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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Fake Meat Alone Won’t Save the World

Not as long as factory farming is still a part of the food supply chain, anyway

In the middle of July, Impossible: The Cookbook, a compendium of recipes designed to showcase the plant-based meat engineered by Impossible Foods, was launched with grimly impeccable timing: Four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, meat shortages and revelations about the terrible conditions in meat processing facilities, where the virus had infected more than 25,000 workers nationwide, had cast an unforgiving light on the country’s industrial meat industry.

Impossible insists there is a better, highly versatile alternative to meat consumption, embodied in recipes like Kwame Onwuachi’s Ethiopian spiced meat with hummus and toasted cashews, where crumbled Impossible Burger takes the place of more traditional ground lamb. It is one of 40 recipes from a slew of well-respected chefs that demonstrate that the only limitation to what you can do with Impossible’s faux flesh is your own imagination.

The word “vegan” is conspicuously absent from the cookbook’s introduction, which instead proclaims that the book is “for people who love meat.” This is the kind of crafty messaging that has defined Impossible since July 2016, when the company launched its signature “bleeding” ersatz beef patty: This may be vegan meat, but it is designed to appeal to actual meat eaters. It’s clearly working: By early May of this year, sales of its products had shot up 264 percent since March.

The Impossible Foods story has been told many, many times since the company launched in 2011. It’s become a juggernaut with almost $1.5 billion in funding, a grocery store footprint that is 30 times larger than it was six months ago, and like any good tech unicorn, a proper direct-to-consumer website. Given Impossible’s projected growth, expanding product line (Impossible sausage was introduced in June), and compelling pitch (“We’re making meat,” the cookbook reads, “mouthwatering, craveable, nutritious meat — from plants” that “requires 87 percent less water and 96 percent less land to produce” than a conventional burger), it is tempting to think that plant-based meat is the way of the future. Impossible: The Cookbook suggests that it is not merely a possibility, but an inevitability, the only direction in which progress points. Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown implied as much in an interview last year. “We are dead serious,” he said, “about our mission to eliminate the need for animals in the food chain by 2035.”

With a subtitle proclaiming “How to Save Our Planet, One Delicious Meal at a Time,” the cookbook — and, by extension, Impossible Foods — is promising no less than a brighter tomorrow that will be built upon patties wrought of soy and potato protein, disgorged on an endless assembly line monitored by contented, fairly compensated workers as happy cows roam on distant fields, free to live out their natural lives.

The strongest case for the vegan supply chain can be made by considering not what it is, but what it isn’t. The vegan supply chain isn’t factory farms, industrial livestock operations that house thousands of animals under one roof, often in miserable conditions that are not only inhumane but also terrible for the environment. Among other things, these farms generate about 70 percent of the country’s ammonia emissions and 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, contribute to deforestation, and create lagoons of animal waste that pollute the environment and sicken people in surrounding communities. The vegan supply chain also isn’t slaughterhouses or meat processing plants, where low-paid, often immigrant workers toil shoulder-to-shoulder in physically grueling conditions ripe for spreading COVID-19. And, although this should be obvious, the vegan supply chain is not one built upon abject animal suffering and exploitation.

Compared to that, the vegan supply chain looks pretty good, and Impossible Foods is hardly the only voice arguing that going vegan can save the planet. In 2018, the journal Science published the results of a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of 40,000 farms in 119 countries. It found that while meat and dairy supplied just 18 percent of food calories and 37 percent of protein, they used 83 percent of farmland — and produced 60 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. The upshot, as the study’s lead researcher told the Guardian, was that a “vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use.” And last year, a report by the United Nations body on climate science concluded that reducing meat consumption in favor of plant-based diets could have a significant positive impact on our ability to fight climate change.

The vegan supply chain is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems.

But while there is very little doubt that eating less meat and dairy is better for humanity’s chances of long-term survival in our current home, the vegan supply chain on its own is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems. Like any agricultural supply chain, it is not automatically virtuous, much less neutral in its environmental impact. To examine some of the issues surrounding the vegan supply chain is to understand why a truly sustainable and ethical food supply chain is defined by more than simply what it is not. It is also to acknowledge that reforming the way we grow our food requires a truly systemic approach.

Even if we do accept that fake meat is the way of the more enlightened future, we still have to ask where, how, and by whom each of its ingredients is being grown and then processed, how the factory where it’s being mass-produced is being powered and how much greenhouse gas emissions it produces, and how much greenhouse gas is in turn produced by the different operations that supply the fake meat’s various ingredients, and packaging, and on and on forever more. Every step of the industrial supply chain — vegan or not — is fraught with these considerations, as well as more vexing questions than encouraging answers.

Take, for example, the soybean, a crop whose byproducts are ubiquitous ingredients in processed foods, both vegan and otherwise. The vast majority of the world’s soy — over 70 percent — is grown for livestock feed, which is why the growing demand for meat, particularly in China, has helped to double global soy production in the past two decades. It is soy grown for livestock feed, not vegan foods, that is a driver of deforestation in South America and its concomitant displacement of Indigenous communities and small farmers.

While only a tiny percentage of soy grown worldwide is for human consumption, the presence of soy in many vegan processed foods means that it is still necessary to ask where that soy comes from, and to question the practices used to grow it. Impossible Foods itself has been criticized for its use of soy, specifically the genetically modified soy in its burger. A host of controversies surrounds GMO soy, but Impossible Foods has defended its GMO ingredients by pointing out that its use of genetically modified soy is more environmentally sustainable than harvesting non-GMO soy, and, moreover, is safe for human consumption.

Along with soy, palm oil and cashews are ingredients that regularly appear in many vegan foods. Increasing demand for both presents a conundrum for anyone concerned about sustainable eating. Palm oil shows up in about 50 percent of consumer goods, including processed vegan foods like margarine, cookies, and ice cream. Palm oil plantations have been linked to numerous environmental and human rights issues, such as biodiversity loss and deforestation, and human rights abuses in Thailand and Indonesia.

The cashew, a foundational ingredient in many vegan dairy products, has been linked to human rights violations in Vietnam, the world’s leading cashew exporter. While some of the more egregious practices, such as the use of forced labor at processing facilities, have been curbed, the difficulties of tracking the cashew supply chain (cashews are often grown in one country, processed in another) mean that it’s possible for worker abuses, such as poverty-line wages and the use of child labor, to go undetected. And the cashew isn’t the only nut with issues: Almond production, for example, requires huge amounts of water, a problem exacerbated by the surging market for almond milk products.

In other words, no matter the crop being grown, there is the persistent issue of how farm laborers and the land they work are mistreated: Whether it is agricultural slavery on Florida tomato farms or illegal deforestation driven by Mexico’s growing avocado trade — which has also attracted the involvement and attendant violence of organized crime — the produce industry is rife with its own exploitative and abusive practices. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the greenhouse gas emissions produced by plant-based agriculture, whether from artificial fertilizers or practices such as tilling the fields or the transport of produce around the globe.

To look at an Impossible Burger, or any industrial food, is to see a myriad of potentially troublesome links in the supply chain. Which is not to say that it’s impossible, so to speak, to have an ethical and sustainable supply chain. But the demands of capitalism — specifically that for food produced cheaply and at great volume in order to yield a profit — frequently undermine that goal. It’s a challenge that is further compounded by the imperative to feed a growing global population, and the varying standards for what it actually means to be ethical and sustainable at every level of the supply chain, vegan or not. Although switching to plant-based meat offers numerous environmental benefits, the companies that make it must find a way to reconcile the need to scale and make money with the practice of how to do so responsibly.

