Up First from NPR - Men, Beef and a Climate Solution

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Eating less beef could make a large dent in Americans' climate pollution. But data show it's men who are disproportionately eating beef. Now food and climate researchers are thinking about how to impact climate pollution through the lens of gender. But for many U.S. men, eating fewer burgers or steaks can require overcoming some big obstacles.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe. This is the Sunday Story and it's NPR's Climate Solutions Week. This year, NPR is looking at the ways climate change is affecting what we eat and how what we eat is affecting climate change. NPR's climate solutions reporter, Julia Simon, is here with us. Now, Julia, welcome, first of all. Thank you. It's going to be fun today. I understand you've been working on a story about beef, and I'm an interested person for you to talk to about beef, because my favorite food since I was a kid has been steak. So even at like eight or nine years old, back in the day, we'd go to

Golden Corral. I would order steak and everybody else would get the buffet and they would bring the steak to the table and they would point it at the adult or the male in the table. And they'd be like, no, it's for the little girl over there. Okay. Well, that's an image. And interesting that they assumed it was for the man because we're going to get into that. Aisha, if you count yourself as one of the high beef-eating Americans, you're probably going to be interested in this because we're going to explore some powerful ideas connecting Americans with beef-eating. Okay, I definitely do consider myself one of those high beef eating Americans. So where do we start? We're going to start in 2006. And this is when Malcolm Regisford was a little boy in Los Angeles watching cartoons. I had to be really young,

maybe, you know, 10 or something like that. And somewhere in between his cartoons comes this commercial. Andrew, our producer, he's going to play you the clip. Okay, okay, cool. I am man, hear me roar. The number's too big to ignore. And I'm way too hungry to settle for chick food. So, Aisha, can you describe what we're seeing here? We're seeing a man.

He was in this fancy restaurant. It looks like getting a little fancy plate. He just threw that away. He's a man. He got to find the real food, not this fancy schmancy stuff. Exactly. He has this vegetarian dish, and he just throws it away. That's the so-called chick food.

He leaves the restaurant, joins a throng of other singing men. Oh, yes, I'm a guy. I'll admit I've been fat, Keesh. Who made tofu, bye-bye. Now it's the Whopper piece I reach. A guy wanting a Whopper, basically. So a bunch of guys singing about how much they love their Whopper. It's a Burger King commercial.

I do not remember this commercial, and I watch a lot of TV. Well, now you're going to have it in your head, living rent-free for the rest of your life. Texas double Whopper. He like a man, man. So Malcolm, he says he saw this commercial often as a kid. Yeah, they were starting it early. A lot of boys and men get messages from advertisements and culture that connect eating meat with being a man, particularly eating beef. Sizzling beef, beef jerky, steaks and hefty burgers. Like that's what a man's supposed to eat.

OK, so Julia, now you're a climate solutions reporter. So I got to ask you, why are you talking about beef? It's because of cows. When cows burp, they release methane, this very potent planet-heating gas. Demand for beef, also dairy, more so beef, means there are lots of cows and cattle on the planet right now, with lots of planet heating burps. Also, demand for beef drives deforestation, which also releases gases that heat the planet. I mean, that doesn't sound good, but what is the solution then? Well, it turns out that if people eat less beef, not even eliminating it, just eating less, that would have a huge impact on global warming. Diego Rose is the head of the nutrition program at Tulane University. He did a study that asked the question, what if on a given

day you decide you're not going to have beef in a meal? You're going to have, say, chicken instead. If it was a beef steak, you had a chicken steak. Or if it was a beef burger, you had a chicken steak, or if it was a beef burger, you had a chicken burger. And with all these, all of the substitutions, we found that it dropped people's dietary carbon footprint in half, 48%. Okay. So, so even if you still eat meat, like if you eat chicken, chickens don't release as much methane into the air as, as the cows do. Is that the case? Yeah. Cows have this special stomach that's really cool, but it releases a lot of methane. And yeah, it's really about the cows heating the planet so much. So if you decide to swap out beef in a meal, these researchers found that will cut the global warming of your diet that day by about half. And this is particularly important for the U.S. because Americans, we go to the Golden Corral, we consume a lot of beef, a lot, about 300% more beef per capita than other countries,

according to the United Nations. But we're not all eating that beef equally. Here's Diego. There's something going on there. Whenever we've looked at the question of gender, we've seen that men eat greater amounts of beef than women. Diego and other researchers, they looked at U.S. government data, which provides this one-day snapshot of thousands of Americans' diets. They found that 12% of Americans eat so much beef that it adds up to half of the beef consumed in the U.S. on a given day. That 12%? Disproportionately men.

