Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet.

Today on the show, we're putting facts against fleshy food.

When did you fall in love with food?

Are you in love with food?

I am in love with food. I've always liked cooking with my mom.

This is Chase Perty. He's a journalist who reports on the inner workings of our food system.

How meat gets from our farms to our plates.

Which made me start questioning meat.

Because when you learn about how our meat system is made, you start having lots more opinions about the food that we eat.

When you know literally how the sausage is made.

Exactly, right. Yes.

And when Chase started diving into this, he quickly saw what a mess our meat system is.

Like, just looking at what it does to our environment.

It's estimated that 15% of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions comes from livestock.

15%. It also uses up a lot of land.

And when these animals poo, it could ultimately get in our waterways.

And then there's just the fact that we're killing a lot of animals.

Billions of land animals every year.

Fish is harder to track, but they estimate between one and two trillion fish.

So it's a hell of a lot of animals that sort of end up getting slaughtered to feed our appetite for food.

And this is a broken food system.

A lot of us have heard about this broken food system.

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