Big Oil has a Big Brother — animal agriculture.

A handful of multinational companies are driving environmental degradation and cruelty around the world to feed their pockets rather than the hungry’s bellies. Welcome to the world of animal agriculture, an industry which gets away with practices which would be considered illegal in any other sector.

Vox reporter Kenny Torrella lays out how this destructive industry has inserted itself into policy at every level of government, ensuring policy-makers ignore the fact the sector is the number one driver of air and water pollution, fresh water use, and habitable land exploitation. While some Nordic governments are trying to push back, as Kenny explains, the EU bloc as a whole is deliberately undermining the plant-based food industry while the meat-heavy American diet remains the aspiration for “developing” economies around the world. This episode is both devastating and revealing — but Kenny ends on a note of hope, explaining how, because this industry functions in the shadows, the movement against it politically homeless, meaning it could generate bipartisan support for animal-human-planetary health.

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BONUS: The Stakes of Immigration with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick