WCW Episode 2

Lily Cole: Welcome to Who Cares Wins, with me Lily Cole.

Paul McCartney: We find ourselves amazingly positioned with them in time and space. I mean, it's just us and them. So I don’t know, I think this is a very strong argument for giving them a break.

Pat Brown: My feeling is if we can take, you know, a low double digit fraction of the market for ground beef, the beef industry will be at the tipping point because you know that it's just a matter of time before that industry is gone.

James Suzman: In order to hunt an animal you have to see, live and experience the world through the animals that you're hunting perspective, their senses. And that creates a sort of level of empathy, and with that a level of profound respect and acceptance.

Alice Waters: The only thing that's going to save the planet is falling in love.

Isabella Tree: You know, nature has had millions and millions of years of R&D and we always think we know best and the technology, you know, will fix it. You know, we'll fix the mess we've got ourselves into. But I think we have to be very mindful of hubris and take a step back and think, how does nature perform? Nature already has the solutions, I think.

Lily Cole: At the heart of every issue that intersects with the environment you find contradictions tensions and divergent perspectives, and these issues are complex and changing. Most of us want a happy life and a healthy planet. But many people have different ideas about the right way to travel towards it. In this new podcast series, I'll be sharing parts of my research from my book Who Cares Wins, interviewing some of the leading and conflicting voices in contemporary debates, such as technology, food, gender, politics and looking at how they intersect with our environment.

I see myself a bit like sellotape, ribbon or string holding together divergent voices and sort of asking ,’who cares who wins?’

Reduced meat diets such as vegetarianism, flexitarianism, veganism, or my favourite ‘vague-enism’ have grown on a massive scale in recent years, largely in response to the scientific consensus that we need to reduce the amount of meat we're eating if we want to be serious about mitigating climate change.

This conversation has never been more relevant now in light of COVID 19 as scientists also warn that three quarters of infectious diseases are zoonotic, passing from animals to humans because of threats to biodiversity, the fact that there's less and less wild land and our intensive animal agriculture systems. Yet whether we need to stop eating meat entirely or produce it in a different way, is at one of the most polarised parts of the environmental debate. And this week I'm going to try and explore both sides of the arguments, speaking to two pioneers in the alternative meat industry and speaking to two pioneers in the slow food movement that advocates regenerative agriculture.

Paul McCartney is one of the most successful recording artists of all time. Yet the McCartney name spoke first to me through Linda McCartney foods. As a young vegetarian growing up, Linda McCartney's alternative meat products were my go-to at family barbecues and events. And I wanted to speak to Paul about why he and his late wife Linda decided to make those pioneering steps into the fake meat market 30 years ago.

Paul McCartney: When I met Linda, one of the immediate things was our love of animals. That was a huge bond between us, that we loved animals. And she had, I say, this warm innocent view of animals, but we ate them because we were both brought up traditional eaters. We were on our farm in Scotland one day and it was lambing season and the lambs were running up and down the field. Such joy of spring, you know, they'd just been born and now they were safe. They were out in the sunshine, winter had finished. So life was looking good and they would just run from one end of the field. And it was as if one of them said, ‘let's go back!’ and they’d all go, ‘yeah!’ and run to the other end of the field, and they just kept running.

And we were looking at it and loving it. Then we just looked down and realised we were eating leg of lamb for Sunday dinner. We went, whoa, wait a minute and we made the connection. So we said, oh, you know, maybe we should try and do something about this. What do you say we try and go vegetarian. And that was what we did, but it was kind of daunting this idea.

And we always used to say ‘the hole in the middle of the plate’, you know, because if you serve a normal meal, then take the meat out, what's left? It’s strange things around the outside, like vegetables and stuff. So we had to fill that hole and this became our mission and we used to do this kind of thing and try and work out ways to replace what had gone, leaving the hole in the middle of the plate.

So we started gradually just to fill that hole with ideas. We realised that it was actually a lot of fun, even though it started off being daunting, it was now like a kind of mission. And I say to people now who sort of say, ‘Oh God, I want to go veggie’. I say, do you realise how thrilling it is at a point in your life? Let’s say to the age of 20-21 or something that you've been at home you've eaten one way basically, then you suddenly at college or you're on your own, or you've got your own flat, and now you have got the choice. And the whole idea of actually reprogramming yourself is really exciting.

