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June 6, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:08:27
Frederic Leroy
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Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Delingpole, and I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
Actually, Professor Frédéric Leroy has been on my list of people to get.
Can you remember who it was, Frédéric, who recommended you?
Somebody said you've got to get him on the podcast.
It may have been David, no?
I don't know.
I'm quite scatty.
But anyway, I'm really, really pleased to have you on the pod because you're going to talk about something slightly different from the usual fare.
And yet I think everything connects.
And I think that what's going on in the area you're about to talk about connects with the climate change scam, with the coronavirus scam.
It's all part of a bigger A bigger problem.
So just tell me a bit about yourself first, about your academic background, and then we'll move on to the chase.
Right.
So I'm a food scientist.
I'm a food scientist and technologist at Brussels University.
So I study food.
And I happen to be, my expertise happens to be in the area of animal source foods.
So meat in particular.
So I've been looking at meat since I started my PhD, basically, as a meat scientist.
And so rather, you know, technical research about quality and safety.
But knowing how meat is produced, where it comes from, what it means nutritionally, what it means with respect to production systems, is part of my background.
So I got confronted with what happens in mass media and what happens at policy levels, where meat suddenly becomes something that has to be reduced or eliminated.
And I found that very interesting, because I know where meat is coming from, I know what it means, I know what its implications are, and it just didn't make sense, scientifically speaking.
And yet we see also that also within academia many high-profile scientists start to identify meat as something intrinsically problematic.
So I found that rather interesting and that's why I also started to explore and also broaden my expertise by working together with people from the humanities, so communication specialists and anthropologists, and trying to figure out what was going on because this was not normal.
It's funny, hearing you describe how you got where you are reminds me very much of Bjorn Lomborg who, I don't know whether you've read his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, but he goes through a similar thing where he's bought into all these environmental narratives and then one day he decides to take his class and show him why Climate skeptics are wrong and they're anti-science.
And he realizes that the science does not support, the evidence does not support, the case for climate change.
And what you're saying, I suspect, is that the narrative you read in the media, that meat is bad for you, that we've got to cut down, has no scientific basis.
Well, there is a scientific basis, there is a complicated scientific context, but it's taken out of context and it's sloganized and it's reduced to simple statements that don't make any sense.
So, the science, let me be clear, I mean, there is work in progress in agriculture, right?
I mean, animal source foods are produced according to certain systems and they need to be improved.
I'm not saying everything is fine, but the same is valid for the plant agriculture.
We just have more and less sustainable systems and we need to work on them.
But trying to create this binary division that states that the plant foods are almost perfectly benign for us and then the other ones are almost intrinsically bad, that's not scientific.
And the interesting part is that by entering this debate through the The window of diet, let's say.
You bump into the same, the exact same actors that you find in the climate debate and in the other debates.
You bump into the same institutions, the same organizations.
And one day I was reading the works of Corrie Morningstar, who has been looking at the sustainable development part and how that is all shaped and controlled by certain, you know, PR companies and transnational corporations and institutions.
And she was mapping the network.
So she was identifying and interrelating the different actors.
And I was finding the exact same organizations as the ones I was finding in my dietary explorations.
So this means that something is going on at the more systemic level, that it's not only about the diet, but it's about using the diet for transition schemes that some architects are designing for us.
Let's get there slowly, because let's go on the kind of, I always get my macrocosmic and microcosmic scales mixed up, but whatever it is, let's focus on the meat first of all, and the diet.
Now, there are some things that everyone knows, everyone knows, because it's been rammed down their throats in the media, that too much red meat is bad for you.
That we must cut down on our meat because it's like we eat too much of it.
That what else?
Meat gives you cancer.
Yeah.
And that a plant-based diet is what we really should be aiming for because we can be just as healthy and it's great.
And you know, why don't we all go, well, we used to say vegan, but they didn't like that word.
So let's all go plant-based.
Tell me where all this comes from.
Well, I think it's interesting to ask two main questions here.
So two essential questions.
The first one is, why is it that what used to be an anti-establishment movement and something in the margin of society being vegetarianism, it was something that was in the margin of society.
How is it possible that suddenly it becomes mainstream and that it's on top of that endorsed by By the highest institutions globally.
How did that happen, first of all?
Because if it's something that is really threatening and weird, the powers that be will try to suppress it.
They will not give it a platform.
The only reason why it reaches the status of being all over the place and also on the front pages of magazines and newspapers is because some Vested interests think it's a good idea, otherwise it would not happen.
Dangerous ideas are suppressed and not given a platform.
So that's something bizarre.
The second question is, why is it that the foods that have always been looked at as the most valuable ones, animal-sourced foods, With all their symbolism, all their connotations of vitality and strength and sensuality, why certainly those ones turn out to be the worst for us in a couple of decades that has flipped around.
How is that possible?
Something must be going on because this is contradicting our entire history as humans and the way we used to look at food.
So how did that happen in such a short window?
So there are dynamics at play that are clearly not just spontaneous or organic.
I mean, this is not happening because of a spontaneous evolution within society.
Something has been manipulated so that the public narrative has become something completely out of touch with the actual ideas and perceptions and notions that live within society.
I sometimes make the mistake of thinking that plant-based is going global.
It's not going global.
It's going global in mass media and in policy documents, but it's not going global in the public.
The public is not there.
I mean, the public is not interested in going plant-based.
It's only a niche within the public that endorses the transition.
Most people are not.
But yet, that's what we see amplified in this course.
That's an interesting contrast.
I was nodding there when you said, like I knew this, but I didn't know this, where you said that the public is not going along with this plant-based thing.
Is that right?
Do we have evidence to show that?
Well, we see that the consumption patterns are not really affected all that much.
What happened is that people have shifted their meat intake from mostly, you know, whatever was red meat is shifting towards poultry.
That's a trend within the West and maybe globally as well, poultry goes up.
