Sustainability trade-offs on Earth Day: Episode 38

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Food Bullying Podcast on the special edition for Earth Day 2020. - That's Michelle Payne. She wrote the book on Food Bullying. - And that's Elizabeth Green. She's all about keeping stress under control. And I don't know about all of you, but there's a whole lot of stress happening today with quarantine and stay at home orders in COVID-19. - Oh yeah, heck yeah. - And I know Michelle, there is a lot of stress around dairy farming right now as well. And I know that's something that is near and dear to your heart. You want to tell us a little bit about what's going on on dairy farms right now? - Well, the first thing that I want to do is encourage everyone who's listening to get out and buy milk, yogurt, ice cream, cottage cheese, and any other dairy product that you can find. Because unfortunately, it is true that in the last couple of weeks, we've had dairy farmers beginning to dump their milk. As an example, and one week alone in Florida, just one state, there were 10 million pounds of milk dumped. So if you have no idea what that feels like, Liz, imagine taking your husband's paycheck and lighting it on fire. Because that's exactly how painful it is. And unfortunately, it's the aftermath as we all know of coronavirus and food service restaurants not needing the milk, cruise ships, not needing fresh produce. I mean, it reaches clear across the entire food system. But I do want to assure everyone there is more than enough food that's out there and remind everyone that if your stores are limiting your milk supplies to please see the manager and ask them to stop doing so. Because there is more than enough milk that's being produced and for that matter, there's more than enough meat and so forth as well. And it's really important to understand the peril that this puts family farmers in because I could go on for the entire podcast about the finance situation in the dairy business being so poor. But we're not here to talk about that today. We're here to talk about sustainability and part of sustainability is keeping farmers in business. So please do your part and I think that we will learn a lot here from our guests today. - And we're very excited to have her. Allison Van Inanam is a livestock geneticist at the University of California Davis. And as you might notice, she is originally from Australia. Welcome to the food bullying podcast, Allison. - Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this. - Well, let's just jump in. What does a livestock geneticist do? - So, well, a geneticist involved with basically selecting animals in my case or plants in the case of plant geneticists that are optimally suited to our production systems. And so we're trying to genetically improve our food species to produce food for us. - So Allison, does that mean that you're messing with the genes of animals and making one animal be a different kind of animal? - Well, I guess I'm messing with them as much as you've messed with the genes of a wolf to make them into a corgi. So, that's basically what selection does. So it selects for optimal characteristics that we want in our food animals. And so, for example, dairy cows you just spoke about have been selected to be optimum for milk production. And that's involved basically selecting animals that are very productive and very fertile and very healthy that are well suited to our production systems. And I think it's important to appreciate the influence that genetics has on sustainability since that's the focus of this podcast today and Earth Day. And if we look historically at the impact that improved genetics has had on reducing the environmental footprint of a glass of milk, for example, a glass of milk today has about a third of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it that it did back in the 1940s. Due in part to improved genetics. And it's fascinating. And I want to just get a little clarification in terms of selecting animals that are optimal. So what you're saying is you're selecting a girl cow that has the right kind of features and a boy cow that has the right kind of features to breed together. - Basically, it's match.com, right? And so that is effectively what animal breeders do is we are matching up what we think is going to be the best combination of parents to produce the next generation. And the next generation in an animal breeding program. And perhaps you might agree with this with your own children. Should be better than the previous generation. And if you look at genetic progress over time, you'll see that you're making progress when your current generation of calves or young animals is better than the parent or generation. And that's basically what we do. And we're very sophisticated about how we do our match.com. So, you know, rather than in my case, I met my husband at a Super Bowl party and he looked in a pair of blue jeans. What we're doing with cattle production is selecting males and females that are very well characterized and that we know their genetic potential. And we're mating the very best with the very best to get that next generation. And that's basically how we've increased production in cattle, for example, in dairy cows, over fourfold since 1940s, just by basically very careful selection of mates. - So, it's cowsmatch.com, where we move you. (laughing) - Okay, maybe quarantine's gotten in my brain. Sorry, go ahead, Aliz. (laughing) - Sure, just make that joke and then throw it to me. That's fair, so I think for someone who's not connected to farming and also not particularly connected to this sort of genetic research, I think this can be a little confusing. And we hear a lot of things in the media and on Facebook about the terrible things