Mmm, but other than me. I'm the exception to the rule on this. I had no idea. Some women do eat a lot of beef too, but data shows it's more of the American men eating a lot of beef. And researchers say for the climate, paying attention to men makes sense. Here's Anna Grumman, a professor at Stanford Medical School. Because men eat more beef, it means you're going to, as a society, get more bang for your buck from the men changing their behavior. Reducing the amount of beef we eat is an important climate solution, especially for men who eat even more beef.

But there are specific obstacles for men, from powerful societal pressures and messaging for men to eat meat, to misinformation about soy and protein. Protein, protein, protein, which I feel like is a big misconception. More on beef, the climate, and men when we come back. Read about the impact of women in music with NPR's new book, How Women Made Music, a revolutionary history from NPR Music. This stunning anthology offers original writing and illustrations, interviews and photos, and the audiobook includes 52 years worth of interview excerpts with more than 60 legendary artists. Visit npr.org slash howwomenmademusic to order now. Hey, it's Mike and Ian. We're the

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Listen on the Code Switch podcast from NPR. We're back with the Sunday story and NPR's Julia Simon talking about beef and the climate and men. Now, Julia, that Burger King commercial we saw, these ideas that men need to eat meat to be a real man. I mean, I do. I have seen this before. It's pretty widespread in our culture. It really is. And these ideas go way back. Men being associated with actually doing the hunting, that connects us to our meat and meat consumption in a kind of primal way. This is Joshua Svetch, historian at University of Notre Dame. Joshua says red meat eating has long been connected to ideas about our primordial ancestors. And there's marketing. Joshua says red meat eating has long been connected to ideas about our primordial ancestors.

And there's marketing. Joshua says pretty much as long as beef has been mass produced, that industry has used ideas of masculinity to sell beef to men. In the late 1800s, canned beef companies sold beef with images of lumberjacks, miners, soldiers, and cowboys. They would depict visions of men who were like out there in the world making their own destiny. Then you had McDonald's, Burger King. Be like a man, man. But today we don't just have commercials spreading those ideas. There's a whole new ecosystem of social media and podcasts out there, and I can't

imagine what they out there saying. Aisha, do you know about meatfluencers? No, I have not heard of that. Okay, well, these are a group of online personalities and celebrities, often pushing the idea that men should eat lots of meat, often lots of red meat, beef, to live up to their potential. Some of them are actually selling beef products, including supplements made of beef. It tastes so good. More. This is Brian Johnson, also known as the Liver King, and he lives up to his name. He eats lots of liver. He's actually eating steak in that video.

He's eating beef. There are lots of diets in this world of meatfluencers. One of them is known as the carnivore diet, which typically involves eating mostly red meat, poultry, pork, seafood, dairy, and eggs. Podcaster Joe Rogan has also talked about the carnivore diet. The best I ever felt, like literally the best I ever felt all throughout the day was when I was on the carnivore diet. Joe Rogan, by the way, has 14.5 million followers for his podcast. 81% of his audience is men. Okay, but there are lots of men in America who don't eat meat, right? Yeah, for sure. There are American men who are vegan, vegetarian, plant-based, which refers to people

who primarily don't eat meat or dairy. And there are men who reduce their meat or beef. Some men cut it for their health or because they care about animal welfare or industry workers. They might reduce beef because they care about the environment or climate. But researchers say all these ideas in the media and in our culture that give men the message, you should eat meat, this can have an impact on behaviors. I talked to a lot of men for this story who reduced meat in their diet, and many of them got questions or pushback, like Malcolm, who saw the Burger King commercial as a kid.

Women, not so much at all, like no pushback at all. But yeah, men were the ones I had to like, in a way, convince. Malcolm is a basketball player. He made it to Colgate University to play Division I basketball, but his junior year, he injured his ankle, and that got him thinking about how healthy he was. And inspired by a family friend, he decided to cut meat from his diet for his health. When he told his teammates and coaching staff, You're not going to eat any meat? Like, you're really doing this? Like, it's just a lot of skepticism. Malcolm, he's going into his senior year. He needs to be in peak performance on the court. His teammates are asking Malcolm, how is he going to get enough protein without meat?