But it's not that total meat consumption is decreasing or falling.
It decreases a little bit, but not substantially.
And even the plant-based market is a very small market.
It's increasing rapidly if you look at the percentages, but that's because you start from a low base and those numbers are increasing rapidly.
But as a substantial total amount, it's not really very meaningful.
Yes, I had a medical treatment a few years ago which where it was suggested that to help me have a sort of low inflammation diet, I should go vegan for, I think, three months.
And it was the three most miserable months of eating I've ever spent in my life.
And at the same time, I read in the newspapers, I mean, it was just when you started getting loads of articles saying plant-based and there were these kind of Groovy young kids who did this plant-based cookbook that everyone was getting.
I can't remember what it was called, but I got it.
And you know, I sort of did the chili con carne recipe.
And it was like, they were just trying to make up for the fact that they hadn't got meat.
That was what they were trying to do.
And this was their problem throughout.
They were doing a cookbook, but it was missing a key ingredient.
And that key ingredient was meat.
You need meat.
It makes everything better.
And yet, So who's behind this propaganda campaign?
Because it's obviously not accidental.
No, and it's very complicated to explain it.
So it needs a careful exploration.
And there are many actors involved, and you see many front organizations.
But when you look behind all those complicated names and different messages, you always bump into the same couple of institutions.
So it is partly orchestrated.
It's not a conspiracy as such.
You know, a hidden group that secretly controls everything.
It's all in the open.
It's clear.
It's basically a combination of a couple of factors and different fractions.
I'll be more specific in a while, but basically it boils down to profit and ideology and technocracy coming together.
And those may be different players.
They may overlap to a certain degree.
But it's this alignment of interests, different fractions that find each other and have found a model for society that they all can endorse because it's interesting for all of them.
And they all have their specific reasons, they all have their specific historical trajectories that basically go back to the late 1960s, mostly as far as the technocracy is concerned.
Because it starts with the idea of the Club of Rome.
We have this planet, and the resources are depleting, and we have to change it.
Population growth is a problem, resources deplete.
So, with the Club of Rome in 1968, and then the Limits to Growth document that was published a couple of years later, We come up with the simulations where scientists will have to redesign how we behave.
So it's going back to the Club of Rome and since foundations like the Rockefeller, because the Rockefellers were very
close to the Club of Rome, David Rockefeller in particular, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Resources Institute, and many others have been on that track of trying to make new plans for the planet, to optimize things from a pseudo-scientific point of view, because it's all about top-down simulations that are completely disconnected from the complexities of reality.
So that's one thing.
And then maybe it's good to mention also that already in In 69 there was another report, again Rockefeller connected, John Rockefeller III in particular, the brother of David Rockefeller.
He set up a commission which was initiated on the demand also of Richard Nixon at the time and it was called Population Growth and the American Future or something along that line.
And if you look at that report, it's very interesting, because back then, already in 1969, they came up with the idea that food has to be produced in factories.
So they clearly say, black and white, very specifically, food has to come from factories and we need synthetic meat.
That was already in the document.
So they labeled it already synthetic meat long before Bill Gates came up with synthetic beef.
It was already part of the mindset of those people.
For decennia, they have been working on that idea.
And now it's coming together in the United Nations Food Systems Summit, where you'll find the same players as back then.
On the way, they have also been amplified by specifically the Rio conference with Maurice Strong at the time.
Who founded UNEP.
So that's where you also get the United Nations Environment Program in the whole story.
And what Strong did was connect the idea of sustainable development, population engineering and so forth with profit.
Because he was an oil businessman.
So he was into oil business and he saw He came up with an idea of private-public partnerships and sustainable developments, he called it.
Sustainable developments mean that you're going to make money by greenwashing and so forth, essentially.
I mean, the ideas are presented as something noble, but in practice it's always about making profit based on, you know, the solutions you come up with.
So the corporations that are mostly Basically polluting the planet or the ones that now offer the solution, the same ones.
And with food is the same thing.
And so it came a bit later.
But Maurice Strong at the time installed this idea.
He was very much involved in organizations, again, the same ones, the World Resource Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, the World Economic Forum, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
I could go on.
But all those organizations that Strong initiated and connected to this idea of sustainable development, now are the ones that are also shaping the science and the dialogue around meat and food.
And you'll find them reshaped in things like the Global Commons Alliance or the EAT Foundation and so forth, which are now setting the agenda within the United Nations Food Systems Summit.
So that's one main track that connects basically this technocracy and the profitable model of sustainable development.
And then you have also the influx here of ideologists that are more on the side of animal rights and they have That vision that they would like to connect our diets also to the concept of transhumanism and effective altruism and that whole cultish idea that lives a lot in Silicon Valley and so forth.
So you have all these young billionaires and, you know, very rich people that invest in their ideologies and they come up and the money, so the flux of the money, passes through such things as the Open Philanthropy Project and so forth.
And they have come up with the strategy that we have to replace animal-sourced foods by their Analogues, which they create in labs, so food factories, as in the report from the Rockefeller Commission back then.
So that makes sense according to the original plans.
And it also brings in movements that are able to create an ideological narrative that becomes popular.
Because what happens as a next factor is that the zeitgeist simply now is The conditions of possibility to go to such extreme visions have been created.
So there's something within society as well.
It's not only the top-down people that try to engineer things.
It's also society as such somehow is in a crisis.
There is a crisis.
We feel it in many things.
We face scapegoating mechanisms, we face class anxiety, there's all kinds of trouble going on.
So all that together is, you know, I'm boiling it down to a couple of ideas here, it's more complicated than this, but basically this is what it's mostly about.
Technocracy, profit, ideology coming together.
Yeah, I was going to write a book about 2020 and I was going to call it A Perfect Storm of Stupid, and what you described then just adds to the mix.
A Perfect Storm of Stupid, you've got animal rights activists.