Even if the Impossible promise turns out to be true, that we can indeed have a perfectly virtuous vegan supply chain engineered by a hegemonic tech company, there is still one inconvenient fact: For any number of reasons — whether cultural or economic — the majority of people on the planet prefer to eat meat and will not give it up willingly, and that will remain the case perhaps even after plant-based meat is a truly perfect simulacrum of the real thing.

There are emerging alternatives. While they aren’t vegan, they do have the potential to accomplish the same goals as plant-based meat, perhaps some even more successfully. The need to create more sustainable alternatives to meat, combined with the preference of many people to continue eating it, has created a potentially lucrative opening for the cell-based, or cultured meat industry, whose inherent promise is meat without all of its accompanying demons. The industry began to get attention in 2013, when a Maastricht University professor named Mark Post successfully made a burger from cow stem cells he had grown into strips of muscle fiber. Since then, a number of cultured meat startups have popped up around the world, growing everything from meatballs to gelatin to seafood. Some observers are bullish about the industry’s potential: Last year, the consulting firm Kearney released a report predicting that by 2040, 60 percent of the world’s meat will be lab-grown or plant-based.

The least terrible option for meat eaters is to support farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices.

Cultured meat offers many potential advantages over both conventional and vegan meat, sustainability-wise: Whereas similar ingredients are used to produce both conventional and vegan meat (i.e. soy, potatoes, wheat, and water), cultured meat needs only a diet consisting predominantly of amino acids and glucose — ingredients grown in labs, rather than in resource-intensive fields.

The challenge, though, is producing it at scale, and doing so affordably; according to the Kearney report, the cost of cultured meat was $80 per 100 grams in 2018, versus conventional beef’s 80 cents per 100 grams (a number that reflects the way the industrial meat industry benefits from cheap grain, cheap labor, and direct and indirect government subsidies). While industry experts forecast that cost will be cut to less than $4 per 100 grams in the next 12 years, there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome, such as regulatory approvals and consumer acceptance.

Cultured meat may indeed be one way toward a more environmentally sustainable future, but that future remains relatively distant and highly speculative. For now, perhaps the least terrible option for recalcitrant meat eaters who care about the environment and have the privilege of choice is to support the small, independent farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices. Nearly 100 percent of most livestock raised for consumption lives on factory farms. There’s little doubt that small farms can be a more sustainable alternative — one that should be combined with an even more sustainable alternative, which is just to eat less meat. Decreased consumption leads to decreased demand and, in turn, to decreased production. But given that global meat production is projected to be 16 percent higher in 2025 than it was a decade prior, this seems as unrealistic as the likelihood of McDonald’s rolling out cell-cultured Big Macs in time for Christmas.

Rather than looking at the sustainable food supply chain of the future as an all-or-nothing scenario — one that either involves animal products or doesn’t — it’s perhaps more practical to take a holistic view, one that acknowledges the dizzying complexities of food production, as well as the varying definitions and measures of “sustainability.” Put another way, there is no single correct approach to fixing our problems, something illustrated by a 2017 study about the potential of organic agriculture to create a more sustainable food system. A 100 percent conversion to organic agriculture wouldn’t do it, the study found — among other problems, organic farming would require more farmland than its conventional counterpart. A more sustainable scenario, the study concluded, would combine organic agriculture with reductions in food waste and the amount of food used for livestock, along with a corresponding reduction in the production and consumption of meat.

Even supposing there is no magic bullet, there does seem to be one obvious thing we could do to build a more sustainable supply chain: stop factory farming. Because while livestock farming can be sustainable and even ethical, particularly if it’s done on a smaller scale and using practices that favor the environment and human and animal welfare, there is nothing sustainable about the industrial livestock industry. And if climate change, environmental degradation, and worker and animal abuses haven’t given us reasons enough to find a better way forward, then the COVID-19 pandemic has provided yet another compelling reason by highlighting the ways that factory farms, with their overcrowded, unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading disease and promoting antibiotic resistance, may put us at risk for future pandemics.

The call to end factory farming is gaining momentum: Last December, Sen. Cory Booker introduced legislation that would place a moratorium on large industrial animal operations and phase out the biggest ones by 2040. Crucially, the proposed bill also calls for strengthening protections for the family farmers and ranchers who cannot compete with these large-scale operations and are often forced into exploitative contracts with the corporations that control the meat industry.

This kind of support for small, independent farmers is at the heart of what the ethical and sustainable supply chain of the future entails: It is not so much about vegan eating as it is about creating systems that enable farming that is humane for the environment, people, and animals. Plant-based meat can be part of that, and should be — provided that the companies that manufacture it are actively invested in creating a system whose concept of ethics and sustainability goes beyond being simply the lesser of two evils.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/32O5Kn1 https://ift.tt/34UzD7W

Not as long as factory farming is still a part of the food supply chain, anyway

The vegan supply chain is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems.

The least terrible option for meat eaters is to support farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/32O5Kn1 via Blogger https://ift.tt/2EE8njn

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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Fake Meat Alone Won’t Save the World added to Google Docs

Fake Meat Alone Won’t Save the World

Not as long as factory farming is still a part of the food supply chain, anyway

The vegan supply chain is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems.

The least terrible option for meat eaters is to support farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/21398972/factory-farming-impossible-meat-vegan-sustainability

Created September 1, 2020 at 09:26PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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10 Tips for improved guest blogging in 2020

As link building becomes a more cautionary practice it’s necessary to get a clear idea of how to acquire the best links for your website, in light of this guest blogging in 2020 can be a good method.

Although Google has openly placed more scrutiny on guest blogging, there is undoubtedly still value in acquiring a link from a recognizable high-authority site in your niche. That being said, it’s not easy to secure links from top sites-especially when you need to scale up your efforts. Many sites only offer nofollow links and with growing competition, there is no shortage of good writers to populate these blog sites with high-quality articles.

This doesn’t mean that all hope is lost in the world of guest blogging. It just means your efforts need to be planned and strategized. Here are some top tips to get the most out of your guest blogging in 2020.

Create a master list of guest blogging sites

Qualify relevance

Qualify authority

Check search visibility

Combine outreach tactics to land opportunities

Research your target sites blog

Strategize your topic

Create an enticing storyline with your headings

Submit infographics

Make your links count

1. Create a master list of guest blogging sites

Be extremely organized with your approach to guest blogging to streamline the process. Create a master list on a spreadsheet in order to keep track of your efforts. Record the sites you’ve made contact with, the dates you’ve submitted articles or pitches and any notes on the efforts you’ve made to help you avoid duplicate efforts.

Start with a pre-existing list

There are dozens of sites that have created a list of the top guest blogging sites for multiple industries. You can start your master list with the most popular authority sites in your niche by exploring a few pre-existing lists.

A few examples that offer a list of guest blogging sites are Lilach Bullock, Izideo, Advanced Web Ranking, and Solvid. This will start you off with a solid base of top sites to work from that are well known within your niche.

Scrape Google

It’s impossible to know about every website that offers guest blogging without doing some background research. One method of discovery is to use command operatives to scrape Google.

Use the following commands paired with a keyword to find guest blogging sites:

“inurl” will tell Google to look for keywords in the URL

“intitle” will find sites with the keyword in the title

Mix and match commands to produce different results:

Inurl: “digital marketing” + “write for us”

Intitle: SEO + “guest post”

Check out guest post sites from your competition

It’s no secret that you can use any backlink report to get the inside scoop on the strength of your competitions backlink profile. Use Moz, SEMRush, Ahrefs or any tool of your choice to produce to see what links your competition has acquired. In the digital marketing space, a typical backlink profile will yield a number of guest blogging sites your competition found in which you can also submit an article.

2. Qualify relevance

If there were no authority transferred by links, what sites would you link to? This type of approach to link building will help you seek out the sites that are highly relevant to your website without being blinded by domain authority.