And that led us then to Linda forming a food company. She said that when writing her first cookbook, people would come and see us, friends or relatives, kids, and stuff, and say, I'd love to go veggie, but I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to, and so she said, well, you know, I'm going to write a book. I'm going to get together and write a book. So I can just say to them, here's a copy of the book. There you go. Throw it on the table. There's how. So that became motivation for that.

And then we started with the kind of things we wanted to eat, but that didn't exist. Like burgers again, you know, I wanted to do a barbie. Well, I wasn't going to do meat. So we developed these burgers and, and in testing them in the early days, some of them would fall through the grill. So we would make sure that they were kind of solid enough to not fall through the grill, that they were tasty, that we could offer them to people who didn't normally eat vegetarian food. And we said, look this is good. You need to try this. So we had a very exciting time really, coming up with those things.

Lily Cole: Was that the first of its kind, would you say in terms of that, because now you go into a health food store and there's a million options, right? So for alternatives to meat, was that pretty new?

PM: Yeah. You couldn't get it. You couldn't get it. There was one restaurant that we knew of in London called Cranks and that says it all. It was called Cranks. They'd cleverly named themselves because they knew that's what people thought of them. When I was a kid, there was sausages. Walls made sausages, skinless, which I kind of like, because I never liked skinned sausages. I always thought of it as a skin. Oh, this is strange little animal skin, something weird, you know? So I kinda liked the Walls skinless, even though they were meat. So we modelled our sausages on that. We didn't have to bother trying to make a skin. So anyway, you know, those became quite a hit. And so we enlarged the food business and it caught on.

LC: When Linda McCartney foods was founded in 1991, the environmental arguments were less clear and instead it was an issue of animal rights that drove Paul and Linda.

PM: So there was the animal welfare, which was certainly the start of it all. And the word that always springs to mind there is compassion. Because when I was growing up, even though we were traditional meat eaters, just, you went to Sunday school, you were indoctrinated with religion because it was just at school.

And you're always hearing about Jesus and suffer little children to come unto me and the compassion. So I was always very attracted to that. So, you know, that's cool, this idea that you know, we should be compassionate, kind hearted. I liked that idea. So, so to me, I think that still is a major argument that if we are on this little sphere in space, that is perfectly situated between, you know, the distance from the sun, they do say that if we were a mile closer to it we’d be fried, if we were a mile further away, we'd be frozen. So that makes us perfect. That makes us a miracle planet.

And then on this planet, there have evolved creatures. Some of which are us. Some of which are these others. To me, I always say, look, you know, we've got these fellow creatures. I want to give them the their shot. Like I want my shot. I want my kids to have their shot at life. And that's how I feel. I extend that to living creatures. They’re our sort of friends. We find ourselves amazingly positioned with them in time and space. And it's just us and them. So I don't know. I think there's a very strong argument for giving them a break.

Then the environmental thing came into it, and the more you look into that, you realise that, you know, if it was just two cows on a farm, or a couple of cows on the farm and the farmer’s only way of making an existence is by farming those animals, then, I don't necessarily agree with them, but I don't have a big problem with that. But when it's McDonald's and it's billions of cows to feed that monster, then I think that's where the problem lies. This over production.

I remember driving down once from somewhere like LA, down to the border, Sila Jose or somewhere. I can't remember exactly, but it's a long long long road, a hundred mile interstate. As you drive along it, to your right are pens of the same cow. So it's 10 miles of this cow and it's brown and white and just the whole landscape was just filled with these guys and you go, no, there's something wrong with that.

LC: The McCartney family, including their children, Mary and Stella, are real activists and have been trying to encourage people to reduce the amount of meat they eat through the initiative, Meat-free Mondays.

PM: So we mentioned it and we thought, yeah, Britain needs this. And we just said to people, we’ve been asking you for years to just go veggie, but maybe that's a little difficult. Maybe that's a lot to ask some people. It's inconvenient. It's not going to be easy for you. So here's another idea. Just stop for one day a week. Monday seemed like a good idea, particularly because of the weekend blow out. And what's nice, what I really love is it's in schools. It's in a lot of schools now and the kids love it.