Am I right in thinking that animal rights activists and all these kids who think that it's kind of sexy and cool to go vegan, go plant-based, are essentially the tools or useful idiots of much, much bigger, more sinister organizations.
Yes.
Yes.
It's not a bad way of describing it because, okay, some people are of course generally invested in trying to improve animal welfare and all that is, all that makes sense in a way because indeed maybe some things have to be done because not everything is great.
But indeed, that movement has been hijacked, co-opted by bigger forces.
And it's no coincidence that in, for instance, if you look at the EAT Foundation, we can come back to the EAT Foundation if you wish, but the EAT Foundation is basically the foundation that came up with a planetary health diet.
So they want to install that one diet on the planet, which is near vegetarian.
So we can come back to that if you wish, but on their advisory board, you'll find somebody from Blackrock, for instance.
I mean, huge, huge money.
Yeah, BlackRock and Vanguard are basically, they control the global investment economy.
They do, yes.
They are called the largest shadow bank.
So they manage, I don't know how many trillions of assets, or at least they can influence trillions of assets.
So what are they doing on the board of a foundation that looks into sustainable diets, if it were not because money is involved?
And you'll find also like the EAT Foundation is also associated with the World Business Council Sustainable Development.
Once again it goes back to Maurice Strong, but today they linked with the EAT Foundation through an initiative called FRESH.
And within FRESH you will find all the major food processors, all the big ones, the big multinationals, you'll find them there.
So suddenly they're all interested in sustainable plant-based heating and you see that their marketing is using it as well.
So they're coming up with those No, nice plan-based narratives and their companies are going to follow and save the planet and then they're producing, you know, junk food.
Yeah.
Mostly.
Yes.
Tell me, taking a step back, I mean, I've Through talking to people like Ivor Cummins, who you must be familiar with, I've become increasingly aware that the narrative about meat is just false and that actually a meat-based diet, it's got most of the nutrients you need and you end up, well, you produce a different form of fat, don't you?
It's not like the unhealthy visceral fat that you produce, it's good fat.
And you're gonna be healthy if you have a lot of meat.
Is that right?
Well, it depends on your dietary context, frankly speaking.
It's meaningless to say that meat is bad.
I mean, if you eat deep fried nuggets all day, that's not going to be very good for you.
But if you eat, you know, mostly unprocessed red meat or minimally processed red meat, that's just fine.
It's the food that we've been eating since, you know, since three millions of years, let's say.
It's in the end, it's unbelievable that we're trying to restrict our diets because that's what we're doing.
We're restricting our diets and throwing out a category of one of the most nutrient-dense foods available, you know, because animal-sourced foods have the advantage of being very robust foods with respect to essential nutrition.
So they bring you not only protein, because we reduce the conversation very often to the fact that we have to replace protein.
It's not about protein.
Protein is just one of the factors.
It's about essential nutrition.
So meat contains vitamins, it contains minerals, it contains all sorts of bioactive compounds like Like taurine and carnosine and carnitine and creatine.
People haven't even heard about those but they do things in our body.
I mean they have bioactive effects and so if you throw up
meat let's say and we're not even talking about the other foods but if you just throw out meat you're just taking up robustness from your diet because to replace all that all that package of nutrients with plants it's complicated and it doesn't work for everybody maybe some people will manage but it doesn't work for everybody especially within vulnerable populations so what is what's really irresponsible here is the fact that we're spreading this and and we with we i mean
those plant-based agendas, they're specifically targeting the youngest generations as well, the ones that need the nutrients the most.
Yes.
I mean, I think one of the problems that the plant-based food movement faces is that if you look at the typical person who eats so-called plant-based food.
They look not very healthy.
They're pasty.
They don't look robust.
Is that fair?
I mean, there are problems with a vegan diet, are there not?
Well, again, if you choose for a vegan diet, I hesitate a bit to generalize it because Potentially, people can be okay on it if they really take care of the combinations of foods, if they supplement well.
It's just making your life more difficult because you have to mind all those different nutrients that you need.
And on top of that, everybody's different.
I mean, my nutritional needs are different from yours.
That is because you can have certain precursors within the diet that have to be converted in your body to the active components.
And those conversion processes are not the same for everybody.
So it could be that what works for some people doesn't work for others because their internal conversion is not all that great.
Now, animal source foods have the advantage of already having converted, because they're animals, right?
Having already converted most of those plant precursors into the bioactive compounds and you have them directly.
If your body has to do it, it's not always working that great.
So in many cases, we see it also with vegan influencers that after a while, they just give up because they feel that their body is not following.
And we know that most of the people that have gone vegan finally give up after a couple of months, after a year, and only very few continue.
And the ones that continue, sometimes they run into serious difficulties.
Like what?
What happens?
Well, you can have, of course, things like B12 deficiency.
Deficiency is a classic one, right?
But the thing with B12 deficiency is that it can take time until you see the problems, which are neurological and it's a couple of, you know, series of problems.
But it may take time because it's one of those that your body somehow is buffered against.
And it's only over time that you start to deplete Deplete your reserves and so forth.
So for some things it takes time until you see the effects.
But you can have protein malnutrition, so loss of muscle mass.
You'll have iron deficiencies.
you may have a series of problems because you make your diet just very often also very low in fat, as you experience yourself, right?
So your fat levels go down a lot and your protein levels go down a lot.
And the effect is, of course, that you're always hungry and you're always... So you can formulate wholesome plant-based diets.
It's possible.
And some people may do well on it.
I mean, I'm not arguing that it's going to be bad for everybody.
It's a restrictive diet and that's what it is.
And it's dangerous if you're in If your needs are higher, you know, elderly specifically suffer from sarcopenia that really need quality protein and lots of it.
Those people may run into difficulties because we often say that we eat too much protein in the West anyway.
It's not true.
We don't eat too much protein in the West anyway.
Many people suffer from protein malnutrition because we look at that recommended daily allowance which is set At a minimal level, just to avoid lean muscle mass loss.
