Feed the People: A Conversation with Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg

Gabriel Rosenberg: It's great to be here.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah, thanks.

Jasmin Singer: I'm excited, Jan, you're like, you know, a regular at this point, so I'm glad you're here. But, uh, I I, I know that you're gonna be back many times and, and today is a particularly exciting day for us because Feed the People is such a huge, it, it's such a huge, monumental moment, I would say for, for you, but also for the animals and, and so many issues that you cover in this book.

So I wanna get into that. But first, let me just say, Jan, you might already know if you're listening or watching, this is an assistant professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, a contributing writer at Vox, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. And Gabriel is an associate professor at Duke University who writes about the historical and contemporary linkages among gender, sexuality, race, and of course, the global food system.

Mariann Sullivan: I have to say that. intro, like that intro Gabriel is so cool because is any, are you the only person in the world studying the food system from that angle? It's so interesting.

Gabriel Rosenberg: I'm not the only person, but it is a very, very small group of us.

Mariann Sullivan: It makes so much sense in so many ways. Anyway, anyway, but you have more to, to intro Jasmin,

Jasmin Singer: I just wanted to say so that I said it, that Our Hen House is now on multiple times a week. Rising Anxieties comes out on Tuesdays, The Hen Report on Thursdays and the long form interviews on Fridays. Bonus for flock members comes out on Mondays. We're on YouTube, so subscribe, hit like wherever you listen.

Okay. Now I really wanna get into this, but before we get into the details, uh, let's, let's go back to you, Gabriel. Explain what democratic hedonism is and, and why is it a necessary frame for looking at food policy and what, what does it have to do with the Waffle House, which is kind of a recurring character in the book?

Gabriel Rosenberg: Yeah. Well, so the thing that we love about the Waffle House, um, is the fact that one, people love it. Okay. Whether or not we may personally enjoy eating there, um, it's, it's a fan favorite. Okay. Uh, people, enj, people love it. They fill, they fill the seats at all hours. It's open 24 7. Um, so it's extraordinarily accessible and specializes in serving up popular favorites, uh, that are of a testament to this idea that we're calling democratic hedonism. That the pleasures of everyday life have real moral value, and that we're called upon as a result of their moral value to think about how we can make them more accessible and how we can be invested in a broader political project of helping other people experience pleasures and avoid the harms that may also attend to them.

So as we put it in the book, you know, hedonism generally speaking might be, we might call that like a celebration of, of pleasure. We're not so impressed with hedonism alone. It's only when hedonism intersects with or meets democracy, which is an ethos dedicated to broadly sharing social goods and power, uh, that hedonism really becomes worth defending.

And then at a very basic level, it's uh, it's about committing ourselves to figuring out how to make the abundant pleasures that are available through the food system more accessible to everybody in their everyday life. That, and that, by the way, our argument is, is that looks a lot more like a, a better Waffle House than it does farm to fork boutique restaurant, or a farmer's market. Which both of those things can be lovely, it's, it's just they don't scale. And, and that's a big part of the difference.

Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: Scale is a big part of everything in your book, and that's one of the things I love about it. And this, well, I mean, you're not really talking about the myth of the farmer's market as a food solution, but kind of. But another myth that you attack, along with this idea that food has to be fancy or elite in order to be good, is the myth of the family farm, which is one of our favorites here at Our Hen House.

We're usually focusing on factory farms for animals, but you're talking about farming in general. Why? I mean, every, I listen to so many commentators on politics nowadays because everyone does, and whenever they talk about farming, they have no idea what they're talking about. Absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

These are like educated people who comment on the world. Why is this incredibly powerful myth of who farmers are and and, what role they play completely wrong? And unbreakable, apparently, until people read this book.

Gabriel Rosenberg: So, you know, obviously within the context of the United States, we have a deep political tradition celebrating small farmers. And indeed the fact that people could come from around the world and have access to arable land was one of the great sort of attractions of immigration to the United States in the 19th century. And in the 19th century, I don't want to get into the complexities and, and quite a bit of the exploitation and, and racism that, that undergirded our system of agricultural production, but one of the things that we can say is that there was a time in the United States when there really were a lot of small farmers. Right?

Interestingly enough, in the 19th century, the term family farm wasn't a recognized term to describe them. The family farm meant more or less a landed estate that a rich person would retire to. That's, that was the actual terminology. It's only in the 20th century that family farm becomes, kind of, first a sociological descriptor for small farms and then a kind of celebratory ideal. Political culture has kind of, maybe should we say, like gripped onto that Jeffersonian rhetoric of the small farmer as the backbone of Republican virtue, even as that has become more and more distant from the actual social and economic realities associated with farming. So we're, we're kind of dealing with this ghost image in some senses of the passive American farming, which did involve a lot of small farming. Not necessarily good or small farming we should be celebrating, but there was certainly a lot of small farming. Um, and now in the 21st century things look very, very different. A lot of farms are family farms, at least on paper, but they also happen to be very large, well capitalized, um, and the families running them tend to be, uh, substantially wealthier than the average American household. And that's a major difference. Uh, we tend to think of them as the good guys because they're small or, or, or something like that.

And there should be...

Mariann Sullivan: struggling. They're always struggling.

Gabriel Rosenberg: They're always struggling, and there should be kind of like a populist crossover where that, that like, uh, eaters should ban together with small farmers. And we don't wanna make the argument that just because they're rural rich people that they're bad. But it would be helpful for us to start with the idea that if they're rural rich people, they're actual material interests and political commitments may look very, very different from how a lot of your listeners might be interested in changing and altering the food system.

And so it's not really, we're not calling to like demonize either farmers or, or, um, uh, rural wealthy people. What we're asking is that we should start being a little bit more realistic about the incentives that drive their behavior, which gives us an insight into how we would actually alter it.

Jasmin Singer: And with that, let's get to a third myth, and then we'll get more deeply into animal agriculture, which it's not the only topic you tackle, but it's one that is, as Mariann said, really important to us and to our listeners. So what does it mean to say that industrial food is, or at least can be, good and actually completely necessary?

Jan Dutkiewicz: Right, so the first thing we need to do is define industrial food. And I think that this is another place where in popular discourse in, uh, a lot of food writing industrial and bad are treated as synonymous. That's just false. In fact, most of the food we consume is industrial.

And by industrial, uh, we mean produced efficiently at scale using, uh, often, uh, sort of, industrial or artificial or chemical inputs and production such as fertilizer or pesticides, but it also means produced to standards. So set standards of quality and regulated. And described that way, industrial quite simply means a method of food production that aims to produce at scale for a large market.

And understood that way, the vast majority of food we eat, be it, uh, you know, the baby spinach you mix into your green smoothie or the Oreos are both industrial. And the argument of our book is that we need to do away with the notion that industrial is bad or undesirable or in fact avoidable on a planet of 8 billion people. What we need to do is change the incentives and disincentives to really lean into what works about the industrial system and get rid of, rid of what doesn't.

Mariann Sullivan: Alright. Speaking of what doesn't, let's talk about meat. We're finally getting to it. I think the most frustrating thing for me about the discourse about animal agriculture. Is this idea that it can be fixed. Like we can still have animal agriculture. Everybody can still start off the day with bacon. I don't know why they would want to, but they can.