LC: Nearly 30 years on with greater demand and huge technical innovations, we are now seeing a boom of companies thinking about how to make fake animal products in interesting ways. I met with Pat Brown, the Stanford scientist, and founder of impossible foods who are producing plant-based burgers, using GMO that taste, look and even bleed like meat. You'll hear in the background, the sizzling of a burger, they were cooking for me at their labs in California. As I spoke to Pat about their mission. Pat, doesn't believe we're going to reduce the global demand for meat by simply asking people to stop eating it. Instead, he aims to disrupt the market in a different way.

Pat Brown: I’m all for people voluntarily changing their behaviour. And I'm not cynical about it, but I just know it's not going to happen. I think that, and we've done a lot of surveys about this. It's very interesting. Actually, 10% of people will say they're vegetarian or vegan, but 97% of them have also eaten meat in the past three months.

So go figure. But anyway, the point is that persuading people, educating people about the issues, trying to make them feel guilty. Any of that kind of stuff is a complete waste of time as far as I'm concerned. Not that I don’t love education, I'm all for it. I wish people cared more and knew more about this, but I went to the COP 21 conference two years ago, or three years ago, whatever. And everybody there is like, you know, devoted their whole lives to trying to address environmental issues and stuff like that. They all went out and had steak for dinner and they knew the problem. So education is great. You know, I'm going to start working on that myself.  

So the only way to solve the problem is to basically say, people are not going to change their behaviour. And therefore it falls on us to figure out a way to produce those foods that delivers everything they want and outperforms the foods from animals, and just compete in the marketplace and take those industries down. That's why I founded this company and that's our goal - completely replace animals in the food system by 2035, which we will do.

I'm completely confident we're going after beef first, because it is the single most impactful win we could have, is to take down the beef industry first. And if we succeed in doing that, it will basically send a signal to the financial markets, that people who are raising any of these kinds of foods depend on, that it's a terrible investment. That this whole technology is going the way of, you know, the horse and carriage and therefore make it harder for those people to get access to the loans and investment they need to stay in business.

My feeling is if we can take, you know, a low double digit fraction of the market for ground beef, the beef industry will be at the tipping point because you know that it's just a matter of time before that industry has gone.

LC: Do you know what you feel is the next priority?

PB: From an environmental standpoint I would go after fish next, but the interesting thing about this is that I'm thinking of it in terms of how the economics of the whole system respond to what we're doing. Like, I feel like if we capture a significant chunk of the US beef market basically, it will be very disruptive to the economics of the pork and chicken industry. Why? Because it's obvious you're next and, and it's doable and there's nothing that's going to stop us. It's just a matter of time.

LC: There are other environmentalists who worry that the mono crops on which fake meats often depend, present new challenges for our environment. And I wondered were there any risks to success that Pat had considered.

PB: Yeah. That's a super good question. It's actually something that, you know, we have spent a lot of time thinking about - is that we need to plan for basically putting those industries out of business and make sure that what replaces that is as good as it can possibly be in all the ways that matter.

The one thing you would give, I would give livestock credit for, reluctantly, is that they can turn any plant into meat, right? And so one of the things that we're looking at on a forward-looking basis is, we don't want to be dependent on any small number of crop inputs for our ingredients. So we're working on developing a supply chain for a protein that can be isolated from leaves of any plant.

The protein in leaves is incredibly high quality from a nutritional standpoint, which sort of makes sense because the vast majority of animals on earth get all their protein from leaves, but it's relatively dilute.

LC: Palm oil, you know, almond milk gets critiqued as well because of the huge amounts of demand.

PB: And this has been part of our design principle. We are thinking constantly about, is there any way that we can anticipate that this is going to create a problem and make sure that we either avoid it, or we have a plan for it. This burgers. We just, independently did a life cycle audit analysis and we can say based on data that the greenhouse gas emissions involved in producing this are a 10th of the greenhouse gas emissions of the cow version. And we have audited data you can look at. A 10th of water. A 10th, the fertiliser, and less than a 20th, the land area. You almost, can't not be that much better, just given that the current system is so horrendous that you'd have to be deliberately trying to be remotely as bad.

LC: Is that compared to averages in meat production, factory farming production, kind of grass, pasture raised cows, like what do you base the comparison on?

PB: So ironically, although despite the fact that it has this kind of halo image, grass fed beef production is much more environmentally destructive than, you know, the factory farm. Because it's habitat destruction and degradation and loss of biodiversity. That there's 10 times more cow biomass on earth than every wild vertebrate combined.