And that minimal level may already be an underestimation, but it is not the optimal level.
If you want an optimal level, especially if you're metabolically already not really healthy, you need higher levels.
And that may be double the dose, for instance.
So a lot of the Western population, maybe even when I was a majority, would benefit from more protein, not less protein.
Protein quality is very different if you look at grains and lentils versus animal source foods.
Yes, tell me, why are we so fat in the West?
I mean, somebody put on Twitter the other day a photograph of a beach in the 1970s.
Nobody was fat.
You look at street scenes, nobody is fat.
Why are so many people often clinically obese now?
And obesity is just one part of the problem, because it's more than obesity.
Obesity is a manifestation of a deeper problem, which has to do with hyperinsulinemia and, you know, metaflammation in the body.
So it is about poor metabolic health.
And how do you get the poor metabolic health?
Well, it's We don't really know exactly, but it probably has to do with the status of the Western diet, which means that it's ultra processed foods.
It's lots of refined starches and sugars and vegetable oils and frying and who knows what.
And then the lack, maybe also of essential nutrition.
And that puts your body in a compromised state, and that translates into those metabolic diseases to the point that in the United States, for instance, we have Only a very small minority of a bit more than 10% that is still metabolically in inoptible health.
10%?
So 90% of the US population is metabolically compromised?
Yes, they're not necessarily translating it into disease yet, but certain parameters within the body are starting to move into dangerous directions.
So it's a matter of time for most of those people.
I know that, for example, that one of the problems is Ansel Keys, that he was responsible for driving diet in a negative direction.
Tell me a bit about him and what he did.
Well, Ancel Keys is the one that came up with the link between saturated fat and heart disease, cardiovascular diseases.
And that was by looking at different countries and seeing that in the countries where they eat most saturated fat, you have more heart disease and in the ones where you eat little.
Those studies have now retrospectively been debated a lot, and it's not very solid science to start from.
But it was extremely influential.
And that's because Ancel Keys himself, his personality was very dominant.
You know, he was all the time trying to push his ideas and bring them into the mainstream science and the medical associations.
And he managed.
And over decennia, this has eventually ended up in the late 1970s into the dietary revisions that we still see today.
So the low-fat guidelines.
And so we have built a whole vision on the food system on the views of a handful of people that were very, that were crusading for their own ideas and opinions.
And that has affected the entire field of nutrition.
To the point that most of nutrition today is dominated by what we call nutritional epidemiology of chronic disease, which means observational studies mostly that look at people and try to figure out what are the healthy and unhealthy diets.
But it's very poor information usually that comes out of these kind of studies and it just reinforces its initial message.
Because what happens is you have a serious healthy user bias.
And that means that because people have been hearing that fat is bad for you.
And that goes back to Ancel Keys, but it goes back to the 19th century.
We can talk a bit about it because it's very interesting.
So this, especially within the United States, there has been this idea that we have to eat whole grains and meat is bad.
And that idea has been installed in the second half of the 19th century because of certain sectarian Christian movements, Seventh-day Adventists and the Bible Christians and others.
They thought that meat was bad.
Why?
Because it would It would agitate us.
It creates lust.
It was a sexual thing.
And that's nice because it's because meat is, you know, it's red and that's the symbolism of meat, you know, the good thing about meat.
It's red and it's vigorous.
But for those people, it's bad because they invert the values, right?
That's the typical transvaluation of values.
So whatever was good becomes bad and whatever was bad becomes good.
And those Christian sects, basically, have infiltrated during the late 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th century, through people like Kellogg, for instance, who was a Seventh-day Adventist.
They have infiltrated the medical discourse.
And since, in the US, they managed to make people believe that we should eat like this to be healthy.
And because household economics were also influenced by it, and some people from, you know, Kellogg's environment, Like Lena Cooper, they set up the Dietitian Association in the States.
And so they created this discourse that meat is bad for us and that we have to eat whole grains.
And because they advocate for a return to the Garden of Diet, to the diet of the Garden of Eden, sorry.
And that was the perfect diet that will transfigure.
Because of that, and because of Ansel Keys coming in with his saturated fat story, people believe that eating meat is not healthy.
But which people do believe that?
Well, mostly the upper middle classes, basically.
Those are the people that tend to believe that story because those are the people that are invested in moral eating.
So they eat morally.
They eat in superior ways to show that they're better people.
And those studies that look at meat eating will find that the higher educated people that go often to the doctor and that check their health regularly, that don't smoke, that eat wholesome diets most of the time, that drink less alcohol, that move more, the ones that are just, you know, the upper middle class is basically healthy people, those studies capture that the healthy people eat less meat.
And the conclusion that gets reinforced in the nutritional sciences is that Meat is unhealthy because, you know, the lower classes that eat lots of meat are clearly more unhealthy and they blame it on the meat.
Yes.
So, you can use sophisticated statistical methods to try to, you know, correct for a couple of those things like obesity and smoking, but you can never correct for the whole lifestyle pattern.
So, it's an artifact and we keep on using that artifact and amplifying the artifact because the more studies come out, the more the idea gets established.
And in the end, it becomes a truth.
But it's so silly, because meat is an evolutionary food.
Meat is a food that has made us human.
Our evolution, our separation from from apes has been because of our diet for a large part.
Changing our dietary package to more nutrient-dense foods has changed our digestive system.
We lost our fermentative capacity and we were able to grow bigger brains.
So it doesn't make sense to blame red meat for all the trouble we have with the Western diet.
It is because of the ultra-processed foods and the refined starches and all the other things.
That's where the problem Yes.
I was reminded, I think, of listening on some podcasts, that there are certain vegetable products which are good for us, but we couldn't digest naturally ourselves.
But when ruminants or whatever eat them, we then get access to those otherwise inaccessible vitamins.
Is that right?
