- Myles Bess here, host of "Above the Noise", and connoisseur of all things chicken wings.

Now, one of the producers here at ATN is vegan.

- I know you think it's not cool, but things still taste good.

Like, okay, I just got this.

- And every time she talks about being vegan, I just zone out.

I just, (Myles whistles).

And she thinks that I'm gonna give up eating chicken wings, and barbecue, and all these other delicious foods.

It's just never gonna happen.

Today is day one of my vegan food diaries.

Okay, she got me, she got me.

I could take a loss But to be completely honest, it wasn't that bad.

Now you'll see how it went as we make our way through this video.

And if you wanna check out the whole vegan diary you should follow us on Instagram.

And while you're at it, you should also follow us on Twitter too.

There's links in the description below.

So I don't eat hamburger meat, and steak, and stuff like that every single day.

But I do have meat at least once a day.

I mean, it's already in the rotation of what I like to eat.

It's all that I've known.

It tastes hella good and it fills you up.

But I never really considered how my diet affects climate change.

Now hear me out.

Scientists say that one of the best ways to help is to stop eating meat and dairy.

Or just less of it.

Now, to be completely honest, I had no idea.

I thought I was making a dent by walking to work and not using plastic straws.

But apparently, less meat consumption is the way to go.

Also, eating a bunch of meat and dairy can be problematic for animal welfare, food security, and our health.

So with all that said, is it time to give up meat and dairy?

This is a sandwich that was recommended to me.

There's a like, seems like tofu or something, pickled onion, cilantro, like a peanut sauce, and like a spicy sauce.

I've already taken a couple of bites as you can tell.

It's really, really good.

Really, really good.

I definitely could see this filling me up.

That was something I thought I'd be worried about on this vegan journey, is food that would fill me up, you know?

Like I eat vegan food and then like an hour later I'm hungry again.

So I'm glad that I could finish this and feel like I actually had something substantial.

People, especially in rich countries, love meat.

The industry is massive.

It raises billions of animals a year.

Every day, over 800,000 cows, over a million pigs, and 130 million chickens are slaughtered for meat worldwide.

And that's not decreasing.

In the last 50 years the amount of meat people eat has tripled.

I mean, just look at the increase in China.

So I grew up here in Oakland and most of my family at one point in their life was vegetarian.

My grandmother used to always try to get me to eat her chicken nuggets.

You'd see like little green specks and I'd be like, come on, Gram.

I still love you.

So with all that being said, I kinda grew up thinking that a lot of people were vegan and vegetarians.

But turns out, I definitely live in a bubble because in 2018, only 5% of Americans identified as vegetarians, vegans only 3%.

And yet, I've been seeing plant-based food products popping up all over the place for years.

I mean how many alt-milk choices do you have when you get your coffee?

Listen y'all, oat milk is fire.

If you haven't tried it, try it.

It's amazing.

And that's not just in the Bay area.

In just two years, sales of these products in the US grew 29%, to $5 billion.

It's grown even quicker due to the pandemic, when you know, COVID outbreaks in slaughterhouses and other supply chain issues caused meat shortages across the US.

Back in high school if my veggie friends weren't into eating just french fries, they had to go to Taco Bell because they have plenty of veg options, you know what I mean?

But now, most fast food chains, they're in the game.

You can get alt-meat items at Burger King, Sonic, Subway, Del Taco, Carl's Jr. Hardee's, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, and some KFCs.

And now I'm being told that Mickey D's will finally be getting in the game with... What, what are they calling it?

Okay.

A McPlant burger.

So hopefully that's coming to the US sometime this year.

And there's not just plant-based meat now, they're actually growing meat in labs without slaughtering animals.

In January, for the first time ever, this cultured meat was approved for sale in Singapore.

Now, I'm curious, but I'm also a bit frightened.

But I'm a little more curious than I am frightened.

So I'll probably try it.

And this is a huge step in the effort to get lab grown meat onto people's plates.

