Podcast Transcript
Hope:
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals Podcast sponsored by Compassionate Living. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec. You can find all our other episodes at our website, Hope for the Animals podcast.org. I would love to hear from you with your questions or feedback.
For today’s podcast, I’m going to offer a couple of film reviews from movies that I really liked and I want to suggest to you, and then we have the extraordinary Jane Velez-Mitchell, who will tell us all about her vegan media projects like JaneUnChained, and a new vegan cooking show that she has out, New Day New Chef, and lots more.
But first, I want to talk about a couple of documentaries that I saw recently. I love film reviews, especially for documentaries, because I don’t have a lot of time and I like to know what I’m getting into with a movie and if it’s worth my time. So I’m excited to offer my first film reviews for this podcast and I hope to do more.
I’m going to talk about two somewhat similar movies; they’re both similar in theme. One is called Countdown to Year Zero, and the other is End Game 2050. Both these films are available on Amazon Prime, and probably other places as well.
There are so many animal and veg and vegan themed movies lately, it’s really hard to keep up. There’s a great resource called vegmovies.com, and they have all of these movies listed in one place, complete with trailers and graphic content, warnings and even upcoming movies that aren’t out. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. It’s really helpful.
The first film I want to review is called Countdown to Year Zero. It’s directed by our upcoming guest on the podcast, Jane Velez-Mitchell. The film, is only about 53 minutes long, which I love. I always feel that documentaries are too long, that really, they shouldn’t be more than about 45 minutes. When you start getting into an hour and a half, two hours, I mean, even if I’m riveted by the subject, it kind of starts to lose me, especially if it’s really sad or a difficult subject. Or if you’re just getting talking heads. So I like the length of this film. I think it’s really a good length.
It came out just last year in 2019. It’s very fast paced, which I really like. It starts with some alarming ecological and planetary statistics. And right away, they start tying these stats into killing animals, both domestic farmed animals and wildlife. Jane Velez-Mitchell is throughout the movie, and she is very plain talking and helps make it emotional and real, going beyond the statistics and the studies. She really drives home the urgency of the situation and brings in a raw emotion that I really liked. There are some really great stats and graphics for sure but the film does what Jane does best and that’s being on the streets where the action is during protests and events. There’s energy and hope. It’s not just boring talking heads throughout, which is what you get with so many documentaries. I feel like this movie was more action oriented and I really liked that.
It’s really an eco and vegan star studded film with Jane Goodall and Sea Shepherd’s Captain Paul Watson, actress Alicia Silverstone from Clueless, Earthling Ed, vegan rapper, Gray, the musician, Moby, and also some amazing youth activists like Genesis Butler and Greta Thunberg. The cool thing is though that it’s not just sitting down and having a talk with these people like so many documentaries. Jane was ingenious, and she filmed them when they were speaking at large rallies and crowds and events. And I really loved that because the energy was up and you felt like you were really there; that you were seeing them and being inspired by them. So I really loved that.
Dr. Sailesh Rao who has been a guest on this podcast, he produced the film and is throughout the movie and puts forth this beautiful vision of a vegan world by 2026. And he talks about creating a new model of normalized nonviolence, as he puts it, and that we, right now, have a system of normalized violence that is destroying us. He’s calling for a system of normalized nonviolence. I really thought that was so beautiful.
There is some graphic imagery, there’s animals in slaughterhouses going to slaughter on the conveyor belts hanging upside down, that sort of thing, but they don’t stay on it long. And it moves through pretty quickly. But it is throughout and if you’re sensitive to that, just be aware of that. Right within the first four minutes, you see pigs being beaten and dragged, so it’s certainly present throughout the movie. But of course, it’s important for it to be there if someone has never seen that kind of footage before. So I’m glad it’s there. And it’s not a lot. It’s just kind of sporadic.
In the middle of the film, Sailesh takes a team to Costa Rica so we get a nice change of scene and some beautiful moments in the Central American rain forest and the connection to animal agriculture’s impact on the entire world. They went to restored forests that used to be cattle ranches. And it was just a really nice travel interlude.
They talked a lot about the coming extreme weather events, and that they’re happening right now. I can attest to that. I live in Northern California, and we just experienced the most intense and horrible wildfire season. I’ve lived here in Northern California, my whole adult life. I’ve lived here for 30 years. We have a wildfire season every year so that’s not unusual. However, the last five or six years, it’s just been unprecedented. It’s been so horrible. In this last one, there were more acres burned than ever before. It was so massive that the smoke enveloped the entire state for about a month. We had ash on everything: ash on our garden, on our cars, the smoke was just filling the air. We all downloaded air quality apps on our phones, so that we could see what the air quality was and it would just be day after day of hazardous air quality. I actually got sick from it. I was dizzy and had headaches for about 10 days straight when it was really bad. And we weren’t able to open our windows or go outside for about four weeks, a month. So I am actually living in it. I just experienced directly climate disruptions effects, and it was horrible.
