The Green Grid Radio team sliced into a meaty topic this week: the broken American food production system, specifically focusing on meat. Today turkeys cannot naturally reproduce and must be artificially inseminated, 60 billion farm animals are annually killed for human consumption worldwide, and we consume eight times as much chicken as our grandparents did eighty years ago. What else is going on in meat production?

The Green Grid Radio team talking about meat at our dinner party.

Guests include: Stanford undergraduate student Caroline Hodge; Matt Rothe, Fellow at the Institute of Design at Stanford; Environmental Earth System Science Professor Rosamond Naylor, of the Center on Food Security and the Environment; Graham Meriwether, Director of the documentary American Meat; Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association; UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Dan Blumstein, author of Eating Our Way to Civility; Professor Christopher Gardner of the Stanford School of Medicine; and Vasile Stanescu, Stanford PhD candidate in the Program of Modern Thought and Literature.

Hosted by Mallory Smith and Adam Pearson.

Resources mentioned in this podcast: “Give Thanks for Meat,” an essay by Jay Bost; FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” (2006); Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation; the American “Farm Bill“; the American Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (1958); “Unnatural Turkeys” Freakanomics podcast (2011).

Audio featured, in chronological order, by Keshco, My Imaginary Loves, Chris Forsyth, Shake That Foot, Dan Warren, Gable, MUTE, and Personal and the Pizzas.