to the bathroom, right? And so there's so much, there's so much manure that comes from that. And also they're being overfed, so they get put on weight quicker. So, there's, like, a lot of manure happening, and so these clean plants had started because they were just spraying it into the air and aerosolizing or spraying it onto their neighbor's farms.
Like actually crazy. All that manure goes into these big, like, open pits.
Ken: Lagoons… lagoons they call them.
Chloe: Yes, football field size, like black, brown muck. Huge toxic sloth.
Ken: Very familiar. Yes. Yes. We don't…
Chloe: Need to go too much more into it, but there started to be this bandaid I was hearing about, right?
Cause then, you know, methane is a huge, huge emitter of greenhouse gases. It's one of the forces…
Ken: A lot of greenhouse gas.
Chloe: It's one of the big, like, reasons that agriculture emissions have been going up, right? It's from the methane. And so people have been trying to see if they could capture the methane that's coming out of all these manure lagoons.
And they're like, “Oh, let's, let's put a bubble on and see how it goes.” And you know, they're now selling that energy back to the grid, right? It's biogas. It's very controversial. Yeah, but I wanted to see what this was like. And so a few years ago, I convinced Smithfield, America's largest pork processor that just had the spinoff from the Chinese owner and is now public again in the U.S. as of this week, I convinced them to let me see their biogas operations. And it was… it was mind blowing. I wanted to see it. I did not know, though, that when I got there that they were essentially going to dare me to go up on top of the bubble.
Ken: It's… a Mount Everest of sorts. It's a…
Chloe: My shit Everest. Yes.
Ken: Yeah, exactly.
Chloe: Yeah. Because, you know, I read in my book, even, you know, before I had done this, I had written about how, you know, lagoons, like, sometimes farmers will fall in. It's like there are different pairs of fathers and sons that have all died because they're trying to get them out and then they can't.
So, it's really serious, really dangerous stuff.
Ken: It’s very dangerous.
Chloe: It’s one of the most dangerous, probably, that I've done in reporting. But so they dared me to go up. They gave me this vest. They were like, “It's okay, you'll be fine. It's what we typically use for avalanches,” and so it's what you get. The big balloon would pop up and you would be able to eventually get out of it if you fell in.
And I was like, well, I've got to be taken seriously. I need them to, you know, respond to my fact checking after this and agree that I was there at the end of the day. And so I held my little avalanche vest very tightly, and treaded on up. It was almost, like, serene up there, you know, because it's billowing very loose.
It's very thick rubber, but then you could see all these other lagoons, like, it's just like these, like, football fields of shit everywhere.
Ken: Yeah, everywhere you look. Now I've seen some photos. I've been down in North Carolina, I've been to parts of Oklahoma where it's a similar phenomenon and where that happens.
People can't continue to live, I mean, I've been on the phone with farmers, you know. They say, “Look, this operation moved in. They're right up against our property. I can't go out of my home most days, and no one will buy it because of the odor and stench.”
It's just amazing though, that this is such a central part of the food system and it's operating in a way that none of us… it's hard to think about it. Your book will take people there and I’m grateful for that reason, but you kind of have to really pay some attention to it.
But on the other side, you also write about the hopeful alternative ways that we might do this, so talk about some of those alternatives but also give me Chloe Servino's vision of what an appropriate agriculture would look like, or meat production system and all that goes with.
Chloe: Yeah, because when I was on top of that bubble I felt like I was, literally, like looking down the abyss. The toxic slop underneath me.
That's what our future is being built on right now, and that's what needs to change. I do think good meat can exist and should exist and needs to exist in the future, but factory farming full stop needs to end. And those assets really need to be repurposed, because at this point, unfortunately, I don't really think we have enough time or resources to really waste.
And we also don't have enough time to start completely from scratch.
Ken: Yeah.
Chloe: And so this is kind of like where we are caught. And there are these massive corporations that at least have infrastructure and also have labor forces, like massive amounts of people that hopefully will be part of the solution because they need to be.
If meat and agriculture doesn't, you know, change, we'll never make any of our goals, even if everything else in this world changes.
Ken: We won't make goals for a fair and equitable and prosperous rural economy. It'll be the concentration and extraction of wealth. We won't meet our climate goals, our water quality goals. The small towns that are shriveling will continue to shrivel and we'll be left with giant balloons full of animal shit.
