Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals Podcast sponsored by United Poultry Concerns. You can find all our other shows at our website, Hope for the animals podcast.org and I welcome your feedback and comments. My email is hope at upc-online.org.
On today’s podcast we have an interview with journalist Martha Rosenburg and we are going to talk about her in-depth research into pharmaceutical use in animal agriculture. I knew that they were using a lot of drugs on the animals, but I had no idea the kinds of chemicals and pharmaceuticals they were pumping into these animals, and how much the animals suffer from them as well. We often look at the Big Ag Pharma issues as human health issues only because we are taking in that stuff when people eat animal products, but these drugs can really harm the animals as well. So Martha will illuminate us on all that, and it makes me even more grateful that I have not been eating animals for 30 years and haven’t been ingesting all those chemicals. Yet another great reason to be vegan. It’s a really eye-opening interview.
But first I wanted to talk about a concept that has always bothered me since I have been thinking deeply about these issues. It’s an aspect of the Humane Hoax. The Humane Hoax is the subject of my book, and I pulled the definition here so that I could read it to you. The Humane Hoax is defined as new language and labels depicted in animal product marketing that convey a false narrative about the humane treatment and sustainable management of farmed animal operations.
The aspect of the humane hoax I want to talk about on this episode has to do with the contradiction or the cognitive dissonance of labeling meat “humane.” Labeling the flesh of a slaughtered animal as humane or implying in the labeling and marketing of meat that the animal had a happy life – the animal was happy – and this also applies to eggs and dairy products because the animals die untimely deaths in those industries as well.
People who are buying humanely labeled meat are essentially saying that as long as the animal had a good life and a swift end, that isn’t so bad that they were killed. Well, I’ve had a good life and I have lived much longer equivalently than most farmed animals ever get to live. So how about a quick death for me? And use my body for products for sale? No. Of course not. Even though my life has many more detrimental impacts on the earth than a chicken, we value human life and we would find it unacceptable to kill me just because of my usefulness, that I could be sold as product. This is Speciesism. It’s the false assumption of the superiority of one species over others. The right to live a full life is every animal’s birthright. Those chickens want to live, they will fight for life if threatened, they will fight for their families’ lives if they’re threatened, we have no right to take away their very lives.
If you really break down the humane meat phenomenon, it’s odd that people can show great concern for how farmed animals are treated while they are alive, and yet don’t seem to be bothered or troubled by their slaughter. This fact demonstrates the inability to recognize the normal various gradations of moral transgressions against one another with killing being the most immoral of acts. If you look at our criminal justice system, it’s based on the idea that punishment must be proportional to the crime, and we, as a society, have institutionalized varying gradations of punishment proportional to how serious we consider a crime to be. There is a general consensus around the entire world, pretty much, that taking another’s life is amongst the most serious of crimes, the most egregious. But farmed animals are somehow exempt from this gradation of transgressions.
The extent to which our society values human life is highly admirable. Why are nonhuman animals not afforded the same consideration? An animal has the same will to live as a human does. Animals have the same capacity to suffer as humans do. Animals have much the same consciousness, awareness, emotional complexity. Are they really so different?
Speciesism is at the core of this. Speciesism has made it normal to see animals as objects for commodification. We have denied some animals a place in our circle of compassion. Not all animals, for instance companion animals are now mostly considered basically family members with all the protections that that implies, but because we think of meat and dairy and eggs as “essential” farmed animals, they fall outside this circle of care and compassion and we fail to properly assess the gravity of the act of killing them.
There is a sense that it’s ok to kill a young, healthy farmed animal as long as they are treated well, the “one-bad-day” scenario. You hear this said by some humane meat farmers, that “Oh, our animals only had one bad day,” meaning the day they went to the slaughterhouse, even though we would never consider this ethical to do to our companion animals. I mean, killing our dog when they have just been alive a few months old like chickens or killing our cat when they are just a couple of years old like dairy cows.
