If You Eat Meat, Moby and Miyun Park Want You to Think Twice About It (Interview)

Richard Melville Hall, a.k.a. Moby, and Miyun Park, the executive director of Global Animal Partnership, are co-editors of a book dropping this week: Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat). Gristle contains essays by a variety of different authors all designed to target "the growing number of people—from omnivores to vegans—who are thinking twice about the consequences of our industrial factory-farming system of raising animals for food."

This much-needed effort to unite vegans, vegetarians, and small farm omnivores against the common enemy of factory farming prompted me to get in touch with Moby and Miyun, have a chat, and share their thoughts here with you.

WATCH VIDEO: Moby on Planet Green's Instrumental

But First, Moby Makes Us Some Vegan Pancakes

My E-mail Conversation With Moby and Miyun Park

Planet Green: Al Gore penned a long New York Times op-ed entitled, "We Can't Wish Away Climate Change," on February 28, 2010. I cut and pasted the nearly 2000 words into a Word Document and ran a search. None of the following terms were found: Meat, Cow, Livestock, Methane, Farm, Diet, Vegan. Why do you suppose Gore just doesn't get it?

Moby: I asked Al Gore about this and he was honest, saying that asking people to cut down on meat consumption was "too inconvenient for most people." It's disappointing, as he's the global face of environmentalism and climate change.

Miyun Park: Thankfully, though, Al Gore's position isn't held by Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Gore's co-winner of the Nobel Prize. Dr. Pachauri has been quite vocal on the need to reduce meat consumption, and not only for environmental reasons, but for human health, too.

Moby: When you think about the fact that animal production is responsible for about 1/5 of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions (MZ: That number has now been found to be 51%), which is even higher than the entire transportation sector. and when you factor in other "ingredients"—like rainforest deforestation for feedcrop production and/or grazing, or the energy, fuel, water, and other inputs, the animal agriculture sector as a whole, primarily the industrial factory farming sector, has a massive footprint. You'd think that more environmentalists would mention the ramifications of meat, egg, and milk production.

PG: Your new book, Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat), is a collection of essays from a variety of authors. How did you and Miyun set about selecting such essays?

Moby: We identified the subjects that we wanted covered and then started contacting experts in each respective area. We got lucky, as we got our first choices for the authors for each chapter.

MP: Some contributors were obvious, like asking Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the nation's largest animal advocacy organization, to write the chapter on the impacts of industrial animal agriculture practices on the welfare of animals. And others weren't so obvious, which is what we were hoping for—to show that people from so many sectors and backgrounds and professions care about these issues. when Paul Willis, manager of Niman Ranch Pork Co., and his activist wife Phyllis agreed to join our project, writing about the challenges factory farming puts on rural communities, we couldn't have been happier. The head of an animal advocacy organization standing side by side with a pig farmer.

PG: As you gathered material for the book, what were you most surprised to learn?

Moby: That almost no one in the general public was aware of the incredibly deleterious consequences of industrial animal production.

MP: The differences between industrial agribusiness and more sustainable, more humane, more ethical production practices are stark, and all of animal ag can't be painted with the same brush. The book focuses on intensive factory farming, which, unfortunately has a much larger share of animal ag. And this isn't to say that there can't be steps taken even within industrial agribusiness, but that won't happen until we all—omnivores, flexitarians, vegetarians, and vegans alike—speak out collectively.

PG: Noam Chomsky is often asked about the connection between his work in linguistics and his political commentary. He claims there is none. How about you, Moby? Do you see a connection between your vegan activism and your music?

Moby: Well, people only pay attention to me because I've made some records, so I guess that's the link. I doubt that anyone would pay me a moments notice if I hadn't made some records over the last 20 years.

PG: Do you know any good vegan jokes? Here's my favorite: How many vegans does it take to screw in a light blub? Who cares, what I really
wanna know is where they get their protein.

Moby: Protein's easy: nuts, soy, leafy greens, beans, etc. Vegans get their protein from the same places cows get their protein.

Go Links
Gristle for the Mill: Moby's New Book Is a Meatless Manifesto
Moby on Stage: Wanna Talk About Climate Change But Ignore Meat? It's Like Talking About Lung Cancer But Ignoring Cigarettes