It happens quite often that at first glance a website DA will influence your perception of the quality of the link which is not always an accurate indication of whether that link will benefit your site.

Make sure the website you are submitting to is in your niche or a direct vertical. Confirm they are publishing content similar to yours so that a clearly defined relationship can be established that indicates relevance to your content.

3. Qualify authority

The DA of a site is the first indicator of a quality link. Although it doesn’t provide the entire picture of what makes up a quality link, you can use this indicator to prioritize your submission sites.

Use the Mozbar for a quick view of a website’s metrics before making a submission.

Target sites that will have a positive impact on your authority. Certain keywords will require links from higher DA sites and others you can get away with links from lower DA sites.

4. Check search visibility

The search visibility of a website indicates how well the site is performing by ranking for keywords and driving traffic. A site that has good metrics won’t necessarily be a good link if it doesn’t have any visitors reading its content.

The authority gained from a link is an important aspect of link building, but the overarching goal behind the practice is to build streams of relevant traffic and awareness of your website.

5. Combine outreach tactics to land opportunities

Not every site will advertise that they accept guest posts but that doesn’t mean they won’t be happy to publish some great content you’re offering. Adam Envoy was able to secure 8 DA60+ sites in 15 days in his guest-posting project and attributed a portion of his success to targeting site owners with an outreach email before proposing a guest post.

Use LinkedIn and Facebook to make initial contact with content managers and editors and let them know you’re interested in link building and guest blogging. In most cases, you will get a response that will lead you to the right person and a link building opportunity.

Even if you don’t get the desired response, making contact is the first step in building a mutually beneficial relationship further down the line.

6. Research your target sites blog

One of the top reasons why site owners don’t respond to an outreach email is because “They didn’t read my blog”. Get a feel for the type of content they’re publishing by scanning through titles and reading relevant content. You can pick up on trends and characteristics that will make your pitch much more targeted to your prospect’s website.

7. Strategize your topic

Choose a topic that hasn’t been covered in-depth on your prospects’ blog. This presents more value for a blog owner to be presented with the option of adding content their site is lacking.

The topic you choose to write about should be something suited to your strength. Apart from making a list-style article, dive deep into a relevant topic that can be broken down and optimized for a specific keyword topic. Writing optimized SEO content is a bonus for publishers when the article is already primed and ready to rank.

8. Create an enticing storyline with your headings

Most online readers are scanners by nature, in fact, 43% of people admit to skimming through articles when they read them. which is a trait you can capitalize on with an original title and descriptive subtitles. Your outline should reflect a storyline that clearly describes the content of your article.

The first impression of your article an editor (and their audience) will have is the headline of your proposed article. This should clearly convey to the reader what they will get from reading your post and how will it will benefit them. Use headline strategies that are proven to improve click-through rates by appealing to the various types of readers.

Follow up the headline with your main points emphasized as subtitles. Make your article actionable and complete for a person who scans through your content.

9. Submit infographics

Although the numbers will show that infographics peaked in 2014 and 2015, they are still an effective means of creating backlinks. In many cases, infographics receive exceptional consideration as a guest post because publishers know that the potential to attract backlinks improves tremendously.

Image source: Moz

Use an infographic tool from companies like Venngage, Visme or Piktochart to add more appeal to your article submissions.

10. Make your links count

The links you insert in your article should provide value to the reader by taking them somewhere that enhances their understanding of a particular point or topic.

Contextual links are more valuable than the link in the author’s box. Make sure to give yourself a link to content that is relevant to your article. Avoid being overly self-promotional by making sure the links you give yourself are truly beneficial to the reader.

Keep in mind excessive anchor text to the same page will result in a negative effect on your ranking. Mix up your links to appear natural with a brand link, long-tail, and naked URL wherever applicable.

Promote previously published articles

Link to previously published articles to increase the DA of those pages and create more powerful links to your site.

Linking to articles you’ve published is less conspicuous than linking to your own site, which gives you more leeway in the number of links you create.

The value of your work as a future guest author increases when site owners see you link to your published work thereby promoting their site as well.

Link to prospects and influencers

Make it a point to link to the people who are in a position to help you in your backlinking strategies. Separate yourself from the masses by showing an influencer quality links you’ve sent to their work. Keep track of the links you accumulate and make it part of your outreach strategy to build powerful alliances and partnerships.

Enjoy the benefits of guest blogging

There is no doubt that despite the scrutiny placed on guest blogging by Google, it is still one of many effective methods of link building.

A well-executed strategy will provide your site targeted referral traffic as well as improved authority and ranking ability. Use guest blogging opportunities to brand your business, demonstrate thought leadership and build mutually beneficial relationships through your link building efforts in 2020.

Christian Carere is an avid contributor to the digital marketing community and a social media enthusiast. He founded Digital Ducats Inc. to help businesses generate more leads and new clients through custom-designed SEO strategies.

The post 10 Tips for improved guest blogging in 2020 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/12/30/10-tips-for-improved-guest-blogging-in-2020/

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how2to18 · 6 years

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TEN YEARS AGO, the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the global financial crisis of 2008. Democrats were eight years in power, and their failure to prosecute the corporate criminals behind the crisis surely ranks as their biggest legacy. That failure was the condition of possibility for the anti-elite narrative that inspired the white working class and the white upper class to support a genuinely fascist insurgency before and beyond November 2016. It was also the condition of possibility for Billions.

Across its three seasons on Showtime, Billions explores the aftermath of Lehman’s and Obama’s 2008 peaks, tracking the waning and waxing faculty of elite professionals to steer their careers and helm the most powerful country in the world. The show is built around an extended parallel between outer-borough upstart Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), principal of the wildly fruitful hedge fund Axe Capital, and Manhattan WASP Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), US Attorney for the New York Southern District and hero of a counterfactual recent past in which 81 bankers and traders were successfully prosecuted for their outlaw engineering of toxic asset slides. Rhoades fancies himself a just warrior, fighting against “[these] Teflon corporations that defraud the American people on a grand scale.” As the series opens he levels his gaze at Axe, the Moby-Dick of parkour finance.

Root for the law, or root for the money? Fortunately, we don’t have to choose, since here both sides equal each other in their maniacal pursuits of professional acme — a steady double date with bent rules, a shared ruthless drive to win. Root for the winners! Both men are game theory geniuses, spooling out scenarios and hedging countermoves with the speed of gigahertz processors. Their sheer effectiveness propels the show’s narrative and renders the difference between good guys and bad guys a mere matter of preference.

The winners run their races in structural parallel, their lines intersected at right angles by mutual ballast: Wendy (Maggie Siff), a psychiatrist whose penetrating understanding of Bobby guides the growth of Axe Cap, and whose lashing crop rouses the vim of her husband, Chuck. The very first shot of the series frames Chuck bound and gagged on the floor, a vinyl stiletto boot pinning him down. (It’s not TV, it’s Showtime.) “You’re in need of correction, aren’t you?” she says, burning his chest with a cigarette and again with urine in the wound. Cut to the Manhattan skyline, that other site of bad boys who will be bad boys even after market corrections, and there we find Wendy’s second sphere: she is lucratively employed as the in-house performance coach at the hedge fund, a high-class fluffer whose flash-sessions amp the traders with dominatrix directives to “get out there and do what needs to be done.” All day long, Wendy dispatches debilitating anxieties and disruptive fetishes at lightning pace, checking in frequently with Axe to save him “from making a huge mistake for dick-measuring purposes.” She takes deep satisfaction in her beneficent effects. On “Comp Day,” when financial firms assign annual bonuses to their employees, she regularly merits $2 million — and that’s not counting spontaneous gifts from Axe like a black Maserati GranTurismo Sport. Her business model is clearly not Jacques Lacan’s.