The consideration that killing is the worst transgression is not limited to humans in our society. We have comprehensive anti-cruelty laws for companion animals, not only in the U.S. but all over the world to varying degrees, that also follows this illogical progression. In companion animal cruelty cases, the charges can become more severe, depending on if the animal was killed as a result of the neglect or abuse, sometimes going from misdemeanors to a felony if the animal died as a result of the neglect or abuse. So if you kill a dog, it’s considered cruelty so extreme in some cities and states that you could get felony charges and jail time, but kill a hundred cows a day, and you get a paycheck. We have made farmed animals exempt from our basic moral and ethical understandings of the degree and severity of offenses and have somehow, I think, compensated for what must be a nagging, unconscious cognitive dissonance with the compromise that farmed animals must be treated well while they are alive. And that’s kind of where we are now with humane labeling. And while this is a good first step in admitting that farmed animals suffer in animal farming, the logical extension of this thinking would be that we should not kill them at all, as killing is the worst of all acts that we can commit against one another.
We don’t extend the same recognition to farmed animals that is the cornerstone of our criminal justice system, that taking a life is the highest transgression, much worse than any crime that allows for the survival of the victim. Of course, these animals are completely innocent, and I hate having to compare them to the criminal justice system and the criminals, but it’s the best analogy, it’s the only place really where we analyze the morality of hurting and killing one another.
Life is an animal’s most cherished possession and animals, like humans, will fight to survive. Animals share similar behaviors to humans regarding their will to live. It’s absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, shelter, if you deny them the most basic right – the right to live out their lives, when you condone or are complicit in their slaughter. It makes no sense.
And I will add an important factor here that just because there is a humane label, certainly doesn’t mean that the animal didn’t suffer. And that’s a discussion for a whole other podcast – that I will get to probably. But if you want to learn more, I really encourage you to read my book The Ultimate Betrayal. It’s all about the totality of the humane hoax. But interestingly what we are talking about here – this part of the humane hoax – I feel is one of the more positive aspects. Humane labeling is saying that this company – the company that is using a humane label – that their animals are happy and all the other animals in farming are not, basically. It’s allowing society – it’s causing society – to accept that animals suffer in framing. That animals feel pain, that they experience trauma and physical and emotional distress, that they are not happy in farming. The logical extension of this thinking is that it is a violent violation to kill them. We’ll get there. I deeply believe we will get there.
To say that a human has the “right” to kill is speciesist. It is wrong to kill someone just because they are not human. Chickens and other farmed animals are sentient beings. Just because one species is culturally dominant and CAN kill another does not mean we SHOULD. It is unnecessary and we live healthier, longer and with way less ecological impact on a vegan diet.
OK, so here’s a question to offer as an example. Would you rather be murdered or assaulted with a baseball bat? I know, just horrible to think about. But bear with me here. Even though being beaten with a baseball bat would certainly be painful and potentially debilitating, potentially lifelong debilitation – most rational people, if faced with this horrible choice, would choose the beating over being killed. We want to live. We value life over any other consideration of well-being. Well, guess what. Animals do too.
To illustrate the point differently… Would you hit a pig with a baseball bat? Of course not, and it would generally be seen as unacceptable for a ‘pork producer’ to do so. You could go to the street and ask anyone, no matter their diet, if they think it would be ok for a pork producer to hit a pig with a baseball bat. They would say, of course, not. No, you can’t do that. So then why is it acceptable to inflict the much greater violation and kill the pig? It makes no sense. When it comes to farmed animals, we tend to consider the lesser infraction of animal cruelty, of inflicting pain, to be the greater moral wrong then the much greater transgression of killing the animal, of actually taking their life. Somehow we have distorted our moral compass when it comes to farmed animals, and we condone the killing of certain species and market the meat as humanely raised. But killing an animal who wants to live is anything but humane. It’s an illogical conflict of our morals. It’s in opposition to our ethics.
