It was all really, really nice,
and it was a guess which wasn't the meat.
I didn't have a clue.
- Now, this was just a fun little experiment.
I really just wanted to know
if the meat alternatives on the market
were convincing enough to make people believe
they were actually eating meat.
And it seemed to work.
If nothing else, I think we can agree
these meat alternatives are pretty damn good these days.
What about baking?
I hear a lot of people tell me they could never go vegan
because they love baking too much.
Well, thankfully, my friend, Steph,
happens to run an incredible vegan bakery business.
And better yet, she invited me over to test out
some of the delicious treats she was baking.
Now, obviously, this is pretty far
from the whole food goodness I was previously talking about,
but it's good to know that on those occasions
where you wanna treat yourself to a cake or a muffin,
you won't be missing out.
[upbeat electronic pop music]
[upbeat electronic pop music continues]
Steph uses ground flax
to recreate the same effect an egg might have.
While this is clearly not a health food,
there's no denying it's delicious,
and it shows how creative vegan bakers
are becoming in the kitchen.
[upbeat electronic pop music continues]
I'm gonna make a mess.
- Okay.
- Mmm!
Oh, my word!
[Stephanie chuckles]
It's so good!
- Thank you.
- [Tom] In fact, I like Steph's baking so much
that I asked her to bake the cake for my wedding.
- Most people have so many barriers in their heads
and so many kind of resistance to it,
and it's really taking that simple step
and trying these things.
- This starts with you.
Your food choices,
you make every single meal support the world that we want.
- [Tom] Round two.
Bench.
[sparse tense music]
Susanna managed 105
and 110 kilograms on the first two lifts.
She's going for 115 kilograms on the third attempt.
[audience cheering]
[weights clanking]
[audience applauding]
Sophia's chasing, trying to close the gap.
She managed a 107.5
and 112. 5 kilograms in the first two lifts.
She's going for a personal best and a new British record
on a third attempt with a massive 118 kilograms.
[upbeat electro-pop music] [people chattering]
- [Judge] Go!
[audience yelling]
[weights clanking]
- [Announcer] Put some weights on the bar!
Three lead weights!
Good lift!
New British record!
- And she gets it, but it hardly makes a dent on the lead.
Sophia still sits in third place.
[tense techno music]
[birds chirping]
So, I'm about to go for my leg with Mike.
And in all honesty, I'm absolutely knackered.
I've not done any running, but I've just not slept.
I've not slept at all.
I can only imagine how he's feeling.
Mike's coming up to halfway through.
Yeah, he's about 100K in.
From the last checkpoint, he was now ahead of schedule.
But honestly, he's so happy, so upbeat.
He's genuinely quite inspiring
every time he comes back to the van.
I'm gonna go with him, try to keep his morale high.
Try not to ruin his pacing and ruin the entire challenge,
'cause, at the moment, he's smashing it.
I was having a great time.
And Mike was still in good spirits.
Although I can tell he was tiring,
which is to be expected given how far he was running.
He was still around one hour ahead of the record,
but the buffer he'd built up
was definitely starting to reduce.
That's stunning.
[camera rattling] [foliage rustling]
Nearly fell off the cliff!
Enjoy. See ya.
Then once again, he's off with around 100 kilometers to go.
So, no big deal then.
Back in the far south of England,
where people can't really understand my accent,
Paul and I were powering on in the 50K.
[upbeat rock music]
As if doing a 50K ultra isn't enough,
Paul insisted on doing 25 press-ups at each aid station.
Just hit the five-hour mark.
Nearly 40 miles in, and Paul's absolutely smashing it.
[upbeat rock music continues]
Halfway through, Paul?
- Halfway, mate, eh?
We made the halfway mark.
- [Tom] [chuckles] Feeling good?
- I'm feeling great, mate.
Yeah.
We made it to halfway.
- [Tom] Before I knew it, we were into the second half.
Over five hours in,
we were back climbing up a bloody big hill.
[wind whistling] [birds chirping]
[upbeat heavy rock music]
[cell phone buzzing]
[light thoughtful music]
Bacon, for over 3 1/2 centuries, people have been eating it.
In Canada, 43% of people would rather eat it than have sex.
Which begs the question:
how are those 43% of people doing sex in Canada?
I need to go back to the start.
I need to see how this becomes this.