We just have to fix it. In fact, as you point out, the amount can't be scaled down if we wanna feed the world. People kind of get that. We need to produce this much and, and the cruelty and all the other problems can't be seriously improved unless we scale down. I mean, it just doesn't work. Am I right?

And if so, why doesn't anyone get that? Because it seems kind of really obvious.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah, so first off, you're absolutely right and animal agriculture is far and away the single most harmful aspect of our food system. It accounts for most emission, the most greenhouse gas emissions. It accounts for the most land use between grazing land for ruminants and between land use to grow feed for animals.

It accounts for the most fresh water withdrawals. It accounts for the most eutrofication, so. It accounts for the most impact on biodiversity. So across any metric we use to measure the harms of agriculture environmentally, it is far and away the worst. And that's before you get into, uh, harms caused to labor, and of course harms caused to animals. Now this system, we in the book, not only is it massively harmful, but it's impossible to reform. There's no way that you can have a more benign, be it more environmentally benign or more quote unquote high welfare, whatever that would mean, uh, animal agriculture system that would also be able to produce meat at the scale and at the low cost it currently does. You simply can't have the two side by side. And so if we're thinking seriously about having a more sustainable food system, we need to think seriously about scaling down animal agriculture.

And one of the first things to address that would be quite simply ending what's called agricultural exceptionalism. Agricultural exceptionalism is a shorthand for talking about the range of carve outs and exemptions that exist for agriculture, where it's regulated more laxly or is under-regulated compared to other industries. So for instance, this applies to everything from zoning factory farms to allowing things like manure lagoons rather than plumbing on factory farms to, uh, agriculture having much lower minimum labor ages than other industries. So all of these things allow agriculture, animal agriculture, to operate in this sort of under-regulated gray area. And closing those loopholes would be a really easy way to disincentivize the large scale animal agriculture business model. Like if it's more expensive to cite the facilities, if water, uh, sort of, if effluent and eutrofication are better regulated as they're with other industries, it would quite simply be extremely expensive and extremely difficult to run the factory farming model.

And that's before we get into the stuff that's much more uncomfortable to talk about, such as, um, exemptions to animal cruelty laws for things like artificial insemination and so on and so forth. While I'm on the subject and sort of while I'm, while I'm already talking, and I'll just briefly say, going back to your previous question, that this myth that we can solve this, quote unquote solve this, by going sort of small, local regenerative simply doesn't hold and it doesn't hold for two reasons. The first is that you quite simply can't scale sort of more extensive pasture system or smaller scale animal agriculture. Uh, we have very solid peer-reviewed literature that says quite simply, we don't have enough grazing land in the United States to have as many cows as you would need if you did away with feedlots to meet current red meat demands. So number one, not scalable. Number two, on a per unit basis, the environmental impact of small scale agriculture is actually higher.

So for instance, if you go, you know, in the book we write about Point Reyes Seashore with all their sort of famous foodie, um, Dairy farms and cattle farms. On a per unit basis, each of those cattle are far more environmentally noxious than a factory farmed cow. Those farms do less environmental damage, not because on a per unit basis they're more benign, but quite simply because there are less cows. And so in a sense, going small and local is the worst of both worlds. It's not scalable and on a per unit basis, it's worse.

Jasmin Singer: Yeah, I mean, honestly, Mariann and I used to give a lot of workshops, and we would always make this point about scaling. We would say, you know, unless we want a world where the rich eat animals and the poor eat nothing, we've got to figure out a way to fix the food system. And it blows my mind how so many smart people, or otherwise smart people, just don't ever think about it.

Like it, it, it boggles my mind. It's such an elite issue. And you know, speaking of elite issues, two useful terms that you use here are minced meat denialism and meat austerity. Can you tell us what those terms mean and how they both represent framing that simply won't work?

Gabriel Rosenberg: Yeah, so minced meat denialism is this, uh, sort of, uh, idea that you can reduce the harms associated with meat production simply by finding, um, those pretty regenerative agroecological small happy family farms with, with all of the happily grazing cows on, uh, verdant hills. Right? So it's a, it's a denialism about what we would say are the systemic effects of meat production, um, that are, you know, at this point globally scaled and catastrophic. And it's using that kind of imagery as apologia to continue with that major system, doing nothing to, to substantially alter it. Right? So it, uh, it sort of concedes the idea that factory farming is really, really bad and some of the harms associated with animal agriculture, but it's a kind of denialism in that it's pulling what is essentially marketing rhetoric as a way to justify the underlying sort of demand for meat. On the other side of things though, um, we don't think it's very helpful for advocates, uh, for our position to simply say, you gotta do away with meat. And the pleasures of meat have absolutely no moral value to us whatsoever. We don't care about that. Um, do with less, do with less. We would call that sort of like meat austerity and it's attempting position, given how damaging this particular item is to humans, to the world, uh, to, to animals. But what we wanna say here is that the more feasible and practical approach is to reduce what we would call the switching costs or the transaction costs from moving from a meat intensive diet to a meat minimal diet. And that is that we need to look at the pleasures that people actually take from meat, we need to assess it, we need to, we need to study it, we need to take them seriously, we need to listen to them. I hate to say it right? And then we need to come up with better substitutes that make it easier for people to step away from it and that actually substantially affect the demand curve, right?

That's, that's part of the underlying issue here, is that if, if we don't come up with ways to invest in alternatives, then becomes more and more difficult for people to step away from it. We think it's a more productive approach to say, look, you still can have these pleasures and these are the ways that we're gonna provide it to you. Offering those alternatives also needs to be a compelling political task. It needs to be an object of our sort of like collective, um, uh, organization. And, and, that to us is, is also important part of the book. We can't just say no meat, we don't care. We need to also help people eat less meat, if that's really what we, what we care about.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. And you know, to be honest, like I think most of our listeners, this is the kind of the project of their activism and, and or many of them and, and, and their lives. And, and you know, we've made enormous progress. I mean, if you've been doing this for a while, it's clear we've made enormous progress in finding this, uh, sustainable plant-based products that are capable of scale and scale them.

And I think a lot of people understand that. But, but, it, it, it's eerie to read your book and see how you feature stories of Impossible and Miyokos and think of what's happened since your book. I mean, I think Miyoko's is, is, uh, I don't, I think she's trying to rescue it, but it's pretty much gone. Um, and Impossible of all of the companies is probably struggling the least, but still struggling mightily.

How much damage has the meat industry been able to do to plant-based products that looked so successful, uh, just a few years ago? And part, you know, I always like to say, well, if you were around in the early days of the internet, there were a million companies and they all went bust except for one, and that was called Amazon.

And that did well from what we hear. Like, beginning a new industry is always hard, but let's face it, the industry is fighting this tooth and nail. How, how, how bad is it?

Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean, I, I think you can't blame strictly the industry. I think that, I think that ignores just a lot of sort of broader social counter movements and what have you. But absolutely, I mean, there's, there's a major report, I can actually send it if you wanna share it with your readers. The Changing Markets Foundation did a quite robust report on the meat industry's attempts to spread misinformation or disinformation, if you will, about, uh, plant-based products.