The protein question is, it comes up all the time. Like, you wouldn't believe it. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's what I always hear. The protein. You gotta get protein. It turns out, Aisha, you actually don't need meat to get enough protein. And we're going to talk about that more in a bit. But, Aisha, there are lots of false and misleading ideas that some men say make it harder for them to reduce the amount of beef they eat. I'm going to run you through four. All right. So what is the first myth that you're going to be debunking today?

The first is pretty basic, but it's the idea that humans have always eaten a lot of beef. We might think of eating lots of beef as this primordial activity, but in reality, for the majority of human history, most people didn't eat nearly as much beef as we eat today. It was the late 1800s that things started changing, particularly in America. With a few key innovations, here's historian Joshua Specht. One is the railroad, right? So goods and people can move further, faster than ever before. So you can move things like cattle, then slaughter the cattle, and move cans of beef, fresh beef. The other invention? Refrigerators. Now your meat doesn't go bad so quickly. By the early 1900s, Americans were eating a lot of meat and a lot of beef. So beef as a special occasion food becomes an all the time food.

Okay, so this idea of the caveman and, you know, Fred Flintstone with that big old, you know, hunk of meat, that's not legitimate. He could not have had meat like that every single day at, you know, three meals a day. No, our ancestors did not have railroads or refrigeration. No. Okay. So that's the first misleading idea. What's number two? The second has to do with some of the health claims you might hear from some of these meatfluencers. Many maintain that primarily eating lots of red meat is good for your health. And many meat promoters make specific health

claims about beef and red meat. Here's chiropractor Eric Berg, who has more than 12 million followers on YouTube. It's difficult to heal and repair your body without animal protein, especially red meat. And today I'm going to prove it. Berg notes on his website that he is not a medical doctor and he is not providing medical diagnosis or treatment. We reached out to Eric Berg. He did not respond to our request for comment, but I spoke to several nutrition experts for this story, including Frank Hu, chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Hu says there's little evidence to support this claim. And also, There is increasing evidence that eating too much meat is actually detrimental to health.

Hu says diets high in red meat and low in whole grains and vegetables are associated with increased risk of diabetes. A spokesperson for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, an industry lobby group, maintains that beef has benefits. In an email, a spokesperson said, quote, research continues to show the important role high quality protein, like beef, plays in a balanced diet. But returning to meatfluencers, some of them don't just promote the benefits of eating lots of red meat. Some of them spread false and misleading views about eating certain plants, particularly soy, including the idea that soy can feminize men. Here's Joe Rogan describing that view. Soy is one of the rare foods that's actually

attached to being a bitch. I mean, wow. I mean, you know, so I would think you're about to clear this up right now because this doesn't sound right to me. Yeah, this needs context. This is the third misleading idea. I talked to Harvard nutrition professor Frank Hu about this. Soy, as well as some other plants, contains an estrogen-like substance called phytoestrogen. All people, including men, make varying levels of estrogen, by the way. But as Hu explains, the effects of phytoestrogen are much, much weaker than the estrogen hormone in human bodies. Still, some men are afraid of consuming soy. It has a stigma. There's even a derogatory term for weak men called soy boys.

It's a pretty popular term. I have not heard the term soy boy. Okay, so I think we're at our final myth. What is it? It's the one we've been waiting for. Protein. Here's Malcolm, the Division I basketball player who stopped eating meat in college. The protein question is, it comes up all the time.

Like, you wouldn't believe it. So this myth is basically that to get enough protein in your diet, you have to eat meat or it's very difficult to get enough protein if you don't eat meat. Yeah, and it turns out it isn't true. You can get protein from lots of different things, including plants. Here's Dariush Mozaffarian, professor at Tufts University, and he mentions amino acids. Those are the building blocks of protein. It seems that people are really obsessed with protein. If someone wants to get protein, amino acids are pretty much the same from any source,

whether it's from plants or from animal sources. There are some variations in the relative amounts of different amino acids, but you can get complete proteins from plants, from dairy, from meats, from poultry, from eggs. If you can get enough protein, are there any downsides for health if you don't eat meat? Frank Hu at Harvard notes that for some people, including people with heavy periods, eating little to no meat may mean they need to take iron supplements. Others reducing meat, particularly older people, might want to consult their doctors to see if they need to supplement vitamin B12. Frank says for most people, though, a healthy and balanced plant-based diet can normally provide enough iron, nutrients, and protein.