[pan sizzling]
I need to see a typical
Red Tractor-assured pig farm in the UK,
not one, that might show up on the BBC
or Guardian for malpractice
and then discarded as a bad apple of the industry.
I know a Red Tractor represents
a world-leading food chain assurance scheme
that underpins the high standard of British food and drink,
and it's a place where animal welfare
is the number one priority for all livestock farmers.
Because I also wanted to get to the bottom
of another argument:
"We give the animals a good life."
I mean, the UK has the best
animal welfare standards in the world,
significantly better than the US, Canada, France,
Germany, and Australia.
The National Farmers Union are quite proud of this fact,
so if animals are gonna get a good life anywhere, it's here.
[bird squawks]
So I went undercover to a pig farm,
and one thing I quickly discovered
is there's three stages to the life of a pig.
[pigs snorting]
Stage one, farrowing crates.
[tense uneasy music]
[pigs snorting]
Stage two, weaner pigs.
[pigs squealing]
Stage three, fattening pens.
One of the rebuttals against veganism I hear
is that, as an individual, you won't make any impact alone.
If everyone else continues eating animals,
then what's the point?
Staring into the eyes of this individual,
I'd never felt more strongly against that sentiment.
In fact, switching to a plant-based diet
saves at least 100 animals a year,
meaning thousands of animals over the course of a lifetime.
Is that really not making a difference?
That night I couldn't sleep.
I couldn't shake the last pig from my mind.
The way they looked at me,
they were the saddest eyes I've ever seen.
I had so many other questions as well.
What happened to the mum?
Where was the enrichment I'd heard so much about?
And why was I reading about cases of tail docking,
teeth clipping, castration, and thumping in the country
with the highest welfare standards in the world?
What even is thumping?
I decided to call it a night,
reminding myself that these are indoor pigs.
I know there's such a thing as outdoor-bred pigs
with better welfare standards,
and that's what people frequently tell me they buy
to avoid supporting factory farms.
But the more I read, the more shocked I was.
98.3% of pigs in the US are factory-farmed.
In the EU, over 75% are in large commercial holdings.
What confused me even more
was the definition of "outdoor bred."
It simply means the pigs are born outdoors
and can then be brought indoors after four weeks.
It also doesn't necessarily mean
they have access to grass to graze on,
as apparently, a concrete yard would suffice.
Do people know this?
If so, why even bother buying outdoor-bred animals?
But when a journalist asked the then CEO of Red Tractor,
he answered the question with,
"The advantages are some people
are prepared to pay more for it
because they think it's better welfare."
Are you seriously telling me
this is the best quality of animal welfare in the world?
I'm not sure I'm convinced.
[pigs squealing]
The next morning, my alarm clock woke me to take Chan out.
Only in my day's slumber, it sounded different.
It sounded like pigs screaming out,
the same pigs I'd seen the night before,
and they didn't sound happy.
And that stuck with me.
The thing is, I know when Chan sounds happy
and when he doesn't.
I'm sure most people with companion animals
wish they could talk to them at some point
just for confirmation.
As it happens, I stumbled across an article
talking about how researchers in Copenhagen
were doing exactly this,
and it was fascinating.
So what sort of situations deliver these positive
and negative responses?
- So, the situations we used in our study
that were positive:
So we had enrichment, for example.
So pigs together in a family arena, where they had toys,
and food, and water, and could just explore.
So, the negative emotions we had
were, for example, obvious ones in the life of a pig,
so castration,
eventually at the end of the life, slaughterhouse.
In piglets, we had when piglets
are being crushed by their mother,
when they miss nursing, when they fight.
- [Tom] I'll be honest,
I wasn't overly surprised by any of this.
So what did the negative emotional responses sound like?
- Then we have examples of more negative sounds,
like piglet castration.
[piglet screeching]
That's very high pitch and very long.
- [Tom] Versus a positive emotional response.
- And then we have reunion with littermates,
so piglets being reunited.
[piglet grunts]
So, that's very short; that's just a simple short grunt.
- [Tom] There really is a clear difference in their sounds.
But what about how they behave?
I had to see pigs in a different environment
to see how they compared to what I'd seen undercover,
so I reached out to an animal sanctuary.
[light thoughtful music]
These pigs clearly look different;
they smell different, they act different,
they sound different to the ones at the farm.
In fact, they sound much closer
to the short grunts shown to me by Elodie
when pigs were demonstrating positive emotions.
