Best of: Ending the age of animal cruelty, with Bruce Friedrich

Jan 4, 2021

Bruce Friedrich, Executive Director of the Good Food Institute, discusses the shocking realities of industrial animal agriculture and its cruelty. He emphasizes the role of technology in making ethical alternatives like plant-based and cell-based meats viable. Friedrich dives into the urgent need for innovation to shift consumer preferences and improve animal welfare. He also touches on the political battles surrounding labeling and regulation of alternative meats. With optimism, he believes we're on the brink of a food revolution that could redefine our relationship with meat.

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INSIGHT

Antibiotics in Animal Agriculture

Modern industrial animal agriculture depends on antibiotics.
Overcrowding creates disease, and drugs enable animals to survive these conditions.

ANECDOTE

Chicken Growth Rates

Broiler chickens grow incredibly fast due to genetic engineering.
A human baby growing at that rate would weigh 650 pounds by age one.

INSIGHT

Technology's Double-Edged Sword

Technology enabled the scale of modern animal cruelty.
It may also provide solutions like plant-based and cell-based meats.

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You often hear that eating animals is natural. And it is. But not the way we do it.

The industrial animal agriculture system is a technological marvel. It relies on engineering broiler chickens that grow almost seven times as quickly as they would naturally, and that could never survive in the wild. It relies on pumping a majority of all the antibiotics used in the United States into farm animals to stop the die-offs that overcrowding would otherwise cause. A list like this could go on endlessly, but the point is simple: Industrial animal agriculture is not a natural food system. It is a triumph of engineering.

But though we live in a moment when technology has made animal cruelty possible on a scale never imagined in human history, we also live in a moment when technology may be about to make animal cruelty unnecessary. And nothing changes a society’s values as quickly as innovations that make a new moral system easy and cheap to adopt. And that’s what this podcast is about.

Bruce Friedrich is the head of the Good Food Institute, which invests, connects, advises, and advocates for the plant and cell-based meat industries. That work puts him at the hot center of one of the most exciting and important technological stories of our age: the possible replacement of a cruel, environmentally unsustainable form of food production with a system that’s better for the planet, better for animals, and better for our health.

I talk a lot about animal suffering issues on this podcast, and I do so because they’re important. We’re causing a lot of suffering right now. But I don’t believe that it’ll be a change in morality or ideology that transforms our system. I think it’ll be a change in technology, and Friedrich knows better than just about anyone else alive how fast that technology is becoming a reality. In a rare change of pace for the Ezra Klein Show, this conversation will leave you, dare I say it, optimistic.

Book Recommendations:

Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy

Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World by Paul Shapiro

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

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