I think that the, the critique that's stuck most is the critique that they're, quote unquote ultra processed and unhealthy. I think that they, there was an alignment between a sort of cultural zeitgeist aiming for quote unquote more natural, less processed food in general, and then assigning plant-based alternatives to this sort of, uh, category that's now being poo-pooed broadly. And so I think that that's been arguably the most successful critique, which I, which actually, if you, which is unfortunate for a number of reasons, right? First of all, it's unfortunate because, and I could talk about this at length, but I'll just give the short version. The, the category of ultraprocessed is an absolute nonsense category. We get into this in the book. It's a schema that is so hyper simplified as to be useless. The category of ultraprocessed quite simply means foods that are produced using ingredients you wouldn't find in an average kitchen or using extract or isolates from a given product.

So that means that everything from an Oreo cookie to an Impossible Burger to baby formula are ultra processed, it completely ignores the individual nutritional properties of given foods.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. Can, can I just interrupt you for a second? 'cause I would just, wa this is something I've always, I've been wondering. Like my understanding, which is, you know, kind of grabbed from the zeitgeist, not the result of research, is that ultraprocessed, the whole category was not developed in order to separate healthy from unhealthy.

It it, it, it was designed to do something else and so that's why it doesn't do a good job at separating healthy from unhealthy.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Right. So I, I mean, I'll try, I'll try to give this debate, uh, short and accessible treatment. The long story short, Nova, even though it's often capitalized as NOVA, it's not actually an acronym, it's just a Portuguese word for new as in new classification. It's a classification that came out of a bunch of public health academics in Brazil trying to create an, an epidemiological schema to map dietary patterns and to match, uh, negative health effects to particular dietary patterns.

Right? So if you sort of said that if a given population eats X percent of a certain type of food, like an ultra processed food, that you could then correlate that with negative health outcomes. So it's meant to be a sort of population level epidemiological schema, but what's happened is because it, the schema itself describes foods, right, so it's these sort of four categories of foods going from unprocessed to most processed, uh, a number of people, including unfortunately the very authors of the initial schema that said, this is not what it was for, have started applying it to individual foods.

And so they've created this association basically saying that ultra processed foods are bad, they're bad as sort of key components of food environments, but they're also bad as individual foods, which creates a lot of confusion and ignores basic things like the nutritional properties of the individual foods you're talking about. And this sort of slippage has created all kinds of problems because it leads to people being able to say something that, like for instance, an Impossible or Beyond Burger is unhealthy because it's processed. When we actually know that that's absolutely not the case. In fact, we've got peer reviewed studies that Impossible Burgers or other soy-based based meat analogs are actually far more heart healthy than the quote unquote unprocessed red meat that they're meant to replace.

So as we get into in the book, the category as a whole is not really useful and it's especially not useful the way it's been pulled into mainstream food discussions, which basically wields it as this, as this cudgel, as this synonym for, all things bad. And, uh, we get into this much more, you know, I gotta plug the book, we get into this in depth in the fourth chapter of the book.

Mariann Sullivan: Plug, plug away. That's what you're here for. want people to read the book.

Gabriel Rosenberg: We, we did a fun, well, I don't know how fun it was for me, but we did a fun, uh, food autoethnography experiment where I ate a 100% ultra processed diet for a month. Which was, uh, Huel. I just ate a month's worth of Huel.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I saw you mention that. I, I'm not familiar with what Huel is.

Jasmin Singer: Oh, I, am, yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: It's like one of those food programs and you buy the packaged food and eat it?

Gabriel Rosenberg: It's, um, it's, so, it's prepackaged and it's designed to be nutritionally complete. Um, every serving essentially has, um, roughly the same sort of nutritional, uh, profile, including, uh, calories. And so, it's supposed to be in some senses, like a meal replacement thing. Like, I don't, like the people at Huel are not saying everyone that someone should go on an all Huel diet.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah.

Gabriel Rosenberg: maybe they are. I haven't heard them say it. I don't think that would be very good marketing. Um, but we, we decided that because it was an ultra processed food that's primarily made from like pea protein, right, and pea protein is very, very nutritious, very healthy, um, that it would be interesting to sort of like do this, uh, the, the sort of like food experiment that you read about, uh, frequently in, in, in different books and was dramatized, um, most famously, uh, in, in Supersize Me the, uh,

Mariann Sullivan: Right.

Gabriel Rosenberg: Uh, yeah, the documentary where, where he does it with, um, with McDonald's. I won't say that it was like gustatorily particularly, like I wouldn't recommend it in terms of it being a dining experience, but it, but it wasn't like threatening to my health in any way.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, and I think you made the point too, to be fair to Huel, that that at first it was good, and then after a while it was like oy vey, this again.

Gabriel Rosenberg: To be honest, there are, uh, there are actually Huel, Huel products that are still in my diet, despite the fact that by the end month I was like, I don't wanna see any of this stuff again.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah.

Gabriel Rosenberg: But, but I, I, I use them quite, I like, I use them sparingly and for, and for particular purposes and stuff like that. Um, but no, it, it's, uh, it wasn't bad. I am just the kind of person where if I had to eat the same thing every meal every day for a month, it would, it would become pretty unpleasant. And I think that's most people, but some people want to eat chicken breasts and broccoli at every meal. Um, that's, I, I don't want that either.

But,

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. That's what the Secretary of Ag of Agriculture wants us to eat, so we save a lot of money. Except you get to have a tortilla with it.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah for $3, allegedly. No, but sorry. But the point, the point of this experiment, which I think, uh, Gabe is burying as he reflects on only having to have this sort of pea slop, is that people sort of say, you know, ultra processed foods are so bad.

Uh, famously in his book, Ultra Processed People, Chris van Tulleken go, tries to go on a 30 day ultra processed diet and he sort of can't make it because he is eating all these sort of pre-made lasagnas and breakfast cereals and drinking Diet Coke, and he gains weight and he freaks out. He can't even make it 30 days.

The point being that existing in this ultra processed food environment is just such a nightmare. And we thought, well, yeah, because you're eating junk,

you don't

Mariann Sullivan: It's not the same. Ultraprocessed does not mean junk.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Exactly, like you don't need this, this new classificatory schema to make this point. If you're gonna eat a lot of junk. Yeah, if you eat junk for 30 days, you're gonna feel ill.

But what if we took actually scientifically nutritionally perfected, or at least formulated to be as perfect as possible, meal replacements that are clearly ultra processed and we eat only that? But we're not eating junk. We're eating things that are actually designed to be nutritionally optimized.

And, you know, Gabe did blood work. He weighed himself, he stayed on his normal exercise schedule, and nothing changed. He did not feel ill. He did not gain weight. He didn't develop, you know, other symptoms. Why? Because he was eating food that was actually nutritionally fine, which sort of gives the lie to the entire ultraprocessed schema.

And so I think one of the things is that we're trying to get across in the book is that we need to get away from these, you know, these shorthands that have this element of truthiness. Right? Like it seems right. No, Michael Pollan says, eat real food, don't eat food like substances, but it's just, it's quite simply not the case.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, it's, uh, this is so important. It is so important. This just is not in the, in the zeitgeist.

Jasmin Singer: Well.