that are being done to cows in either beef or dairy production. Why do you think people believe this sort of thing? - Well, I think often groups will televised an egregious situation and make the assumption or characterize that as being typical care of dairy or beef animals. And I just don't think that that's fundamentally true. And it gets a lot of sensationalized kind of media when you do something like that. But I think if you look at the care of dairy cows and beef cows throughout the nation, and often I hear all the cows they're stuck in feed lots for their entire life. And it doesn't seem to be a real appreciation for the fact that beef cows are for the most part born on cow car branches out on the range and that the feedlot end of it is the last 60 or 90 days of their life. And just a general lack of understanding really of how the system works and how animals are being raised. And I have to commiserate with the dairy farmers at the moment that are being faced with these supply and demand shifts. When you've got a cow that's in milk production, you can't just turn her off when supply changes. And it's very difficult for dairies to make big changes in their production overnight because it would be an animal welfare concern to suddenly stop milking, for example. A dairy cow in the peak of her lactation because she's used to producing 100 pounds of milk a day and you can't just not milk her one day. Anyone that's had breastfed their own kids and has knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's quite painful. And so I think there's some dairy welfare issues associated with some of the demand shifts that we're seeing in the middle of this pandemic as well. And I feel for the producers that are trying to manage that. - Pivoting is one of the most overused terms. As far as business is needing to pivot through the whole COVID-19 pandemic. And you are absolutely right that it's impossible for a dairy cow to suddenly pivot and not give milk. But I think one of the great stories that's out there is the sustainability of milk production. And I know you've experienced some bullying around science and have some pretty strong feelings that there's a market advantage for some of the claims that are made out there around dairy and meat not being sustainable. So what has your experience been as far as how this negative science bullying, negative food bullying affects you, affects dairy farmers, affects food consumers? - Well, I'm an agricultural scientist. And so I spend my entire life trying to apply science to agriculture to basically improve the efficiency and reduce the environmental footprint of food production. That's kind of my bread and butter, if you will. And unfortunately, I think some of the quote unquote the sustainability claims associated with different food production systems or different products are actually working counter to my entire life's endeavor. And what do I mean by that? I mean, that if you're. telling consumers that they should avoid foods that have been produced using certain technologies. And I can go through a range of technologies, food irradiation, genetically modified organisms, recombinant bovine somatotrophin, then effectively you're saying that those farmers can't use those technologies. And the trade-off associated with that is basically less efficient production systems that require more resources per unit of food. And that's the exact opposite of what I spend my day doing. And so I find these marketers are actually kind of my enemies because they're working the opposite of what I'm trying to do all day. And so for example if you let's just look at dairy production for example. So back in the 1940s we adopted artificial insemination and that's a genetic tool to utilize males more commonly or the best males more widely. And that was an unpopular technology at the time. It was seen as unnatural and the marketers were saying you need to keep buying bulls. You can't use semen in a tube because that's unnatural. And as a result of the adoption of that technology the better genetics was able to be adopted. And so how does that affect the consumer? That reduced the dairy cow population of the United States from about 26 million to 9 million. But they're producing about 1.6 times more milk. So we've got less cows producing more milk which reduced the environmental footprint of a glass of milk. But if we'd said no to that technology, no to artificial insemination, even sounds artificial by definition, then the outcome of that would have been we would have needed more cows to produce the milk, which would have worked the opposite of most consumers' concerns around the environmental footprint of food production. And that's really I think where I find that these marketers are working against the efforts of scientists. And there's a lot of the misinformation that goes around quickly. And you were talking about which I think what we see on labels is RBST, is that right? Correct. So that that was a it's a protein product that's produced by recombinant bacteria that can be given to dairy cows to increase their production. And there was that came on the market about 20 years ago and there was a great big activist campaign that was suggested that that milk was somehow unhealthy. And Jeremy Rifkin was actually involved. Do you remember that name? Effectively that drove that product off the market. So I believe I'm correct in saying that's not used at all in Derry's in the United States anymore. And so the marketers might say, well, that's a great win. And they had a short term market advantage by selling RBST free milk. But now nobody can use that technology. And so effectively you've increased the environmental footprint of glass of milk about 6% by removing that technology from the US market. So