Well, it's one of those interesting points also in the sustainability debate, because we blame ruminants specifically for being catastrophic and for destroying the planets.
Now, ruminants have always been on the planet and their numbers have always been elevated.
They were just maybe more, you know, the wild type when we have domesticated them.
But we always had loads of ruminants on the planet in the first place.
And the fact that ruminants are able to upcycle Indigestible material into quality food is something remarkable.
I mean, that is a plus if you want to make a sustainable food system.
Now, there are, I mean, we have to take into account certain conditions about, you know, water pollution and we have to do that properly.
But if it's properly done, what you're doing is upcycling inedible material, cellulose, you know, grass, basically.
And the grass is coming from, you know, sunlight and photosynthesis and rainfall.
It's natural input.
And you can manage to upcycle that into high quality nutrition.
That otherwise would not be available.
So it is a fantastic system to create a sustainable food system.
Because also those ruminants, they will also create topsoil, right?
It's not only that they just are machines that convert grass into food.
At the same time, they also are needed to manage the grasslands and to keep them in good shape and in good health.
They can be combined with crop agriculture, so you get synergistic effects.
They are an absolute essential part of a sustainable food system.
And yet, we're trying to take them out and replace them with Beyond Meats and Impossible Foods.
Yes.
Because those companies are specifically aiming at taking out all of the cattle industry.
That's their final agenda.
And they're open.
They clearly said, we want to take out the cattle industry.
By 2030 or 2035 they want to get rid of it and they want to substitute whatever comes from that with, you know, whatever they produce.
Yes.
Well, tell me about this.
You obviously know the economics of it.
One of the arguments I hear against meat is that there is no way, once the poorer populations acquire a taste for meat, that there is enough space on the planet to be able to satisfy their meat desire.
Therefore, we must wean ourselves off meat because it's unsustainable.
Does that argument have merit?
Well, that goes back to the Club of Rome.
That's a very Malthusian idea that has been amplified in the Club of Rome.
documents and and since this has always been on the background it's just that it gets reused again nowadays um now i don't know how much meat we can produce on this but it's very difficult to simulate that and i'm i'm not i'm i'm opposing all those Modellers that are calculating how much we can produce based on these model systems they have.
Because what they do is, they're using these very simplistic metrics basically.
They're using things like CO2 equivalents per kilogram of meat.
They're working with metrics.
It's interesting that many of the scientists that are now working most loudly on the food system have an economic background.
So they look at reality as if it were a spreadsheet, and use the metrics, and they're mobile.
But you cannot do that.
Reality is just too complex.
It's too contextual.
Specific.
The food you can produce in a certain area is not the food that you optimally produce in another area.
It's a patchwork.
You just cannot do that.
And I don't think it's possible to know how much meat we can produce in a sustainable way based on those simulations.
That's the hubris that we saw in the Club of Rome.
You know, you cannot calculate that in this manner.
What you can do is try to fix, bottom up, the systems that are not working well or that are polluting.
Indeed, if you see there is a problem with the disturbance of the nitrogen cycle or anything else... Sorry, I'm putting in my batteries.
Or if you see that there's water pollution or low efficiency, you can fix those systems and then you'll see where we end up with.
So you have the time and you can robustly move towards better systems.
If you're going to impose a top-down vision on the whole entire global food system, like a planetary health diet from the EAT Foundation, You're just gonna mess with a very complex system.
Now, the thing we know about complex systems is if you mess with a system, the system kicks back.
And you don't know how it will kick back.
It's very unpredictable.
Messing with a system is asking for trouble.
Unless you do it carefully, you tinker with the system a bit, you try to improve it.
And because we're talking about food security, we're talking about nutritional security, It can be a catastrophe if we imply their strategies, right?
Yes, I see that.
I mean, like dumping GM mosquitoes on the Everglades, say.
Yeah, exactly.
Yes, yes.
This intervention's coming from... Somebody woke up with an idea and it'll become implemented.
It's dangerous.
I think it's dangerous.
And I think we should start bottom up by making our system more resilient and improving whatever is not working well with the best of the science we have, but rationally, you know, carefully, with ambition.
I'm not saying we have to keep the status quo either, because we have to face those challenges.
I mean, population is growing, that's putting pressure.
We need to take it into account, but we have to do it.
carefully so that we don't end up with a complete disaster or some black swans appearing at some point in time.
Yes.
But the same is valid for the crop agriculture.
I mean, this is the ridiculous part.
It's the seed as a binary thing where the animals are the problem.
I mean, look at how avocados are produced sometimes or, you know, some of the nuts being very water-intensive.
And still the E. lancetii, the panthera healthii, is arguing for I don't know how much Multiplication of the amount of nuts we eat, that is enormous.
Yes.
But that will have its own repercussions on the way we produce things.
So one thing is taking out the animals, the other thing is replacing them with something else.
And what you replace them with will have its own effects.
So you can have those beyond burgers, but those beyond burgers are depending on those vast cultures of peas that need to be collected to have the pea protein extract that they use to make their burgers with.
How are they going to do that?
Well, that will need also, you know, megacultures and fertilizers and massive production systems that will most likely also have an impact on biodiversity and on so many other things.
Yes, the mention of pea protein reminds me of a propaganda documentary that briefly persuaded me that veganism was good, called Game Changers.
Have you seen it?
I saw parts of it.
I cannot stop watching the whole thing.
It's pure propaganda.
But it's an interesting one, because again what you see in Game Changer is that they're trying to sell you this idea that you can have the same benefits from the plants than you get from the meat.
And they're using specifically also the athletic performances, right?
And sexual!
And sexual performance.
Exactly.
So that's because meat comes with these connotations of health and strength that are ancient.
They go back to the beginning of times because it's such a valuable food.
We have been hunter-gatherers for 99% of our time on the planet, right?
gatherers for 99% of our time on the planet, right?
So that's in our blueprint.