Okay. 10 times more total cows than every mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian put together, right now on earth. And that means that we're taking all the land and resources and photosynthetic productivity that previously supported diverse species and just focusing on making cows. And that is a catastrophe.

And as you may know, from the world wildlife fund, that the total number of wild animals living on earth today is less than half what it was 40 years ago. And if you look at their data or any other data, you realise that it's almost entirely due to use of animals in the food system. It's, you know, fishing for fish. Hunting, hunting's a small factor. Habitat destruction, degradation is overwhelmingly it. And although palm oil is a factor, it's a very small factor compared to animal agriculture. And so we are, in my mind, we're in the very late stages of a catastrophic meltdown in biodiversity, that we haven't even begun to see the full effects on, on us.

Because if, as you've probably read, in many parts of the world, the population of flying insects, which are responsible for pollinating a very large fraction of wild plants, has had a meltdown. And what's going to be the consequences of that? Well, what's going to happen is that these plants over time are not going to be able to replenish themselves. Or not as efficiently, but that's not going to happen right away. But 20 years from now, you're going to have further shockwaves of biodiversity loss, just due to that. So right now, animal agriculture takes up about half of Earth's land area. The large majority of that is cows. In the US 40% of the entire land area is devoted to raising cows for beef.

If we could snap our fingers and make that industry go away,  immediately 40% of the land would no longer have any economic value for agriculture. And it's not like when people sometimes say, Oh, well, now you just have to grow more plants to replace the cows. No, actually you're gonna have to grow less plants because so many of the plants are being used to feed the cows.

And I mean, you know, agricultural plants, the point is that you get a huge return on reduction, environmental impact by freeing up that land. And if you want to bring down atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the only reasonable way you can do it in a finite amount of time is by photosynthesis and turning atmospheric CO2 into biomass.

The recovery of the land that's being used for animal agriculture will pull out 17 years worth of fossil fuel emissions, out of the atmosphere as CO2, which if you could turn that clock back by 17 years, that would be extremely valuable because it would give people more time to get their act together.

LC: Pat Brown's vision is very clear. In his mind, if we moved absolutely away from farming animal products, we would free up a huge proportion of the world to rewild. Yet interestingly, I met with one of the pioneers of rewilding projects and she believes there is an important role that animals can play in certain types of agriculture. In her book, Rewilding, Isabella Tree documents her and her husband Charlie's journey to take their inherited farmland and turn it into an enormous wildlife project, Knepp wildlife estate in West Sussex, England. I went to visit her one sunny day at Knepp to learn more about her thoughts on meat and rewilding.

LC: First of all, thank you so much. It was a joy driving through and seeing the fallow deer

Isabella Tree: Yeah, fallow box.

LC: It was so beautiful. At first I thought they were a sculpture actually, because they were just so perfect and so close as well, to me as a human. Do you want to start by telling me a little bit about Knepp and your background and the transition that you've made here from farming to what it is now?

IT: Yes, my husband inherited this estate, and it's three and a half thousand acres, in the 1980s from his grandparents. And when we inherited it was an intensive arable and dairy farm, but it was losing money hand over fist. That was really just because his grandparents hadn't invested in infrastructure. They didn't know the latest technologies. You know, we were all set really to carry on our lives being intensive farmers. And that's what Charlie had studied at college at Cirencester agricultural college.

And so for 17 years, you know, he threw everything he could at it to try and make a profit. You know, he invested in infrastructure. He amalgamated dairies together, made efficiencies. He changed our breed of cows so that they were better milkers. We experimented with different varieties of crops. And obviously we put more and more chemicals on the land, you know, more fertiliser, more pesticides, or herbicides, more fungicides, everything in an effort to increase the yields of the crops and the yields of the milk and make a go of this farm. But we're on really, really heavy clay. This is low wield Sussex clay, and it's kind of infamous for being kind of like concrete in the summer. I mean, you walk out there now it's absolutely hard under foot and in places where you don't have restored soils, you get these cracks where you could literally, certainly when we were farming, you could put your hand in, right up to your shoulder. It's just unfathomable. And you can't get heavy machinery sometimes in a wet winter, like the one we've just had, you can't get machinery onto the land for six months. So there's no growing of spring crops. You can't maintain your ditches, your fences, you can't just do anything that normal farmers would be doing on better, more stable soil. So that really puts you at a disadvantage in a global market and facing a future where you don't know; I mean, the only thing that was keeping us afloat just was subsidies, but we could see down the line that that was going to disappear.