And while I was at the sanctuary,
I got to see various other animals
living out their best lives.
And Katherine, who runs the sanctuary,
also showed me some chickens they'd rescued
from a nearby battery farm.
At least, I thought they were from battery farms.
I know chickens have it rough.
They are the most abused land animal
with 180 million dying every day.
I'd done my research on chickens long ago.
I knew that 95% of broiler chickens
were factory-farmed in the UK
and a staggering 99.9% were in the US.
I knew that caged hens only had the space equivalent
to the size of an iPad.
But because I knew that, I never bought caged eggs.
I bought free-range.
Caged equals bad, free-range equals good, right?
They don't suffer; they're free.
- All of these chickens,
whether they're coming from a caged farm,
which we have rescued from,
whether they're coming from a barn,
where they just don't go outside but they're kept in a barn,
or whether they're coming from free-range farms
and sometimes organic free-range farms,
that people think is the highest welfare imaginable,
they all come with a lot of medical issues.
A lot of them featherless, being pecked on by each other,
redraw.
They will have a lot of issues
with their reproductive systems.
They will have a lot that are egg-bound,
which means the eggs get stuck.
They will have egg peritonitis, have a lot of prolapses.
We have a lot of leg problems.
So a lot of them will come in limping,
a lot of broken legs, a lot of pulled muscles.
Of course, I don't know if people know this,
but the way that is accepted that you pick chickens up
is by the legs.
So when you are collecting hens, they will bring out,
like, four or five hens, sometimes, in one hand,
held by their legs.
And the Defra standard
is that you're supposed to hold both legs.
- [Tom] Free-range birds bread for meat
are kept alive for a meager
two to three weeks longer in the UK than caged chickens.
They only have to be kept outdoors for half their life
but when they're indoors,
they're allowed to house 13 birds per square meter.
That's only four less than the 17 limit for a caged chicken.
Real kicker for the animal-loving vegetarian I grew up as
was that free-range eggs
meant that the hence could still be crammed
with up to nine chickens per square meter
when indoors on a night.
And that most egg-laying hens that don't die on farms
are killed for meat at 72 weeks
when they're not fit to lay anymore.
It would seem to me that the egg industry
is the meat industry.
- No.
I mean, we didn't know.
People think that free-range equals high welfare.
It depends what your definition of high welfare is.
- [Tom] Pondering over what I'd learned
and witnessed myself at the factory farm,
I met up with Dr. Alice Brough, a former pig vet,
to discuss the footage I'd captured.
- It's what you'd describe as a typical farrowing house.
What we see here is the length of the sow
is obviously, like, as long,
if not slightly too large for the crate.
There are stereotypical signs of stress behaviors,
and that's because the only thing she has to do is eat.
It's really sad.
I mean, farrowing houses are probably the saddest
places on farm, in my opinion.
She's obviously got, like, a little bit of sawdust there,
which the law specifies that you have to provide
some sort of nesting substrate,
which can literally be a handful of paper,
and that will sort of-
- That will tick the box. - Yes, so exactly.
That's what it is.
But I mean, that's better
than a lot of places I've seen, to be honest, in providing
some substrate for them. - Oh, really?
- [Alice] Yeah.
[somber thoughtful music]
- We also visited Pear Tree Farm Animal Sanctuary.
- [Alice] So, immediately, we see them rooting in the ground
with their snouts, which is such a strongly motivated,
like, natural behavior for pigs.
That's their thing.
Long tails, lovely to see.
- [Tom] This pig is having the time of its life.
- [Alice] Having a great time.
- [Tom] Getting a bit of a belly rub, and bloody loves it.
- Yeah. [Tom laughs]
Oh, they're so like dogs, aren't they?
Like, they do love a belly rub.
They have so many vocalizations.
If you spend time, particularly with pigs on sanctuaries,
they do almost, like, converse with you.
- So, this is a second phase, as it was described to me,
'cause there's three phases.
So, do you wanna tell us what's happening here then?
- [Alice] This is like a typical
sort of weaner accommodation unit.
That thing there is meant to be a toy.
The flies are absolutely typical.
That's such a standard thing to see.
Feces all over the walls, all over the floor.
Again, this looks like relatively decent
compared to, like, quite a lot of units that I've seen.
Most of these pigs have sort of wounds on their flanks,
which is from fighting.