It scares me for our future. I’m so glad that these films exist and are hopefully going to inspire people to do something to make change in their lives. I’ll end talking about this first film, Countdown to Year Zero with a quote from the film from Dr. Sailesh Rao. He said, “When the earth is ravaged, a new tribe of people shall come onto the earth of many colors, classes, creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again.” I thought that was a really beautiful quote.
Another film that I think is worth reviewing and endorsing has a similar theme and it’s also available on Amazon Prime. It’s End Game 2050. Now this one is longer, it’s a full hour and a half. And the first 15 minutes are really crazy. It was really unexpected and kind of intense. They created this dramatic representation like a mini movie within the documentary with actors actually playing parts in this movie. In this mini movie there was a newscast from the year 2050. There were these massive methane explosions from the trapped gas underground and the melting permafrost was causing the gas to release and explode on the surface and it was blowing up roads and towns. And the newscast was talking about the fishless oceans and how this was predicted 40 years ago. They talked about food and water rationing and riots.
And the whole time, there’s this group of people watching the news report. And they are patients in a psychiatric ward. And they’re getting increasingly agitated by the news. And all I could think while watching this is, yeah, that’s gonna be me if I make it to 2050 and all these ecological disasters happen. I don’t mean to make light of mental illness at all, but it certainly felt like, yeah, this could drive us all crazy. And that’s exactly what they were trying to portray. There was much more to this dramatization, but I’m not going to give it away, it would be a spoiler so I’ll just I’ll leave it at that.
But after this short segment, then we get into your typical documentary with expert talking heads. I mean, that’s kind of the rest of the documentary. Although it’s very well done, it certainly then goes into feeling like your regular documentary. It goes into some good clear explanations about how we’re in the sixth mass extinction event and how humans are causing it with biodiversity loss and habitat loss. They connect it to animal agriculture as being the number one use of the most viable land on earth. That land should be natural habitat for wildlife and flora. They also get into ocean acidification, which is very important and not talked about enough.
So something that both films talk about, and that I didn’t even realize, is how half the world’s oxygen is produced by plankton, the plankton in our oceans. Plankton are a diverse collection of organisms that live in large bodies of water. They’re, of course, the crucial food source for many small and large aquatic animals, fish, and whales. It’s really concerning that the plankton are dying off in mass amounts. This is acidifying the oceans and reducing the oxygen content in the oceans and on Earth. One expert in End Game 2050 said every second breath we take, comes from the ocean. So that was really powerful and fascinating.
As for graphic imagery, there’s not much but there is some certainly. There isn’t really anything until about 20 minutes in, there is this moment where you see a rhinoceros whose horn has been cut off. Half his face is gone and he’s still alive and stumbling around. It was really intense and very affecting to me, even though it was just a few seconds. At about 40 minutes in, there is an important section on fishing. It had a lot of video of mass fish in distress on the decks of boats out of water. That was disturbing to me. But it was a very important segment. And I’m always grateful when fishing is included in the conversation.
They get into talking about plastics in the ocean and there is a really moving segment around 35 minutes in where they show all this marine life and sea turtles and birds tangled in and strangled by plastic debris. It’s really sad. Animals drowning and caught in nylon fishing nets. It was very heart wrenching and really moving and my mind went immediately to my quest for a plastics-free household and made me consider what else I can do to reduce my plastic. So it was very affecting to me and a really powerful part.
I was surprised when at about 45 minutes in, they tackled human population growth and really went there with our excessive population of 7.5 billion people now. I was really happy to see this because it seems like this issue is really one of the only other issues that is more taboo than veganism in the environmental community. I mean, even more forbidden to mention than veganism. So I was really glad to see an entire section on it. People, they only like to talk about consumption and say that it’s about distribution of resources and consumption patterns. They don’t want to touch on the population issue. But the exponential growth that is happening and that this movie points out is really alarming. We’re gaining 80 million people every year. It’s unsustainable and growing the population rapidly. I was really glad to see that this movie was brave and talked about it. They had a whole section on it. That was great.
For about the first hour of the film we hear only environmental information. Up to this point it’s all been about the environmental impact of animal agriculture and other environmental issues. Then there was this really powerful and heart wrenching story from the main commentator, she’s been kind of the host throughout. She talks about her experience with this one white cow while filming at a slaughterhouse. It was probably one of the most moving and powerful stories I have ever heard about an individual animal and a connection someone had with that animal at a slaughterhouse. It left me in tears. I was bawling. I wish I could take just this five minute segment and have it as a short piece to share. I think that this one moment with this white cow, it was worth the entire movie.
So wrapping up and looking at the two films, I would say that Countdown to Year Zero is much more hopeful. They show Sailesh’s vision of manifesting a vegan world and they take us to these action groups at a conference where people are working on creating solutions and solving the problems. It’s got a clear message of how we can help by going vegan. End Game 2050 is more apocalyptic and dire. And it’s long. But I think we need both. I think the situation calls for both. We need to be realistic about how dire the situation is, like in End Game 2050, and we have to have hope that we can fix it like in Countdown to Year Zero, so it’s not overwhelming and we don’t become immobile. So I really like and recommend both films. I would say if you’re going to watch them both, end with Countdown to Year Zero because it’s a bit more hopeful.