And since the 19th century already, because we have some interesting text from back then already, they tried to invert that by saying that vegetarian swimmers and cyclists, we find texts like this back in the 19th century.
Produced by Seven Day Adventists, by any chance?
Well, yes, or those societies that come from the first vegetarian societies which were created by the Bible Christians, yes.
And they were using these images of somebody that did the Tour de France on a plant-based diet and he was better than the ones that ate meat, you see.
So they're trying to To invert the idea that meat is the thing that makes you stronger.
And why are they doing this?
This is strategic.
Because they know very well that this is the weak point in their debate.
They know that if you take out the meat, it's nutritionally not all that.
And people associate it with those ancient connotations.
And they want to attack those.
And make people believe that it's not true.
They have been doing that since, you know, since the beginning of the vegetarian societies.
And Game Changers is just the modern version of it.
It's not all that revolutionary as a movie.
It's just recycling the old idea of the first vegetarian societies that were trying to sell the same message.
Interesting.
Interesting.
So, do we eat as much meat as our ancestors did?
It depends who you're asking, but as a Western society, no, clearly not.
We have some estimates, but it's difficult, you see, because the Paleolithic era is a vast era.
The Paleolithic is an enormous amount of time.
And it's also, we don't have good information about it.
We have some information and we try to reconstruct, but it's still a big question mark.
So we don't... Books from that period.
Sorry?
Not much literature from that period.
No, exactly, no.
And so we have to dig, you know, we have to work and dig up, dig into the information and reconstruct them.
But what we know from hunter-gatherers, for instance, is that hunter-gatherers tend to eat much more meat than we eat in the West, specifically red meat.
So most likely they were eating much more meat than we're eating today.
But, I mean, much more meat.
And interestingly, you will not find the diseases of modernity in those people.
You will not find the diseases of civilization in the hunter-gatherers, even though they eat more meat.
So to blame it on the meat is a bit peculiar.
But what we do know is that in the West, we have information from the United States, for instance, where we see that the consumption of red meat in the beginning of the 20th century is more or less what we were eating today.
It just, they had a peak up to the 1970s, more or less, and then it went down again.
And that's when the advice came in.
That's when we heard this advice that, you know, we should eat less fat and cholesterol and meat, and then it went down and it was replaced by poultry.
So people didn't eat less meat, but it was replaced by poultry.
Right.
Does poultry have the same nutritional value as red meat?
Are we missing out by going off red meat?
Red meat is interesting for a number of reasons.
There are a couple of nutrients there that are more difficult to obtain from the poultry, specifically if you talk about iron or maybe also some of the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids that you can obtain specifically also from grass-fed beef, but you can also obtain from fish if you want.
I mean, there are different ways of... That's my issue with the Planetary Health Diet as well.
They propose you one diet, and that's very United Nations-like.
They propose you one thing that It covers everything else.
They reduce diversity and cultural legacies and traditions into the one model that they want to impose everywhere.
You see it also with religion and with, you know, one thing for the planet.
So what I want to say is that there are many solutions to come to wholesome diets.
If you don't want to eat lots of red meat, that's fine.
There are other ways to get your nutrition.
I mean, there are things like eggs and fish and dairy and they're all very good foods.
Um, you can, according to your preferences, according to your cultural background, according to your, uh, availability, you can have different solutions.
We have invaded the planet.
We went into all kinds of different ecosystems.
Like the Inuit have their very specific diet.
They're perfectly healthy people before the West came in.
So there are a zillion solutions to come to healthy diets.
Yeah.
Red meat is a, is a nice food because it's, you know, just very interesting nutritionally.
I suppose what I'm angling for is, you know, when I've had red meat two nights in a row and I say, well, I fancy a steak tonight.
And my wife says, oh no, we've had too much red meat recently.
Who's right?
Well, everybody is right as long as you like it and as long as you feel good with it.
There's no right and wrong and that's the problem.
We're making it a moral discussion.
If you feel like eating your steak, have your steak.
I'll tell you what I get a real craving for quite every now and again.
Like a savage craving.
Lamb's liver.
Sometimes I really need lamb's liver.
Why is that?
Lams liver is a nutrient bomb.
It's difficult to address your case if I don't have more specifics, but what we do know is that if your body craves food, it could indicate that you're missing out on some of the nutrients.
And because the liver is so nutrient dense, It could be that you're just looking for something there that your body is actually, you know, trying to recover.
We see that, we know that from animal studies, that animals will go to those foods that cover what they're missing.
So animals, nicely, if they're given choice, of course, if you force them with a certain, you know, And it's not working.
But if you leave them the choice, they will go for those foods that cover their needs.
So they will eat more or less of certain foods.
If it's, you know, overshooting a bit of the ones that are toxic for them, or if they need a bit more of this nutrient, they will go to that.
So they adjust.
And it's a normal thing.
I mean, we're biological organisms.
We look for the nutrients we need.
And because liver is just a very, it's one of the most, maybe the nutrient, the most nutrient-dense food that we can find.
Is it?
That's why.
So my body is sensible.
It's actually making the right decision for me.
Absolutely.
I mean, if you let your body govern your food choices, you'll get pretty far, I think.
It's when you start overruling it with those preconceptions that are, you know, installed in your mind that you maybe start messing around with.
Because after the Dietary Goals for Americans have been published and the low fat Craze stepped in.
We came up with all sorts of functional foods, you know, low-fat and supplemented with those vitamins.
But in the end, public health is going down year by year.
We've talked about it before.
Public health is getting worse with the year, despite the fact that we have never seen so much functionally designed foods on the market.
So we're going for those labels and we're buying those, you know, breakfast cereals that claim to be healthy for you, but we're not eating them because we feel that they are doing us well.
We're eating them because the label says it's good for us.
Yes.
Now, I've noticed a sort of parallel, as well as the war on meat, There's a sort of war on dairy and cheese.
Cheese, which strikes me as a kind of, what's not to like about cheese?