And so in 1999, Charlie, my husband made the bold decision to give up farming. I think it was a bold decision because it really went, I mean, literally against the grain. It went against the whole ethos of his family, of our neighbours of I think really what, what British people have come to expect of the landscape. It's every single inch of land has to be plowed up and used for agriculture.

And of course that's a very false premise because we know that we are over producing food where we're certainly over-producing arable. And that's why we've started to feed grain to cows. That's why we've started to feed maze to our cars. And it's really driven by subsidies. We already know that we produce enough food globally for more than 10 billion people, and we're 7.5 billion people now. We have to stop wasting food and we also have to move to regenerative agriculture. And if we do that, there is plenty of space for nature, plenty of space for rewilding projects like this.

And so in 2000, when we decided to look at alternatives to farming, we were very inspired by a Dutch ecologist, Frans Vera, whose thoughts about how our landscapes would have looked before human impact have really changed in the last 20 years, how we think of conservation and how we could bring biodiversity back. Because what he's saying is that in our sort of analysis of what our landscapes look like, we've only ever looked at it from a botanical point of view. We've looked at the vegetation and the trees. We've never thought about the zoology. We've never thought about wildlife.

And if you appreciate the huge herds of animals that would have been here in the past before human impact, so herds of bison of aurochs, the original ox, tarpan, the original horse, elk, reindeer, red deer, wild boar, beavers by the millions. If you start putting them back into the landscape, as they would have been, you suddenly get a much more dynamic and sort of kaleidoscopic, mosaic of habitats, than this kind of close canopy vision we often have in our heads of ubiquitous forest.

These animals would have disturbed that vegetation. They would have debarked trees. They would have pushed trees over. They would have kept open clearings. They would have trampled, rootled, made messy margins around the rivers. They would have coppiced trees and they would have created much more of a sort of Savannah like landscape. So what Frans is really saying is that if you want to recover biodiversity and you want to recover the systems on which species, including our own survive, then the way to do that is to introduce free roaming animals into the landscape again, and to let them drive the system, let them create dynamism again in landscapes that have kind of undergone what scientists called a catastrophic shift to kind of depletion.

And it's almost like putting these animals back. And obviously you can't put them all back because we hunted a lot of them to extinction, but you can put proxies of them back. You can put their descendants. So we have old English Longhorn cattle instead of aurochs and we have Exmoor ponies instead of Tarpan and Tamworth pigs instead of wild boar.  And these will drive the system, so they will pull the glider back up into the sky so it can fly again.

LC:  So once you made that decision to try and rewild your land, how long did that take and what was that process?

IT: Well, we weren't brave enough to do it all in one go so slowly we took fields out of agricultural production. We took the worst fields out first and left the best till last best. The best wasn't saying much, but we stayed farming those really into about 2008 I think. So the land came out in stages. It's really been, you know, a sort of 20 year process. It feels very much like a sort of African landscape, like the Bush, like the Serengeti. I mean, it really does feel like you're out there in the wild and any minute you could turn a corner and there's going to be a giraffe or a leopard up a tree, it feels completely different to anything you recognise in Britain today.

We certainly should not be eating meat that's produced in intensive systems where animals are fed grain. It's not only unsustainable, it's bad for the animals. It's also bad for the humans that eat those animals. It's bad on every level. But there is a role I think for animals in a system like this and in regenerative agriculture too. And there is a market, I think now for people who want to eat less meat, but want to be really certain where that meat comes from. And to be as ethical as they possibly can about it.

As soon as you take animals out of the equation, you're negating every species that would feed on dung, that brings that dung back into the soil ,that regenerates the soil. You’re taking out of the equation just things like animal hair, which so many birds need to make their nests. You're taking out of the equation the capability of a cow, for example, to transport 230 different seed species in its gut and its fur. And it's one of the most important vectors for getting flora from one place to another. And this whole movement of minerals and nutrients that would have been transported around the landscape and the great migration of the animals of the past. So they’re a vital dynamic part of natural processes.

LC: And what would happen if you had those animals and you didn't kill them for meat?