Jan Dutkiewicz: And sorry, sorry, So I, I know that I'm, I'm cutting people off here, but I wanna pull this back to the central point. But the point is because people don't understand it this way, the critique of going back to your initial question, the critique of plant-based meat analogs that has been most effective, right, because you can't say that they're worse for the environment because we've got reams of peer reviewed studies that show that they're actually far better for the environment. You can't say

Mariann Sullivan: And they're also delicious. You can't say they're not good.

Jan Dutkiewicz: And I, and I think there has actually been this sort of narrative that actually they're not that good.

I think a lot of 'em are actually perfectly good, right? Like Cornell University Tasting Lab, as we write about in the book, has done blind taste tests with Impossible Burgers and beef featuring, no vegans, only meat eaters who can't differentiate the two, or who even prefer the Impossible Burger.

I think we basically need to put the ultraprocessed thing, out to pasture, if you will, and really focus on the nutritional properties of foods rather than this broad category. And I think, you know, introducing something like in Europe, they've got the nutri score labeling, which is a, which is a product by product,

sort of nutritional score rather than a broad category.

And, you know, on nutri score sort of, uh, vegan plant-based alternatives, they do quite well. They get, you know, like a solid B rating for nutrition. And that's, great. If you really want a burger, then it's totally, totally fine for you to have Impossible Burgers. And we, we really want to communicate this because we really, really believe our, from our research that something like alt protein, be it plant-based burgers or cellular agriculture or what have you, has to be part, at least a part of the solution to, uh, meat heavy diets.

Jasmin Singer: It seems like your entire take on food is, is largely the opposite of RFK Jr's, particularly when it comes to processed food. Would you agree and, and could you just riff a bit on where you think he's trying to take us vis-a-vis food?

Gabriel Rosenberg: I think that it's wound up in, frankly, a destructive and deeply paranoid take on what benefits the regulatory state has to offer, uh, everyday consumers and eaters, and what it has provided to everyday consumers and eaters. RFK Jr, on the one hand, wants to encourage people to eat real food, uh, which is kind of this, um, highly simplified naturalism. Uh, it's essentially, uh, like just an aesthetic mode. It's connected to right-wing politics in a deep sense, and it's, it's by and large a kind of rhetoric of purity, um, that is not surprising, gravitates towards aggressive hostility to the regulatory state and reactionary politics writ large. So, I'm, I'm not surprised that like this mantra of real food is also attracting like anti-vaxxers. I, and I wanna say that like, this was kind of predictable. Like we have this deeper critique of obviously the, the sort of like locavore movement and, and, and like what we feel has been a largely ineffectual approach to actually altering food systems for the better. But part of it has to do, I would say, with the way in which that movement has really, like mainstreamed voices, like RFK Jr and kind of laid the groundwork for everyday people to be confused and scared. Right?

And so that they gravitate towards these kind of like food demagogues. And you know, the clearest example of this is Omnivores Dilemma. It's Michael Pollan. He spends the entire middle third of the book valorizing Joel Salatin.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah.

Gabriel Rosenberg: Um, and, and this really is the sort of like clearest thing that, that the, that the book puts out there to being a better vision. Well, Joel is a pretty vocal, like reactionary libertarian who wrote, wrote a book called, Everything I Wanna Do is Illegal, which is essentially a polemic against even the most basic regulatory standards for food and agriculture. So, you know, when, when the proponent of what's supposed to be a progressive kind of left take on food is mainlining this kind of paranoid libertarianism, it's not surprising that down the line there's a big confusion amongst these different categories, and why we see so many people sort of fooled or hoodwinked by, to me, what is a pretty vacuous statement about how we would actually improve the food system. I, I do not think that the MAHA movement, um, is going to make people healthier. I certainly don't think that the MAHA movement is going to equip our regulatory state, um, with the tools that it needs to improve the safety of the food system and improve nutritional outcomes. Um, it's definitely not gonna happen. They certainly don't have the interests, uh, of, of animals in mind. Certainly not, uh, bears, I think, didn't, didn't he eat a bear or kill a bear that he was going to eat?

I don't know what the story is...

Mariann Sullivan: There was a bear cub in the trunk of his car. I think.

Gabriel Rosenberg: We don't know how it got there.

Mariann Sullivan: I don't remember the whole story. It had something to do with the bear and the trunk of his car.

Gabriel Rosenberg: He was gonna leave it in, in

Mariann Sullivan: It was a dead bear. A dead bear.

Gabriel Rosenberg: Um, in any case, I, I, uh, I. wish, I wish that like the food movement, the alternative food movement of the past 25 years had clean hands when it came to this issue. Uh, but it really doesn't. Uh, RFK Jr is, to be quite honest, um, is is one of the, the creatures spawned by that movement.

Mariann Sullivan: I mean it really is like in the food context, like the horseshoe between the, the, the left meeting, the, the far right in, in, in eccentric, uh, ideas, which has been a very unfortunate, uh, phenomenon. I have one more question I wanna ask about processed food, and this is kind of, kind of not in the spirit of what we've been talking about, because it is an attempt to characterize processed food or ultra processed food as as really bad.

But I always like to say that meat is basically a processed food since it's vegetation processed through an animal's body, using enormous, enormous amounts of energy to add saturated fat and cholesterol, destroy fiber and diminish the nutrients. Prove me wrong.

Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean, so where you're right is that this is an extremely inefficient system, right? We have extensive research that quite simply shows that no animal will yield the calories or protein through its meat that it's fed. So you have a net loss of calories and protein through that processing system. But what you're actually getting at is something, something else that's absolutely wrong with this ultra processing schema, which, yeah, I mean, as I said, I think is just doing tremendous damage to how we understand food. All that schema looks at is how foods, once they are produced, are processed. So you get this absolutely ridiculous idea that, for instance, tofu counts as processed, or depending how it's made, even ultra processed food, even though it just comes from soybeans. Whereas a factory farmed chicken, which lives in heinous conditions, is fed ultra processed feed, is fed antibiotics, is perhaps fed growth hormones, is slaughtered at a mass scale slaughterhouse, at tremendous. Once it's slaughtered chicken breast counts as NOVA one unprocessed.

Mariann Sullivan: It is crazy.

Jan Dutkiewicz: It's, it's an absolutely useless way of understanding anything about the food system from environmental impact to nutrition. It's just, it needs to be, as I said, it needs to be put out to pasture.

I think very few things, if there are two things I could wave a magic wand at and wish they'd never happened because I think they've absolutely poisoned the way we talk about food, it would be, I would wish that Omnivore's Dilemma had never been written, and I would wish that the, that the NOVA classification system had never been created.

I think we would be in a much better place without the two of them.

Gabriel Rosenberg: Think it also, uh, your point also links back to something, um, that we kind of started the conversation with. And, and I would just sort of like emphasize that this isn't narrowly about processing, it's also about the larger statement that we make in the book about fundamentally the strength of plant agriculture as a really efficient way to feed the billions and billions of people on this earth that need to be fed and in a way that's minimally harmful to the environment, um, and minimally harmful to animals. And our take in the book is, is pretty straightforward, we say plant agriculture as a means of feeding people is fundamentally the most efficient way currently that we know how to feed people. Animal agriculture is intrinsically inefficient and it's intrinsically inefficient for exactly the reason that you indicate, right, which is that you have to grow an entire animal and that animal spends its entire life eating plants, and then at the end of it, um, you, you harvest some portion of it, uh, for consumable food.