You're cramming them into these tiny little barren cells.
And generally, this looks like a typical,
sort of Red Tractor finishing unit.
No wonder they're fighting.
They've got nowhere to go.
- That ball there- - Yeah.
- [Tom] Is part of their enrichment then, I guess?
- [Alice] Yeah.
So, we can see, on this one shot,
we've got a really filthy ball
and a completely filthy plastic tube hanging up.
Their tails are docked,
so that's a mutilation done without anesthetic.
- [Tom] And how do the piglets react?
- [Alice] Oh, they scream.
- [Tom] I've seen the term "thumping" thrown about
as something done to pigs, but what is it?
- [Alice] Picking the piglet up by the back legs,
swinging them over your shoulder,
and sort of just cracking their skull on the-
- Oh, my. - Concrete wall,
or on the side of something.
- [Tom] And that's legal then?
- That's legal.
That's something I've done myself a lot.
[tense uneasy music] [pigs snorting]
- [Tom] I think this is like maybe the sick bay,
the sick pen. - Yeah, like a hospital pen,
if you can say that with a straight face.
There's no evidence that these pigs are being treated.
I'll talk about this little fella now,
with the huge mass under the throat there.
That's not something that's gonna get better
before slaughter.
So, what they're doing here is just leaving him to linger.
Like, there have been times where I've gone onto farms
and had to go around and shoot, like, 20 pigs in a row,
just because they've had these joint swellings
and been left on the slats
and obviously not been checked properly or treated.
- [Tom] What I don't understand
is that the Animal Protection Index
rank us top for animal welfare.
The National Farmers Union boast about it on their website.
- The NFU have put this up as sort of a proud moment
of doing well with farm animal welfare.
But what they haven't done is separate out
our ranking for actual farm animals.
So, what we got for farm animals was a D,
which ranks us in line with South Korea,
Mexico, Brazil, Italy,
various other countries
which are not known for their high welfare standards.
So, you know, the fact that they're putting this out
as something, which is great,
and we celebrate our world-leading welfare,
but actually, the animals that they're in charge of,
the farm animals, are scoring incredibly poorly.
- What the hell?
Surely, that can't be right?
But it is.
While the Animal Protection Index
scored the UK overall with a B
for our animal welfare standards,
largely because of our laws on protecting companion animals
and those in captivity,
for animals used in farming, we did score a D.
The lowest grade of any area scored.
Although globally, I was having a hard time finding
a country that did score higher than a D for farmed animals.
The US and Australia scored an E.
What are they doing to their farmed animals there?
I've read and heard a lot about antibiotic use in farming,
but in the UK, it's dropping, right?
- The NFU puts out this big boast
that we've reduced our usage by 53%
over, you know, 2014 to 2018.
And it kind of went down really quickly
when we started monitoring what we were doing,
and then it plateaued because we've reached a point
where we couldn't physically use fewer antibiotics
without all the animals just dying.
They did a huge analysis on 139 different studies,
and 72% of them said there was a confirmed clear link
between use in livestock and resistance in humans.
- When we go to hospital,
we want the antibiotics that we're given to work.
We want our loved ones to survive a sepsis.
But as things are going,
that's becoming increasingly unlikely,
because not only of the overuse of antibiotics in general
but specifically the overuse of them
when we give them to animals for us to eat.
- There was a previous figure quoted
in the last of round of studies into this
that it would be 10 million deaths,
a predicted 10 million deaths a year,
from antibiotic-resistant infection by 2050.
And the fact that we've intensified our agriculture
and we're pumping over 70% of the world's antibiotics
into livestock in very inappropriate ways
just means that it's skyrocketing
much quicker than we were sort of planning for.
- [Tom] Now, that really pissed me off.
There's someone very close to me
that requires antibiotics on a daily basis to survive.
20 of the 27 antibiotics prescribed to animals
are vital for humans to be treated with.
But I couldn't stop.
There was so much more to learn.
Next stop, the slaughterhouse.
I've never been to a slaughterhouse.
I couldn't tell you where the nearest one is to me,
despite the fact that there are over 150 in the UK
and 2,700 in the US.
- [Investigator] Slaughterhouses are so hidden from society.
Many have got 24-hour security high perimeter fences.
You could be mistaken; they were prisons.
- [Tom] So what's it like inside?
- The sounds and smells, I still get, they stick with you.