So I hope you get a chance to watch these two movies. There’s really a wide selection of vegan themed movies out now. Watch them, watch them with others, and share them on social media. Films can be a life changing experience, so veg out with a veg movie tonight.
Hope:
Okay, I’m going to bring in our very special guest now. We have Jane Velez-Mitchell with us and she is the founder and editor of JaneUnChained News, a nonprofit social media news network reporting on animal rights, veganism, health and climate change. Jane has launched a vegan cooking series called New Day New Chef streaming on Amazon Prime and also public television stations around the US and we’re gonna talk a little about that. The network also just launched the show, Support and Feed Edition on Amazon Prime to promote vegan restaurants that are feeding those in need during the pandemic, which is really cool.
Jane has won numerous awards and accommodations in her years of high profile animal rights work. You may remember her from her own show on HLN (Headline News)/CNN for six years where she ran a weekly segment on animal issues. I certainly remember that and I would cheer at the TV every time she came on. She’s been a hero of mine for a very long time. And I’m just honored to have her joining us today. Welcome to Hope for the Animals Podcast, Jane Velez-Mitchell.
Jane:
Well, thank you for having me, Hope, and you’re my hero too. So, right back at you.
Hope:
Oh, that’s awesome. All right, great. Well, let’s get into it. I would love to ask, what got you started on your journey to veganism? What got you to go vegan? When did you go vegan? How did you get into animal advocacy? Tell us about your journey.
Jane:
Well, actually, it begins with my mother who was born in 1916 on the beautiful island of Vieques, which is part of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth. She had a pet pig. She thought the pig was her friend and even her brother loved this pig. But the pig was a food pig and it was slaughtered for food. When she came home and discovered that, she literally fainted, and when she woke up, she shunned meat from that point on. She came to New York in 1928, just in time for the start of the Great Depression. She formed a very successful Latin dance troupe called the Nita Velez Dancers that played the Caribbean, United States, and Canada. She was the last of the vaudevilles playing the Palace Theatre and the five-a-days when they used to have live performances in between the movies. She met my dad who was an Irish American advertising executive. He was a meat eater, but he pretty much converted. Growing up, we thought we were vegetarians, but we were pescatarians: we ate fish, we ate eggs, we ate dairy. We were at least aware that chicken wings don’t fall from trees. I don’t ever remember a chicken wing being brought into the house. We were on the journey. I credit my parents a lot. My dad would read The Mucasless Diet. As he got older, he got really into macrobiotics. That was a bit of a problem for me as a kid because I would look at things like snow cones, and I would say to myself, “When I grow up, I’m gonna have all the snow cones that I want.” And so yeah, we were sort of on the journey.
I grew up in midtown Manhattan, right across from Carnegie Hall on 57th and Seventh. You can’t get more Midtown. It was pretty much like the center of the universe. It was a blessing and a curse. I had tremendous exposure to culture; the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art was a five minute walk. In any case, the downside was that it wasn’t a place where you could run and play. My dad would say, “You have the biggest backyard in America, Central Park!” and I’m like, “Dad, give me a break. I can’t go there by myself, I’d get mugged!”
I went to New York University. I graduated with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and I started my journalism career in 1977. My first job was in Fort Myers, Florida, then I worked in Minneapolis for two years, then I worked in Philadelphia. It was in Philadelphia that somebody sent me a videotape of infamous head injury experiments on primates. I believe they were baboons.
Hope:
I remember that.
Jane:
It was one of the most horrific videos I’ve ever seen. And I was just devastated and appalled. I said, “This is evil. This is evil, and we need to do something about it.” But I was just kind of a cub reporter. I wasn’t an investigative reporter. I didn’t see any way to do anything about it at the time and these were very powerful institutions doing these torture exercises.
Then I went to New York City, back in my hometown, literally working down or up the block from where I grew up at WCBS. I was there for eight years. I was a reporter and weekend anchor. And then I got a job in LA as a weekday anchor at KCAL, working at Paramount Studios, which was great. Honestly, I thought I died and gone to heaven. So I ended up in LA. I’ve always loved LA. I love the sunshine, the ocean. It’s just a happy place for me. And I was working at Paramount Studios. To this day, it was the best job I ever had. I had a good parking spot in the Paramount lot. I was walking past people who were movie stars and doing my local news with a very famous anchor, Jerry Dunphy, and Disney had bought the station so they had deep pockets. They were doing amazing things. We won a lot of awards, the Golden Mic Awards, etc. Anyway, in walks Howard Lyman, who is a fourth generation cattle rancher turned vegan activist, and he’s the guy who went on Oprah. He ran this big cattle operation, and then he got sick. This is my understanding, he went into surgery and as he was going into surgery, he made a pact with God: “God if you get me out of this, I’ll spill the secrets of my really horrific torture in this industry.” He survived. He went on Oprah and she famously said, “That just stopped me cold from eating another burger.”