I love cheese.
Do you have cheese where you come from in Belgium?
It's more of a French thing, isn't it?
But I imagine you've got a few cheeses as well.
But I like a cheese.
I like lots of cheese.
But there's so much now that you hear that, oh no, dairy, cheese, cut cheese out.
It'll make you so much better.
Is that true?
For health reasons.
Yeah.
It's the same narrative that's just shifting.
In the beginning, I've seen that also within the livestock sector and the people within the sector, you know, the industries and the federations and the farmers.
When the whole red meat story, anti-red meat story started to establish itself in media and in policy, The dairy players were not all that worried about it because red meat and still the vegetarians will still eat the dairy and then it's fine.
I mean, the dairy is going to be fine because vegetarians still have dairy.
But what they underestimated is that the agendas are not aiming at red meat only.
They're taking red meat, they're singling red meat out because it's the most symbolic thing to do.
It's the one that has to fall first.
It's the first domino thing that has to fall.
The others will follow.
We have a clear statement from The CEO of Impossible Foods.
So he said that the goal of their company is to take out the cattle industry.
So that means red meat and dairy by 2035.
But then he says that once that is done, the pork industry and the poultry industry will follow.
So they want to take out all animal agriculture.
It's just that the focus on red meat is the one that is the most effective.
Yeah.
Because it comes with all those, you know, it's again, it's red, you know, it's red, it's bloody.
It's just more interesting.
They can connect it to the methane and that's because they start to connect it to the methane issue.
Dairy is having the same trouble.
So they managed to connect dairy already to red meat because of that perspective.
And then the rest will follow once they come up with the imitations.
With the lab meat and the... Has lab meat got any chance of taking off?
I mean, it looks disgusting and it's expensive to produce.
Why would you?
Well, because that's what they want to achieve, right?
It's this idea that if you can get rid of animals and you can make foods in factories, it's interesting for certain players.
Whether it's feasible or not, let's come back to that in a minute.
But the idea is that they want to take out the animals and replace it with their food.
Why is that interesting?
Because it's patented.
Because it's centralized, because you don't depend on fluctuating complicated factors that are external and have to do with farmers and animal welfare, and so we can get rid of all those things.
You make it based on bioreactors, it's predictable, and so forth.
So if you manage to do that, you control the food supply system.
It's as simple as that.
Investors love it.
Corporations love it.
The great architects of the great transitions, they love it.
And it's the perfect science fiction idea for the future.
And it seems to become reality.
Now, whether it's feasible is another story.
A lot of it, of course, because investors are involved, depends on creating that bubble and creating.
Yes.
So they have been pushing the story.
I've been hearing about cultured meat since a long time, especially in Belgium.
We hear a lot about it because one of the pioneers is coming from the Netherlands.
And so he came up with it a while ago, and he has always been saying in five years, we'll have it on the market.
So I've been hearing this in five years, we have it on the market since a long time now.
Yeah, it's not there yet.
We have seen the Singapore launch of that cultured chicken thing.
It's hyped, I think, just for investment reasons.
It's also extremely difficult to do.
That's why you see that it's very typical that all the imitation foods are always nuggets or burgers or amorphous things that you can hide in a bun or you can put sauce on it and you don't really see it.
It doesn't have a specific texture or It also doesn't have a specific taste because they say it tastes like beef or tastes like whatever animal food, but it really doesn't because it's just the sauces that you taste and it's just all covered up and you're not confronted with the food as such.
And there's a reason for that.
It's just because they just cannot do the rest.
They cannot come up with a cultured t-bone steak or something.
They can't.
It's just too difficult.
The marbling of the fat and you know the whole mouthfeel and the complicated aromas and the complicated nutritional composition.
They just can't do that.
What they can do maybe if and if it will become cost-effective because I'm far from being convinced that it's possible.
If it can become energy efficient and so on and so on.
Maybe they could come up with those you know cultured tissues that are something that you can integrate in the fast food culture.
But it's a difference with coming up with, you know, beef cheeks or T-bone steaks or... Yes.
You know, whatever.
It doesn't look like it and it's not... Go ahead.
Do you not think there is something... I mean, let's cut to the chase here.
The architects of the Great Transition, as you call them.
Yeah.
There are some very, very dark forces in a very narrow elite.
Who I think arguably despise us or view their fellow humans as no better than cattle.
They want us to eat insects, we've seen from the World Economic Forum.
They're against everything that we've achieved.
One of the things that saddens me talking about meat is I think about animal husbandry and how generation on generation has worked out how to work with animals, how to breed them for their maximum, you know, to produce more meat, better meat, more flavored meat, hanging meat, all the different techniques, butchery, all these things which are Which, of course, the vegetarians think, oh, it involves animal cruelty.
But I think most farmers, serious farmers, I mean, not factory farmers, maybe, but farmers love their animals.
You look at a shepherd and his sheep, or a sheep farmer and his sheep, or a cattle farmer, they look after them.
They are their livelihood.
Do you think that ultimately this is about destroying our civilization, destroying the things that we hold dear and making us weak?
For example, the vegan diet.
If you wanted to depopulate the planet, what better way than to encourage everyone to go vegan?
I don't think it's about destroying the population, but it's certainly destructive.
And what you're saying is absolutely true.
The whole legacy of animal husbandry is extremely rich.
It's a wonderful legacy.
It goes back to ancient times and people have invested so much of their lives into that.
People that are into animal husbandry tend to be very passionate people.
And it becomes problematic when those people start to be vilified, right?
So if we're vilifying the people that are providing us with our foods.
And it's also, it's so urban as well.
It's so Western.
It's a typically Western urban narrative coming from deconnected people, right?
You cannot be connected to the food system and come up with these ideas.
You can only do that if you don't know about food.
It's very easy, of course.
If you get paid, you go to the shop, you buy your things, you go back home, you prepare whatever you bought in the supermarket.