I have seen friends and family weep over the loss of their dog or cat, but then shed no tears and have not a second thought for the animals they will eat that same day who certainly suffered much more than their dog or cat ever did. But if they knew the chicken, and the misery she endured, and saw her suffering every day and saw her the same way they do a companion animal, they would likely also be distressed that her life cut short merely for a meal. Most people have compassion for helpless beings and don’t want to see them die, just like the injured bird who fell out of her nest. Just like the starving, stray dog. How are they different from a chicken? Most people’s window of compassion is only open for certain species. We need to open that window wide and let farmed animals into our concern. How can we, in good conscience kill when it is unnecessary? Causing another’s death when there is no need and in fact, is detrimental to our health and the health of the planet, it’s simply inconsistent with our ethics. Open your window of compassion and include all animals in your world of care and live vegan.
OK, I would like to introduce our guest now, we are happy to welcome Martha Rosenberg. She is a nationally recognized public health reporter who covers food and drug safety. She contributes to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Consumer Reports, Consumers Digest, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and other top publications. Martha has appeared on CSPAN, National Public Radio, she’s lectured at medical schools and universities. We are so happy to have her and her expertise with us today. So, welcome Martha Rosenberg.
Martha
Thank you so much Hope. I’m really happy to be with you and I have a lot of respect for United Poultry Concerns.
Hope
Thank you! We appreciate that and we have a lot of respect for you and all that you have done over the years writing extensively about animal agriculture in your work. And I want to get into that. But first, I’d love to know when and why you went vegan. And also maybe what got you into journalism. What is your story?
Martha
Well like many vegans, when I was a little kid I was just horrified to learn that the meat I was eating was from an animal. The idea just made me cringe. It was antithetical to loving animals but eat what’s on your plate. So that was one thing.
When I was also young like that, my mom took us to a dairy. And this was back when we had you know maybe manual milking, you know it was a ma and pa kind of a dairy. But I remember seeing these two newborn baby calves. And my mom said, “Oh, people eat them, it’s called veal.” Well, I never got over some of that.
And then, as I got a little older, I somehow saw a bullfight on TV. I don’t know why it was on TV. But anyway, I saw that. And all these factors came into play. Probably the most extreme factor for me was in 1970. I read an article about industrial or corporate animal farming. Modern farming, where, you know, the animals are drugged – the more modern. And this was known a long time ago. And they talked about how the turkeys have been bred so their breasts were so big that they couldn’t mate, and a couple of other things. And at that moment, when I was really pretty young, I just said – that’s it, I will never eat meat again. I will never support this system again.
Hope
What then drew you to journalism?
Martha
Once the internet began, there was a real need for content, and you know local community pieces – it kind of opened up for a lot of would-be journalists. And I began writing about Big Pharma, which I still write about – Big Pharma. And some of the news events that really spawned me into being a reporter were the Women’s Health Initiative where so many millions of women have been given hormones. And then, they said “Oops!” It causes cancer. And some of the exposés about what Big Pharma was doing to the public. And that was where I began being a reporter.
Well, I soon discovered that most of this Big Pharma stuff also applied to animals. So that’s sort of how I got into covering animal agriculture and all its horrors.
Hope
I know that you have written extensively about the chicken industry over the years. How did you get started doing that and what have you shared with readers about chicken agribusiness?
Martha
Well I should start by saying that I love birds, and I have two shelter birds myself, who I love more than any people on this earth so I am a bird lover anyway. But…
Hope
I think I heard them in the background earlier. What are their names?
Martha
Miguel and Julie. People should know that if you love birds and you would like a companion bird, they have shelters just like they do for dogs and cats. So you don’t have to patronize the pet stores. You can go to shelters. So that’s important for people to know. You can save, rescue them, adopt and give them a home.