But we're interested in, know, thinking about how we change those incentive structures so that all of the social investments we make in the food system go to improving and expanding plant agriculture as a means of feeding people and, and really frankly, reducing the impact of animal agriculture, um, by reducing the amount of animal agriculture that's happening.

That is, as Jan put it, scaling it down.

Jasmin Singer: Hmm. You seem pretty skeptical about any near term success for cell-based meat though. What's your forecast?

Jan Dutkiewicz: Well, I mean, I don't, I don't think either of us is in the prediction business necessarily. But look, I mean the analysis, our analysis in the book, it's also analysis that I've put forward in peer reviewed, uh, literature that I can send you is cellular agriculture is a very odd technology for marketing to the, to the mass audience because the basic science behind it was not settled. I mean, you know, scientific progress is never settled, but the sort of basic building blocks of the science necessary to do cellular agriculture, uh, are still to this day nascent. But because there was the nature of the funding structure to support, uh, this sort of research was such that there wasn't really funding at the university level or in national labs at the scale necessary to carry it out.

And so lot of these companies basically went, uh, new venture capital and started promising products and preparing, uh, preparing prototypes get venture capital money in order to be doing basic research. This is not how most industries work or should work.

It's just not, it's not a sustainable way to fund basic science. And so these companies always had to be basically doing basic science while promising, uh, commercialization, while doing these sort of tastings of prototypes that were, that were never scalable. And now, you know, we're seeing a pullback. Venture capital has turned to things that it, things has a higher return on investment.

It's turned to AI, for instance, and the money's drying up, which is why we're seeing a lot of companies in the cellular agriculture space shutter. But that's not, I, I don't think that should be read as an indictment of the viability of the technology, it should just be read as an indictment of the way that the technology's been funded.

And actually what we're seeing now is maybe this was all necessary. So a lot of research now starts actually being done back in universities.

Jasmin Singer: Hmm.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Right? So now we're, we're finally seeing real investment. Not at the scale I'd like to see it, but real investment at University Labs in the US, in Europe, in Asia, Japan has quite robust cellular agriculture programs.

We don't know much about how Chinese state backed science works, but we do know cellular agriculture is in their agricultural development plans, which means they're going to be investing money in it. And so I think we absolutely can't write the technology off, but it's, it's viability is still a bit of a question mark.

And if we, if we see effects, if we sort of see it on the market, it'll be in the medium term or the long term.

Jasmin Singer: Yeah, I, I mean, I just wanna add real quick, and this is sort of neither here nor there, but you know, Mariann and I have been doing this podcast for over 16 years and in 2010, the first time we had Peter Singer on, no relation to me, though I like to call him dad. Uh. He, he basically said that that was the only choice that, I mean, that was the only, the only way that we're gonna get out of this mess was cell-based agriculture and that it was 10 years or less away.

So this was 2010, and maybe I'm just a fan of kicking the can or something, but it gave me a lot of hope. And here we are in 2026 and I'm like, where is it? You know, like, what's going on? It, it's just, I don't know. I, feel really heartbroken. And

Gabriel Rosenberg: Jan is correct that we're not in the prognostication business here and. I'm, I'm certainly not invested in any cell ag companies. I don't know, Jan, if you, if you need to disclose any conflicts of interest here, but to be, we can try to be honest brokers. Um, you know, like, I think that the immediate term politicization of it, um, has thrown up some barriers. It's probably created additional new barriers, uh, to commercial interest, um, and to, and to consumer uptake, right? So, so eaters may now be more skeptical of it than they were, um, five or even six years ago as a result of, of like really active demonization of it. Um, but there are of course still real commercial viability problems and a lot of those have to do with scaling, right?

This, this topic that we keep on coming back to. I, I wouldn't give up on it though, entirely. And, and there are a couple of reasons I think that we should probably be optimistic. Um, one is that, like skeptics of the technology, of the underlying technology, um, have claimed that like what has now been done could never be done. Okay. That's, that's the first part that this is, the claim was that it was always gonna be an imaginary technology and that this was pie in the sky. Um, we've had the chicken, we've had the salmon, uh, we've had, uh, sausages with, uh, with cell ag pork in them. Um, it's, it's, uh, it's remarkable. Um. It's not yet, it's not yet producible at a price that most consumers would be willing to pay, um, but even that is a really substantial victory, at least in terms of what a lot of skeptics were saying about it.

Jasmin Singer: Mm-hmm.

Gabriel Rosenberg: The second thing though, is I think we should probably take a much broader view of the technology and understand that it's not actually, um, exclusively a food technology that, like synthetic biology as a broader, um, sort of like space, uh, has, has a tremendous amount of crossover into biomedical technology.

So something even like bioreactor design and the underlying sort of like algorithms that control, uh, circulation, um, of energy, uh, within bioreactors, like all of that, which is basic science that's still being conducted. Um, is, is like also important for biomedical, uh, research and, and eventually, um, uh, medical, uh, technologies. So, you know, like we, we, we tend to think of this technology exclusively in the space of what consumers are willing to eat at a particular price point. Uh, but the underlying technology itself still has a great deal of value and is gonna continue to be developed. It may not be developed in ways that, um, advance the commercial viability of cell ag burgers as expediently as maybe some of us would like. Um, but I, but I think that in like, uh, a 10 to 15 to 20 year, uh, outlook, there's, there's a lot of possibilities for this technology and, and we shouldn't be, uh, we shouldn't be so, uh, so fast to scoff at it. Whether or not that winds up like displacing all meat. I, I, I don't know. That's, uh, that's a crystal ball question that, that I'm not

gonna answer.

Mariann Sullivan: That was, that was very enlightening.

Jasmin Singer: My cats are waiting for the mouse meat that's, I think already in the EU

Mariann Sullivan: Every vegan, the only reason we want it is for the cats.

I'm not sure that's gonna be quite big enough a market, but you know, we, most of us have a lot of cats.

Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean, it's a huge, you know, uh, something like a fifth of all factory farmed meat in the United States goes to pets.

Jasmin Singer: No, he, Murray wants you to know he's a vegan, not by choice, but we make him be.

Mariann Sullivan: Involuntarily vegan. Um, alright, I wanna, I wanna move on. 'cause there, there's a lot of other issues in this, in this book that I at least wanna touch on. And one of them is labor and, uh, we can talk a little bit more here. Waffle House makes a reappearance in a less attractive, a less attractive light when you start talking about labor.

And I'm, I'm just curious, are the labor issues in the food business just to the, the prime example of the way the rich are getting richer? And you already talked about farmers not being the poor, the poor folk in the, in this business, but servers certainly are, and people in, uh, in, in food access perhaps, uh, are. So is this just, you know, classic American capitalism, the rich get richer and the working poor get the shaft in general? Or is there something particular about the food issue that really, really is leading to an underclass?

Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean in, in short, I would just say that yes, you are correct.

Mariann Sullivan: Well, I need more than that, Jan..

