My friend Moby just co-wrote a book called “Gristle” about from factory farms to food safety, about the impact of raising animals and what it does to our environment, not to mention what it does to our own bodies. And it just shows that, that it’s better and more efficient and more productive to have a vegetarian or vegan diet. Vegan essentially.

“Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)” was released in March of 2010. When the book’s co-editors, Moby with Miyun Park, first went on tour to promote its release, Supreme Master Television was present on their first stop in Los Angeles, California, USA in support of the book’s message. To our pleasant surprise, we were met by some of our mutual friends:

What brings you here tonight?

To support Moby and Miyun’s new book “Gristle,” of course.

I’m here because I’m a friend of Moby’s and I’m a very passionate vegan and animal lover and I want to support anybody who is fighting to reduce the suffering for animals.

What brings you here tonight?

Oh my goodness! Moby and his new book. He’s such a huge inspiration. And his new book looks really wonderful “Gristle.”

Today and next week, on Vegetarian Elite, we will present to you some of our insightful talks with the multiplatinum musician Moby on the Golden Rule and veganism, and the goal he and Miyun hope to accomplish with “Gristle.” And of course, we will take a glimpse into this factually bound and eye-opening book that’s creating quite a buzz with readers, book reviewers, and even big corporations.

The only way to have a good life is to spend your life being an advocate for causes that you believe in and in whatever capacity you can, trying to make the world a better place.

Richard Melville Hall, known globally in the music world as Moby, is renowned for his chart-topping music, as well as his social activism. Although he has been making music since age 9 and started out in classical music, Moby made a name for himself in the early 1990s with the release of his progressive house single “Go.”

Since then, he has performed in more than 3,000 concerts, sold over 20 million records worldwide, released eight Top 40 music singles with much acclaim, and garnered several Grammy Award nominations in effect. He has created scores for films like Heat and James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies, and his extraordinary collaborations include legendary musicians like Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Bono.

Perhaps equally impressive to Moby’s musical career is his social activism, animal welfare advocacy, and charitable works. He has devoted countless hours and huge amounts of funding to organizations like The Humane Society and Institute for Music and Neurologic Function.

In fact, all proceeds from the sale of “Gristle” will go to benefit animal welfare organizations. At the “Gristle” book signing event, many attendees were introduced to another of Moby’s collaborators – Miyun Park, who served as the book’s co-editor alongside Moby.

Miyun Park is the Executive Director of Global Animal Partnership, which is an international non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of animals in agriculture through collaborative multi stakeholder efforts. She’s a board member of Farm Forward and serves on the editorial board of the Gateway to Farm Animal Welfare, a web portal created by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. And before joining the Global Animal Partnership, she served as the Vice President of Farm Animal Welfare of the Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International.

Miyun spoke about the first time Moby had contacted her to work together on reducing the suffering of animals raised for food, to the progression of their friendship to the present day. Their like-minded concerns led to the creation of “Gristle.”

We had evolved as advocates, not only for environmental concerns or other social justice issues but you know, most specifically for us, for non-human animals, that the issue isn’t promoting veganism, the reason is all about reducing suffering. And that’s what’s so important, I think, about this book, that it gives you all of this information on how easy it is to reduce the suffering of individual beings whose lives matter to them.

When we return after this brief message, we will learn about how the Golden Rule led Moby on the path of veganism.

So I became a vegetarian for the simple reason that I liked animals and it seemed inconsistent to both like animals and eat them. And then that same criteria that led me to be a vegetarian, led me to be a vegan.

Welcome back to Vegetarian Elite on Supreme Master Television. Today’s episode features the multiplatinum recording artist Moby and the newly released book he helped to co-edit: “Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat).” Turning a couple of “Gristle’s” first pages, readers will find Moby’s introduction. He writes:

I’m a vegan and animal protection advocate… My agenda as regards animals and animal welfare is also simple: to end animal suffering. My agenda had its nascence when I was quite young and I first heard the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” That’s the Golden Rule, right? When I was young, this made a lot of sense to me in an uncluttered and beautifully self-evident way. But it then begged a follow-up question: who are these “others” referred to in the Golden Rule?

The 22-year vegan shared with us how applying this Golden Rule can open up one’s heart and increase our love and respect for all beings.

Well, one of the reasons I became vegan is the Golden Rule, you know the idea of “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And I talk about this in the intro, is the idea, “It’s easy to apply that to our friends and to our family.” (Right.)