Hope
Absolutely. There are particular bird rescues, and for different kinds of birds even. We have a specific pigeon rescue here in the Bay Area, so in your area there may be particular bird rescues.
Martha
And especially because the parrots and that family of birds, they live so long that sometimes their owners just don’t live as long as the birds and they need new homes.
So around 2005 or 2006, the mainstream media began exposing the egg industry. I’m sure you remember this Hope because it was really welcomed from our viewpoint. And they exposed the battery hen operations, the debeaking of the newborn babies, the crowded conditions, how the egg-laying hens lived among dead cage mates.
I was very horrified and began writing about it. More importantly, I began researching it and discovered that the trade groups for egg growers would fight any reforms that would help the poor animals. I was very horrified about the conditions of producing eggs and I haven’t eaten an egg for like fifty years.
Hope
Good for you. That’s great.
Martha
Thank you. But I was especially horrified at what happens to the newborn males at the hatcheries. And I say to anyone who will listen, my family and friends, that there is no such thing as an ethical egg no matter how the hen is raised because of what happens at the hatchery. The fact that just thousands of newborn little boy chickens, or chicks, are ground up at birth. You know, how can an industry like that even exist? And so that sort of propelled me to start writing about the egg industry which I have done for years. I think there have been some reforms but not at the hatcheries. xxx
Hope
Your articles you have exposed drugs that are used on chickens and other farmed animals like antibiotics, arsenic, hormones AND the diseases that they’re hiding, basically, that they are trying to cover. And this is of course very prevalent today with our current pandemic that we have and the connection to zoonotic diseases. Tell us more about this, how you got into this work of connecting Big Pharma and the drugs given to animals.
Martha
Well, as a reporter, of course, I am reading the agricultural journals. And I began reading a lot about Ractopamine which is a growth promoter given to not chickens, but given to turkeys and pigs and cows. And I began asking myself, what the heck is this? Obviously animal pharma is making a lot of money selling this, and yet I’ve never read about it in the press.
And I began digging around, and this is just one of many, many drugs that animal pharma gives the food animals. But this particular one, it’s an asthma-like drug and it promotes growth in the animals. Like several drugs… if you really dig into the records, Hope, it’s just shocking the leeway that animal producers take when it comes to drugs and animals. And specifically, a lot of the drugs that are given – and we know they’re given antibiotics and hormones and growth producers – and also vaccines – a lot of the drugs have the provision that it needs to be withdrawn from the food two weeks before the animal is sold to be eaten. And if you look at USDA and FDA records, you’ll see many, many citations where farmers have not withdrawn these drugs and there is residue in the meat of animals that people eat.
The drug Ractopamine, which is an asthma-like drug given to pigs, and cattle – or cows, and turkeys. And it was legalized in 1998 for pigs and then it was subsequently legalized for other animals. And as I began digging around the medical journals, and the veterinary journals, there were all sorts of studies saying that the animals are harmed, and that the animals can’t move, and they fall down, and they shake – it was just horrific for the animals regardless of whether it’s in residues of what people eat.
And as I dug further, I discovered that when the drug first was legalized for farmers to use, to make more money by putting more weight on their animals, many, many farmers called the drug maker and said, you know, my animals are dying on this. They can’t walk, you know, this and that, and this was never covered by the press. So that’s one of the first things I began covering. And luckily it did shed some light. I think that some meat is now called Ractopamine-free.
There is a corollary to this which relates to a lot of the meat that people eat in the U.S. which that overseas, none of the countries we might export to would take this meat with the Ractopamine and other chemicals that we use. So, they recognized the dangers whereas we didn’t. And I might add here, that the EU will not take our beef because of the high hormonal levels.
But getting back to Ractopamine, many people remember Temple Grandin, who was kind of a Ralph Nader of the slaughterhouse. I mean she obviously believed in killing animals, but she wanted to do it with reforms. And even she said that this Ractopamine was causing great harm to the animals, like they wouldn’t move, they couldn’t move, they became muscle bound. And there was rough handling, which of course is euphemistic for the sorts of things that are done to animals, such as moving them with forklifts. I kind of began with the Ractopamine.