Chloe: Yeah, so hope… hope. No, there's a lot of hope, because again, look, I think there is this beautiful freedom in this idea that if you can take control of your food system that it is something we can still try to save. There's something we can make meaningful change with it. Just, it's not going to come from Tyson and JBS, and so I want to see a food system, a meat system, that's designed with climate crisis at the forefront.
Ken: And who's leading that now, do you think? Who's at the front end of that advocacy or that effort?
Chloe: Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of different folks. My real point is that I hope it's not so centralized. Like, I don't, I want something beyond the individual. I want it to be a regionalization of the food system.
I want there to be dozens of food entrepreneurs and people who are excited about being in the CSA or having a buying group or even, you know, working or funding, you know, like a regional facility, which would help people, you know, can at scale or freeze things at scale.
Ken: Slaughter at scale…
Chloe: But not have to use additives and different things that, like, kind of how we used to have, you know, a bunch of canneries and different types of infrastructure in this country that have all completely, you know, gone by the wayside.
And so I think it starts with, you know, this kind of regionalizing and different groups. I write about several different groups in the book, particularly indigenous communities, native communities who are like re-matriating bison and bringing back, like, small scale slaughter so that they can have sovereignty and not have to send their bison that they're producing with such care then to, like, the big consolidated bison slaughterhouse because there's also one of those.
It's not just, you know, Ted Turner owns like 50 percent of the bison in this country and there's one main slaughter guy, Bob Dineen of Rocky Mountain Natural Meats and he's not indigenous. He slaughters most of the bison for the indigenous, but yeah, it's the equity. It's really fascinating.
And so, there are some groups I think really doing amazing work and creating, like, case studies I think can be replicable. I don't think it's about scalability. It's about replicability and how we can get that to happen as many places as possible. But when you all talk about hope, I'd say that I also, I get, particularly, it is the dreamer in me, but I get particularly hopeful when you talk about, like, universal food access and different ways that that could work in a policy system at the minimum.
I think, you know, getting, like, free school lunches and more breakfast back, right? But also, it could be this thing where, like, in South America, there are these cafeterias where everyone from all walks of life go and it's just universal access to food.
I mean, why do we have universal access to water or education or health, right, in theory, but you know, not food? It makes absolutely no sense
Ken: Yeah. YThat is a vision to reach for. The book is ‘Raw Deal, Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and The Fight,’ and it is a fight. It is a fight for the future of meat.
Chloe Servino, thank you so much for joining. I recommend strongly that you buy and read this book. It will help you think seriously and deeply. A lot of the easy solutions that we read about, you politely, but firmly, treat and sort of dispense with and say, “No, this is, this is really a major remaking we have to undertake.”
And it has to be, you know, civil society and entrepreneurs and policy makers. It's going to be a lot, but I think you're right. This is not something we can solve by just by voting with our dollars alone.
Chloe: Hand in hand, I believe we can do it together. So we're talking about bison. I'll maybe end with this ending of hope.
You know, my book talks about how it's really competitive in grocery stores and there's this kind of manufactured demand which also controls what we have access to, and one brand that has, unfortunately, kind of had to go under is Tonka Bar is a native owned bison protein bar.
Ken: Yeah.
Chloe: Really special company.
And, unfortunately, it kind of got squelched out in the mix of, of all these kinds of competing interests. It's such a shame, but the CEO, Don Sherman, had told me something that really has stuck with me. And I think it's really important to think about it as we're thinking about, you know, collectivism and looking at the climate crisis.
And that's that, you know, bison have always, ancestrally, instinctually known that if they herd up and they band together, they will make it through a storm and get out on the other side. They know that when they're separated they won't, but together they will. And I just think, like, that is how we need to rebuild the food system.
Ken: Well, that is a great metaphor on which to rebuild the food system. Chloe, thank you so much for joining ‘Raw Deal, Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat.’ Chloe Servino, whose day job is covering everything food and agriculture at Forbes. thank you so much for spending some time with us and congratulations on this amazing investigative work.
Chloe: Thank you. Really appreciate it.
Ken: Thank you for joining us on the show today. I also want to thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast.
And if you're interested in learning more about EWG, head on over to EWG.org or check out the EWG Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup. Now, if you liked this episode, send it to a friend you think might like it too. Environmentalism is all about meeting people where they're at. And if you're listening to this, you probably know someone who might be interested in today's episode, but doesn't know it yet.
My ask is that you send it to that person or as many people as you see fit. Today's episode was produced by the incomparable, incomparable Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly, and our show's theme music, ‘Thank You,’ is by Moby. Thanks again for listening.