And then you apply that to all human beings, and say like, “Well, okay these human beings, they all have two eyes, they all have a central nervous systems, so clearly if I don’t want to suffer, I can assume that other people don’t want to suffer.” And then you apply that to animals, you apply it to fish, you apply it to birds, you apply it…

For me, there’s no harm in applying a circle of compassion as far and as wide as it can go. And everyone benefits. I can only speak for myself, but the best way for me to be unhappy and anxious and depressed, is to be selfish and focused on myself. The best way to increase my happiness and also hopefully increase the happiness of others, is to actually be concerned for the wellbeing of other people and other animals. So that’s a big part of my veganism as well.

For some people it’s purely health reasons. For some people it’s ethnical reasons because they care about animals. For some people it’s because of deforestation, because of water pollution, because of air pollution, because of climate change there are myriad different reasons why someone might choose to be vegetarian or vegan. I think they’re all valid. For me, I’m vegan for all of those reasons and also for spiritual reasons as well. I don’t like the idea of creating suffering when I don’t have to. It’s one of my goals in life, is to just diminish the amount of suffering on the planet.

Moby’s written introduction in “Gristle” continues:
Later I was able to expand upon my Golden Rule extension, and I came up with a happy little logical-sounding catchphrase to justify my veganism and animal protection advocacy: Death is unavoidable, but suffering is avoidable. Just as I hope to avoid unnecessary suffering in my life, I can assume that all beings capable of suffering also hope to avoid it; therefore, we should do our best to prevent suffering.

I’m really proud of this book. I think it’s a great resource. And it reminds me… One of the things that sort of solidified my veganism and my interest in animal rights was the book “Diet for a New America” by John Robbins. And because, I think I was sort of like a nascent vegan and I read that, and that just made me realize that as much as I like yogurt, as much as I like some animal products, I care about animal suffering too much to not be a vegan.

My hope is that this would somehow accomplish a similar thing for someone that “Diet for a New America” accomplished for me. I think this is a remarkable book and I hope that people buy it and give it away because it has the potential to actually change the way that people think about food production, and in hopefully a very factual non-didactic way. That’s the goal.

On next week’s Vegetarian Elite, we will take a look into the “information-packed, lively, and informative” guide “Gristle,” and introduce the 15 esteemed contributors of its 10 chapters.

They range from chief executive officer and co-founder of FEED projects Lauren Bush, human rights activists and granddaughters of Cesar Chavez – Christine Chavez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Ultramarathon champion Brendan Brazier, bestselling authors and sustainable food advocates Frances Moore Lappé and Anne Lappé, World Watch researcher Danielle Nierenberg, chief executive officer of Whole Foods John Mackey, to the president and chief executive officer of The Humane Society of the United States Wayne Pacelle. United, they deliver a strong message that touches on topics like the environment, taxpayers, children’s health, zoonotic diseases, and global hunger.

There are so many impacts on industrial animal agriculture, on all of these different sectors and that's why, as Moby was saying, having all of these different contributors. I mean we have the CEO of the country's largest Animal Advocacy Organization standing side by side with the CEO of one of, in my opinion you know, most important retail stores in the country, in terms of advocating for the reduction of suffering, standing next to a pig farmer, the manager of “Niman Ranch Pork.”

And the fact that we have all of these people standing shoulder to shoulder and just saying, “Industrial animal agriculture is not okay, and we can all do something about it every single time that we eat.”

Respected viewers, we appreciated your company today on Vegetarian Elite. We’ll see you again next week for the second half of our special feature on “Gristle” and the multifaceted Moby. Up next on Supreme Master Television is Between Master and Disciples. Blessed be your compassionate hearts.

Find out more about Moby and “Gristle” at Moby.com and Gristle-Book.com

So Miyun came up with the title "Gristle." And we then tried contacting a bunch of relative experts in their respective fields, or experts in their respective fields, to see if they would contribute chapters. And we got lucky because we ended up with a really interesting, eclectic, well-informed bunch of people who have all contributed amazing chapters about each respective aspect of the consequences of animal production.

Welcome to Vegetarian Elite for the second part of our special feature on multiplatinum musician Moby, and “Gristle,” a newly released book he co-edited with Miyun Park. Today, we will look further into this information-packed guide that has received a wide range of supporters, from celebrities, to doctors, to the ordinary consumer. Supreme Master Television interviewed Moby and asked him what he hopes readers will gain from reading “Gristle.”

The main message is for people to be more aware of the ramifications of animal production, specifically animal production on factory farms. So it’s a very factual book, we have 15 different experts in their respective fields, writing the different chapters. We’re just sort of presenting the facts and hopefully letting people make up their own minds.

The chapters and their authors include: Environment by Lauren Bush, Workers by Christine Chavez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Zoonotic Diseases by Dr. Michael Greger, Children’s Health by Sara Kubersky and Tom O’Hagan, Global Hunger by Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé, Taxpayers by John Mackey, Climate Change by Danielle Nierenberg and Meredith Niles, Animals by Wayne Pacelle, and Communities by Paul and Phyllis Willis.