Hope
Wow, that’s I mean, amazing. I didn’t know a lot of that, so thank you so much for your in-depth reporting on this. I’m curious about the antibiotics, if you could talk more about antibiotic use, because that’s something that, you know, is very prevalent, and people are concerned about. And we also have possible antibiotic resistance in humans that could cause another pandemic. This is certainly connected with what’s happening now. How have the drug makers gotten around FDA regulations with antibiotics? Tell us a little more about antibiotics.
Martha
The antibiotics story is one of the more shocking examples of the depths to which the livestock industry will stoop to keep their profits. About 2008 there were hearings on Capitol Hill because the FDA had wanted to reduce the use of a specific antibiotic, Fluoroquinolones. And they’re also used in humans. You don’t want to overuse them because you get resistance microbes. But antibiotics are a big profit center for Big Meat.
There was a hearing on Capitol Hill in which the FDA wanted to reduce, or restrict, or monitor this family of antibiotics Fluoroquinolones. And what happened was the turkey industry, the dairy industry, the poultry – uh, other poultry producers – the usual suspects – descended upon Capitol Hill. And they said to the FDA, we can’t farm without antibiotics. We can’t do it.
I’ll never forget this of course because of course it relates to poultry concerns, but the turkey trade group said that without the antibiotics, they couldn’t squeeze the animals together as we know they do now. And it would require more land, and it would require higher cost, and there would be more manure because one thing that people don’t necessarily understand about antibiotics is their effect on the intestines is such that farmers need to use less feed for the animals. They save a lot of money. That’s why animals gain weight on antibiotics. It’s a more efficient feed usage.
After these hearings, the FDA backed down and these special interest groups from the livestock and meat industries won. I was just shocked!
Hope
How is animal farming contributing to antibiotic resistance in humans?
Martha
This is very interesting Hope because it’s a mental issue of which veterinarians and doctors are on both sides of the question. The veterinarians – the large animal veterinarians – are pro antibiotic because they serve Big Meat. Whereas the doctors are horrified at how many microbes and pathogens have become resistant to our common antibiotics for humans.
You might remember, maybe ten years ago there was an exposé about pink slime? It was going to the school lunches because the school lunch programs buy the meat nobody wants. But this pink slime created quite a stir because what they were doing was treating the raw ground beef with ammonia puffs to kill E. coli. Now why are they using ammonia puffs? Because all the antibiotics don’t work anymore! Big Meat sells antibiotics by the ton.
Hope
I’m sorry, they were using what was it? Ammonia? What were you saying?
Martha
Yes, they were treating the ground beef with ammonia gas. Because of the way these poor animals are raised, and the slaughterhouse conditions, many – I’m going to say most – animals harbor bacteria. And E. coli is a very common bacteria found in many of the animals and a lot of the livestock. The E. coli is not killed by a lot of the antibiotics that once killed it because of the antibiotic resistance we’re talking about, because the antibiotics are no longer able to kill the E. coli, or maybe salmonella, and some of the other common pathogens in livestock. They were using the ammonia gas to kill the E. coli in the ground beef before they sent it to the national school lunch program.
Hope
Wow…
Martha
I laugh because it was so disgusting – and people for the first time realized that stuff is happening in livestock production. That’s just sickening on every level. It’s cruelty to animals, it’s disgusting to eat. And that was one example of the antibiotic resistance, it drove to the use of ammonia gas. About maybe five years ago – I think it was Tyson – I could be wrong, but it was a poultry producer – announced that they were no longer feeding arsenic to their turkeys. And most of the nation was like – no longer? We didn’t know they were doing that. You know?