Hope:
Right.
Jane:
The cattlemen sued Oprah and Howard became a cause celeb, famous for that time period. I believe it was at that time when he came into the studio, this was 23 years ago, I think. It’s a little fuzzy. I suppose one day I could sit down and do a lot of research and find out exactly when he walked into the studio. But I know it was after I got sober. I’m 25 years sober. I’m a recovering alcoholic.
Hope:
Congratulations.
Jane:
And I like to say that I wouldn’t be doing any of this if I hadn’t gotten into recovery. I also came out as gay. So getting sober was the first thing and I have to always put my sobriety first because I won’t be an effective activist if I don’t. I did an interview with Howard and he had revealed all the horrors of the industry. Afterwards, he and his publicist, Marr Nealon, a very fierce activist I would later learn, they came up to my cubicle and they said, “We hear you’re a vegetarian,” and I said, “Yes.” And they said, “Do you still eat dairy?” And I kind of hung my head because they had just revealed all the horrors. And I just very shamefaced said, “Yes.” And then they pointed their finger right up my nose, and they said, “Liquid meat.” That was the moment I went vegan.
About a month later, I was at a restaurant and the chef had put cheese on my salad by accident and I bit into it and I spat it out. The reason why rehab is at least 28 days, is because it takes at least 28 days to change any habit, sometimes a lot more. But in those 28 days, in that one month that I hadn’t been eating dairy, my taste buds had totally changed. And I found cheese to be very repulsive when I used to love it. I loved nothing more than dairy, you know? Cheese or whatever. So it only takes a few weeks for you to change your taste buds.
Along with getting sober and coming out as gay, going vegan is the best decision I ever made. In fact, they’re all three really important decisions and they’re very interconnected because when you get clarity as a sober person, you start reexamining your life and you start asking yourself, “Are my behaviors in line with my beliefs?”
Hope:
So tell us about how you got started doing JaneUnChained.
Jane:
After I was a local news anchor and reporter for many years, I jumped to syndicated television. I worked at a show called Celebrity Justice, which is the precursor to TMZ. It was a tabloid show and the rules for getting a story on the air were you had to have celebrity and justice. So as a budding activist, I called PETA and I said, “The celebrities, they have the causes. Let’s do some celebrity justice.” And we got a lot of stories on that. I even interviewed Robert Redford, because he was concerned about the impact of military sonar on the whales. So that was when I was really starting my activism. And that was just a gift to be able to do all those stories.
Then I ended up covering the Michael Jackson trial, and I was getting a lot of national attention, Larry King Live, and various other shows. Then I ended up filling in for Nancy Grace and then getting my own show. When I got my own show on CNN Headline News, I asked them, “Would you mind if I do an animal segment once a week?” And they thought about it. Maybe they thought it was going to be pet adoptions, but I started doing hardcore animal rights.
Hope:
Yes you did. It was wonderful.
Jane:
I had the leaders of different organizations on and also showcased new vegan foods. I had Josh Tetrick on who was pushing Just Mayo and just starting out and he even said, “I appreciate that you gave me this video that I could use to show off Just Mayo.” I was really excited about that. I did it for six years. The show had a nice run. It wrapped up and I left on great terms. They gave me my social media and I even went and talked to an executive and she said, “Look, your passion is clearly animals and animal rights, why don’t you just do that?” So she was the one who gave me the idea. I said, “Okay, I feel very empowered. Yeah, let’s do this.”
I started going to protests. And in fact, my girlfriend at the time, who’s still a dear friend, Donna, That Snarky Vegan Girl, said, “Jane, you’re unchained! You can go to protests!” Because you know, when you’re a reporter, you can go to protests to cover them when you’re assigned, but you can’t participate. I immediately noticed there’s something missing here. It was in New York and it was freezing. People are going to extreme lengths for these protests but they’re not documenting it. It was so cold and people really weren’t paying that much attention. I said, “Now I can start documenting these and doing what I used to do every Friday. I’m going to do that and put it on my social media.” So that’s how JaneUnChained started.
I started with a GoPro camera. Then, after moving to LA, I decided to turn it into a nonprofit because it was a money pit. People don’t understand, in this culture, either you’re making money or it’s a nonprofit. Our mission is a vegan world. We want to do as much as we can to normalize veganism. And it’s not that we don’t cover other issues, we do, like when they’re trying to destroy the wetlands here in LA, as they are, or the terrible animal experimentation, but the vast majority of animals are being tortured and killed for food. And so that’s our focus.