IT: Then you would get an increasing population and eventually you would get an overgrazed system we're familiar with in our industrial landscapes. And then you're faced with, you know, an animal welfare issue. So in the Oostvaardersplassen in Holland, they didn't kill them. That's the natural process in the wild, in the Serengeti for example, you would have boom and bust scenarios where you have huge herds of animals starving. The population would collapse. The vegetation would come back and then slowly the population would grow again. Nature performs on these boom and bust scenarios.

But we feel we have to be pragmatic about it. We don't want to live with starving animals on the doorstep. And we also don't have apex predators. I mean apex predators wouldn't actually control the numbers to the same degree. I think in the wild, they only account for about 10% or 15% of mortalities. But what they would do is they'd harry the animals around. They put much more stress on them and so their reproduction rate would go down. That would have a big impact too on the vegetation.

So we're very aware that we're not living in a landscape of fear here at Knepp and that our animals are very loosely grazing, they’re very relaxed. But what we can do is, and this is pretty much the only management we do, is control the numbers. So you don't want too many, to allow those populations to rise without killing them, or you would get an overgrazed system. And eventually they would anyway run out of resources. You don't want too few, or you would get the closed canopy woodland, which is very species poor, and undynamic.

You know, if you're wanting to conserve with biodiversity and dynamic natural processes, you're going to have to intervene quite a lot. So you'll have to coppice your woodland or disturb your soils yourself. So say if you've only got 20 acres, you might be able to bring in a pig for a few weeks to rootle the soil and disturb it, open it up so that seeds can come in and germinate and you can get much more diverse flora.

But you wouldn't be able to sustain a pig in 20 acres all year round without feeding it, or intervening in some way.

LC: So I interviewed Pat Brown, the founder of impossible foods. They are developing a molecularly identical burger to meat, but it's all plant-based and he's a scientist and it's kind of amazing when you try it. It does taste like meat. What's your position on the alternative meat market?

IT: We have to keep innovating and we have to keep thinking of alternatives. And all of these are kind of very exciting ideas on paper. I think the crucial question is, are they carbon neutral? So it's not even actually carbon neutral. They have to be carbon sequestering. That's the vital, vital piece of evidence I think, to test whether they are sustainable.

So when you talk about regenerative agriculture, and you're looking at systems that involve rotations of livestock, where the dung and the urine and the trumping of the vegetation back into the soil, all that system is actually regenerating soils. And the potential for carbon sequestration of those systems is absolutely vast. It's probably the single most powerful answer we have to climate change, is restoring our soils. So if these systems of the impossible burger or lab-based technologies, if they are not sequestering carbon at the end of the day, at the end of the process, it's not just enough to be carbon neutral. They have to be acting positively for the climate. And if they don't do that, then I would argue it's unsustainable.

I think it's much more interesting to look at things like fermentation, the process of growing kelp and those sorts of programs, I think have enormous potential. And why would it be surprising that work more closely with nature that are going to be successful in the long term?

You know, after all nature has had millions and millions of years of R&D and we always think we know best and that technology, you know, will fix it, you know, will fix the mess we've got ourselves into, but I think we have to be very mindful of hubris and take a step back and think, how does nature perform? Nature already has the solutions I think.

LC: So in your vision of things, we would be eating a lot less meat, but it'd be coming from better sources, basically.

IT: Yes, it would be pasture fed only meat. It would be a meat from regenerative agriculture, and it would be from rewilding projects. And a lot less of it, absolutely. I think the important thing about industrial farming is the carbon cost. The massive carbon cost of it on top of everything else. But it's the carbon cost of producing the grain to feed the animals in the first place, the transportation. At every single level of that process is a carbon cost. Even the buildings themselves, even the transportation of water to feed the animals, is a carbon cost. So it's the overall picture of emissions that we need to look at rather than isolating just the methane. If you look at a pasture fed system or regenerative agriculture system or rewilding system, the methane emissions pale into insignificance when you look at the net carbon sequestration of the soils and the plants that that grazed system is driving.

LC: What would be your concerns, if you do have them, about what a 100% vegan world might mean and how that might impact the way we're growing other parts of our food staples?

 IT: I think we would see a very impoverished biodiversity. We would lose a huge amount of potential for the soils to regenerate using animals in the system. I find it very difficult to imagine not having animals out there at all.