And this is also fantastic news for people like my producer who feel bad about the suffering of animals, which if we're being completely honest, is kind of an inevitable part of large factory farming.

Look at those adorable little animals.

Look at 'em.

Oh.

See, look at her, trying to persuade us.

Come on, Mel.

You're better than this.

Don't fall for it.

Focus on the facts, people.

More than three in four people say they're concerned about the welfare of animals that are raised for food.

And 70% say they pay attention to labels that show how the animals were raised.

Nevermind that most consumers don't really understand what those labels mean.

I don't know exactly what they mean all the time, but I've always put a few extra bucks away so I could get the cage-free eggs, or the organic milk.

You know what I mean?

I did wanna go to the grocery store because I didn't wanna be eating out every day this week that I'm doing this vegan thing.

All this stuff, there's more stuff in the bag, cost me around like 40 to 50 bucks.

No more than 50 bucks, which I think is solid for a week's worth of meals.

We'll see though, 'cause this stuff could very well be gone in the next couple days.

I'm gonna go through all this stuff, and all the things that I already have in my cabinets and my pantries and stuff, and try to make a vegan dinner.

I got an Instant Pot.

(romantic music) So we'll see how it goes.

(peppy music) Okay, so obviously eating meat isn't great for the animals supplying the meat.

But what about our health?

Well, I was reading about diets and just different ways of eating, just to kinda see what habits made sense for me.

And I started reading about folks going keto.

And all I could think is, isn't eating this much meat like bad for you?

The truth is that studies about food and nutrition are always controversial.

There's a lot of conflicting information out there.

And you can check out our video on how to spot bad science reporting if you wanna go deeper in that.

But without a doubt, there is plenty of reputable research that suggests it's not so great for you to eat a ton of red or processed meat.

And most people in wealthy countries, like this one, eat a lot of it.

I didn't think about dinner.

So I ended up just making this salad.

I wanted to make it pretty for y'all.

This is like the first time I'm feeling like I'm missing something.

I didn't even thinks to get tofu or something like that.

So I'm probably gonna have to make another store run.

I probably am gonna be hungry later on.

This morning it's like, as soon as I opened my eyes I was ready to eat.

So I ended up getting a burger.

This was 20 bucks.

It's really good, I've had it before.

But I don't know if I could spend 20 bucks every day on one meal.

(peppy music) Producing all this meat is just so damn bad for the planet.

It uses too much land, too much water, and raises greenhouse gases, a lot.

Picture South America, right?

Humans have cleared an area slightly bigger than that to grow crops.

Our water sources, including rivers and lakes, are then drained to irrigate all of that land.

And 36% of that is for animal ag.

You know, to grow animal feed, or house cattle.

Each minute, an area larger than a football field of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil is destroyed.

And it's getting worse.

Basically, we're trading tropical forest for farmland, which is monumentally destructive for the environment.

Food production is responsible for 26% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

And animal ag produces over half of that.

On top of all that, this loss of wild lands is the leading cause of the sixth mass animal extinction happening and speeding up right now.

Check out our video on endangered species to learn more about that sadness.

It's so much of a hassle to think about what I'm gonna eat.

You know what I mean?

Normally I'll just think like, oh, I want steak, chicken wings, a burrito.

And it was straightforward.

But being vegan, it's like a extra layer of like, okay, I can't have that.

Or I wanna make sure that this fills me up.

So it's been a challenge for me, I'm not gonna lie.

But it's been fun and rewarding 'cause it just gives me a chance to be in the kitchen and cook and stuff.

So I ended up making cauliflower steak.

I made some salad, you can see that.

And then I made some smashed potatoes.

It is kind of distracting having this awesome cake that my mom made.

It's a apple caramel cake and I can't eat it.

It smells really good, but it has all the things that I'm not supposed to be eating this week.

So milk, egg, butter, all that stuff.

But (Myles sighs), soon, soon.

But it's not about this cake, it's about this vegan dinner.

I have more energy and I like the way that that feels.

So I'm definitely gonna consider cutting back on meat.

I'm excited about my food that I made today.