As part of that nonprofit where we were shooting videos, I started realizing, “Wait a second, I’m one person. There are things going on all over the world.” The movement was exploding as JaneUnChained got started. You had the Cubes of Truth, the Save Movement, Veg Fest. I’m on the board of Veg Fest LA. I used to go to that when it was Worldfest. It was the only Veg Fest in town. Now there’s so many of them. So I realized we needed a lot of contributors. So I started inviting citizen journalists. This is a team effort. This is not me. This is like 70 people around the world going live, working super hard putting together great recipes. So then Facebook Live came along, and I said, “Hallelujah!” because I was staying up very late almost every night editing stories. Editing is a very slow process. There were too many stories. I was getting overwhelmed. Now we can just go live. And so we started enabling these citizen journalists to go live and people go live all the time at Veg Fest, at conferences, at galas. And we’ve been live with you, Hope. We’ve interviewed you.
Actually this started because I was out on my deck. I had invited some friends over and they just happened to be glamorous friends. Not all my friends are glamorous. But it was Katie Cleary, who’s from America’s Next Top Model and Simone Reyes who had her own reality show. And these are incredible activists. Simone’s also a country music star. And we were doing a cookout with different vegan burgers I had purchased. I wanted to see if the live video worked on my deck where we were doing this. And sure enough, it did. And I started going live and I couldn’t believe the response. “What’s Katie eating? Which one does she like? Which one does Simone like?” I realized that there was a lot of interest in this food segment. So that’s how Lunch Break Live was born. And so every single day, since we discovered Facebook Live, which was right after it started, we’ve been doing a vegan cooking show at 12:30 Pacific (that’s 2:30 Central, 3:30 Eastern) every single day, seven days a week, where we showcase a different vegan meal. And to just prove the incredible variety of vegan cooking, we’ve never repeated a recipe once. Not because it’s intentional, that would be too complicated to try to arrange, just by accident. Nobody’s ever done the exact same recipe twice. That’s how much variety and versatility there is.
We have incredible people, I don’t like to start naming names, because what happens is I leave somebody out. There’s so many incredible people who are giving their energy and their time. And we just would love to invite everybody to be a part of this. That’s why I just created something as part of JaneUnChained called Plant Based Neighbor. It’s a new app. Right now, it’s in beta testing as a website: plant based neighbor.com. And it aims to connect all vegans around the world. And basically you sign up you put in your photo, we also add vegetarians because we want to embrace people on the journey. I, for example, was vegetarian before I went vegan. So we have two categories: vegan and vegetarian. It’s an app where you sign up, you add your picture, and it connects you with vegans in your immediate vicinity, in your zip code. But you can also reach out to vegans around the world.
You should also put your profession in the app because we’re trying to create the veg-onomy. For example, if I am looking for a hairdresser, I don’t want to give money to a hairdresser who’s going to go out and buy a steak with that money. I’d rather find a vegan hairdresser. And in fact, I have a vegan hairdresser. I would love to get to see her one of these days. Right here is going to be declared a national forest in a couple of days. I have a vegan handyman. I have a vegan piano teacher. I have a bookkeeper for JaneUnChainedwho is also an activist, and my accountant is vegetarian and we’re working on him. So it’s called the veg-onomy.
Now, a lot of things you need to spend money on, you need to have people in your vicinity. You can’t get a hairdresser in Berlin if you’re in Los Angeles. So by everybody signing up, they can connect with vegans in their neighborhood, emotionally and psychologically. That’s a boon. I know when I’m sitting here and there’s the death smell of the cookout from a nearby neighbor, it’s heartwarming to know that another neighbor agrees with me. And maybe I could invite them over for a vegan cookout, right? Yeah. From a psychological perspective, it’s very important to know that we’re not alone and that there are others who agree with us.
And so this app is in development. I urge everybody just go to Plant Based Neighbor to sign up. By the way, you can also sign up your organizations. Organizations can also sign up. It’s growing and you can post videos and photos. I’ll give you an example. I asked my friend who lives in downtown LA, I said, “Will you please go on Plant Based Neighbor?” He said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m gonna find anybody.” This is downtown LA. I said, “Just do it.” He called me back, he said, “There are 162 people in my neighborhood who are vegan!” “Yeah,” I said, “Yeah.” Now you’re talking.
Hope:
Yeah, that’s a fantastic idea. It’s it’s kind of like a vegan Next Door, which is so great. Oftentimes people do feel really isolated. When they go vegan, they don’t feel like they have the social support so this could really be helpful for them to find that connection in their area. I love that.
Jane:
Okay, sign up at Plant Based Neighbor.com.
Hope:
Absolutely. So I want to ask you about the project, New Day New Chef, which is a vegan cooking show on Amazon Prime video that is put on by JaneUnChained News. I’ve watched a couple of them and they’re really interesting. I don’t cook. And I actually don’t like to cook. And I like to tell people that because you really don’t have to cook as a vegan. I’ve been a healthy vegan for 30 years, and I barely and rarely cook. So it can be done, just to let everybody know. But there’s a lot of people that do love to cook and want to learn to cook vegan. So it’s really awesome that you have this show. And there’s different guests and celebrity chefs every episode. So tell us a little about this show, New Day New Chef.