Present at the first stop of the book tour in Los Angeles, USA was two-time Canadian Ultramarathon champion, Ironman triathlete competitor, and vegan, Brendan Brazier, who wrote Gristle’s first chapter on Health.

When they asked me if I could contribute and write about health, I thought, “Well that’s a great opportunity and I’d love to spread a message that I feel very strongly about and feel as though it could really help a lot of people and animals and environmental issues, all kinds of things. So, I’m really, really proud to be a part of it.

Within this opening chapter are facts about meats, eggs, and dairy, as researched by the prestigious Harvard University in the US. For example, did you know that 90% of chicken flesh tested at retail is contaminated with E. coli and campylobacter from fecal matter? This statistic makes chicken the most common cause of food poisoning, affecting millions yearly. Just one bout of campylobacter can lead to an entire lifetime of irritable bowel syndrome.

Or did you know that the leading cause of seizures is from a brain parasite called Taenia solium, which is a tapeworm found in pork. The studies also found that a single infection of salmonella, often found in eggs and other contaminated meat products, can leave one with painful, chronic arthritis for the rest of their life. And did you know that mad cow disease, which can even be humanly contracted from eating farmed fish that was fed infected cow meat, can be fatal? In fact, the pathogens cannot be cooked out, even at temperatures high enough to melt lead.

One of the most popular topics of the evening was tax subsidies for the meat industry, a subject often shielded from public knowledge.

The meat lobby, the factory farming lobby is not so happy about our book and so they issued a statement saying something like, “Oh, it’s easy for rich rock stars to eat vegan, but what about the rest of us who can’t afford it?” I was like, “Well, remove the subsidies, create a level playing field, and a pound of beef without subsidies would on average costs about what, $25? A meal for 4 at McDonalds, if you removed all subsidies, would be about $75.”

Removing subsides from dairy production, from beef production, from tobacco production, why not? I mean, if we’re talking about lowering the money that we pay into federal taxes, why not cut out subsidies? Vegan food is inherently less expensive than animal food, it just is. It’s more efficient, and it’s less, inherently less expensive.

Food subsidies, in a very egregious way, distort the cost of food. It’s easy for me to talk about veganism because it’s a healthier way for people to live. And if you removed food subsidies it would be a less expensive way for people to live. I don’t know if people are talking about lowering their tax bill and employing free market economics, animal production would be a great place to start. Let a pound of beef cost what a pound of beef actually costs without tax payer subsidies.

Without much public knowledge, billions upon billions of tax dollars are pumped out to subsidize animal factories. A 2008 report from the Union on Concerned Scientists found that every year, US$1.16 billion goes to subsidize distributing and applying manure to fields, $1.5 – 3 billion in taxes is wasted on animal agriculture’s antibiotic overuse and public health impacts.

In total, over $30.1 billion in taxes has been used to fix manure lagoon leaks and paying for falling property values. In effect, unhealthy fast food meals cost dramatically less than nutrient rich organic fruits and vegetables.

Part of my childhood, I grew up in the inner city and we were very poor and so I know exactly what that’s like. We wouldn’t have access to fresh food, so we’d just go to McDonald’s or Burger King. McDonalds, and In & Out Burger, and Burger King, the reason they can charge nothing for their food, is because it’s so heavily subsidized by tax payers.

You remove the tax dollars or redistribute the subsides so the subsides go to promote healthy agriculture and go to promote food stuffs that actually don’t kill people. A family of four, a woman who’s just finished her shift and just wants to feed her kids, is she going to go to McDonald’s if it’s $75 to feed her kids a meal? No, she’ll go somewhere else, or he’ll go somewhere else.

So, I think it’s key to the idea of examining subsidies and removing subsidies from really nefarious agricultural practices that hurt the animals, that hurt the environment, that hurt the communities, and that hurt the consumers.

If you look to the plagues of the 20th and 21st centuries - heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes – these are all related to diet, and they’re all related to diet that is subsidized by our tax dollars. And so end the subsidies and shift the focus away from industries that create unhealthy food to industries that create healthy foods.

When we return from this brief message, we will examine one of the hottest and most relevant topics of our era – climate change and its worrisome effect on the environment and our existence. You are watching Vegetarian Elite on Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Vegetarian Elite. In our brief intermission, could you guess how many animals were slaughtered simply for consumption? In those brief two minutes, around 43,500 innocent animals had been killed in the US to be the meat on someone’s plate.