Chuck’s rewards differ: he can’t help but be bad, even as he draws the compensation of righteousness, and his inner conflict mines much more fodder for repentance under the latex lash. “I work for the public good!” Chuck scolds Wendy in season one. “No, you work for the good of Chuck Rhoades,” she flatlines back. When he initiates an indictment against another giant hedge fish whose political ties will fall out advantageously, Chuck’s deputies repeat the exchange in a later season: “It’s the right thing to do,” Lonnie Watley (Malachi Weir) says. Kate Sacker (Condola Rashad) parries, “It’s what Chuck wants. It doesn’t make it right.” At the end of his righteous road, if Chuck Senior (Jeffrey DeMunn) pulls enough strings from behind the velvet curtains of his Fifth Avenue study, Chuck will be governor, a latter-day Spitzer chasing corporate offenses in between incriminating sexploits, clad in ever-more refined sharkskin grays of power.

Even as Axe, Chuck, and Wendy split repeatedly over the public good, legal technicalities, and codes of honor, they are three peas in a pod, winners united in their incomparable competence, their oft-declared outsized intelligence, their profound professionalism. The show’s creators are also consummate professionals (a team that includes Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times financial pages): the script is exacting, the plot gasping, the performances riveting, the cameos towering, the wardrobe flawless. Not your average workplace drama, Billions is impressively synoptic in its horizontal integration of mental health, financial services, Silicon Valley industries, and law and order, with a little Yonkers-secret-recipe-pizza and private-duty-intravenous-hangover-cure-nurses spicing the mix. Some seek money, some seek glory, some seek power, but everyone wants to win. The show thus poses the question, at the time of writing in 2014, at the time of setting in 2012–2016, and at the time of airing in 2016–2018, of professional potency. What is it about this decade that makes being excellent at your elite job a matter of concern?

The authors of the financial crisis were, on the whole, excellent at their jobs. Inventing asset classes to dissimulate toxicity, booking loans as revenues, hyping instruments to defer reckoning, evangelizing for the equations that discount merely mortal common sense, and evading regulatory oversight with NASCAR agility, the hedgies of the new millennium performed spectacularly. What Axe calls the “unimaginative, do-gooder authorities” — regulators and legislators, Federal Reserve governors and lifetime senators — stood equally spectacular in their unwavering commitment to the upward transfer of wealth.

Barack Obama, the executive officer with purview over all this excellence — Harvard Law stamped, a 10 million popular vote win span, and cooler than the crispest cucumber — tragically forswore the audacity of power, and instead measured his every move for the middle. Appointing Wall Street alums to the Justice Department, maintaining the GOP Treasury, and utterly staying the course with the boondoggle bailout Hank Paulson and George W. Bush had rushed in late 2008, Obama achieved bipartisan support for the plutocracy. He declined to bail out the people. He announced but never really executed a program to aid homeowners in tiny proportion to the support for banks. He committed to but never delivered a plan for jobs for struggling homeowners, and he oversaw, in the name of Too Big To Fail, outrageous mergers of investment banks with consumer banks destined to risk even bigger failures. Facing the black and white of racist obstruction and class war, he went gray. Professionalism of the middle is not professionalism of the top.

2008’s extreme wreckage couldn’t be answered from the center. Billions endorses excess, and not only through the tops of S&M dens. It meets tremendous deeds with zealous, polarizing professional prowess. All three principals are awesomely effective, getting out there and doing what needs to be done. In supreme-stakes “three-dimensional chess,” as they call it, Axe, Chuck, and Wendy appraise their options with hawkish precision, and much of the viewing pleasure rests in the exertions of keeping up with these darting analysts. If we can hang with these pros, tracking their razor rhetoric, technical argot, nimble abbrevs, and bountiful movie allusions, aren’t we smart too? (I watch the show with my JD/Econ PhD husband, and we need subtitles.)

The power of the spoken smart animates most episodes of Billions. Choice bon mots leaked to the press can trigger shorts and swaps, misdirections planted in the ears of suspected moles confirm corporate espionage, incendiary insults inspire ire, and single syllables can suborn murder. Threats are promises and speeches are deeds; to be effective is to wield the word as cause, spurring domino actions. Fierce oratory anchors the action, accomplished stage actors people the remarkable cast, and the show makes much ado of theater, its narrow focus on the orators predominating over fancy camerawork, set design, or action sequences. Drama is the paramount medium of the act, so Billions deploys its theatricality to foreground its study of agency.

Evoking black box theater in its constrained interiors — the dark kitchen of the Rhoades’s Brooklyn townhouse, the wood paneling of Upper East Side clubs, the utilitarian taupe of federal offices — the show’s aesthetic is a tight frame for the efficacious act. It makes virtually no use of exterior settings, establishing shots, panoramas, or montage, only occasionally inserts drone footage of the Manhattan skyline between scenes, and is almost exclusively low-lit, faces half in shadow. Even the gleaming white of the Axelrod Westport headquarters (a conspicuous post-9/11 relocation for many such firms) reflects the light of scrutiny, transparent office walls and centered communal trader table exposing and circumscribing power plays. Chess moves within close squares, the actions anyone takes best be good form, as they’ll ramify into a long tail.

Poor form haunts Axe even as he cuts a precision figure, since his solo firm originated in unsavory transactions around 2001, a second world-historical juxtaposition alongside 2008. The destruction of the World Trade Center created all kinds of opportunities for financial crimes and shady gains, from insufficient health care for widows and first-responders, to the war-profiteering that drove the stock market up after the fraudulent invasion of Iraq. Axe, we learn late in season one, owes no small segment of his empire to 9/11. A stroke of luck kept him out of the office that morning, and a stroke of evil genius netted him nearly a billion dollars by shorting airline and hotel stocks in the very hours during which his colleagues perished.

The line from 9/11 to 2008 to 2018 spun by Billions is the problematic of professional power, from W’s amateur incompetence to O’s centrist impotence to HRC’s unshakable taint. Does power rest with the mighty rulers of imperialism, or with the few who seek retribution? When the elites peddle business as usual amid crises of their own making, how do they get away with it? Can a woman maintain the same middling charade as her male predecessor? Billions merges these elite domains of the political, the legal, and the financial with the baser registers of the professional, the sexual, and the criminal. Absolute effectiveness requires relative tactics in different domains, but the strategy remains the same.

Luxely compensated black-clad Wendy is the cold, beating heart of the show. Her impeccable professionalism carves out an admirable Obama middle way between justice and money. The creative choice to foreground a woman in a genre usually defined by its abundant big swinging dicks comprises the show’s sizable allure. Beautifully loyal to both Axe and Chuck, Wendy’s actions are not quite as determining as theirs, and indeed several of the plot trajectories involve elaborate maneuvers by both men to protect her from implication in their misdoings. But she is fiercely dignified in her right to a career unhampered by her husband’s, hungry at every moment for a harder puzzle. Her work acumen shines as a real point of identification.

The middle imagines itself as noble, going high when they go low, but it often requires a certain prostitution, and Wendy finally sells herself to protect both her men. Having quit Axe Cap and left her marriage at the end of season one, over the course of season two she eventually negotiates a deal to recenter herself and buffer her men from one another: she’ll return to the firm, and Bobby will drop the hundreds of malicious prosecution lawsuits he is funding against Chuck; she’ll return to the marriage, and Chuck will hunt other whales. A potent broker like the rest of them, she exudes Swiss neutrality even as the show centers her decisive seat of power.

