Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are the Weather

Climate One

News, News Commentary, Science, Earth Sciences, Social Sciences

4.7 • 583 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is clinging to habits and cravings destroying our future? An outspoken critic of factory farming and animal-centric diets, Jonathan Safran Foer writes that stopping climate change begins with a close look at what we eat — and don’t eat — at home for breakfast. At the office, industry leaders like Google are taking steps toward veggie-forward diets by reducing meat, rather than cutting it out entirely. But when it comes to global food habits, are societies up for changing norms — individually and collectively — at a scale ambitious enough to meet the challenge? Guests: Jonathan Safran Foer, Author, "We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast" Helene York, Chief Procurement Officer, Guckenheimer Enterprises; Faculty Member, Food Business School, Culinary Institute of America For more information on this episode, visit climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts. This program was recorded at the Commonwealth Club of California on September 24, 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can a climate-smart diet still satisfy our deepest food cravings?
0:12.0	Climate One Conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats,
0:18.0	the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I'm Greg Dalton.
0:23.7	Eating a meat-free diet is one of the most powerful things one can do to cut their personal
0:28.5	carbon footprint. I still find it extremely pleasurable to look at meat and to smell meat,
0:34.2	and I desire to eat meat when I see it. I just choose not to.
0:38.5	Author Jonathan Saffron 4, who teaches creative writing at New York University,
0:42.9	wrote about meat eating in his 2009 book, Eating Animals. In his most recent book,
0:48.3	We Are the Weather, Saving the Planet begins at breakfast. He asks how individuals can change
0:53.3	their behavior to create new climate-sensitive
0:56.0	norms.
0:57.0	The analogy in the restaurant world is that it is now inappropriate for chefs not to have a plan
1:03.0	to reduce food waste.
1:05.0	Helene York is head of social and environmental responsibility at ISS. Guggenheimer,
1:10.0	a company that manages cafes on
1:12.2	corporate campuses around the country. She previously supervised a food program for Google
1:17.3	that served 300,000 meals a week to its employees. Helene describes Jonathan's book as stunning,
1:23.9	even though it takes them until page 64 to confess that it is in fact about the impact of animal agriculture on the environment.
1:31.9	I had read a lot of books about climate change before I even contemplated writing my own.
1:37.4	I was, I guess, what you might call a concerned citizen, concerned father.
1:43.3	And over the last couple of years, I heard myself saying more and more often,
1:49.0	wow, somebody really has to do something. Somebody has to do something. Can you believe this? Look at these images of the Amazon burning. Look at these super storms,
	...

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