- The number of animals that need to be killed for a start
just negates any, like, kindness and, like, gentle handling.
- [Tom] But how are they killed?
What are the common practices?
[fence rattles]
[cow thudding]
[gate clanking]
What makes it humane?
[fence rattles]
Cows are stunned using a captive bolt or electricity.
[gentle somber music]
Poultry are hung upside down
and dipped into an electrified water bath to stun them
before their throats are slit.
Sheep are stunned and killed with electricity,
but just like this one here,
it's not always a quick process.
Fish are exposed to carbon dioxide,
bled out without stunning, gutted alive,
or suffocated out of water.
And what about pigs?
How do we get bacon?
It's either the CO2 gas chamber
[pigs snarling]
[gentle somber music continues]
or electrical stunning, followed by sanguination,
then transported to a scalding tank.
- [Alice] Yeah, I mean,
I've seen pigs swimming around in that,
like, bleeding to death.
[gentle somber music continues]
- I often ask myself, "Would this be okay
if I was doing this to a human?"
- [Tom] I've asked everyone I've spoken to
whether they think humane slaughter is possible
in today's global farming system.
I've asked activists, the RSPCA,
vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores.
I could go through every answer one by one,
but I think you already know it.
And what of the human toll,
working in these surroundings with these animals?
What are the physical and psychological effects?
- Colleagues there who'd get frustrated with the animals
and take it out on them, take it out on each other.
- Going home, absolutely traumatized,
like calling my mum, sobbing on the phone,
saying, "I've had to shoot another 20 pigs
because of these welfare issues."
- I'd go out,
it got to a stage where if someone looked at me,
I'd probably go over and headbutt them.
- [Tom] As the UK and other nations
struggle to fill this sector,
it's perhaps unsurprising that the meat industry
is heavily reliant on migrant workers
willing to work for far more money
than they could ever earn in their country of birth,
creating two-tier working conditions
with migrants being paid less and expected to work more
to ensure that the meat could be kept cheap
and to supply the demand.
- I think I've found peace with myself over the years
through how I've changed and what I've done,
but I still have two, three nights a week
where I can't sleep at all,
and I still get those nightmares, and I still get moments
where you just think, "What's the point?"
Or "You're worthless."
Or, you know, "Whatever I do,
can it ever make up for what I've done?"
- [Tom] After the animals have been killed,
what's the meat line like?
- For starters, there's a lot of diseases
that we can pick up from pigs and other animals anyway.
Like, you can't see pathogens.
- [Tom] 48 million people get sick in the US each year
with foodborne illnesses.
Nearly 3/4 of all chicken sold in UK supermarkets
have previously been found to be contaminated
with campylobacter.
And in the US, 60% of pork, 70% of beef,
and 80% of chicken is contaminated with E. coli.
It's not just pathogens either.
When the UN published its list of the seven causes
driving the risk of zoonotic diseases,
six of them were linked to animal agriculture.
[pigs snorting]
After the cows, and sheep, and pigs,
and all the other farmed animals are slaughtered,
we have our beef, our lamb, our bacon,
but is it actually any good for us?
If we were to take alcohol, something which most people
wouldn't constitute to be healthy,
but manage to add the likes
of some branched-chain amino acids and iron to it,
would that suddenly make it healthy?
So why does a food that the World Health Organization
categorizes as a carcinogen, or probable carcinogen,
suddenly become healthy
because it contains the likes of protein and iron
when these are readily available
from non-carcinogenic foods?
- Again, it comes back to thinking about the healthy food
rather than the individual nutrients.
- [Tom] I'm a bit nervous, I'm not gonna lie.
Susanna's combined lifts put her on 313 kilograms,
while Sophia's combined lifts total just 288 kilograms.
[tense suspenseful music]
That means Sophia needs to lift
25 kilograms more on the deadlift
just to draw even with Susanna.
Her deadlift's impressive, really impressive;
she's not the British record holder for nothing,
but she needs to hit that weight here
and hope that Susanna doesn't lift a PB;
otherwise, she's in trouble.
And so we're on to round three.
Over the three attempts,
Susanna lifts a very impressive 197.5 kilograms.
Sophia has got her work cut out for her.
Back in Barcelona, and we've lost Mike.
Or at least, we'd not had contact for a few hours
and were starting to fear
something terrible might have happened.