Hope
Yeah…
Martha
And then so when I looked into that further, arsenic was being fed to turkeys to not only make them gain weight, but also to produce a certain color that was considered, um, appetizing to people who buy these things, and so the arsenic was also a de facto antibiotic.
And I might add here another thing… Some people don’t realize that fish also suffer and fish are also animals, and they eat salmon – which I’ve never eaten in my life – but one thing that farmed salmon does not have is that pink color that people think is natural. In point of fact it’s a pigment that’s given to the aquaculture raised salmon. I just mention that because we’re talking about the color of the turkey flesh.
The FDA continued to try to regulate antibiotics against all odds. And they did ban a few. One called Baytril that was given to chickens. They did ban it, but the sad fact is that it’s still found in residues – even this year or last year, so enforcement is an issue. The attempts of the FDA have really not worked to ban most antibiotics.
One attempt a few years ago was to have no more routine dosing of animals with antibiotics, requiring a prescription and a reason to give the animal the antibiotics. Well as that happened there were these farmers – and that’s “farmers” in quotes, “farmers,” because they’re really operators of, you know, sweat shops – but I call them farmers here – all they did was then say this animal’s sick, it needs antibiotics – and they lied – when in point of fact it’s for growth purposes cause they save money. The antibiotics I would say are really, really central to animal-based agriculture at least in this country. Probably in Europe – though I think there are a few more regulations there. I always say to people, if you knew the types of diseases that animals and farms are susceptible to – the ick factor alone would keep you from eating them even if you didn’t care about their suffering.
Hope
So Martha, you’ve written a lot about farm animal abusers, and the abuse of farmed animals and their suffering in animal agribusiness. Why is it that it so seldom ends in charges for the individuals or for the companies?
Martha
Well Hope that is a very, very good question because it explains some of the directions the animal rights movement has gone into. When I first began working in these areas probably more as an activist than a reporter, we would go to these rural locations where stories had been told about you know animals freezing to death on trucks. Or one example was hens put in wood chippers. And we’d go and we’d speak to the local authorities, let’s say district attorneys or prosecuting attorneys – and the response we got was a big yawn because animals there were for us to eat is what they think. And one of my colleagues said that he was so sick of looking at the bottom of the shoes of these legislators, because they have their feet up on the desk. They just didn’t give a darn.
And so what began to happen, what the animal rights movement realized was that they had to go directly to the food producers – whether it be a Wendy’s, or a Kentucky Fried Chicken, or a McDonald’s – and expose to the potential customers what is happening to these animals before they’re sold.
There were horrific stories that never resulted in charges. I always say that wherever you find animal abuse, on a farm, you also find worker abuse, environmental abuse, and probably a product of abuse is the person who eats it. They’re all very interconnected. So there was a huge – I call him the egg tycoon – Jack DeCoster – and he had many, many egg operations all over the country. Some of the eggs were recalled because they harmed people, but my focus was on the animals. And he had a particular egg operation in Maine that was so egregious that the local authorities did come in to raid it. And I found this so interesting, Hope, the people who went in to raid it – local law officials – fainted, and got sick and had to go to doctors just from being in those barns for a few minutes. And the animals are supposed to live there? And that’s of course from the ammonia, from the conditions. I always say if the law enforcers got sick from a few minutes – what about the animals? And also, what about the workers? And these workers at this particular egg farm in Maine were living in trailers with vermin. They were abused like the animals, and we should talk about slaughterhouses because they’re the same thing – but any operator who is willing to abuse animals is also willing to abuse workers and vice versa.
During Covid-19 there was a lot of focus on slaughterhouses because so many workers came down with the virus. It draws attention – or it should draw attention – to the conditions in these places which are egregious. A big meat producer – I believe it was Smithfield but it could have been Swift, in North Carolina – had a program to allow prisoners to leave their cells – tight security felony prisons – to leave their cells to work in the slaughterhouse because it was that difficult to get workers to do that type of work. And the prisoners would not do it, they literally said no, we’d rather stay in our cells. That’s how bad the slaughterhouses are. Cheap meat and the slaughterhouses are very reliant on worker abuse. And the slaughterhouses are no place that anyone who wants to drive by much less work in.