LC: Do you think there are potential dangers to the rising trend of alternative meat markets?

IT: I think we have to look at where all our food comes from. And if we're just simply going to shift from meat proteins to soy or almond, you know, that can be even more destructive if we're not careful. We’re looking at a huge areas of rainforest being deforested because of those crops, maize too. So all those corn alternatives. We've got to start thinking about where everything, even our plant based food comes from. Rice is incredibly greedy for water, and it's also a big emitter of methane and nitrous oxide. So it's one of the biggest carbon, greenhouse gas emitters.

So, you know, we have to think really, really carefully about what we're eating, where it comes from, how it's produced. And it does all come back to the soil. If the way our food, whatever it is, is produced is degrading our soil then that is a bad thing. It's not only going to be unsustainable because we'll run out of soil to grow anything in because it will keep disappearing. But it also means that we have no solution for climate change, because it's all in the soil. You can turn to a plant-based diet, but actually our food is actually getting less nutritious all the time. You know we have to eat about 10 tomatoes to get the nutrition of one in the 1950s. So it's that idea of every single inch of the land being ploughed, is ingrained in us from that moment of crisis, and I suppose trauma of having nearly faced starvation in the Second World War but things have moved on and we now have varieties of crops that are producing higher yields and ever before, we've got less land under arable, I think, than we had even before the Second World War now in the UK even though our population has rocketed. so we can produce more food from less land than ever before. We've just got to start getting smarter about how we do it.

LC: Knepp Estate is fairly unique for producing meat from rewilded land. They use abattoirs to kill the animals, but are trying to get permissions to shoot on land, which would make them much closer to the model of animal consumption that humans have practiced for hundreds of thousands of years. Indeed, my friend anthropologists James Suzman argues that gatherer hunter communities were the most sustainable human societies on Earth, practising their way of living for hundreds of thousands of years. I asked him about what we could learn from the sun bushmen in the Kalahari desert about their relationship to eating meat.

What is your perspective on the way that we eat meat nowadays, comparatively to the way that our gatherer hunter ancestors ate meat? And do you think there's a version of eating meat today that would be better?

James Suzman: A forager’s meat was the most fundamental and important of all foods. So there was a very potent spiritual element to it, you know, when a hunter pursued an animal, it created a very potent empathetic bond between them. And in fact, there's very good reason to argue that all these sort of animistic cultures, the ones who actually considered animals to have souls were largely cultures that focused on individuals hunting.

And if you're pursuing an animal on foot, you develop that intensely personal bond. To be able to hunt that animal, you have to know, Ju/‘hoansi for example, talk about the spirits conjoining during the process of the hunt. They merged two spirits, the hunter and the hunted merged together into one being. In order to hunt an animal, you have to see, live and experience the world through the animals that you're hunting perspective of their senses. And that creates a sort of level of empathy, and with that a level of profound respect and acceptance of their personhood.

Now meat for most of us in the supermarket, most of the meat that lies in the racks and on the shelves, comes from basically factory farming and factory farming is a hideously depersonalising process. It's converting living creatures into kind of chattels and on the whole, they lead very bleak, very brief lives before they get shuffled into an abattoir where people kill them all and fairly disrespectfully as well. I mean the process of mass slaughter is a fairly grim process. And that's partially because where a hunter, like a Ju/‘hoansi that goes when they're pursuing an oryx bull, they'll see the animal in that moment, pursued at death at its magnificent best. But it's a question of respect. When you're sitting in a slaughter house, one fifth of their natural lifespan, you’re seeing them, animals of their diminished worths. It sort of takes all the respect away from it. So I think there is a place for meat,  but in my worldview, there's not much of a space for factory farming.

Animals eat other animals, it is just the nature, but this kind of idea of mass producing cattle or chickens is just horrendous. And there's also the environmental impact. I mean, when we look at, for example, the quotient of mammalian biomass on the planet, you know, now most of the mammalian biomass in the planet is made up of humans and their domestic animals, some astonishing number, like sort of 80, 90 %. Whereas 10,000 years ago, humans and their domestic animals didn't make up even a fraction of 1%.