But then, finally, after almost seven hours,
Mike showed up at the checkpoint.
Although it was clear
he'd had an extremely challenging night on the mountains.
- I was tripping my face off all night.
- Oh, dear. - Oh, imagine.
- It was mental.
I was pretty hungry, actually.
At some points, I just didn't know what was going on.
Like, full-on, like, forgot what I was doing there.
I was sort of thinking at the time,
"This may be a bit irresponsible."
[group laughing]
- [Tom] Mike sets off for the final 43K.
- [Mike] Beats working.
- [Tom] It's clear how unbelievably exhausted he is.
And I can't help but wonder
if he's actually gonna make it to the finish,
let alone break the record.
But back in Taunton, Paul's still in high spirits.
[footsteps crunching]
So Paul, what would you say is the key to a happy life?
- Well, I would say giving.
Giving of yourself, giving of your time,
giving of your energy, whatever you're good at.
Helping people, helping other fellow creatures.
Yeah, giving.
- [Tom] But there was no denying
it was starting to feel tough, and the ridiculous hills
and baking heat certainly weren't helping.
It's a big hill.
- [Paul] Yeah.
- [Tom] And we are on
21.65 miles.
But at the final checkpoint,
Paul still insisted on doing his press-ups.
- 37K.
- [Tom] Before we knew it,
we were into the final leg with eight miles to go.
- Feeling good.
- Feeling good? - Yeah, feeling great.
[bell dings]
- [Tom] I've made a terrible omission from this process.
We're gonna have to go back to the start.
Earth, a mesh of verdant greens and cerulean waters.
A magnificent sight.
A planet full of wonder.
But almost everything we do on this wondrous planet
has an effect.
From brushing our teeth and flushing the toilet
to the way we travel and the food we eat.
The industries and sectors around the world
have an even bigger impact.
Some more than others.
And right now, billionaires,
who may or may not be living in lairs,
the type seen housing villains in Bond movies,
are concocting ways to get to Mars.
It's unclear if we're invited.
But compared to Earth, let's be honest, Mars looks shit.
Earth should be priority.
And for a few, it is, and it has been for some time.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution,
people have discussed the effects humans have on the planet.
In 1970, we had the first Earth Day.
By 1979, the World Climate Research Programme was launched.
And by 1990, the IPCC warned that the world had been warming
and future warming is likely.
Subsequent IPCC reports were worded firmer,
causing global leaders in 2015
to sign the Paris Climate Agreement
with a plan to prevent global heating
of 1.5 degrees above industrial levels
while saying things like:
- [Tom] In 2018, the IPCC told them to stand as one faster.
And by 2023, the world was getting hot.
Really hot.
And as people from the UK can attest,
that's not all we're known for.
In fact, around the globe,
all sorts of disastrous weather-related events
were occurring.
- I don't think many people grasp just how serious this is.
This is the greatest catastrophe humanity has ever faced.
The collapse of our life support systems.
We're just sort of staggering towards the precipice.
Almost as if we're saying to ourselves,
"If it were really so bad, someone would stop us,
wouldn't they?"
- [Tom] So why don't they?
Why aren't governments doing more?
- It's the issue above all others
that they don't wanna talk about.
Because even when, for instance, Joe Biden said something
very tentative about meat,
suddenly there was this massive pile on:
"They wanna steal our burgers!
They're trying to destroy the American dream!"
The lobbyists are unbelievably powerful,
partly because it's extremely concentrated.
There are just a handful of firms
who control almost all the beef,
and another handful controlling almost all the pork,
almost all the poultry.
So, those companies become extremely powerful,
more powerful than many governments.
Nothing is as visceral, literally and metaphorically,
as what we eat.
- [Tom] You might be wondering what all of this has to do
with the climate crisis.
So, in 2018, a team of researchers from Oxford University
carried out the largest-ever study
on the effects of our global food system.
They assessed nearly 40,000 farms across the globe
and 40 different agricultural products,
focusing on the use of land, greenhouse gas emissions,
water usage, acidification, and eutrophication.
[tense thoughtful music]
They concluded that the single biggest thing
we as individuals can do to lower our environmental impact
is to reduce or eliminate animal products from our diets.
And then in 2023,
another ground-breaking study from Oxford University
assessed the dietary patterns of 55,000 people,
highlighting further just how much more destructive
high and low-meat diets are for the planet's health
compared to a vegan diet.
