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Meathooked & End of Water (VICE on HBO: Season 4, Episode 5) | VICE | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Meathooked & End of Water (VICE on HBO: Season 4, Episode 5)
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Core Theme
The escalating global demand for meat, driven by the pursuit of cheap production, is leading to severe environmental catastrophes, including water depletion, pollution, and unsustainable land use, prompting exploration of alternative solutions like lab-grown meat and sustainable farming practices.
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This week on VICE
The global threat caused by skyrocketing demand
for meat.
Our focus is on making the meat
as cheap as possible
that's where we often have
environmental catastrophes
Then crisis that humanity is facing
in our global water supply.
Something's happening
this drought is worse than anything you've ever seen. In the history of farming
here in silicon valley yes.
Those red spots represent groundwater depletion
it's happening all over the world
*music*
The World Health Organization recently classified processed meats
in the same cancer causing group 1 carcinogens
as tobacco, diesel exhaust, and asbestos
But some scientists feel that our global addiction to meat
might pose an even greater threat.
*music*
So this is the very first step of getting the
stem cells out of a piece of muscle.
if we just take a very small piece of it, in a couple of days
those stem cells will fall out.
Once we have sufficient number of cells
we will provide the conditions for them to
uh grow into a tissue
meat
so what is it that you are actually doing here in this lab?
We are creating hamburgers from stem cells.
Dr Mark Post is famous
for his work in creating the first
synthetic burger. And how long does that whole process take to turn
these tiny little stem cells into meat?
About seven weeks, so that's much faster than a cow
much much faster than a cow
So this is the new McDonald's. Yes. Can I try? No.
Mark's first burger cost him more than
$325,000 to make
This will be the first time a burger made with
cultured beef has been cooked.
It's close to meat, there's quite some intense taste
But Marks' hopeful
he can produce them cheaper
and on a larger scale. What are your biggest reasons for
for wanting to make this sort of synthetic meat in the first place?
The demand for meat is going to increase and
there is no way with current livestock production method
that we can match that demand. So that we'll put a lot of pressure
on food security. If we would all say
let's refrain from eating meat
five days a week, it would work out fine.
But we're not doing that.
We're actually doing the polar opposite.
Global meat production has quadrupled
Since the 1960s and by 2050
it will increase by half again.
One country that's capitalized on that explosive growth
is Brazil, which is now behind only the US
for title of largest beef producer in the world.
There's a hell of a lot of resources that go into a feedlot like this, I mean water,
energy, absolutely everything is done
for maximum efficiency and that means that each one of these cattle gets to eat about
48 pounds every single day. Pedro Morolo,
owner of the feedlot explained to us how it works.
Oh wow! Look at these skinny little runts.
These guys are the cattle that have just arrived
These are the ones that are about to go for slaughter?
Wow, look at the difference in size
that three months can make. You've fed these guys pretty damn well
Feeding all these cattle
is already a massive operation and Pedro
is planning on doubling his production
to keep up with global demand
So what is this they're mixing up here?
And how much feed do the cows eat every day?
450 tons a day? Wow.
This system is called a concentrated animal feeding operation,
or CAFO.
This CAFO is designed to make these
cattle gain nearly 400 poiunds
in just 90 days.
These cattle have been cooped up in their pens but now
they've finally reached the end of the road; they're just being herded
towards the final weighing station before heading out to one of
several slaughterhouses across the country
So many cattle have you got in today?
Uh, everything's done on such a massive scale. The amount of cattle
that they're processing
is crazy.
And business is expected to get even better
Brazil's about to be allowed to export fresh
beef directly to the US.
Americans ate more than a hundred pounds of read meat
per person in 2014, and now Africa
Asia are moving toward that same diet.
We spoke to Ken Cook
A food policy expert about the state of meat production today.
70% of
the land devoted to agriculture on the planet
is devoted to meat production. That's almost a third
of the entire surface area.
That many acres producing red meat
pork, chicken, all of that is
completely unsustainable.
Let's assume that the world population will grow to
9 billion people by 2050.
There isn't enough land, there isn't enough water,
there isn't the capacity for the Earth's
atmosphere to absorb all of the CO2 and
the methane that would come out of animal agriculture.
The problem is
that our focus is on making the meat as cheap
as possible, and as they cut those corners,
that's where we often have environmental catastrophes.