So they got this one page and it says, "Number of animals killed per year in the United States: it’s 11,429,831,400.” That’s in a year and that’s a huge number! But then you break it down, and then number of animals killed per day: 31,314,000. And then number of animals killed per minute in the United States: 21,750. One minute!

The book’s editors discussed several topics often unknown to the general public – the filthy and hazardous conditions of factory farms. One in four animal farm workers suffer from respiratory problems like asthma and bronchitis brought on by noxious gases including hydrogen sulfide, methane, and ammonia. Dust and harmful bacteria generated by decomposing manure can cause toxic, oxygen-deficient, and explosive atmospheres. To contain the toxic waste produced by the animals, factory farms make manure pits.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH, they are so concerned about these manure lagoons that are on so many factory farms, that they actually have a publication that’s called, quote “Preventing Deaths of Farm Workers in Manure Pits.” Human Rights Watch has determined that working in a slaughter plant, is the most dangerous factory job in the country.

And no one wants to live by a factory farm. Gristle’s chapter on Communities details the falling property values around factory farms. Pig factories in the US state of Iowa lowered by 40% the value of homes located within half a mile; homes within 1 mile were robbed 30% of their property values.

An undisputable part of the event’s discussion dealt with climate change and meat production. A report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture (FAO) underlined that livestock production is the number one cause of climate change, causing at least one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s so strange that people will talk, be advocates for climate change, and still eat animal products and still support factory farming. I mean it is, not to indulge in too much hyperbole, but that’s the equivalent of like, working on heart disease and lung cancer and smoking cigarettes.

CNN and CBS legal analyst, and attorney Lisa Bloom, also present at Gristle’s book event, offered her comments on the direct connection between meat raising and environmental degradation.

Well I’m a lifelong vegetarian and I’m a vegan now. There’s no question that the number one contributor to climate change is livestock production. In fact, more than all of the cars, planes, trains, and boats in the world contributes to climate change.

And climate change is the biggest threat to my children’s generation. It’s probably going to be the biggest humanitarian crisis in world history. So I think we all have a moral imperative to do whatever we can to stop it. And the quickest way to make an effect is to immediately start on a vegan diet. It also happens to be delicious and good for your health so it’s a win-win.

But you know, the methane gas that cows produce which is a big contributor to climate change will very quickly disappear from the atmosphere if we stop producing livestock, versus the CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, so it just makes sense on so many levels to stop eating meat, to stop eating any kind of dairy products or eggs, from a climate change point of view and also to reduce animal suffering, and also for human health.

Towards the end of question and answer session with members of the audience, Moby offered a poignant notion for consideration.

There’s a fallacy called “The Is-Ought Fallacy,” which is to justify the continuation of a bad practice because it’s already in existence, which is what, how people use the argument they used to justify the slavery. Saying like, “Oh, well, slavery exists because it’s always existed.”

And one of the arguments before the Civil War, for the continuation of slavery was that it was the economic engine that ran the country. So people, a lot of people pre-Civil War said, “Yes, slavery is bad, but without it, what happens to our industry?” And unfortunately, from an ethical prospective, I don’t think that’s it’s enough a justification for continuing really nefarious practices.

In this particular case, animal products are an incredibly inefficient use of resources, specifically grains. It takes an awful lot of grain, let’s say, 20 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of beef; chicken is even less efficient. And so, if you’re making less animal products, it actually does more to solve the issue of global hunger, and more to solve the issue of keeping people fed in the inner city, because you have all this extra grain that can suddenly go to feed people directly, rather than fattening up cows and chickens.

Thank you for your company today on Vegetarian Elite. We would like to express our gratitude to Moby, Miyun Park, and all the contributors of this informative book. May your dedication as purveyors of truth bring awareness to the public about the harrowing effects of animal agriculture which jeopardizes all facets of life.

And now, please stay with us for Between Master and Disciples, coming up next on Supreme Master Television. May wisdom and compassion guide your life always.

Find out more about Moby and “Gristle” at Moby.com and Gristle-Book.com

Frances Fisher(f): My friend Moby just co-wrote a book called “Gristle” about from factory farms to food safety, about the impact of raising animals and what it does to our environment, not to mention what it does to our own bodies.

And it just shows that, that it’s better and more efficient and more productive to have a vegetarian or vegan diet. Vegan essentially.

HOST: “Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)” was released in March of 2010. When the book’s co-editors, Moby with Miyun Park, first went on tour to promote its release, Supreme Master Television was present on their first stop in Los Angeles, California, USA in support of the book’s message. To our pleasant surprise, we were met by some of our mutual friends:

Find out more about Moby and “Gristle” at Moby.com
and Gristle-Book.com