Yet despite this, I'm forever hearing people tell me
they only buy local, grass-fed beef.
And on the surface, that statement sounds logical.
I mean, transporting goods has an environmental impact,
but as it turns out, probably not as much as you'd think.
I was shocked to learn that transportation of beef
only accounts for 0.5% of its total emissions.
We shouldn't disregard the impact of travel,
but to imply switching to local beef as the solution
to a climate emergency rather than to plant-based protein
would only really make sense if the plant-based protein
and the beef had the same environmental impact
before that transportation was taken into account.
And it's not even close in any of the areas measured.
I was also having a hard time with the term "grass-fed."
Grass-fed simply means animals only have to spend
part of their life out grazing in fields.
Grass-finished beef,
whereby the animals eat nothing but grass or forage,
is far less common.
In the US, less than 1% of beef is farmed this way.
Despite that figure being so low,
if everyone globally ate the average US citizen's diet,
we'd need to use the entire planet's habitable land
for agriculture, and we'd still be 38% short.
The country with the largest dietary land requirement
is New Zealand.
That's a country where grass-fed beef
and lamb contributes enormously to people's diets.
If every one of us
suddenly started eating like a New Zealander,
we'd need another planet almost the size of Earth
just to sustain us all.
In a world where we're trying to figure out
how to feed in excess of eight billion people,
it's not really the definition of sustainable
if only a handful can eat this way.
- We're constantly being told
the problem is intensive farming.
And so people then say,
"Well, the answer is extensive farming.
Let's have free-range grazing
and the animals outdoors and stuff."
But that has massive problems of its own.
I really try to hammer this home
because people don't get it.
But the more land that humans take for their activities,
the less land there is for nature,
the less land there is for fully functioning ecosystems.
Grazing is a fantastically inefficient way
of producing food.
- [Tom] So, what about this idea
that we'd need even more land
to grow plants for people to eat if the world went vegan?
- But, actually, the figures show very clearly
that not only do you retire
all that land used for livestock grazing
and allow the trees to come back,
allow the wild ecosystems to come back,
you also would retire 19% of all the arable land.
We'd be using less arable land than we are today.
- [Tom] The stats around the sheer amount of land
required for animal agriculture were mind-blowing.
Over 1/3 of the entire world's landmass is used for farming.
Over 40% of the US, and almost 70% of land in England,
and a massive 83% of the land used globally for farming
is for animal agriculture.
Yet, it provides only 18% of calories.
Now, that really is fantastically inefficient.
Almost 1/2 of all the world's habitable land
is used for farming.
Just to pull that into perspective,
only 1% is defined as urban sprawl.
The land used for farming dwarfs
that used for towns and cities.
Amazingly, if the world was somehow to move
to a plant-based diet, we'd require 76% less farmland.
But let's be real, that can't include soya.
Because if there's one plant that I keep hearing about
over and over, how it's destroying the planet,
unbalancing women's hormones,
and giving men massive breasts, it's soya.
- I think people, again,
are not so used to eating minimally processed soya foods
like tofu, and tempeh, and miso, and soya milks,
but they're so healthy.
They've been associated with so many good health properties,
such as lowering your cholesterol,
reducing your chance of breast cancer and prostate cancer,
reducing your risk of heart disease.
And they probably can't think of another food
that's been so well established in the medical literature
at being good for us as humans.
- [Tom] Okay, so it's healthy, but what about the land?
Are vegans part of the problem by eating soya?
- So, people say, "Oh, you tofu eaters,
you know, you're the ones who are causing the deforestation
of the Amazon because of all the soya
being grown to feed you."
No, almost all that soya is being used to feed farm animals.
There's more soya in a piece of chicken breast
than there is in the same weight of tofu.
- [Tom] Well, bugger me.
If only 7% of soya grown is eaten by humans,
and 73% of it goes to feed animals,
why the hell do people say it's vegans
causing deforestation?
It turns out humans don't just say silly things;
we do silly things, too.
Humans make up a mere 0.01% of all biomass,
yet somehow we've collectively wiped out
83% of all wild mammals.
But where you could forgive our ancestors
for their blissful ignorance
in the effect they had during their hunter-gatherer days,
the move to farming,
and in particular, what occurred before our very eyes
during the great acceleration of the 20th century,
is becoming harder to forgive.