To see how meat production can lead
to those environmental catastrophes, we went to
Duplin County in North Carolina,
where the pork industry is
so big the hogs outnumber people. So this is the
lagoon right here. See the pipes coming out?
It doesn't smell pretty either. Larry Baldwin
monitors CAFOs in North Carolina for the water keeper alliance.
This is the situation. The pigs are in there, they're
defecating, you know, so you've got urine and feces dropped through
the floor, but then there are slots through that concrete
the waste falls through that
and then gets flushed into the lagoon which is what you see over here.
So that's where we can see the pipes coming straight out of this
Each one of these buildings has a pipe
that empties into the lagoon . That's a hell of a lot of waste
Right here. People would be outraged, even
suggesting that's the way we would handle human waste.
What's the difference?
And when you see this region from the air, the scope
of these hog CAFOs and their waste is incredible.
So up here you can see every single CAFO is
attached to these huge lagoons
There's hundreds of them, there's such an intense concentration here
The ground simply cannot absorb this much waste.
And according to NAME of Cape Fair riverwatch
that's wreaking havoc on local waterways.
Now this stream's surrounded by
You see, nitrogen and phosphorus
level off the chart, bacteria levels off the chart
it's raw, feces.
And how many sort of streams like this are you looking at
in North Carolina? Thousands. If you're a fisherman
or if you're a swimmer, if you're throwing your ball for your dog
you gotta deal with the dangerous levels of bacteria.
and this stream flows downstream into the northeast
and part of the Cape Fear Basin which is part of the
the river basin in North CaRoLiNa
it's a problem, you have to pay more to treat your water which means you have
to pay more to drink your water. You drink this water?
A fifth of North CaRoLiNiAnS drink out of the Cape Fear Basin
and it isn't just the quality of the water that's the problem,
in meat producing regions in the west,
it's the quantity.
In the dry high plains region, many feed crops
draw water from the Ogallala Aquifer,
which is now losing water faster than if can be
replenished. Mike Callicrate
a small cattle rancher in this area broke down the relationship
between water, corn and industrial meat.
It takes about 2500 gallons of water
to produce a bushel of corn. And if an animal
eats 50 bushels of corn in its time in the feedlot,
we're looking at about 125,000
gallons of water per animal under the industrial model.
So when it comes to those industrial scale feedlots, the majority
of the water that they're using actually goes into
producing the corn? That's correct and the reason that
JBS has a big feedlot at Yuma Colarado is because there's water.
and they don't pay one dime for that water
and they pay below the cost of production of that
corn. The corn is the cheapest thing that we can feed
because we buy it below the cost of production. The water
is subsidizing that operation
So, with free water and cheap corn
the price of mass produced beef is kept artificially low.
The question is, how much of the Ogalalla Aquifer
do we need to support an industrial model
or any model as far as that goes, and if we are so
foolish as to let that precious resource run out
that's a tragedy.
Mike showed us the scale of land and water
used by the giant meat producers here.
So we're just flying over Yuma County in Colarado. This is one of the huge
huge scale feedlots. You've got a hundred thousand cattle
in this one feedlot down here. Is this call corn down here, these circular crops?
While this is the system that produces most of our meat
we spoke to one farmer who 's going in a drastically
different direction. The system
that depletes your resource base
will eventually crash and burn.
Joel Salitan is part of the farm to table movement
that focuses on responsible production. He uses
a system called rotational grazing
holla holla
So you just move these cows from this patch into her?
Yes, so every day the cows get a brand new salad bar
that was one day's plate full of food,
today they get a new plate full of food
So there's a huge difference between where they were just now and
where they are now? Sure, this looked just like this yesterday
at this time, and in fifty days
this will look like this again
So this is the way that cows have traditionally grazed on grass right?
This is the role of herbivores in nature
On this type of farm, every animal has a role
and even their waste plays a part. Joel 's
demonstrating for us this integrated system that he's got going on.
So he's actually moving his egg mobile containing
all the chickens right to the spot where the cows have just been.
doo doo
We follow the cows with
the eggmobile, the chickens then scratch through these cows
paddies and help break them into the soil, eat out the fly larva
and actually sanitize the field
before the cows come back through so it's a very
multi speciated system. I've never seen anyone so excited to
eat shit before.
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