Today we’re interviewing Chole Sorvino, Forbes reporter and author of the new book, Raw Deal, Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and The Fight for the Future of Meat
This is a book that is a deep dive into the meat industry and its future. This includes food tech such as plant-based and cultivated. Chole’s viewpoint is what I’d view as skeptical but it’s well-researched and the perspective is much needed in this industry.
Colored in this book is the quick 5 decade history of the scale-up of animal agriculture, the externalities in terms of how the meat industry acquires labor and the environmental damages caused by the tons of waste generated daily.
Biggest takeaway? The meat industry we know has quite a brutal history of taking advantage of and proliferating its tactic for world domination. Conventional meat is an innovative technology (which is efficient and huge slaughterhouses that kill, tear apart, and clean animals extremely fast) and has influenced how we eat and we don’t even notice it!
But to be frank, this industry is only 50 years old. It’s actually an amazing case study of scaling a premium product with huge externalities and we can compare this to similar things such as well, smartphones and social media.
Another key section in this interview is our discussion on the current climate in food tech Chloe has access to a lot of information and it was nice to get some perspective on what’s going on.
At the end of the interview, Chloe and I talk about some innovative solutions that she finds promising.
Overall, highly recommend this book. I know a lot of our viewers who listen to My Food Job Rocks are interested in alternative protein but broadening your perspective is really important. I find Chole’s book super informative from a historical viewpoint and her suggestions for creating a better food system are another potential solution for a better world. As someone who’s worked in slaughterhouses, and food tech, and looking into various solutions to solve a lot of these externalities, it was refreshing getting Chloe’s insights.
What’s Up with Adam
I want to talk about a specific instance that I found really touching this week. I contacted a friend I used to work with at a past job because she was Turkish and you might have heard about the natural disaster that really screwed up everything over there. Her family is fine, and then we talked about work. I used to give advice to her son because she couldn’t understand teenage boys’ mannerisms and I was a teenage boy once upon a time, we would have really enjoyable talks about what her son’s going through. Among other topics, I found the talk really fulfilling. Reaching out is super important. It’s super hard to do, but it’s one of those things that I feel you never regret once you do it.
Ok more stuff about me.
To supplement this interview, I want to talk to you about my 3 month stint at a slaughterhouse in Waco Texas. So I talked about this a few times, but I actually worked at a slaughterhouse. It was my first job. At the Cal Poly job fair, I interviewed for a position at Cargill and little did I know, Cargill had a meat division. Who knew?
Anyways, I took the job because it was a cool opportunity and it paid a lot. That whole internship paid for my housing the next year. Fun fact, I paid $600 dollars in a cheap apartment with 4 other people. I’m glad I don’t have to do that anymore.
The slaughterhouse job was interesting in just how efficient and huge it was. Turkeys would go through a real efficient process of bringing them in alive and coming out into carcass. This involved huge machinery and dozens of line workers with razor sharp knives eviscerating turkeys as they go down the line. I gawked at the fact that 20,000 turkeys go through the ringer every single day, and the capacity triples during thanksgiving. What people don’t know about the industry is just the amount of mechanical, manufacturing and chemical technology that goes through slaughtering animals.
I do have to comment, the plant was really clean and very professional. I found the people nice, but not “invite to your house” nice. They also gave out 50% discounted meat products. You would think the slaughterhouse experience would ween me off meat. To be frank, it didn’t and I still ate meat and it wasn’t until I got into the plant-based space, that I started to reduce my meat consumption.
I got a job offer to join the Waco Team but rejected it. I just couldn’t imagine working in a place like this though I have to admit, it wasn’t the category, but rather, I really didn’t enjoy working in Waco Texas.
Enjoy this interview with Chloe Sorvino. We do this online early in the morning.
Links
Raw Deal
Temple Grandin
Harassment in the meat industry
Antibiotics in meat
Tattoo’d Chef might sell meat
Beyond Meat
Crossing the Chasm
Internet Bust
Mycelium
Better Meat Co
Impossible Foods IPO pullback
Dan Barber Barley
Farm Bill
Twitter: @chloesorvino
Instagram: @csorvino
Email List
End of Show
Let’s talk about presenting solutions.
In general, most books that go into a subject work out as they give a history of the past, insights on the present, and then share a potential future. The most common example I can give is the author Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote the book Sapiens, which gives a great reframing of how we view human history. Sapiens became well-acclaimed and it’s a good read.
So Harari made 2 more books. One talks about the future, Homo Dues, and another about the present, called 21 Solutions for the 21st Century. Homo Dues was so far into the future, it was still a good read, though not as good as Sapiens.
The book about the present, however, didn’t do as well as his other books and I think there’s a reason for this. Everyone is an expert of the present and we have an inherent bias on the present because we all view the world differently and gather different information.
Solutions take a stance and even those that are considered the world experts may be discredited. These experts take the data they’ve heavily researched and present a prediction based on their research. In general, there’s a good amount of people who just won’t believe it.
There is beauty when people think that “this is different, it’s not going to be like the other times”. I think it’s ingrained in us to believe that.
I sometimes talk about Chloe’s solutions to other people in my space and I get some good counterarguments.
The thing about the present is that we are all inherently invested in making the future in what we think is the right one. With all of these individualistic thoughts, it’s extremely hard to band to one world view, and no solution is ever perfect. The most common flaw in most solutions is human hubris.
Presenting solutions is really hard and very complicated. This is why great leaders have the ability to convince people that their solution is the right one. Whatever you believe in, keep believing in it but keep in mind, in today’s world, no solution seems to convince everyone.