Combining the financial and legal expertise of her two men with her own primary expertise in psychic motivation, Wendy’s control is dazzling to behold, her deeds superseding those of both men. It comes as a hard gut-punch when the third season’s decisive misdeed is her own: she violates her patient Mafee, a likable every-bro with just enough “Navy SEAL” to thrive at Axe Cap, trading on her insider knowledge of his infatuation with her to seduce him, persuading him to lie to federal investigators on her behalf. Axe, Chuck, and Wendy are all facing jail time for their vertiginous triple crossing at season two’s climax, in which Chuck raids the personal trust he had sequestered when taking public office to overinvest in his friend’s juice company, but really to bait Axe into sabotaging the company to score on a big short of the IPO. Wendy, learning of the sabotage, does not warn Chuck, but joins the short. Her hedge is financially savvy though legally and maritally unsound, a middle ground between competing value systems, but no longer innocent. It primes her to shrewdly cross lines in season three, colluding with Axe and Chuck to pin the sabotage wholly on a fourth party, and to mine the exculpating falsehood from Mafee’s affections. As her black vixen sheaths foretell, the gray is untenable. There’s no credible integrity in the middle.

Wendy’s highly calculated betrayal of Mafee, and her betrayal of us for rooting for her, gets repaid in a patient’s betrayal of her. Taylor Mason is introduced in the second season as Mafee’s intern analyst, bound for the U Chicago MBA. Axe demands to be introduced to the young temp who makes Mafee millions, and on walks Taylor: “My pronouns are they, their, them.” Played by Asia Kate Dillon and earning Billions the Outstanding Drama Series award from GLAAD, Taylor is often celebrated as the first major gender nonconfirming character on a television series, but their drive is all too binary. “It’s not just about numbers and decimal points,” Wendy warns them. “No, I’m pretty sure there is only money,” comes their icy retort.

Where others want the good or the might, Taylor’s want is the machine. A stony quant, their grad school plans dissipate in the sway of one of Bobby’s trademark virile speeches: “You retreat behind your aquarium walls. What you don’t realize, Taylor, is that glass — it’s not a barrier, it’s a lens. It’s an asset. It’s what makes you good. You see things differently. That’s an edge.” The ensuing comp bargaining, rapid-fire and cut-throat, is equally signature. If there is someone who can rival Bobby, it is Taylor — not Chuck, poor analog soul. Where Chuck tries and fails to use Wendy to beat Axe, Taylor wins, optimizing their private sessions with Wendy to ultimately manipulate Axe.

Heeding Wendy and trusting their judgment, Bobby gives Taylor the reins at Axe Capital after one of Chuck’s contortions at last ensnares him in enough legal trouble to warrant a trading suspension. After crushing the capital raise by garnering $6 billion in new investments from a single speech, Taylor abruptly launches a solo firm, breaking Bobby’s bank and Wendy’s heart. All along, we’ve watched Wendy’s dual loyalties reap uneven returns: Axe tells her almost everything, leaving little plausible deniability (thank god for Doctor-Patient privilege), but Chuck tells her lies, and profanes patient confidentiality to steal fuel for his cases against Axe. With Taylor, she finds a relationship more complicated and intriguing than those with the male traders — an arc of actualization for both, a hint of the psychiatrist’s vocation beyond fluffing. But she also finds out that her most genuinely gratifying work can be someone else’s chess move; Taylor uses Wendy’s empathy for their experience in the über-male workplace to spur Wendy to advise Axe to offer Taylor more money, more prominence, more “forward momentum.” In a gray garage, in the most stabbing exchange of all the show’s Shakespearean duels, Wendy spits, “What do you want?”:

Taylor: You.

Wendy: You think … I’ll actually come with you? Haven’t you done enough damage?

T: I’m building not destroying. That’s where you come in …

W: Nice ideas. You are no moral fucking compass. For a moment, I thought you might be because you needed me to think that. But you used me. … You preyed on me and my empathy for you, preyed on me to get what you wanted from Axe — being part of the raise — so fuck you.

T: Oh, you don’t seem to understand. I’m not just offering you a job for my sake. I’m offering you a fresh start for yours. A restart for your slew of fuckups. You let things devolve at Axe Capital. You didn’t see me being pushed out the door. You couldn’t stop Axe from succumbing to his own worst nature. Instead, you succumbed to it. And who knows what other fallout you’ve created or at least allowed elsewhere in your life.

By recognizing that Wendy’s professional power underwrites Axe Cap’s, and thus that Wendy is culpable for its sins, Taylor caresses Wendy’s raw desire in one hand, while bitch-slapping her with the other. Wendy pretends to be in the middle, but is really in charge; by contrast, Taylor intends transparent management, “top down but not imperious or impetuous,” and largely “tech-centric,” employing the team of algo writers Axe Cap only briefly entertained, working as purely as possible. “A place free of arrests, indictments, insinuations,” Mase Cap pledges a Shangri-La of robotic proficiency bulwarked against irrational exuberance and illicit info. Even through the original sin of its founding, it’s a vision that winds Wendy, thudding the sternum of her own illusory virtue. Like Axe before them, Taylor goes solo with filthy lucre, but points out that Wendy, too, is an axe. There is no middling in financial baseball.

Axe vows certain vengeance, while Wendy counsels “looking within, to see what you, what we, may have done to cause this. We rebuild our business as we rebuild ourselves.” As Wendy and Bobby align against Taylor, Wendy and Chuck also realign, finding new thrills in resistance to the noxious anti-black autocrat Jock Jeffcoat (Clancy Brown), the new Attorney General after national regime change. A gruesome fusion of Sessions and Trump, Jeffcoat’s racism is matched only by his corruption. (He even gets to shout, “You’re fired!”) Chuck spends the second half of season three working with his two black Assistant US Attorneys and a black New York State Attorney General to build an obstruction case against Jeffcoat, renewing his commitment to justice after a détente with Axe Cap, but applying all the brinksmanship lessons learned to goad Jock into exposure. Jock is a better target than Axe, for it is easier to believe in preserving the neutrality of political institutions than in revealing the open truth of the rigged market. Sacker assures: “He’s finally doing it right, the right thing […] He’s doing that Chuck thing, but for the right fucking reasons this time.”

The final sequence of season three distills all these tactical realignments. In companionable silence with Chuck, Wendy takes a call from Axe. “I saw Taylor,” she says. “Fuck them. No, I mean fuck them over. You have to. We do.” “Well, that’s different from look inward,” Axe reproves. “Yeah, well, you know what, I’m different.” A different Wendy invites Bobby into the Rhoades dining room, mutually funding a new rapprochement. The closing lines over flowing wine put the long play for season four: “So you know how you’re gonna go after Jock?” Bobby asks. “Some ideas floating around my head. And, uh, Taylor?” Chuck reciprocates. “Yeah, yeah, got a plan that’s starting to form.” Wendy, wronged by both Taylor’s treachery and Jock’s tyranny, husbands the partnership: “Tell him about it. There’s no one better at breaking down a strategy.” From above, the camera’s final shot captures the tops of three heads harmoniously leaning in, readying for “a real good time together” (The Velvet Underground trills us), for staking out different fights.

From Wall Street to The Big Short, the financial malfeasance genre is often marked by its gray regard for greedy elites, and Billions doesn’t quite crack this ambivalent mold. It offers charismatic winners at many chosen professions, unencumbered by constructs like ethics or law, and we want to be on their teams. But the insistent connections it draws among its principals, their common core of intrinsic drive, provokes not so much the guilty pleasure of cheering guilty heroes, as the savory systematic reflection on the diversified ends of powerful means. Use your might for the middle, or go one better?

A hedge offsets risk by playing both sides, rapacious plunder in middle-ground clothing. Billions deftly explores these faux middles via elite power struggles, elite deeds, and the tactics of elite war. Strikingly, though, its insights catapult beyond elites, whose monopoly can’t be trusted, who shouldn’t be the winners all the time. Everyone needs tactics, everyone needs strategy. Even we the writers and readers of literary magazines amid the ruins of the university, we the taxi drivers and lawyers at LaGuardia, we the marchers for climate science and gun regulation and feminism, we the teachers on strike, we the candidates with “impossible” platforms, we the servers in restaurants, we the occupiers outside baby jails, we too with power. The middle cannot hold. Get out there and do what needs to be done.