Jan Dutkiewicz: And it has to do no, but it has to do broadly with two things, right? Number one is quite simply, uh, the nature of agricultural work, which is that it is often... I hesitate because it is not low skilled. It's extremely high skilled. Making a good waffle at Waffle House, cutting berries or grapes off a vine is high skilled and tiring, uh, work. But in terms of educational or other prerequisites, there are just a lot of people who can do the work. So the basic forces of supply and demand make it a buyer's market, which depresses wages, right?

So if you're gonna be a server, if you're gonna work on a farm, there are a lot of people who can work those jobs and who might wanna work those jobs, which means that employers can just pay less. But the second part of this is that employers can pay less because historically, in the United States, there have been very organized business interests, more powerful and more organized than labor interests who have actively sought to depress wages. And we see this in terms of everything from the federal minimum wage in general to things specific to the food system, like, uh, the extremely low, just over $2 to this day, minimum wage for tipped workers.

Mariann Sullivan: Unbelievable.

Jan Dutkiewicz: And that's the result of, as we write in the book, very active lobbying by, uh, the food industry, the National Restaurant Association, and so on and so forth. But this is not a sort of immutable fact of labor economics. So you go to places, so for instance, the fight for 15 increased minimum wages for fast food workers.

You look at other countries like Europe, where minimum wages are much higher and there are more labor protections. So you can have more dignified, safer, better paid food labor. But in order to do that, you need the political will and you need the organizing. And historically in the United States, uh, you know, to put it most simply, the bosses have been better organized than the workers.

Gabriel Rosenberg: To answer your, your question or just to add a little bit of context here, um, know, like workers specifically in restaurants and groceries as a percentage of the overall workforce, I believe has grown pretty substantially, um, over the, the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century.

Right. So we've, we've had a, a migration of the workforce from other sectors increasingly into service. Um. Mid-century America is the peak of unionization, and people often think about unions through the prototype of the industrial factory setting. Um, and, and there's a deeper history about the ways in which unions have attempted to, to sort of shift their organizing strategies in light of, of the shift in, in sort of like the, um, the labor market. Uh, and, and some of those shifts have been successful and others have not. But the thing that's really exciting to us and was really exciting to us when we were writing this is that when we look at employment in the United States and we look at where the real front lines for workers taking control of their workplaces and demanding dignified work and, and good wages, we find that like food service locations are at the front lines over and over again.

Mariann Sullivan: Hmm.

Gabriel Rosenberg: And when we listen to people, um, kind of like talking about the evils of a place like Waffle House and, and we are upfront about those evils in the book, right? We are upfront about a lot of the things that are wrong with how Waffle Houses are run. But it's really instructive to listen to the workers who are organizing in Waffle Houses and what they say about their work. What they say about their work is not that they want Waffle Houses to go away and to be replaced by boutique farm to fork, whatever, whatever they want their Waffle Houses to be dignified places to work where they are paid decently and where they are treated, um, like with, with the respect that they, that they ought be due. In other words, they're not out there asking to get rid of the industrial food system. They're trying to make the industrial food system a place where dignified work can be had and where people can support themselves.

And, and, and our, and our stance is quite simple, we should be supporting them in that effort, not, not by arguing that, that we gotta shut down the industrial food system, but that like improving the lot of workers within the industrial food system really ought to be a major progressive objective, uh, for people who care about food.

Mariann Sullivan: Absolutely. It's such a compelling argument. I do wanna move, you know, we're, we're not gonna, we're gonna run outta time and there's so much to ask you, but I do wanna move on a little bit to the labor issue... 'cause this is currently my obsession, labor issues on the farm, quote unquote farm than in food service and.

And obviously the immigration question, which, you know, you could say is kind of at the forefront of everybody's minds these days. And the absolute hostility of the administration to immigrants, um, is ,uh, affecting or has the potential to affect the, the food system because in factory farms and, and in slaughterhouses there is enormous number of immigrant workers.

And I am, I am really concerned with what they're planning on doing with h2a visas. I know the meat and dairy industries really want them on their factory farms, even though the whole idea of h2a visas was, sort of the idea, was for, for work that is, uh, not full year round, that it, you know, it's, it's seasonal. And so that's why they allowed these crazy visas, which are basically, uh, well, not slavery, but indentured servitude.

Uh, and and the other day I heard Stephen Miller tweeted, The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare and the right to vote. And that sure ain't true of people who have h2a visas because they're just brought in here to work and then sent home.

Alright. I know I'm ranting now, but can you explain a little bit of how these visas work in agriculture? The, the vita, the the need for immigrants and, and how you think the, the industry is moving? Because I think this idea that, uh, I saw that the Democrat running for Congress around here is supporting, um, 'cause we live in a place where there's a lot of dairy farms, it's, it is totally in support of using H two A visas for dairy farms, which is think is insane. All right. That was my rant. Who wants to comment on it? That wasn't exactly a question.

Jasmin Singer: love your rant.

Mariann Sullivan: Been on my mind.

Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean, look, the, the long and short of it is that American agriculture relies on immigrant labor. There simply are not enough Americans willing or able to do the...

Mariann Sullivan: can I just insert there? At the amount they pay. People will do anything if you pay them enough money. They're really bad jobs and they pay shit. Sorry.

Jan Dutkiewicz: But even, well, that's the thing. I mean, this is, this is one of those labor economics questions that's, it's hard to run the counterfactual. Because if you paid extremely well to do some of these jobs, you know, and we see this actually, we see this sometimes with, uh, right when wages go up in farmed work, but the proportion of American to migrant labor does not change because of the difficult nature of the work.

And this is,

Mariann Sullivan: Well, if you raised it even higher.

Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean, as, as I said, it's

Mariann Sullivan: I mean, I guess the point point I'm making is that it's not a viable business because you can't pay people enough to do it unless they're desperate. I'm sorry. This is a my, this is a thing for me at the moment. All right. I'm gonna shut up now.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Well, I think it's, it's a valid question to ask. It's an important question to ask. As I said, we can't run the counterfactual 'cause we can't run a counterfactual where there are very good wages and less or no migrants to know if those jobs would be filled or not. Right. But I think you, I think what we can say, uh, is that quite simply the nature of agricultural work, some of which remains very seasonal if we're talking about, you know, the harvest in California and all up the west coast. And those jobs do rely on migrant labor. In fact, historically there were, you know, if you look at something like the Bracero system, there was a specific system to facilitate seasonal labor coming in from Mexico to the United States, again, to address labor shortages. So I think this is one of those places where political rhetoric just doesn't jive with the realities of agriculture. You can't have American agriculture of any kind, nevermind dairy farms and slaughter houses. You also, you can't have, uh, you know, berry harvests or grape harvests without, without migrant labor. And that's just a hard reality of the way our food system works.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. And to be clear, I'm not, I mean, I don't think there's a problem with having migrant labor. I, I'm all for immigrants. It's just that I think they're immigrants like any other immigrants, and they shouldn't have this special situation. Um, and there's no reason to do it just because the work is seasonal.

Because almost all of the work is done through contractors, not individual farms. So basically they're working year round. I mean, they're just on different farms, but they can't leave the farms because they're enslaved... well, I shouldn't use that term, they're, they're, they don't have options like any other immigrant in any other business.

