Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety

By Moby, Miyun Park, Brendan Brazier and 6 more

The musician and activist offers “a collection of compelling, well-researched essays . . . shining light on the world of agribusiness” and Big Meat (Publishers Weekly).
 
For everyone from omnivores to vegans, this eye-opening guide offers food for thought on today’s meat industry. Moby, renowned musician and passionate vegan, and Miyun Park, leading food policy activist, bring together experts from diverse backgrounds including: farming, workers’ rights activism, professional athletics, science, environmental sustainability, food business, and animal welfare advocacy. Together, they eloquently lay out how industrial animal agriculture unnecessarily harms workers, communities, the environment, our health, our wallets, and animals.
 
In the tradition of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Gristle combines hard-hitting facts with a light touch and includes informative charts and illustrations depicting the stark realities of America’s industrial food system.
 
Contributors include:

• Brendan Brazier
• Lauren Bush
• Christine Chavez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez
• Michael Greger, MD
• Sara Kubersky and Tom O’Hagan
• Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé
• John Mackey
• Danielle Nierenberg and Meredith Niles
• Wayne Pacelle
• Paul and Phyllis Willis

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781595585905

Book preview

Introduction

Moby

In some ways I wish that I had more objectivity regarding the subject of this book. But alas, I have an agenda. I’m a vegan and animal protection advocate. (This almost sounds as if I’m at a meeting of Vegans Anonymous: Hi, my name’s Moby, and I’m a vegan.) My agenda is simple: to one day be the first democratically elected dictator of the world and its satellite, the moon.

Oops. That’s a different agenda. My agenda as regards animals and animal welfare is also simple: to end animal suffering. My agenda had its nascence when I was quite young and I first heard the golden rule: Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. That’s the golden rule, right? When I was young, this made a lot of sense to me in an uncluttered and beautifully selfevident way.

But it then begged a follow-up question: who are these others referred to in the golden rule? Should this golden rule only apply to me and my family? Should it extend to friends? Strangers? And what about animals? To my young mind, it seemed inconceivable that I would extend the golden rule to strangers, but not to the animals in my house (three pet rats, two dogs, three cats, and a cranky iguana).

I loved the animals in my house, so I decided that I should extend the golden rule to them. Which then begged another followup question: If I don’t want the animals in my house to suffer, well, then, what about the animals who don’t live in my house? Shouldn’t the golden rule apply to them as well? So, at an early age, I decided that the golden rule should probably extend to all animals who seem to have the capacity to suffer.

Years later, when I was a pretentious philosophy student, I read about Pascal’s wager. Pascal, a French philosopher, basically posited that it made more logical sense to bet on God’s existence than to bet on God’s nonexistence (kind of a shaky theological premise, but an interesting logical position).

I took the logic of this and applied it to my extension of the golden rule to humans and animals. I decided that it’s probably a better bet to extend compassion as far and wide as possible, as opposed to restricting the lengths to which I was willing to extend compassion.

Later I was able to expand upon my golden rule extension, and I came up with a happy little logical-sounding catchphrase to justify my veganism and animal protection advocacy: Death is unavoidable, but suffering is avoidable. Just as I hope to avoid unnecessary suffering in my life, I can assume that all beings capable of suffering also hope to avoid it; therefore, we should do our best to prevent suffering.

As I got further into veganism and the animal protection movement, I found that my decision to be an animal advocate was also supported by a lot of nonanimal welfare criteria.

That’s what this book is about, the rarely publicized ramifications of industrialized farmed animal production and meat, egg, and milk consumption on the environment, human health, communities, workers, taxpayers, zoonotic diseases, global warming, global hunger, and, of course, the animals themselves.

There are huge and egregiously well-financed interests who want to keep the truth of animal production hidden. (Although, who knows, maybe some of these egregiously well-financed interests are currently sitting in the corporate bathroom reading this introduction. If so: hi, thanks for reading.)

We don’t have their money, but we have two very powerful things: naiveté and the truth. Hopefully, if enough people find out about the hidden ramifications of industrialized farmed animal production, we’ll eventually see a shift away from supporting these destructive industries, which would lead to a healthier, cleaner, and more humane world. That’s my agenda. Hopefully, it’ll all make more sense after you read the book.