But look, Ayesha, giving people the facts about protein is one thing. Researchers say that's just the start towards getting people to eat less beef. Getting people to change their diets? That will require a whole lot of new messaging. I think it's one of the greatest communication challenges of all time. When we come back, an NBA player reduces his meat eating. Leave the cows, whoever alone, leave the animals alone. Stay with us.

As Election Day approaches, NPR's Consider This podcast is zooming in on six states that could Stay with us. they want the country to go. Follow along with new episodes this week on the Consider This podcast from NPR. For a while now, you've probably been hearing about book bands, how they're gaining momentum everywhere, in Texas, in Missouri, Florida, and Pennsylvania. On the Code Switch podcast, we're taking a look at why. Why are so many books suddenly considered

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I guess I understand you have one last commercial for me? I do. This is a commercial that started airing earlier this year. Andrew, our producer, is going to play it. Listen up, America. Meat has problems, and it's going to take us meat eaters to solve them. Ayesha, can you describe this guy in the ad? He looks kind of like a big burly man, and he's walking around aggressively. Exactly. He was slapping a beef hamburger out of some guy's hand. He replaced it with a plant-based burger because this is an ad for the plant-based food company Impossible Foods. Okay, let's go on.

Because now we can turn plants into burgers and hot dogs. Even meatballs. Then someone offers the main guy a helmet and he gets on a motorcycle. We're solving the meat problem. With more meat. Impossible! Meat from plants! He gets on the motorcycle and he zooms off exploding, exploding into the horizon. I showed this Impossible Foods ad to Gabriel Rosenberg. He's a professor of gender studies at Duke University. Gabriel specifically studies gender and food, and he thinks there's some very important symbolism going on here.

He's this like, like older figure of like masculinity. He's teaching you how to be a man. And then he's like explosively virile. It's basically just saying, men, you have permission to eat our product and still be manly and still be masculine. I wanted to ask the company about what they're trying to do with this ad. So I got on a Zoom with Peter McGinnis. He's the president and CEO of Impossible Foods. When he came to the company a few years ago, he learned about the customer base. But the main thing Peter found is that there were people they weren't reaching. Customers who see plant-based food and think it isn't for them. They see it as food for vegans and vegetarians. Peter wants it to be more inclusive. That really means more

meat eaters. To reach more of them, Peter says they needed to change the branding. I think we had the messaging wrong for a long, long time on all this stuff. Impossible Foods was founded to help curb climate change, to reduce that huge amount of climate pollution from animal agriculture. But Peter says in their advertising, they are not leaning into climate. So you don't lead with that. You don't hide it, but that's not your, you know, lead marketing horse. Yeah, because, you know, climate change, like so many other things,

has become politicized and kind of a part of the culture wars. It's true. And Peter doesn't want his customers to associate his product with politics at all. We don't want anything partisan, political, weird. They changed the packaging from green, often associated with environmentalists, to red. So it looks like red meat. So we're leaning into that, right? All those meat cues. They want to make a big tent to welcome meat eaters. Impossible burgers were designed to look and taste like beef burgers for that reason. Researchers told me that diets that are very high in highly processed plant-based meats can sometimes not be good for health either. But psychology researchers say ads like this are important. They can broaden social acceptance for plant-based foods.

To shift diets away from beef, shifting social norms will be key. So this is the court you sometimes go to? Yeah, we'll come out here sometimes, play a little bit one-on-one, do some spot shots. Nice. A little bit, yeah. I'll try to not get hit. Okay, so Julia, this is the sound of you poking around at the practice with an NBA player? That's right. When I was in L.A., I met up with Jalen Hood-Shifino. Point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers. He there, I just catch, dribble, body.

I got to watch Jalen and his trainer Gabriel prepare for the upcoming season. I'm not even, it's three dribbles. So it's not like I can sit there and just go crazy. And I was there to talk to him about his diet because he is plant-based. Jalen's 21. In high school, he started cutting meat from his diet. He had many motivations, including his health, ethics, animal welfare. Just how our lives are important.