One more thing I really would like to add Hope, if we have time, because I think it’s so relevant, is bird flu and mass diseases from the industrial farms. In 2014, 15, and 16, the US experienced a major avian flu epidemic, which was hidden from the public to a large extent. If you read what happened, the animals – the birds – were gassed and depopulated in the millions. And yet the news never really hit the public because so many of the mainstream news advertisers are meat producers, or process producers, who don’t particularly want their customers to see big piles of “depopulated” animals. The depopulation of these poor birds is done with a fire extinguisher foam-like material that suffocates them. Again, this was kept out of the news. Millions and millions of innocent birds, many of which were only killed for prevention because the greedy farmers didn’t want their whole flock to become infected. So if one got infected, the whole flock would be killed because to these farmers the animals are just as disposable as heads of lettuce. They don’t think of them as sentient beings.
The avian flu was very much hidden and will happen again because of the crowded, antibiotic-based farming seen in the US and other industrialized countries.
Hope
Good point. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about animal-free meats, like the Impossible Burger, and Beyond Burger and all these meats that really mimic meat and are seen as gamechangers and many believe they can really speed the transition to a vegan planet. But there are detractors and some groups are attacking these plant-based meats. Who are they, and why do you think this is happening?
Martha
So, plant-based meats, I believe, are wonderful. I think the people who developed those plant-based meats realized they could create food that tasted just as good without the animal suffering and slaughter, without the worker suffering, without the environmental impacts. The plant-based meats are being bashed by… well this is ironic, Hope, that the big meat producers – such as Conagra, and Tyson, and Purdue, and you know the usual suspects, they’re kind of moving into that because they realize that their business model of murdering animals and bringing in illegal workers and abusing them, and polluting the environment, isn’t going to work anymore, so some of them…
Hope
Well, yeah, it’s a moneymaker, it’s what’s being demanded, so that’s why their interested in.
Martha
Right, right. So they’re not as much threatened by the plant-based meat as are the smaller producers who are trying to say, well, it’s not organic, and it’s GMO, and it’s not healthful, and it’s quote-unquote fake, and it’s Silicon Valley – and I am very offended by that because a product that does not require slaughter is, for me, ipso facto a better product. That is non-negotiable.
Hope
Right. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that that needs to be the number one concern right now. And that’s what these plant-based, mimicking meats address. They don’t slaughter animals to create the Impossible Burger, or the Beyond Burger. And that should be our number one concern. I think once have the animals free of suffering, then we can talk about the health aspects and other things. And we certainly can do that along the way. Make it a little healthier, maybe get them to change – to not using GMOs. But I think those concerns, like you said, should be secondary at this point. And we should be promoting animal-free meats any way that we can.
Martha, this has been a really wonderful conversation. We do have to wrap up soon, and I wanted to ask you, what gives you hope?
Martha
I get hope from young people, Hope. Because if you look at not just millennials but generation A – you see a lot more vegan awareness and vegans. And I think I’ve seen the numbers at maybe eleven percent. It just doesn’t compute if you’re against racism and you’re against homophobia, Islamophobia, ageism and sexism. Speciesism is in there, and I think a lot of the young people kind of see that. So that gives me quite a bit of hope.
I don’t know really too many young people who are meat lovers. And so that’s a wonderful trend.
Hope
Well, Martha, it’s been a really wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.
Martha
Well, thank you, Hope. I know that we believe both so much in these issues and it’s wonderful to reach some people with this podcast
Hope
Thank you so much for being on, Martha Rosenberg.
And thank you for listening to the Hope for the Animals Podcast. You can support this podcast by leaving a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts, you can also support us with a donation to upc – online.org. Please have hope for a better world for animals and live vegan.