So that is where the severe impact lies, is actually broader environment. And also this diminution of the animals that we eat and as somebody who is a meat-eater and who has hunted as well, it's reflected in everything, it's reflected in the experience of eating meat. Factory farm meat doesn't taste good. And it doesn't taste good partially because we've diminished the soul of the animal that we've slaughtered, in both its life and the way we kill it.

LC:  Finally, I spoke with Alice Waters, the pioneering chef and activist, who in 2015 was awarded the national humanities medal from President Obama for her work bringing together the ethical and the edible. For decades Alice has advocated the slow food movement and regenerative agriculture, and set up edible school yards across the United States, which encouraged classrooms to move into the garden. Alice is skeptical of any type of fast food, meat, or otherwise, and believes that our attitude to eating needs to be more holistic.

We spoke on the phone with my daughter playing in the background and she told me why she thinks local, seasonal and organic is a key to solving our climate crisis. Like Izzy and James, she believes there is a role for animal agriculture to play in our world, but the way we're farming meat needs to change.

Alice Waters: Patrick Holden in England is very interested in the same thing. And they're talking about making all of the farming in England sustainable by 2042, to eliminate factory farming. I believe that farming needs animals as part of the big picture of farming. At the restaurant I feel like we’re probably a little too meat heavy, and I want to change that. I want to do at least one or two meals,  that downstairs in the fixed price menu that are vegetarian. And we're sort of going towards that right now.

LC: Why do you feel that having animals is an important part of a healthy farm dynamic?

AW: Well, it has to do with certainly manure on the grasslands. It has to do with, um, I mean, I'm saying this not from knowledge of my own but from the people I admire most like Wendell Berry. The chickens just dig up the bugs and they fertilise and make the land ready to be clamped. We have a chicken tractor at the school that we move around the chickens so that they can fertilise at different sites that's going to be seeded.

LC: I asked Alice, why so much of her work has focused on children. And I was moved by her philosophical response.

AW: The way that you eat becomes the way that you think. And so when you're eating fast food, you're digesting the values that come with food. The idea that it’s ok to eat in your car. The idea that more is better. The idea that time is money. The idea that cooking and farming are drudgery, all come from a fast food industry that wants you to forget about the seasons, wants you to believe that you can have anything, any time, 24/7, any place in the world. And these are the ideas that are really destroying the planet.

LC: The emphasis on local and seasonal, how absolute is that for you? Like, do you ever in your own personal life eat non-seasonal non-local food?

AW: I am absolute on that. I find it a huge pleasure. When you eat second rate fruits and vegetables all year long, when the good thing comes around, you’re bored. My parents had a victory garden during World War Two and they didn't have much money. So they had to grow all the food that we basically ate. And that was a very early edible education for me. Also, my mother wasn’t a good cook and that was a problem. But I have definitely memories, of eating strawberries out in the garden and eating apple sauce that my mum made from the tree.

And so I have a real connection to nature. And that's what we’re hoping to give to children in schools, is that love of nature. The only thing that's going to save the planet is falling in love. And fortunately, it's pretty easy when you're four and six.

LC: Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree.

AW: You wanna lie down on the grass and climb a tree. You want to be outside.

LC: We have a three-year-old and last year we grew our own vegetables in the countryside and it was so magical.

So, what do I think? There's something to learn from the different perspectives within this debate. Everyone seems to agree we need to eat less animal products, and if we are going to eat them, we need to move to much, much healthier ways of farming animals.

That seems very clear. The pragmatist in me gets very excited about companies like Impossible Foods, because I see them as a gateway to push against factory farming, without draconian political policies we're unlikely to see anytime soon. Having been vegetarian for 22 years, I'm also selfishly quite happy to see the rise of interesting alternatives on the market.

That said Alice's philosophy speaks to me so profoundly. And I think we have to be very mindful about the alternatives we're creating and other unforeseen impacts it may have. Ultimately the philosophy of local, seasonal, organic feels right. And we made find that the soil underneath our feet holds the very solutions to solve the climate crisis if we can empower it.

So who wins or maybe there is no winner and that's the point. There's something to learn from different perspectives, as we try to figure out how to get to sustainability and perhaps happiness.

You can hear more from Paul McCartney, Pat Brown, Isabella Tree, and Alice Waters as well as many others in my book, Who Cares Wins, which is out now in hardback e-book and audio book. Join me next time on this podcast, where I'm going to explore the intersections between our environmental reality and questions of inequality.