They're just brought in here to do the works, treated very poorly, and under this administration, of course, even more poorly and sent home. And I think this is Steven Miller's plan for a lot more than agriculture. All right. I'm sorry.

Jasmin Singer: Mariann. I was wondering, uh, what you think about it.

Mariann Sullivan: I'm sorry, but I'm right. Everybody. I'm right. Um, what,

Jasmin Singer: I just was gonna say, but what do you, really think. Uh, did, did, before we move on, did either of you wanna reply to that? I didn't wanna step on your words.

Mariann Sullivan: You don't have to.

Jasmin Singer: Okay. All right.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Look, well, no, like you're, I mean, broadly speaking, you're right, right? Like the h2a Visa is a visa that facilitates a specific type of labor that creates sort of poor living and working conditions for people who are basically enthralled to the visa. And it's not, but it's not just the United States thing, and it's not just a recent thing, right? Canada has had this problem forever and the Canadian, the Canadian Migrant Worker temporary visa, which also relies on Mexican labor in large part, has also been, you know, fraught with absolute, just absolute horror stories. And because this is a general answer to, and this is also the case in Europe, with people coming from outside the Schengen zone into onto EU farms. And I think it's just the result of the clash of a politics, which seeks to generally speaking, reduce migration or make it more difficult for people to migrate running headlong into the political economic realities of a high demand for labor in jobs a lot of people don't want to do.

And so I think that as long as there's, uh, an anti-immigrant sentiment and the need for these jobs, then this will continue I'm sad, I'm sad to say. Should it be reformed? Yes, it should absolutely be reformed, but it's extremely difficult, but it's absolutely not a recent development in the United States or in other liberal democracies.

Mariann Sullivan: I'm sure that's true. I mean, I don't know about Canada or Europe, but I'm sure it's true. I mean, we may be very envious of Canada at the moment, but it's not like it's, uh, you know, the perfect society. And, uh, I just wish the, as a first step that more people knew this, so that Stephen Miller couldn't get away with saying that, uh, all of our foreign labor class is granted full political rights.

Uh, that's ridiculous when it comes to agriculture,

Gabriel Rosenberg: The only thing I wanna add, uh, to this conversation is that soy agriculture in the United States, um, has very, very little by way of, um, of immigrant labor. Just worth,

worth, worth noting given, given the, the, the broader conversation we've been having about, uh, the merits of, of soybeans.

Jasmin Singer: Hmm.

Mariann Sullivan: Soybeans for everybody, well, not for the animals, but for everybody else. All the humans.

Jasmin Singer: So another important theme of the book, which, which you think a lot of people get wrong is food access. So first let's talk about Snap. You were critical of the program's adequacy to tackle hunger when you wrote the book, which was of course before it was attacked by the Trump administration. And I know that some of the worst proposed cuts by the administration were avoided by the last shutdown, but what's the basic situation? Does Snap stop hunger in America? And if not, what else is needed?

Gabriel Rosenberg: Yes. Uh, but not entirely, and not as, as comprehensively as it could. that's, that's kind of the short answer. Um, Snap and what we would say are, like, the most direct cash transfers tend to be the most effective ways to deal with food insecurity and particularly, um, lack of food access. Uh, there's, there's a, a desire to kind of like reinvent the wheel here and to try to find solutions to, uh, a lack of food access that, that often confuse availability with access or that are rooted in ideas, um, uh, of kind of like, again, boutique and artisanal modes of like feeding people, but the simplest way, uh, to get hungry people food is to get them the money to buy food. There's, there's plenty of food on the shelves. What, what poor people don't have is, um, sometimes the money to purchase it. So Snap does that, but it doesn't do it at the levels that we would like to see. And there are changes, both in terms of how we might calculate, um, like SNAP benefits, but, but just like the overall thing is that it needs to be better funded. Uh, and obviously under the current administration, that's, uh, that's gonna be really, really difficult.

Mariann Sullivan: That's actually pretty reassuring to hear that, uh, a government program that basically just needs more money, that is a pretty, um, simple fix compared to a lot of them.

Gabriel Rosenberg: I can give you another one. Uh, school lunches.

Mariann Sullivan: Oh, I have to tell you, I was born in, nor the Norwood area of the Bronx. I was so excited to read about it.

Gabriel Rosenberg: Like the, you know, we had this brief moment, um, during, uh, uh, 2021 when, as a result of the response, um, to, uh, the COVID pandemic, um, there was this window in which we had real federal investment in universal school lunches. And all of the, the, the data coming back from that are telling us that it was an enormously successful experiment. Universal school lunches substantially reduced, uh like, food insecurity for kids. Um, and, and, and like there's just really no reason why we shouldn't be financing it at a broader level. And it, and it's a similar sort of situation in some senses to Snap. Both of these programs try to leverage the abundance and efficiency of the existing food system to get food to people who may not have the income, uh, to actually purchase it. And, and that's one of those situations where like if we do fund the programs sufficiently, we really see a lot of bang for our buck, and we really get the people who need food food. That's gonna be a lot more effective than, than, you know, uh, paying grocery stores, um, to, to open in a, in a new neighborhood or something like that. Which, you know, has the capacity sometimes to marginally improve, uh, availability, but doesn't do a lot, um, for access.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I found that the, your report of the, um, the, the school lunch program in that school in Norwood, which is not a, um, a, a wealthy area at all, uh, and, and was very moving. I mean, the, we we're not talk, you know, you hear so much about school lunches being unhealthy and just like chicken fingers or whatever.

These kids were eating great food in a poor neighborhood in, in the middle of New York, and that needs to be everywhere. It was a great report.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Thank you. No, look, I'll say this too, that even that idea, which is now being promulgated by some in politics, that school lunches are quote unquote full of junk or unhealthy is false. False period. And I'll tell you why. It's because for a school lunch to be free and to be reimbursed by the USDA, all school lunches are reimbursed by the USDA, every single thing that's eaten by students has to have three of the five food group present in the MySpace or so... MySpace, excuse me, MyPlate model. Um. So that means that even if the student is getting sort of like a white bread and cheese grilled cheese or chicken tenders, it also means that plate is gonna have some sliced fruit, it's gonna have some veggies, 'cause otherwise that meal doesn't get reimbursed by the government. And everything we know from just basic sort of like studies of human behavior is that if you make something available to people as a default, they'll eat it. So when we talk to a lot of these kids, they did say, you know, critics say, well, school lunches have chicken tenders, which aren't healthy.

Well, they're not necessarily that unhealthy. I wish they weren't chicken, but they were the Rebellious vegan chicken nuggets. Right? But if a student is eating those and likes those, but then they're also getting rice and beans and they're also getting a sliced apple, they're also going to eat those. And we know this is true because if you look at peer reviewed longitudinal research of school lunches, we know that they're among the most healthy meals that students will get on

any given day.

Right? And it's done for, and it's done for relatively low cost. I mean, in New York City, they're doing this for $7 per students, per student per day for lunch and breakfast. And as we say in the book, imagine what you could do with $10 per day, per student per meal. Right?