nobody's got that market advantage anymore. You've increased the environmental footprint of glass of milk. And you've also discouraged any company from wanting to invest in that technology or something analogous to us in the future. And it actually spills over and affects the ability, for example, of someone like myself, utilizing some of these technologies to produce things like disease-resistant cattle. And so you have this kind of knock-on effect on in terms of investment and innovation and agriculture where companies are going to be unwilling to take a bet on bringing new to products to market. And that has the effect of basically an opportunity cost of your will of precluding innovation, which means that therefore we use, quote unquote, old-fashioned or less useful technologies or less productive technologies. And that increases the environmental footprint of our food production, which goes against what Earth Day is all about. And I think these trade-offs are not well understood because a lot of people are urban and don't know that much about agricultural production systems. And so I think that that's what the real issues that we run into when there's a simplistic marketing message that I'm good and everyone else is bad by my product because they're bad. And there's no discussion of the resultant trade-offs associated with basically turning your back on useful innovations in agriculture. Right, or the I'm good and everybody else is bad, but everybody else is the same, because the global doesn't even really think, because I know in my grocery store, I still have the no RSBT label on my account. Yeah. Well, if you're really woke, it's no BGH, because growth hormone sounds scary, whereas both somatotropin is kind of the scientific term for it, but it's absolutely a fear-based marketing approach, because you're basically proud of the fact that something isn't in your product, that isn't in anybody's product. Except, of course, for the growth hormone that the cow herself produces for all animals do, including humans. And that's what's so frustrating is this fear-based marketing message is so nonsensical from a scientific perspective, but it sounds scary. And so marketers have used it to their advantage and are basically, you know, conning the public into believing that there's something wrong with a product that's just not backed up by science, but that's the bigger misinformation campaign that's associated with many controversial scientific topics, not the least of which is the current pandemic. Right. That's incredibly true. And there's a lot of fear around the GMO label as well. And we've talked about it on the podcast before, but just in case people are entering and maybe this is their first one, what exactly is the definition of GMO? Well, there is none. That's what's so beautiful about it, right? So it's kind of like, it's like beautiful. It's in the eye of the beholder to some extent. So GMO technically means genetically modified organism, but it's a very, that's a non-specific description. As a scientist, I hate, you know, non-precise descriptions because I might argue a corgi is genetically modified relative to the wolf, right? But that's conventional breeding. So in the kind of the common parlance, it's an alternative term for what's technically genetic engineering, which is introducing a gene from potentially a different species to give a plant or an animal a characteristic that you desire. And so for example, there's a gene from a bacteria that's been brought into plants to make them no longer susceptible to insects, the BT protein. And that basically has dramatically reduced insecticide use globally, which I would think would fit with most people's idea of reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture, especially in insecticides, because they're some of the more dangerous pesticides that are used in agriculture. So a GMO is kind of a pseudonym for a genetically engineered organism that has been modified to make it have a characteristic that's useful to the farmer. So let's talk about genetically engineered animals, because I know from research that that seems to hit very close to a fear of consumers. And that's of course humans being genetically engineered and genetically modified. So to be clear for our listeners, can you talk about how genetically engineered animals are researched as compared to what's available in the grocery store today? So yeah, I often like to ask people and ask your audience, have you ever eaten the product of a genetically engineered animal? And almost invariably, I get, I don't know, 70-80% of the people that think that that's true. And if you're an America, that's not true. At the current time, there are no genetically engineered animals on the market with a single exception, and that is the fast growing aqua-advantaged salmon, which has never yet been commercially sold in the United States. And so that animal was produced about 30 years ago and has recently received regulatory approval. And so potentially will be available. It's basically a salmon that gets to market weight in about half the time of a conventional salmon. And as you could imagine, it uses less food to do that. And it's being raised in land-based tanks. And so it actually offers an opportunity to produce locally produced Atlantic salmon. So we typically import our Atlantic salmon from places like Scotland and Chile. And this actually opens up the opportunity for locally grown salmon, which obviously dramatically reduces the transportation footprint associated with salmon. And so a little startup company in America called Aquavounty is actually going to produce this salmon. And it's taken basically 30 years for it to go through the research and development and very extensive regulatory evaluation