Jane:
So I’d always had this dream to have a cooking show on TV because I spent 38 years on television. I had actually pitched the Food Network about 20 some years ago, “Hey, let’s do a vegan cooking show.” And you know where that went: nowhere. One of our cooking shows on Amazon Prime is working with Maggie Baird, who just happens to be Billy Eilish and Finneas’ mom, and she’s an actress herself and an artist, just an incredible person. They are a whole vegan family. And she started this brilliant concept, Support and Feed.
We donate to Support and Feed.com. Support and Feed.com gives money to vegan restaurants, New York, LA and Philly. But you can do this in any town, they have an instruction manual that explains how you can do it. Support and Feed picks up food and brings it to hungry children and hungry seniors and hungry nurses and doctors, people who are struggling right now. And so it’s brilliant because it’s keeping the vegan restaurants alive during this crisis that is not going away. When I heard about that I was just taken with it. We were trying to figure out how to do a new season in the pandemic. Hollywood is to a large degree shut down because it’s so hard to film when you’re trying to social distance. That love scene is getting a lot more complicated, you know what I mean?
Getting back to Amen. He’s so brilliant, our producer from inspired Amen McChrystal. He created a contactless studio with six robotic cameras. I co-hosted with celebrity co-hosts from my home. We had Lesley Nicol, who is a chef. She plays the cook on Downton Abbey. She’s a vegan. We had Elaine Hendrix, who’s a great vegan who is Alexis Carrington on Dynasty. We had Emilie de Ravin, who’s plant based and she is from the series, Lost. The list goes on and on. Again, I’m leaving people out and I don’t want to upset anybody.
Hope:
Were these all on New Day New Chef?
Jane:
New Day New Chef, Support and Feed edition.
Hope:
Oh the Support and Feed edition, okay.
Jane:
We have another season coming up in October with incredible chefs. Matthew Kenney, he’s one of the most brilliant restauranteurs, entrepreneurs and chefs in the world. He’s showcased along with a lot of other chefs. Once you watch New Day New Chef, you can watch New Day New Chef, Support and Feed.
Hope:
So you have also produced a really powerful documentary called Countdown to Year Zero and Sailesh Rao was involved. He has been on the podcast as well. It’s a feature length documentary at about under an hour. And it’s also available on Amazon Prime video. I’ve watched it twice now. I rewatched it this weekend, and it’s really dynamic and fast paced, which I can’t say for most documentaries. I think it’s really well done.
Jane:
Thank you.
Hope:
Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you’re focusing in on climate disruption because this is such a critical aspect of what we’re facing as a species and as a planet. And I actually started my vegan journey in the early 90s as an environmentalist. My first activism was with Earth First and protecting the old growth redwoods in Northern California. We knew the connection of climate change back then. We knew that animal agriculture was incredibly destructive on so many levels. It was really through the environmental community that I went vegan. So I love seeing what’s happening now in that environmentalists are finally recognizing and embracing veganism. Vegans are joining in with climate marches. The young people understand the importance of this connection. And it’s all coming together. These natural allies, these two movements are finally coming together. So it’s really awesome to see. And that’s what this film focuses on, Countdown to Year Zero. There’s incredible people in it: Jane Goodall, Paul Watson, Greta Thunberg, and of course, Jane Velez-Mitchel. So please tell us all about Countdown to Year Zero.
Jane:
Well, I was at the Rowdy Girl Sanctuary in Texas for a festival that the cattle ranch turned vegan animal sanctuary was having. And this guy gets on stage and it was a huge field. And I think this is a really important example of why what we do at JaneUnChained is so important because not that many people were listening because it was a very fun event and people were eating, and they were shopping, and they were scattered at all these tents. And this guy’s talking and I was going live. And what he said blew my mind. It was Dr. Sailesh Rao. He has Ph.D. from Stanford, he’s a systems analyst, and he was instrumental in the acceleration of the speed of the internet. I personally feel that he’s a genius.
He starts talking and he says that we’re going to create a vegan world and we’re gonna do it by 2026. We know why we have to do it. And we know when, by 2026, because that’s when, at the rate we’re going, we’ll have no wildlife vertebrates left on this planet because we’re destroying them all. We’re killing their habitats through animal agriculture. He said, “The only thing we need to figure out is how.” When he said that, I was like, “Hallelujah! Finally somebody is saying what we want to achieve.” If we are too meek to even state our goal, how are we gonna achieve it? We want a vegan world! In order to achieve anything, you need a by when. I know that as a reporter. Until I have a deadline, it doesn’t get done. And the deadline propels you. So I was just taken with his message.
So at some point he invited me and a bunch of other people to Coast Rica to look at a cattle ranch that has been reforested. This is really the primary thing that needs to happen. Most of the land that we have, we are using either for cattle grazing or to grow food to feed farm animals. So most of the land that’s being used in this world is being used, not to feed people, but to feed farm animals or in the process of grazing. That is the big problem because trees absorb carbon. This is happening in the Amazon right now. They’re burning down the Amazon to create cattle grazing land. They often say it’s for logging but that’s really a byproduct. They’re clearing the land for cattle grazing. So again, the best thing you can do to save the planet is to stop eating animals and their byproducts. It’s really that simple.