Mariann Sullivan: I just hate to bring this up, but, uh, 'cause I wanna end on a high note, and this is a real high note, but you talked about the MyPlate. I mean, now we have the new, uh, pyramid. Is the quality going to change, do you think? Of, of, I mean, people will certainly be much more confused about what they, they can put on the plate, but it, do you think the quality will change because they're changing that at the USDA?

Gabriel Rosenberg: Jan may have a, um, better sense of this, but like, one of the bizarre ideas behind encouraging people to eat more red meat is that red meat is substantially more expensive. So, so actually I, I don't know how, within the budgetary constraints that most school lunch programs face, I don't know how they could shift,

like into a really substantial increase in the amount of red meat that was on the plate. Obviously there are other parts of the diet, dietary guidelines that they might be, um, they might be following, but I actually don't know if those components of the dietary guidelines are what would would affect, uh, reimbursements. Um, Jan, do you, do you know the, the answer to that? I, I, I'm, uh, I think it's still like distribution and like, um, uh, food categories.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah, I mean, look, ultimately, other than the, the real insistence on more protein in the new dietary guidelines, in some ways they're quite similar to the other ones. I mean, this is a gloss, you can, we can go at length into the new dietary guidelines, but I think in terms of reimbursement, it's really a budgetary question.

I think ultimately kids getting fruits and veggies and whole grains wouldn't go away. Right. So absolutely. If you, if there was insistence on red meat in the meals, then that's simply not within schools' budgets. But I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic

that, uh, the reimbursement and the general sort of the contents of a student's plate under new, the new plan won't change all that much.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah.

The, the new the new pyramid is, is confusing and it, it, it, it certainly allows a lot of good foods. It just puts them in this weird kind of assortment. So presumably schools will have some, some leeway in what they can pick in order to fit within the, um, this new, this new scheme. So that is good news.

We, I have so many more questions, but I think that, you know, we have to kind of wind up here.

I, I just wanted to ask one final question to kind of encapsulate it all. I mean food and ag, the, a lot of what your book proves is that food and agriculture have been pretty much immune to policy change for a long time.

It lives in this own world of like people thinking that it is something that it isn't and going along with that. I mean, it's not like nobody's ever talked about these issues, but we're really encapsulating like a lot of the things that really could be done if the political will was there. Do you have some hope there?

Gabriel Rosenberg: I don't think we would've written the book if we didn't. One has to be cautious about making any kinds of predictions about where politically we're going to be in five to 10 years.

Mariann Sullivan: Yes, indeed.

Gabriel Rosenberg: Just ' cause like, yeah. Uh, I wouldn't have made accurate predictions five or 10 years ago, so I have no reason to believe that I would make accurate predictions now.

The thing, the thing that I always come back to on this is that like there really is a huge constituency of people interested in improving the average meal that is available and accessible to Americans. And that includes consumers and eaters who do really care about what's on their plate and what they're feeding to their, to their family and to their friends. It also includes those 30 million workers within that system. I think when you start to think about that and like the large number of individuals who are actually impacted by how food is produced, you can begin to see a new kind of emerging constituency for a different sort of food politics. And that really is the kind of food politics that I think we were trying to bring to the fore.

It's, it's a, it's one that's not really so invested in the idea that like, eaters are gonna get to know their farmers and like, know, transform it that way. It's one that's, um, gonna look a lot more like the people showing up at a Waffle House on a Friday night. Those are the people who need to get together and ask the question of like, how can we feed ourselves better?

And, and we hope that some of these ideas would be useful to those people.

Jan Dutkiewicz: I, I don't think the book, I just, I, I would hate for people to listen to this and think the book is pessimistic about the possibility for policy change, historically and into the future. We're very clear that policy change in food difficult, but that it's been done. Right?

Universal school lunches and the reimbursement of universal school lunches, especially more healthy ones, is the result of policy. It's the result of Obama era policy that was passed and implemented. Universal school lunches were made universal, as Gabe just said, during COVID, that's the result of effective policy.

The fight for 15 and other organizing by food workers has led to increases in a minimum wage and jobs that have been codified into law. That's policy change that has happened, that has made lives better. You look at things like heat protections under OSHA, Cal OSHA has had heat protections for a long time, but then the Biden administration, despite pushback from the industry, implemented environmental and heat protections for workers under OSHA. Policy is possible. It's been done. I mean, Snap, SNAP is policy. Snap is the bulk of USDA funding. It's this sort of hot potato every Farm Bill. But SNAP is... before Snap there was no SNAP and then there was Snap. And we know Snap massively addresses food access. So I think the potential for policy change is absolutely there. It has happened historically.

We've got a lot of precedent. It just requires diligent organizing and politicians willing to fight these fights and listen to their constituents and take the fight to basically organized business interests.

Mariann Sullivan: That is a very hopeful place to, uh, and, and really well taken. And I do know that that animal rights activists, you know, who are listening to this, and who are hosting it, tend to see the food system in, in the light of animal agriculture, which is, you know, probably the biggest nightmare out there. And this fact that, that so much progress has been made is a good, is a really good place to end.

I do wanna talk to you a little bit more about that, um, on the bonus. And I also just wanna mention to everybody, this is the thing I was gonna mention. It's completely silly, it's just a small detail, but important. I looked it up and just everybody out there, Waffle House doesn't have anything vegan, so don't try looking it up.

It's like it's not for you. Uh, even though you did make it sound so delicious.

Jasmin Singer: Denny's does.

Mariann Sullivan: Denny's has vegan pancakes

Jasmin Singer: Yeah. They have vegan

Gabriel Rosenberg: The hash browns aren't vegan?

Jasmin Singer: At at Waffle House?

Mariann Sullivan: Well, I don't know. AI told me they had nothing.

Jan Dutkiewicz: Don't listen to AI, that's your first...

Mariann Sullivan: Maybe they did say they, the hash browns were, uh, I don't remember. The waffles are, the waffles are not vegan. I don't wanna mislead anybody.

Gabriel Rosenberg: That would not surprise me. Yeah. Okay.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, no it wouldn't. It didn't surprise me either. I just had my fingers

Jasmin Singer: Go to Denny's and get very healthy tasting pancakes instead. Um, alright. The book is called Feed the People. Our guests were Jan Dutkievicz and Gabriel Rosenberg. Thank you both so much. Can you just tell our listeners how they can follow your work and get a copy of the book?

Jan Dutkiewicz: Well, you can follow our work. We're not that active on social media anymore, but I'm on Blue Sky. I'm just Jan Dutkiewicz on Blue Sky and before Gabe goes, I will say that if you're listening to this before February 17th, you can get the book on basicbooks.com for 20% off with the code feed20.

And after February 17th, it'll just be available at major bookstores.

Gabriel Rosenberg: And, uh, I'm, uh, GN Rosenberg on, uh, blue Sky. Uh, like Jan, I'm not tremendously active, although I do occasionally throw up a kettlebell, uh, workout video. Um, and, uh, I also do a, uh, a Substack newsletter, um, that's somewhat intermittent, but that people can keep up on, uh, the writing that both Jan and I do. And then some of my, um, uh, solo stuff. And that's, uh, bearistotle.substack.com.

Jasmin Singer: Wonderful. Well, congratulations and thank you both so much for joining us and if you're out there, thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe and hit like and comment wherever you listen or watch this, and we'll talk to you next week.