Thanks,

Moby

New York City, 2009

Moby is one of the world’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful musicians. Known for his political and social activism, he has been a vegan for more than twenty years.

"If we want a healthier diet, and I say this as a livestock producer, we must move to a diet less centered on animal products.

Moving away from grain-fattened livestock will reduce corn and soy acreage, making more land available for staple food crops, rangeland and forests."

¹

—Jim Goodman, W.K. Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow and organic beef and dairy farmer

1

Health

Brendan Brazier

Unlike most other fifteen-year-olds in Vancouver, my priorities didn’t revolve around football games against high school rivals, dating, or who would win the 1990 Stanley Cup. But, like most kids my age, I was a bit obstinate and a bit reluctant not to question authority.

So, as a serious, young athlete who already knew that I wanted to compete as a professional Ironman triathlete, I found the pro-meat mantra of my coach and trainers a little hard to swallow.

An Ironman triathlon consists of a 3.2-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile marathon. I didn’t need a coach to tell me that I had a huge amount of training ahead of me. Given how much time I would need to invest in preparing my body for professional competition, I knew that, to get a head start, I needed the most effective training program possible. Since imitation can be the highest form of flattery, I looked at the training programs of some of the top professional Ironman triathletes in the world, with the plan of mimicking their routine. To see what elevated the best from the rest, I also looked at the training regimens of those with respectable, yet average, performance. What I found surprised me: the average athlete’s program differed very little from the elite’s.

If training discrepancies were minimal and natural talent can only get you so far so fast, what caused some athletes to pull out ahead of the pack?

The most significant difference I found between the upper echelon of elites and the moderately performing athletes had nothing to do with training; it was all about recovery. Breakthrough performances are hinged on the rate at which the body recovers from physical training—which makes sense. Training isn’t much more than breaking down muscle tissue, so it stands to reason that the athletes who can restore theirs the quickest will have the advantage by being able to schedule more workouts closer together. Over just a few short months, that extra training will translate into a significant performance gain. Realizing this, recovery became my focus.

As surprised as I was to discover that there were few differences in training routines between the best and the average athlete, I was even more so when I learned that diet has the single greatest impact on recovery: food choices can account for up to 80 percent of the total recovery process. If cleaning up my diet was a principal component to becoming a professional athlete, as I speculated it might be, I needed to learn more. With this newfound appreciation for diet, I decided to take mine more seriously and, for the first time, developed an increasingly growing interest in health and nutrition.

In those early years, I experimented with many different nutritional philosophies, ticking them off as I methodically continued my search for the diet that would give me the results I was looking for. At long last, I tried a purely plant-based diet. Right from the outset, my meat-, egg-, and dairy-free diet was unexpectedly met with extraordinary resistance by friends, coaches, and trainers. They all seemed closed to the possibility that a plant-based diet could support the high physical demands of professional Ironman training and racing, and I found their adamant stance intriguing. They assumed that a diet free of animal products was either too low in protein, iron, and calcium or deficient in vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids.

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As only a stubborn teenager can, I set out to prove them wrong— and succeeded. I completed my first triathlon in 1993 as a high school competitor. In 1998, at 23, I began my professional career, going on to place eighth in Ironman Utah and third in the National Long-Course Triathlon Championships, and twice winning the Canadian National 50km Ultra Marathon Championships.

Throughout my research, training, dietary experimentation, and competition, I’ve benefited enormously on a professional level from adopting a diet free of meat, eggs, and dairy products, while, unknowingly, improving my overall health and protecting myself from the many diet-related diseases and disorders that have become commonplace in North America.

According to estimates published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Preventive Medicine, meat consumption accounts for up to two-thirds of the high blood pressure cases in the United States, about one-quarter of the heart disease cases, maybe 40 percent of certain cancer cases, one-third of the diabetes cases, up to three-quarters of all gallbladder operations, most of the food poisoning cases, and half the obesity cases.

Those who eat meat are twice as likely to become