So anyway I was down there with him and somebody had asked me to videotape him for a possible documentary they were doing. I said, “Of course!” So I grab my camera and I started videotaping. And being the addictive personality that I am, I couldn’t just videotape a little bit. It’s very hard for me. I’m very black and white. I can do something not at all, or do it really over the top. So I just started videotaping and everything that came out of his mouth was like a gem! And I just kept videotaping and videotaping and putting the camera into the faces of everybody.
It turned out we had 12 people, including Dr. Rao and his wife. And we ended up coming up with a declaration of what the vegan world stands for, almost like a new constitution. It was very powerful. We were in this gorgeous place, one of the most biodiverse regions of the world. It was just amazing. It was just a magical experience to be there.
I ended up deciding to do a documentary about Dr. Rao because I think he really offers us solutions. Instead of us just beating our chests, he’s like, “Let’s plan what needs to happen in order to create a vegan world. Let’s do it the way engineers do it. Take all the issues that need to be resolved, and break them down into different categories and assign task force groups to those categories, and then subcategories.” This is how they deal with problems in the engineering world. I was like, “Great!” And then of course, you were involved. We were all there at Vegan World 2026 trying to come up with answers and asking the right questions.
He doesn’t have the answer to how we’re going to create a vegan world, what he has, is the answers to what is it we need to do to create a template in order to start constructing a vegan world. I really feel Countdown to Year Zero makes the environmental case that the best thing we can do for the environment is to move away from animal agriculture, to stop eating meat, to stop eating dairy. And it’s a message that I think that environmentalists are starting to get but there’s still a long way to go. There’s still a lot of resistance that I have personally encountered. I’ve been told to basically shut up about it at environmental events. So I did the documentary as a way of trying to make the case that you can turn off all the light bulbs and turn off your faucet while you’re brushing your teeth, but if you do not move away from animal agriculture, you really can’t call yourself an environmentalist or a conservationist.
Hope:
So a really moving part of the film are the pig vigils, where people are giving water and comfort to the pigs on the transport trucks that are bound for slaughter. It’s really heartbreaking to watch. I know that you’ve been to a lot of these vigils. What has been your experience there with these pig vigils? What’s it like and tell us a little about that.
Jane:
Well, it’s very interesting. My mother’s name was Anita and she lived to almost 100 and when she died, shortly thereafter, I met Anita Krajnc. She is my hero. She’s the founder of the Save Movement. She’s an extraordinary visionary and she’s in Toronto. She was the one who started the whole Save Movement. Basically she was walking her dog and she saw some pigs in a truck and she made eye contact. She happened to be a student of Tolstoy and Tolstoy says when you see suffering, you have a moral obligation not to turn away, not to ignore it, but to get closer, see if you can help, and even if you can’t help, to bear witness. And she made a pact with that pig and said, “I will bear witness.” And then it grew.
She was arrested for giving water and comfort to a pig. It became a big, big global story. And then these vigils started popping up all over the world. There’s almost 1,000 of them now and the goal is to have a vigil at every slaughterhouse in the world. And the one here near Los Angeles right outside downtown is the largest one. It happens twice a week, actually. And even now, during the pandemic, there’s social distancing ones. I haven’t gone to ones during the pandemic. I’m self-isolating. But I’ve gone to many many prior to that. And it’s heartbreaking, but it needs to be seen and so we go live. We have a rotating group. Because it is so emotionally difficult, we don’t have just one person go. My other heroes are people who go every week and who organize this. It’s a very difficult task. So we rotate and we try to show what this is, this truth bomb if you might call it that, to people who might be watching on Instagram or Facebook and just scrolling through and then they see that.
Once you see these babies, they’re 6 months old approximately when they’re sent to these torturous places. I mean the whole thing, it’s a long drive, they’re thirsty and they have no water, they’re packed in together, and sometimes they’re foaming at the mouth. Or in the deep cold of winter, they arrive with frostbite. It’s morally wrong! You cannot look at this and say this is ok. And that’s why people don’t want to look at it. They don’t want to see it. In fact, I tried to take a friend of mine who’s not vegan, a neighbor I’ve known for many years and she said, “I don’t want to watch a snuff film.” I just said, “Wow.” Yeah, wow. We have a lot of work to do.
It’s very important for us to get out of the vegan bubble and to go out and see, because while things are changing, they’re not changing as rapidly as they need to change. When this Coronavirus hit, I was trying to process it and figure out what it’s like. I talked to Dr. Rao and because he’s a big picture guy, he said, “This is nature doing an intervention. Nature is saying to the human race, go to your room. You’ve been bad. Think about what you’ve done. Come out more evolved. Or you’re finished. You’re done as a species.” And when he said that it made it all clear. It was like, “Yes!” This is part of the process. Nature is accelerating the changes that have to happen.