Anna Kornbluh teaches literature and literary theory at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

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downloaddubbedanime · 6 years

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HD New Dubbed Anime Movies Lists 2018

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT FROM his party’s recent San Diego convention was the state’s top Democrat, the longest serving governor in its history, a man touted nationally as the de facto leader of the opposition to the Trump administration. Why was Jerry Brown not there for his own party’s party? Well, as the Los Angeles Times noted, at a previous convention he had “faced protests and heckling from critics who did not agree with his stance on fracking” (he doesn’t oppose it). And, if you witnessed the 2017 convention razzing of even nominal single-payer health insurance backers whose support was deemed superficial or insincere, you knew what Brown could expect if he showed up (he doesn’t support it). After all, retiring California Nurses Association executive director Rose Ann DeMoro did tell the San Francisco Chronicle that “not convincing Jerry to do single-payer” counted as “my greatest failure” — and there was a large and vocal CNA contingent at both conventions. This issue, entirely missing from California Comeback: The Genius of Jerry Brown, Narda Zacchino’s otherwise fine review of the governor’s career, does suggest that the author goes a bit too far in her subtitle — which is not to say that the long-time Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle journalist is off base in considering Brown’s career as one characterized by seriousness and intelligence beyond the political norm.

Calling California “a nation-size state famous for its progressive models” and “the key test case not only for the United States but also for the entire world,” where “observers will learn if a multicultural, democratic, and postindustrial society can remain united, functional, and progressive in the face of globalized, high-tech capitalism” (whew!), Zacchino is particularly impressed with the “radical moderate” Brown’s shepherding of 2012’s Proposition 30 tax increases, effectively closing a tax-cutting era that began with the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 during his first stint as governor.

Prop 13 reduced the state’s real estate taxes, previously soaring in tandem with its real estate values, to no more than one percent of assessed valuation. Its passage, coming at a time when California had a $4 billion surplus — equivalent to $14.6 billion in 2015 — was epochal. A counter measure allowing local governments to create a “split roll” — taxing owner-occupied residences at a lower rate than commercial properties — had also been placed on the ballot by the legislature, but the 20 percent cut it offered was too little, too late, and Prop 13 carried with a 65 percent majority, immediately reducing property tax collections by 52 percent, from $10.3 billion to $4.9 billion. Additionally, Zacchino writes, it set off “a flurry of initiatives, most of them constitutional amendments,” so that between “1978 and 2014, California’s state constitution was amended seventy-three times, compared with forty-seven amendments in the preceding sixty-five years,” making it “the third longest constitution in the world.” Although Brown, then finishing his first term as governor, had been a staunch opponent, he immediately declared that “the people have spoken” and, as Zacchino notes, “did a turnaround and embraced it with such fervor that a Los Angeles Times poll three weeks after the election revealed that a majority of people thought the governor had supported it all along.”

After a single year on the Los Angeles Community College Board, Brown — the son of Edmund “Pat” Brown, California governor from 1959 to 1967 — made the leap to statewide office as Secretary of State in 1970, where he succeeded an arguably even more remarkable father-son act — the Jordans, Frank C. and Frank M., Republicans who had held the office for all but two years since 1910. (Frank M.’s widow ran in 1970, but lost the Republican primary.) Four years later, at age 36, Brown became the youngest governor in the state’s history, winning California’s closest gubernatorial election in 50 years and replacing Ronald Reagan, the man who beat his father.

To the rest of the nation, Brown seemed echt California — a one-time Jesuit seminarian who dated pop star Linda Ronstadt and took a post-campaign vacation at the Tassajara Hot Springs Zen retreat house (although Zacchino notes that “ironically, he has never been a politician to mix God and politics in his speeches or persona”). He eschewed the Reagan-era armored Cadillac and the privately funded governor’s mansion constructed at the behest of outgoing First Lady Nancy, preferring his own Plymouth and a “modest $250-a-month, sixth-floor apartment furnished with a few things from the governor’s mansion and other state apartments” — bedsheets and towels that Zacchino reports were “provided by the state’s psychiatric hospital in Napa.” He canceled his inaugural ball and spoke about the right of farmworkers to unionize in his inaugural address. He floated the idea of the state launching its own communications satellite and hired an ex-astronaut as a space advisor. He ran for president in 1980 (his second try) on the slogan “Protect the Earth, serve the people, and explore the universe.” Although Zacchino describes his resulting nickname, Governor Moonbeam, as “a moniker he still disdains,” when the Trump administration recently threatened to discontinue collecting climate change-related data, Brown reminded scientists: “I didn’t get that moniker for nothing. […] [I]f Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite. […] We’re going to collect that data.”

Brown lost a US Senate race in 1982 and would not hold office again until becoming mayor of Oakland 16 years later. He did, however, run for president again in 1992, accepting only individual donations of $100 or less, a stance fueled by his distaste for the corporate fundraising he’d done during a stint as chair of the state’s Democratic Party. During the race, Zacchino tells us, he “developed a dislike for the Clintons — or certainly their brand of ‘Democrat’ as part of the Democratic Leadership Council,” a group that included “among its membership tobacco lobbyists, who are in the business of killing people.” Over the years, his career has exhibited something of an inverse relationship between power and radicalism. In the years when he hosted guests like Noam Chomsky on his We the People radio show, he sometimes appeared to be flirting with socialism. He got over that, though, as soon as he returned to elective office.

One of the book’s stories most worthy of wider recollection comes in a chapter contrasting the economic development strategies of California and Texas and actually doesn’t involve Brown at all. Gray Davis, Brown’s one-time chief of staff, occupied the governor’s office during the passage of the state’s 1996 energy deregulation law, which the Center for Public Integrity has called “the most costly public policy miscalculation ever by state lawmakers.” The bill passed with no legislative dissent from either party, in either branch — a useful, if unpleasant reminder of the Clinton-era business-oriented neoliberal ideology that then dominated the Democratic Party and continues to haunt it to this day.

A 1998 repeal initiative failed in the face of a $40 million industry-funded campaign against it, coming on the heels of “an $87 million advertising campaign — the cost being passed on to ratepayers — explaining the new system to the state’s residents.” Reality begged to differ, however, and Zacchino reports that, in San Diego, “[t]he average price of residential electricity increased 413 percent from the third quarter of 1999 to the third quarter of 2000.” Corporate reaction to this windfall was revealed in audio tapes released in a lawsuit involving one of the laws’s greatest beneficiaries, the Enron corporation — George W. Bush’s largest campaign contributor over the years. The conversations, she says, “sound like a Hollywood parody of amoral greed, and in nearly all of them Enron traders are heard laughing. […] [I]n one crass example […][,] two unidentified Enron traders celebrated when a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and forcing an increase in prices.” Says one, “Burn, baby, burn.” At one point, the company’s top West Coast trader compliments a co-worker: “He just fucks California. […] He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.” When interrupted and urged to rephrase, he says, “Okay, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day.” All in all, she writes, it was,

[A]n opportunity for master manipulators to rip off consumers, plunge the utilities into near bankruptcy, cost the state tens of billions of dollars, and subject nearly every man, woman, and child in California to rolling blackouts not experienced since the days of World War II, when the reasons for what was happening were at least comprehensible.