for it to get to market. And so, unfortunately, as distinct from genetically engineered plants where there's something like 18 million farmers growing that globally, this is the single product that's ever got to market for genetically engineered animals. And so, the technology has basically been tainted and poisoned by the debate over GMOs in plants and it's basically precluded the use of the technology in animal breeding for the last 20 years. Yeah, it's frustrating, doesn't it? Well, it's, you know, it's particularly frustrating because many of the applications are disease-resistant animals and you may not be aware of the fact that there are diseases like African swine fever and pigs that has decimated the global pig population, particularly in China, which is the biggest consumer and producer of pork in the world. It's taken their pig population down 40% over the last year and a half, which has put real food security issues as it relates to providing food for that large population. And so, you know, these types of disease-resistant animals, if you don't allow them to come to market back to what I mentioned earlier, if you preclude access to useful innovations, you don't solve the problems that those innovations were designed to address. And so, you still have the problem. You still have animals getting sick that are not productive. Maybe they need to be treated with antibiotics. All of the negatives that we don't like associated with our food production and yet we're not allowing useful technologies onto the market to help address these problems. And those are the trade-offs I think we don't hear about. I think it's an interesting perspective to bring on Earth Day and to consider how sustainability sometimes looks different than the label claims and the common myths that are out there around topics like genetics. And so, Alison, as we get ready to close this, what are three quick tips that you would offer for our listeners to overcome food bullying? Well, I guess I'm probably the worst shopper to go into a supermarket, but I look at a label and I think, well, what are the trade-offs associated with what that label's saying? So, if the label is bragging about the fact they're not using a certain technology or a certain, you know, they don't have any preservatives, I'm like, well, what does that mean? Then it's going to go, it's not going to last as long, so it would have more food waste associated with it, you know, no antibiotics ever. Well, what happens with sick animals? And so, I look at that and I look at what is the marketer trying to tell me? Are they bragging about the fact that they're doing something well, or are they trying to demean their competition? So, if they've got some absence label, are they trying to impune their competition and suggest that, for example, you know, gluten-free water that somehow there's gluten in their competitors? So, are they trying to trick me? Are they trying to use my good intentions to trick me into paying more for their product? Just because they assume that I don't know that they're trying to do that because they assume I don't understand there is no gluten in water in the first place, right? And so, those are two things I take and I guess I'm a parent and a mother and when I go shopping, I avoid that those types of labels and I just try to buy my family healthy food and, you know, fruits and vegetables that we know are associated with improved human health. And I just don't buy into the fads and the absence marking and the fear-based labeling because I know that they're trying to trick me into paying more money for their more expensive and often inferior product in terms of its environmental food. This has been a fascinating conversation and my biggest takeaway is what you just said about thinking over the trade-offs when either when we're in the grocery store and looking at labels, but also I think on Earth Day, really thinking about what are the trade-offs of denying research into technology that could really have an impact on the sustainability of our entire planet. So I really appreciate you coming and bringing that. Well, thank you. It's nice to have agricultural science have a voice at the table. We don't get asked of very many parties. And that's a crime because you guys are fun. Well, good. I appreciate that. Thank you. And Alison, you're always welcome at our party, coronavirus or not. Well, we'll keep our social distancing up for now. Exactly. I think being in three different states might cover it. Seriously, yeah. If people would like to connect with you online, where can they find you, Alison? So I'm on Twitter. I'm at BioBeath, B-I-O-B-E-E-F. And then I'm also obviously at the University of California, Davis. I have the Animal Biotechnology site there, which goes into detail. It has some fun videos and musical parodies to there because even scientists need a little bit of space to burn off their creative energy. So I encourage you to have a look there. Excellent. Well, Alison does a great job. I have followed her on Twitter for years and we sure appreciate you being with us today on the Food Bullying Podcast. Thank you very much. You're having me to all of our listeners. We hope you found information to build your own food story rather than bull speak. Feel free to leave a rating comment. You can ask questions on the Food Bullying page on Facebook and we would love to hear from you. This is Michelle Payne. It would be great if you could understand where your food comes from and why it is sustainably raised today. And this is Elizabeth Greene and I would really like it if you didn't get stressed out over technology. Ask somebody who really knows and don't be afraid of choosing the wrong food. Remember, food should be about celebration, not condemnation. Cheers.