Hope:
That’s really powerful. So true. I fully agree. So Jane, since you have had so much experience and knowledge around media, I wanted to ask you about the importance of media in animal activism. Can you give some thoughts on why media is really crucial for outreach? Why social media influencers are so important right now? I started doing activism in the 80s and 90s and we didn’t have social media so it was very different back then. We were begging the nature and local news outlets to give us some kind of coverage. But now we have the power in our own hands. So I’d love to hear about how you feel about that and maybe even offering some tips.
Jane:
I would tell everybody, your phone and your laptop are your most powerful tools in changing the world. I’ve worked many many years. I’d like to be on the beach, reading a trashy novel, and eating vegan bon bons. We’re doing this because we have to do it. What I would urge everybody to do is if you’re not vegan, obviously, go vegan. It’s an adventure, it’s not a sacrifice. Just like I thought when I got sober, “I’ll never sing again, I’ll never go to a party again, I’ll never make a fool of myself again,” and I make a fool of myself every day with regularity. And now I remember it! It’s the same thing with going vegan. You’re gonna have great times in the kitchen. There’s so much versatility and variety. You don’t have to make the same thing over and over again. So if you’re not vegan, go plant-based.
And if you’re already vegan, become an activist. We need you. We have momentum right now. But you know the swing of the pendulum, it’s gonna go one way and then there’s gonna be push back. So if all of us, if every single vegan was, for example, taking a photo of every vegan meal, a pretty photo and posting it, right there, we would probably hit the tipping point tomorrow. Ok?
Somebody else said if we all just stopped drinking alcohol and took all the money we spend on alcohol, and put it right into activism, donating it to our favorite animal rights organizations, we would hit the tipping point tomorrow. So I would say to use your phone. Not everybody wants to see this content on television. The young people aren’t even watching television. I had a young activist staying here with me for two months and I would try to get her to watch television. I’d say, “Come here! Something really big is happening!” She was not interested at all. She was just on the computer, on the phone.
I would also say, brand yourself. One of the things that I would love to do is go to Veg Fest and speak and then toward the end say, “You all need to have a brand.” This is the world we’re living in. I didn’t make it up, but it’s better if you have a brand. Earthling Ed, he is an incredible speaker, but it also helps that he’s Earthling Ed. Right? Donna, she was being very snarky one day and I said, “You’re that snarky vegan girl.” She goes, “yeah, I am that snarky vegan girl.” As soon as she started calling herself That Snarky Vegan Girl, her Instagram following went way up. People even started commenting online, “Where’s Snarky? Where’s Snarky?” So people should brand themselves. It’s like a stage name, essentially. And so I’m Jane UnChained. It just allows them, when they’re on social media, to be more memorable.
Hope:
I’m Hope for the Animals!
Jane:
There you go! Hope for the Animals! Exactly! Honestly, I’ve known you for quite a while now, I don’t know how to spell your last name, but I can get to Hope for the Animals really quickly.
Hope:
Right!
Jane:
So I’d say, brand yourselves. Have fun with it.
Hope:
So Jane, we are going to have to wrap it up soon. I want to ask what do you see a post-pandemic world looking like? What gives you hope?
Jane:
Well, I feel like we are going to hit the tipping point. I think they say something like when 3.5% of the population is vegan, when we hit that tipping point, then the society changes. I think that the pandemic has accelerated that change. We know that plant-based meats are skyrocketing. We know that plant-based products in general are skyrocketing. So I feel that it’s gonna flip.
Already in some restaurants I go to in LA, you see that it’s mostly vegan but they don’t say they’re vegan. Maybe they don’t even know that they’re a vegan restaurant, they’re just naturally eliminating the meat. I saw a TV commercial the other day for a product and it was promoting vegetables in an easy to grab container and I thought, “Oh my god, they don’t even know they’re a vegan product,” you know? As the powers that be start to really see, you know, with this pandemic being a zoonotic disease and the evidence mounting, you’d have to really be in willful denial not to see how how terrible animal agriculture is, I think that the shift is going to occur. And I just urge everybody, do everything you can, every day.
The other thing I’d say is stop worrying about the three or four, I would call them “militant” meat eaters. We all have our three or four people that we have resentments against and that we want to change. Take all that energy and let them go, they’re on their journey, and put it to some low hanging fruit, people who are interested, people who are veg curious. Don’t waste your time with people who are completely shut down and won’t listen. Go to people who express interest.
Also use social media. Use social media.
Hope:
Yeah. Wonderful. You’re doing a fantastic job using social media to change this world. I’m so grateful that you were able to join us today. Thank you so much, Jane. You’re an inspiration and I’m just so glad you’re out there fighting the good fight for animals.
Jane:
And you too, Hope! So let’s do it together!
Hope:
Yes! Absolutely! Yeah!
Thank you so much for listening to the Hope for the Animals Podcast. I’ll be sure to include links to Jane’s work in the show notes. So go and check out her movies, and cooking shows and all that Jane UnChained offers. I’ll have links in the show notes, so check that out. I really hope this podcast was an inspiration to you and moves you to take action for animals, for the climate, for the planet and I hope that it moves you to help create a meaningful, vegan world.