At this point, Brown was making his political comeback, starting with two terms as mayor of Oakland and then one as the state’s attorney general. Transformed from visionary to administrator in his more methodical second rise to power, his breadth of knowledge has served him well as he has taken on a leadership position in the opposition to Trump over the last two years, when he has been the oldest governor in California history. And he has not shied away from challenging the shibboleths of more liberal administrations, either — for instance, telling Obama administration Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, “You assume we know how to ‘turn around all the struggling low performing schools,’ when the real answers may lie outside of school,” and explaining to Zacchino that “the latest effort principally by hedge fund and other individuals at the top of the income scale to apply business practices, performance metrics, to the school, is an untested set of propositions. There’s not empirical data that justifies them.”

A recurrent theme of Zacchino’s book — which is a revision of her 2016 tome, California Comeback: How a “Failed State” Became a Model for the Nation — is the sheer size of the issues in California, where, as Newt Gingrich once noted, “in thirty-three years, the state built twenty-two prisons and only one additional public university.” And lest we think that the Golden State’s famous environmental problems began with fracking or anything like that, Zacchino recounts how mid-19th-century gold diggers revived the ancient Roman technique of hydraulic mining, blasting away entire hills to uncover the bits of gold they might contain — at one site, seven nozzles each spewed a million gallons of water an hour, 24 hours a day. As a result of this largely forgotten practice, she writes that “in some areas, land levels were raised as much as seven feet by the aquatic transfer of some twelve billion tons of earth, the equivalent of eight times the earth that was removed to carve the Panama Canal.” In comparison, current problems like the fact that it takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond may come to seem like, well, peanuts.

Returning to the vexed politics of single-payer health insurance, the state’s Democratic leadership has engaged in an elaborate charade on this issue for some years now. In 2006, a single-payer bill actually passed both Democratic-controlled legislative houses before being vetoed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a scenario repeated two years later. So with a Democrat taking over as governor during the next legislative session, it should have been problem solved, right? Alas, no — during the next two legislative sessions, the bill died in committee. And in the session after that, it wasn’t even filed — despite considerable pressure on legislators known to be sympathetic to the idea. Not that there’s anyone talking about it, but the legislative leadership obviously gave the members to understand that they were not to file the bill (that is, if they wanted any bills important to them to be passed). It seems equally clear that the reason for this ban had to do with the fact that Governor Brown does not wish to see single-payer legislation passed on his watch.

Here we have another instance of the Jekyll/Hyde nature of Jerry Brown’s career. In 1992, the out-of-power Brown argued in a presidential primary debate with Bill Clinton that “through a single payer, as we’ve seen in Canada, you can eliminate tremendous amounts of paperwork both for the doctors, the hospitals, and the […] insurance companies.” But 25 years later, when he is in a position to shape a state-level single-payer system that would be larger than Canada’s, we find him asking: “Where do you get the extra money? This is the whole question. I don’t even get … how do you do that?” The bill was refiled in this, the last legislative session of Brown’s career, but the co-chair of the single-payer advocacy group Campaign for a Healthy California told the Sacramento Bee, “We’re hearing the governor is doing everything he can to make sure this never gets on his desk.”

If Jerry Brown really were the genius Zacchino thinks he is, or wants him to be, surely he’d remember how “you do that.”

Tom Gallagher is a writer and activist living in San Francisco. He is the author of Sub: My Years Underground in America’s Schools (2015) and The Primary Route: How the 99 Percent Takes on the Military Industrial Complex (2016).