I'm proud of it.

It looks really nice.

(peppy music) Okay, so where are we?

We talked about meat, and our health, and how meat is bad for the planet, but we still make a lot of it.

So what blows my mind is how many people are still going hungry.

In 2018, 820 million people didn't have enough to eat.

And there's gonna be about 2 billion more people to feed by 2050.

Already, one in nine people are hungry.

And this is partially because of all the crops grown in the world, almost half are fed to livestock.

And in the process, a lot of calories are wasted.

When you eat a beef patty you're only eating about 3% of the calories from the crop that fed that animal.

But if you ate a Beyond Burger, or a lab grown patty, you'd get 75% of those calories.

For milk it's more like 40%, and 22% for eggs.

Still, 40% of the protein eaten globally comes from animal products like meat, dairy, and eggs.

And in some parts of the world there is no good alternative yet.

in India, for example, and much of Africa, some of these foods are a essential part of maintaining health and food security.

Eating meat is also a part of cherished traditions in some places of the world.

You definitely cannot skip a meal if you're doing the vegan lifestyle thing.

I was hungry, but I was working through and just kinda got distracted.

But like, I'm really hungry right now.

So I'm gonna show you this and I'm gonna just grub.

I believe this is a vegan Vietnamese restaurant, not too far from my house.

Chicken with like a nice glaze on it.

Look in there.

Thai tea with some coconut milk in it.

The flavor's really good on that.

I'd say that this costs like a little over 20 bucks for all three of these things.

But the chicken you could probably get two people fed with this.

So more bang for your buck than that burger I had the other day.

(peppy music) The meat and dairy industry may not be good at feeding the world, but it is good at making money.

It makes over $2 trillion a year worldwide.

We could do an entire episode on just this topic.

About 500 million people rely on livestock for their livelihood worldwide.

In the US, the animal slaughtering and processing industry employed 527,000 people in May of 2019.

And though they depend on this work, these people are often exploited as cheap laborers.

Imagine how an undocumented worker who has the world's worst job of sanitation worker at a slaughterhouse is treated, not well.

And just look at the COVID outbreaks of slaughter houses across the country last year.

The situation is kind of similar to the fossil fuel industry.

It's bad for the environment, but we'll need to transition a lot of people to new sectors if we want them to survive in a greener economy.

In the US, there are some programs to help farmers move from things like dairy farming into growing crops like hemp, but there aren't nearly enough yet.

And then there are rural populations in poorer countries where the livestock economy is even more important.

It can play a role in reducing poverty, increasing gender equity, and improving livelihoods.

Went and got these vegan burgers.

I got a couple, one for me and one for my mama.

And then I got some vegan chicken tenders, and some tater tots.

And I also got this vegan Captain Crunch milkshake.

All of it looks good.

So yeah, I'm about to chow down.

But I will say that I learned a lot about myself on this journey.

I've been thinking about giving up meat, or at least cutting back for a long time.

I don't really miss beef.

I definitely don't wanna ever give up chicken wings or seafood, so those will definitely stay.

But I can definitely see myself doing vegetarian or vegan, and then just sticking with like chicken and fish.

All right, so being vegan wasn't as bad as I thought.

I like how it made me more aware of just my body.

I was way more aware of the energy that I had throughout the day, and how much money I was spending on food.

Again, I'm here in the Bay area, so I had a bunch of options when it came to vegan takeout.

But you don't necessarily have to eat alternative meat just to have a plant-based diet.

You didn't see me cooking any, you know what I mean?

So we're not gonna make the world vegan overnight.

But supporters of the movement do have suggestions on how we can lower our meat consumption.

One is to slap labels on meat that show their climate change cost, similar to how we do nutritional information.

Another suggestion is we can tax meat and dairy, which would be a huge shift from what we normally do, which is to subsidize those industries.

But you know the drill, we wanna hear from you.

Considering everything that you know now, would you think about giving up meat, even if it was just for once or twice a week?

As always, I'm your host, Myles Bess.

Peace out.