That's easy.
But those farmers are the ones that are day enough... I mean, they're hard workers.
They spend all their time and their energy in producing the food that we as urbanites are just buying in the shop.
And instead of being grateful for that, what they usually get is the spice.
And that's, of course, very frustrating.
And the problem here is that farmers are The situation for farmers is becoming so difficult that the new generations are not wanting to continue the legacy of their ancestors because it's difficult and there's too much pressure, there's no appreciation, so they're dropping out.
And the danger here is that the way back will be very difficult.
If we start to understand that the food factory system is a bit of a problem, how are we going to return to the original system?
It will be difficult.
Yes.
We'll be trapped into something that is almost irreversible.
And that's the absolute danger here.
Before you know it, the UK can become, as one of your policymakers once said, it can become a new Singapore.
You know, it can become a place for financial transactions and for services, depending on food imports.
Yes.
Or maybe on factory produced foods.
Now, That's very fragile.
If something happens with food supply, if something happens because of a pandemic or because of a financial crisis or because of a geopolitical effect, it's over.
There's no food.
Yes.
Believe me.
I feel this.
Yeah.
It would be the worst idea of all to get rid of all your farming and just depend on imports and gamble that you'll be doing well because of your financial affairs and so forth.
If that crashes, there's no food.
Absolutely.
You, I know, travel the world, or used to when we were allowed to travel the world, talking about this thing.
Are people waking up?
Is there any resistance?
Yeah, well, people talk about big meat.
Well, there are, of course, there are corporations like, you know, Tyson and so forth, which, by the way, are also very interested into the plant-based foods.
They want to gamble both sides.
But they talk about big meat and about, you know, the lobbying of big meat.
Mostly what I see is farmer federations that are quite worried and quite anxious and don't know what to do.
There's a lot of fragmentation.
There's a lot of They feel overpowered.
They feel a bit desperate, of course, because, you know, there's never anything positive about farming.
So the resistance, I don't know where it's supposed to be situated.
I see now that people start to wake up, especially because the United Nations Food System Summit is coming up, which will heavily impact on the future of food.
And now they start to understand that it's serious.
Because what we see is that in the United Nations Food System Summit, the Action Track 2, which is on sustainable diets, is chaired by the founder of the EAT Foundation, which is a World Economic Forum global leader, young global leader.
And within the track, all the players within that track are either linked to the EAT Foundation or they are linked to the World Resources Institute and so forth.
So the whole typical network of, you know, the sustainable development players in Davos.
Or they are from animal rights organizations such as the Good Food Institute, which is an animal rights movement through the 50 by 40 Foundation and so forth.
So the whole track is dominated by EAT and animal rights activists and investors behind that.
And they're going to come up with policy documents or policy ideas for the future.
So we have the COP coming up in a while in Glasgow.
So all those summits will come up with new policy documents.
We see what's happening also within the European Commission and the Farm to Fork strategy.
So they come up with new documents and policies.
And those will shape the future of food for decades to come.
It will be very difficult to change it, you know, to revert to change things after it's black and white on paper and installed in policies.
And now I think some people start to understand that and trying to act.
But I don't know what is still possible and what can still be effective.
But whatever we've seen with the low fat guidelines that we've talked about before, is going to be overshadowed with what we will see with respect to animal agriculture in those policy documents and in those.
Apart from we'll kill ourselves now, what can we do?
Well, I don't want to over-dramatize it either.
I mean, I think it's not... One thing is what is being said, and I know that already we see the first signs.
We already see that in some countries, recently, I think it was yesterday or before yesterday, that the French Minister of Ecological Transition, from the technocrat Macron government, She's already saying that she will install one vegetarian meal a week in the schools.
That's still very light.
But you see that the first signs are there.
You see in Barcelona and in Milan, because they belong to the C40 Cities Initiative, they're also following the EAT Foundation and they want to change public meals.
So you see that that is happening.
It's light.
It's not very intense at the moment, but who knows where it will end.
But yet, one thing is what they say, what they claim, you know, that we're going to have a collapse of the dairy industry in a decade, or that we will have only self-factured meats by 2000.
They can claim that.
It's not necessarily what's going to happen.
So that's one thing.
Secondly, I think it is worrying though, because it can do damage.
such as affecting farming and undermining or eroding farming, as we know it, by making our diets even worse, because all the imitations are basically even more ultra-processed foods that we will be consuming.
So the damage, and especially also the younger people and how they will, in their climate and anxiety, how they will be Potentially undernourished by giving up some of the nutrient dense foods.
So those things can happen and they are worrisome.
How can we act?
Well, I don't have the solutions.
I identified the problem.
I'm not the one that is designing the policies, but I think that we really seriously should try to, as you know, as the masses, as the public here, we should seriously consider investing our food money, our budget, our weekly food budget into those suppliers that are
are the ones that are the robust ones and the sincere ones and the ones that are really connected to your local farmers and to the foods that we're producing on a wholesome basis within our own territories.
Yes.
So instead of going globally into a centralized food supply system dominated by corporations, I would say we should massively drop those people, not buy any of their products, and put that money that we usually spend on the rubbish we buy into the food from our local butchers, fishermen, grocery shops, that come from, you know, farmer markets, whatever is possible.
Yes.
It may be more expensive.
Not necessarily so, though.
It may be more expensive, but it's really worth it.
Because you also pay for your health, you pay for your future, and you pay for the next generations as well.
That's a really nice, positive way to end, I think.
I hope you'll come back on the podcast again, because you've been a great guest.
And thank you for that.
I think it's an important message to get out.
May I remind everyone, these podcasts, freedom isn't free.
Do please remember to support me on Patreon, Subscribestar, or via my website, dellingpoleworld.com, where you can buy a special friend badge and things.
Frederic Loire, thank you so much, and really good luck with your campaign.
It's been great talking to you.
Thank you for having me.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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