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Not as long as factory farming is still a part of the food supply chain, anyway In the middle of July, Impossible: The Cookbook, a compendium of recipes designed to showcase the plant-based meat engineered by Impossible Foods, was launched with grimly impeccable timing: Four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, meat shortages and revelations about the terrible conditions in meat processing facilities, where the virus had infected more than 25,000 workers nationwide, had cast an unforgiving light on the country’s industrial meat industry. Impossible insists there is a better, highly versatile alternative to meat consumption, embodied in recipes like Kwame Onwuachi’s Ethiopian spiced meat with hummus and toasted cashews, where crumbled Impossible Burger takes the place of more traditional ground lamb. It is one of 40 recipes from a slew of well-respected chefs that demonstrate that the only limitation to what you can do with Impossible’s faux flesh is your own imagination. The word “vegan” is conspicuously absent from the cookbook’s introduction, which instead proclaims that the book is “for people who love meat.” This is the kind of crafty messaging that has defined Impossible since July 2016, when the company launched its signature “bleeding” ersatz beef patty: This may be vegan meat, but it is designed to appeal to actual meat eaters. It’s clearly working: By early May of this year, sales of its products had shot up 264 percent since March. The Impossible Foods story has been told many, many times since the company launched in 2011. It’s become a juggernaut with almost $1.5 billion in funding, a grocery store footprint that is 30 times larger than it was six months ago, and like any good tech unicorn, a proper direct-to-consumer website. Given Impossible’s projected growth, expanding product line (Impossible sausage was introduced in June), and compelling pitch (“We’re making meat,” the cookbook reads, “mouthwatering, craveable, nutritious meat — from plants” that “requires 87 percent less water and 96 percent less land to produce” than a conventional burger), it is tempting to think that plant-based meat is the way of the future. Impossible: The Cookbook suggests that it is not merely a possibility, but an inevitability, the only direction in which progress points. Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown implied as much in an interview last year. “We are dead serious,” he said, “about our mission to eliminate the need for animals in the food chain by 2035.” With a subtitle proclaiming “How to Save Our Planet, One Delicious Meal at a Time,” the cookbook — and, by extension, Impossible Foods — is promising no less than a brighter tomorrow that will be built upon patties wrought of soy and potato protein, disgorged on an endless assembly line monitored by contented, fairly compensated workers as happy cows roam on distant fields, free to live out their natural lives. The strongest case for the vegan supply chain can be made by considering not what it is, but what it isn’t. The vegan supply chain isn’t factory farms, industrial livestock operations that house thousands of animals under one roof, often in miserable conditions that are not only inhumane but also terrible for the environment. Among other things, these farms generate about 70 percent of the country’s ammonia emissions and 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, contribute to deforestation, and create lagoons of animal waste that pollute the environment and sicken people in surrounding communities. The vegan supply chain also isn’t slaughterhouses or meat processing plants, where low-paid, often immigrant workers toil shoulder-to-shoulder in physically grueling conditions ripe for spreading COVID-19. And, although this should be obvious, the vegan supply chain is not one built upon abject animal suffering and exploitation. Compared to that, the vegan supply chain looks pretty good, and Impossible Foods is hardly the only voice arguing that going vegan can save the planet. In 2018, the journal Science published the results of a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of 40,000 farms in 119 countries. It found that while meat and dairy supplied just 18 percent of food calories and 37 percent of protein, they used 83 percent of farmland — and produced 60 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. The upshot, as the study’s lead researcher told the Guardian, was that a “vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use.” And last year, a report by the United Nations body on climate science concluded that reducing meat consumption in favor of plant-based diets could have a significant positive impact on our ability to fight climate change. The vegan supply chain is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems. But while there is very little doubt that eating less meat and dairy is better for humanity’s chances of long-term survival in our current home, the vegan supply chain on its own is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems. Like any agricultural supply chain, it is not automatically virtuous, much less neutral in its environmental impact. To examine some of the issues surrounding the vegan supply chain is to understand why a truly sustainable and ethical food supply chain is defined by more than simply what it is not. It is also to acknowledge that reforming the way we grow our food requires a truly systemic approach. Even if we do accept that fake meat is the way of the more enlightened future, we still have to ask where, how, and by whom each of its ingredients is being grown and then processed, how the factory where it’s being mass-produced is being powered and how much greenhouse gas emissions it produces, and how much greenhouse gas is in turn produced by the different operations that supply the fake meat’s various ingredients, and packaging, and on and on forever more. Every step of the industrial supply chain — vegan or not — is fraught with these considerations, as well as more vexing questions than encouraging answers. Take, for example, the soybean, a crop whose byproducts are ubiquitous ingredients in processed foods, both vegan and otherwise. The vast majority of the world’s soy — over 70 percent — is grown for livestock feed, which is why the growing demand for meat, particularly in China, has helped to double global soy production in the past two decades. It is soy grown for livestock feed, not vegan foods, that is a driver of deforestation in South America and its concomitant displacement of Indigenous communities and small farmers. While only a tiny percentage of soy grown worldwide is for human consumption, the presence of soy in many vegan processed foods means that it is still necessary to ask where that soy comes from, and to question the practices used to grow it. Impossible Foods itself has been criticized for its use of soy, specifically the genetically modified soy in its burger. A host of controversies surrounds GMO soy, but Impossible Foods has defended its GMO ingredients by pointing out that its use of genetically modified soy is more environmentally sustainable than harvesting non-GMO soy, and, moreover, is safe for human consumption. Along with soy, palm oil and cashews are ingredients that regularly appear in many vegan foods. Increasing demand for both presents a conundrum for anyone concerned about sustainable eating. Palm oil shows up in about 50 percent of consumer goods, including processed vegan foods like margarine, cookies, and ice cream. Palm oil plantations have been linked to numerous environmental and human rights issues, such as biodiversity loss and deforestation, and human rights abuses in Thailand and Indonesia. The cashew, a foundational ingredient in many vegan dairy products, has been linked to human rights violations in Vietnam, the world’s leading cashew exporter. While some of the more egregious practices, such as the use of forced labor at processing facilities, have been curbed, the difficulties of tracking the cashew supply chain (cashews are often grown in one country, processed in another) mean that it’s possible for worker abuses, such as poverty-line wages and the use of child labor, to go undetected. And the cashew isn’t the only nut with issues: Almond production, for example, requires huge amounts of water, a problem exacerbated by the surging market for almond milk products. In other words, no matter the crop being grown, there is the persistent issue of how farm laborers and the land they work are mistreated: Whether it is agricultural slavery on Florida tomato farms or illegal deforestation driven by Mexico’s growing avocado trade — which has also attracted the involvement and attendant violence of organized crime — the produce industry is rife with its own exploitative and abusive practices. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the greenhouse gas emissions produced by plant-based agriculture, whether from artificial fertilizers or practices such as tilling the fields or the transport of produce around the globe. To look at an Impossible Burger, or any industrial food, is to see a myriad of potentially troublesome links in the supply chain. Which is not to say that it’s impossible, so to speak, to have an ethical and sustainable supply chain. But the demands of capitalism — specifically that for food produced cheaply and at great volume in order to yield a profit — frequently undermine that goal. It’s a challenge that is further compounded by the imperative to feed a growing global population, and the varying standards for what it actually means to be ethical and sustainable at every level of the supply chain, vegan or not. Although switching to plant-based meat offers numerous environmental benefits, the companies that make it must find a way to reconcile the need to scale and make money with the practice of how to do so responsibly. Even if the Impossible promise turns out to be true, that we can indeed have a perfectly virtuous vegan supply chain engineered by a hegemonic tech company, there is still one inconvenient fact: For any number of reasons — whether cultural or economic — the majority of people on the planet prefer to eat meat and will not give it up willingly, and that will remain the case perhaps even after plant-based meat is a truly perfect simulacrum of the real thing. There are emerging alternatives. While they aren’t vegan, they do have the potential to accomplish the same goals as plant-based meat, perhaps some even more successfully. The need to create more sustainable alternatives to meat, combined with the preference of many people to continue eating it, has created a potentially lucrative opening for the cell-based, or cultured meat industry, whose inherent promise is meat without all of its accompanying demons. The industry began to get attention in 2013, when a Maastricht University professor named Mark Post successfully made a burger from cow stem cells he had grown into strips of muscle fiber. Since then, a number of cultured meat startups have popped up around the world, growing everything from meatballs to gelatin to seafood. Some observers are bullish about the industry’s potential: Last year, the consulting firm Kearney released a report predicting that by 2040, 60 percent of the world’s meat will be lab-grown or plant-based. The least terrible option for meat eaters is to support farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices. Cultured meat offers many potential advantages over both conventional and vegan meat, sustainability-wise: Whereas similar ingredients are used to produce both conventional and vegan meat (i.e. soy, potatoes, wheat, and water), cultured meat needs only a diet consisting predominantly of amino acids and glucose — ingredients grown in labs, rather than in resource-intensive fields. The challenge, though, is producing it at scale, and doing so affordably; according to the Kearney report, the cost of cultured meat was $80 per 100 grams in 2018, versus conventional beef’s 80 cents per 100 grams (a number that reflects the way the industrial meat industry benefits from cheap grain, cheap labor, and direct and indirect government subsidies). While industry experts forecast that cost will be cut to less than $4 per 100 grams in the next 12 years, there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome, such as regulatory approvals and consumer acceptance. Cultured meat may indeed be one way toward a more environmentally sustainable future, but that future remains relatively distant and highly speculative. For now, perhaps the least terrible option for recalcitrant meat eaters who care about the environment and have the privilege of choice is to support the small, independent farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices. Nearly 100 percent of most livestock raised for consumption lives on factory farms. There’s little doubt that small farms can be a more sustainable alternative — one that should be combined with an even more sustainable alternative, which is just to eat less meat. Decreased consumption leads to decreased demand and, in turn, to decreased production. But given that global meat production is projected to be 16 percent higher in 2025 than it was a decade prior, this seems as unrealistic as the likelihood of McDonald’s rolling out cell-cultured Big Macs in time for Christmas. Rather than looking at the sustainable food supply chain of the future as an all-or-nothing scenario — one that either involves animal products or doesn’t — it’s perhaps more practical to take a holistic view, one that acknowledges the dizzying complexities of food production, as well as the varying definitions and measures of “sustainability.” Put another way, there is no single correct approach to fixing our problems, something illustrated by a 2017 study about the potential of organic agriculture to create a more sustainable food system. A 100 percent conversion to organic agriculture wouldn’t do it, the study found — among other problems, organic farming would require more farmland than its conventional counterpart. A more sustainable scenario, the study concluded, would combine organic agriculture with reductions in food waste and the amount of food used for livestock, along with a corresponding reduction in the production and consumption of meat. Even supposing there is no magic bullet, there does seem to be one obvious thing we could do to build a more sustainable supply chain: stop factory farming. Because while livestock farming can be sustainable and even ethical, particularly if it’s done on a smaller scale and using practices that favor the environment and human and animal welfare, there is nothing sustainable about the industrial livestock industry. And if climate change, environmental degradation, and worker and animal abuses haven’t given us reasons enough to find a better way forward, then the COVID-19 pandemic has provided yet another compelling reason by highlighting the ways that factory farms, with their overcrowded, unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading disease and promoting antibiotic resistance, may put us at risk for future pandemics. The call to end factory farming is gaining momentum: Last December, Sen. Cory Booker introduced legislation that would place a moratorium on large industrial animal operations and phase out the biggest ones by 2040. Crucially, the proposed bill also calls for strengthening protections for the family farmers and ranchers who cannot compete with these large-scale operations and are often forced into exploitative contracts with the corporations that control the meat industry. This kind of support for small, independent farmers is at the heart of what the ethical and sustainable supply chain of the future entails: It is not so much about vegan eating as it is about creating systems that enable farming that is humane for the environment, people, and animals. Plant-based meat can be part of that, and should be — provided that the companies that manufacture it are actively invested in creating a system whose concept of ethics and sustainability goes beyond being simply the lesser of two evils. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/32O5Kn1

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