Between 1900 and the year 2000,
humans farmed as much land as we had
over the previous 10,000 years,
causing further species extinction around the globe.
This century, it's accelerated further still,
as 10,000 acres of rainforest fall every day.
And in 2019, the Bramble Cay melomys
became the first documented extinction
attributed to human-induced climate change.
They certainly won't be the last.
We're facing the sixth great mass extinction;
only this time we have the indignity
of having to accept that this one is caused by us.
But it's worth pointing out that, as a species,
we're also capable of great things.
Certain humans are doing their best to try
and fix this crisis.
Rather than take land, they're giving it back to nature.
And I was curious to see just how quickly
we can start to see a difference in the land's biodiversity
if we rewild it.
- In the first year,
I started seeing massive amounts of insects.
Those insects brought back rarer birds.
Your stonechats, your warblers.
Then came the buzzards, then the red kites,
then the peregrine falcon appeared.
Then we had the woodpeckers.
That's in two years of rewilding, my style.
Who knows what we could do in 20 years?
- [Tom] It was incredible to see firsthand,
and I found countless other examples around the globe
where rewilding projects were yielding similar results.
It gave me some hope.
But unfortunately, it wasn't just the land usage
causing problems in our global farming system,
it was also water usage.
Even almond milk, which undoubtedly
has a higher environmental impact than oat or soya milk,
still uses far less water than dairy.
It's the same with eutrophication,
which occurs when the environment
becomes enriched with nutrients such as nitrate
and phosphorus, increasing the amount of algae growth,
something I hear very little about in mainstream media.
- For years, I've been visiting the River Wye.
It's meant to be protected by law.
And over the past 10 years, I've seen it go
from being a thriving ecosystem to an open sewer.
What the hell has happened to this river?
What's gone on?
It's the chicken farms in the catchment,
some of which have got many tens of thousands
of chickens in, being bred for either meat or for eggs.
And it's a huge amount of excrement,
which those chickens are producing,
which is being spread on the fields,
which then washes straight into the river
because the fields can't absorb it.
But of course, it doesn't stop there,
because the rivers go somewhere; they go into the sea.
And what we're seeing around the world
is the growth of what biologists call "dead zones."
And they're called "dead zones" for a reason
because, at certain depths in the sea,
there's just nothing living there anymore.
And so even hundreds of miles downstream
from where the animal agriculture is happening,
you'll see these devastating
ecological effects taking place.
- There is basically hardly any functioning life
in that water because the water has become either so toxic
or has become devoid of any oxygen that no life can exist.
The term "dead zone" is a very appropriate term.
- [Tom] The numbers are staggering.
Right now, in this catchment alone,
there are 16 million chickens
on a never-ending conveyor belt.
I quickly learned this was a global issue, too.
Rivers the world over, full of shit.
If you live in a developed nation,
chances are your waterways are heavily polluted
because of animal agriculture.
What about this idea that vegans kill way more insects
because of eating plants?
Is there any truth to that?
Arable farming does have some issues.
It can be destructive
if farmers rely too heavily on the likes of pesticides
and fertilizers, but it doesn't need to be that way.
[birds chirping]
- [Iain] Here on the farm,
we grow around 100 different types of vegetables.
A lot of our soil has been badly damaged,
but soils can be recovered.
What we grow on the farm is biodiversity.
So, the biodiversity comes first, vegetables come second.
[deep thoughtful music]
- [Tom] Iain was defying everything I'd heard
about traditional organic farming methods.
He didn't use manure; he didn't use pesticides;
the land was considered unsuitable for arable farming,
and yet somehow, it was working.
Iain Tolhurst is proof there is another way.
But my main issue with this argument against the vegan diet
is that the majority of plants grown are feeding animals.
I'd already learned that if we shifted
towards a plant-based diet,
that we'd actually free up 19% of arable land.
Therefore, less land would be used to grow crops,
and less insects would die.
And what about greenhouse gas emissions?
First sector I think of
with regards to greenhouse gas emissions
is the fossil fuel industry.
So, I was surprised to learn
that even if we eliminate fossil fuels completely,
the emissions from animal agriculture alone
make it impossible to prevent the planet warming
to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
And that's because the agricultural industry
emits more greenhouse gas emissions
than the entire transport sector.
Yet despite this,
I keep finding claims that animal agriculture,
and more specifically regenerative grazing,