Animals' lives are important as well. So leave the cows, whoever alone, leave the animals alone. So was he thinking about climate change when he cut out meat? For Jalen, like many people, climate wasn't his main motivation. But he says he's happy to help. I mean, I'm human, so I'm definitely a part of this environment. And, you know, while I'm here, I definitely want to make the world a better place and live in a healthier environment. Jalen's change to a plant

based diet was mostly self-directed. But Jalen, like you, Aisha, grew up in North Carolina, the birthplace of a very famous NBA point guard. You want to guess who I'm talking about? Point guard. The only person I know from North Carolina is Michael Jordan. Oh, man. Okay. Well, there's another one. Oh, okay. Sometimes called the point God. I don't know. CP3? Oh, Chris Paul? You got it. You got it. Okay. Okay.

Three seconds. Two seconds. Paul, the pull-up. He nails it. Current point guard for the San Antonio Spurs. He's been in the NBA since 2005, a long time. And since 2019, Chris Paul has been plant-based. When Jalen was in high school, he went to Chris Paul's basketball camps. Going to his camps and everything, he would have two sides. He would have like regular food, then he would have his vegan

chef cook the vegan meal. So during that time in high school, I was still obviously kind of dibbling and dabbling, but I would always go to the vegan side to try that food. So I was already hip to it. So I would eat the vegan food and I would kind of just ask him questions about, you know, the vegan diet. And he would always talk about how, you know, that helped his longevity in the NBA and how much energized he feel. Jalen says seeing the Chris Paul go plant-based, it didn't hurt his choice to do it himself. Definitely seeing him do that was definitely cool to see. And I him do that was definitely cool to see. And I'm excited that, you know, he's on that lifestyle. And, you know, me now being a part

of that is, you know, dope. Researchers say seeing a famous athlete or someone in your circle of friends or family reduce meat first, that can make it seem more socially acceptable. So the way to get some people to eat less meat is to get other people to eat less meat. This is Daniel Rosenfeld, a food and psychology researcher at UCLA. Like Malcolm, he also decided to cut out meat in college and he got teased. He says a lot of guys reducing meat hear stuff like this, associating meat eating with strength. I asked Jalen about this. Had anyone told him he was weak when he cut out meat? I never really heard weak because in a humble way, but if you ask anyone that I'm playing against, a lot of people are going to say

when it comes to the basketball court, I'm one of the strongest players that you're going to come across. He says he hopes to someday be a role model for kids if they might be interested in eating less meat or plant-based diets. Don't fall for the oaky-doke. You can live a really good plant-based life, a healthy life, and feel the best. A few weeks ago, I went to Canoga Park, Los Angeles, to meet that kid who saw the Burger King commercial. Malcolm registered. We went straight into the kitchen. Okay, first things first, we're going to get this pan nice and hot. Okay.

After playing Division I basketball in New York, Malcolm came back to L.A. and became a plant-based chef. He just released a cookbook. One of the recipes is a vegan quote unquote steak. The star of the show is not beef, of course. So lion's mane mushroom, it looks and feels like a lion's mane. Hundreds of thousands of people follow him on social media. When Malcolm talks to guys who follow him, he sometimes hears suspicion about plant-based foods or reducing meat in diets. He gets that connections to meats like beef are deep and cultural and that it can be hard to let go. But he tells them, all this other stuff that you think is attached to eating a certain way,

it's not as important as you may think. I talk to so many climate people and they tell me over and over again, if a person wants to reduce their impact on climate change, eating less beef is one of the best things you can do. Helping people switch away from beef will require making sure other options, plant-based options, are accessible. And for Malcolm, he wants to make sure plant-based foods are easy to make and delicious. What's next? We're ready to serve it up now. Oh, amazing.

Censor the sound of me chewing. Well, Malcolm, I've done it. I ate the entire steak almost by myself. That's exactly what we wanted. That's how you know it was a success. A good steak. Yes. Absolutely.

I'm very glad you enjoyed it. I really did. So, Julia, you really enjoyed this mushroom steak. I did. I did. I ate pretty much all of it. I don't know, Aisha. You got to try it.

Okay. Well, I think I'll try it. Maybe you'll try it. I'll give it a try. Thank you so much for bringing us this report in. I really try it. I'll give it a try. Thank you so much for bringing us this report. And I really appreciate it. Thank you, Aisha. That's NPR Climate Solutions reporter Julia Simon.

This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt. The reporting for this episode was brought to us by NPR's climate desk and chief climate editor, Neela Banerjee. The engineer for this episode was James Willits. Special thanks to Nicolette Cohn, Allison Aubrey, Selena Simmons-Duffin, Danielle Kurtzleben, Jerry Holmes, and Arielle Redding. The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan, our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.

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