Beef.
A public service announcement from artist and chef bryant terry on the power of culture.
Fuck.
That pretty much sums up the reaction that I had to reading ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells a week or so after it came out in 2019. It paints a pretty terrifying picture of what is to come without systemic change to mitigate the worst of climate change. And I happened to be reading it while accompanying my wife as a stand-in photographer on a research trip to Côte d'Ivoire.
It was pretty clear that the impact of climate change would not be evenly felt when I started reading Wallace-Wells’ book in a well air-conditioned home in Northern California and finished reading it after a seven-hour car ride on frequently unpaved or ill-paved roads in scorching hot West Africa. Time in the hotel pool was more about a moment of reprieve than recreation.
It wasn’t that climate change hadn’t been on my radar entirely, but as a early-30-something hipster foodie who had just spent the last seven or eight years living in Brooklyn and Venice (LA), I was more concerned about meeting friends at Roberta’s or getting a table at Gjelina. I was a little more aware of the impact of animal agriculture on human and non-human animal health through campus activism when I was in college and more recent pop-documentaries like Cowspiracy, but hadn’t fully connected my diet to a possible future with unrestrained climate change.
Reading Wallace-Wells’ book - and then several others about climate change and activism during COVID-19 lockdown - began to build a base of knowledge. I quickly learned that the most impactful thing I could do right then to reduced my personal footprint was to reduce or eliminate animal agriculture products from my diet. And everything I could find pretty much reinforced that.
What I then learned when sharing this with others is that not everyone is going to be convinced by the science.
Starting the You Can't Eat Money podcast back in 2022 was my first attempt to create something that would attract people to environmentally responsible eating. I talked to folks in the regenerative organic food space, ecologically-minded chefs including Dan Barber who featured on Netflix’s Chefs Table, and Paul Lightfoot, who leads Patagonia’s food arm - Patagonia Provisions.
What I realized is that for much of the privileged Western world in particular, food is as much or more about culture than nutrition and survival. Even people who ‘did the research’ would somehow come out the other side with wildly different conclusions about the environmental impact of the food system than the scientists, researchers and journalists I was reading.
The month I published the last episode of Season One earlier this year, NPR ran a story with the headline “Eating less beef is a climate solution. Here's why that's hard for some American men”.
While the article points out that a researcher at Tulane University found that cutting beef specifically from your diet can cut your carbon footprint in half there are ‘powerful societal pressures’ - culture - that keep men chowing down on cow.
"Messaging to men about beef absolutely matters. If there's a large portion of men out there who are being programmed to not just eat more meat, but to be completely resistant to any messages about meat reduction," he says, "that's a real problem.” - Jan Dutkiewicz, professor of political science at the Pratt Institute
That messaging started from canned beef companies in 1800s and now comes from the same manosphere that many people think put President Trump back in office. The Carnivore Diet - which is not just meat focused, but pretty much meat exclusive with butter and eggs also encouraged - is hailed by folks like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and Paul Saladino, who despite having ‘salad’ in his last name tells people most plants are inedible if not toxic to humans.
This has little to nothing to do with facts and science.
Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the carnivore diet is a “terrible idea” and is “going to be very unhealthy in the long run”.
And it’s pretty unhealthy for the planet.
That line indicating emissions at the top that is more than double the length of every other major food product is beef. (And yes, regenerative beef is less damaging for planetary health, but it isn’t clear by exactly how much.)
So what do we do when the science isn’t breaking through?
On Ecosystem Member, I take that same idea of exploring our human relationships with nature and the more than human world, but for Season Two, start to look at that relationship through the lens of the cultural work - music, films, art, etc - we create.
The evolution of the idea being that if we can’t shift people’s relationship through science, then maybe we can do it through culture.
As bryant terry - the award-winning cookbook author, vegan, chef and artist - said at a panel as part of the Hammer Museum’s “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” exhibition - the power of artists and the cultural work they create is that they can help us “envision a different reality than the one we’re living in”.
terry - who is completing his MFA at the University of California Berkley - first used food and now his art to explore issues of social justice and community, particularly around our food system.
In the exhibition catalogue for Collapsense - the first year MFA show terry’s work was included in - Madeleine Morris, PhD Student, History of Art at University of California, Berkeley wrote, “The intrinsic interconnections of food, justice, and community all resonate in this installation, underscoring the collective theft of black life, culture, and land in the violent and exploitative history of the United States.”
It’s a powerful piece that asks the sort of big questions we need to wrestle and reckon with to create a better future for all people. And it’s the sort of cultural work that can shift people’s perspective in a way data often can’t.
And it’s particularly relevant because terry’s own decision to adopt a vegan diet didn’t come from a book about climate change but with a song by the hip hop group Boogie Down Productions. At the panel at the Hammer Museum, terry recites the lyrics to the song ‘Beef’ that ignited his desire to change.
Beef, what a relief
When will this poisonous product cease?
This is another public service announcement
You can believe it, or you can doubt it
Let us begin now with the cow
The way it gets to your plate and how
The cow doesn't grow fast enough for man
So through his greed he makes a faster plan
He has drugs to make the cow grow quicker
Through the stress the cow gets sicker
Twenty-one different drugs are pumped
Into the cow in one big lump
So just before it dies, it cries
In the slaughterhouse full of germs and flies
Off with the head, they pack it, drain it, and cart it
And there it is, in your local supermarket
Red and bloody, a corpse, neatly packed
And you wonder about heart attacks?
Come on now man let's be for real
You are what you eat is the way I feel
‘Beef’ from the album Edutainment by Boogie Down Productions, 1990