I take it quite seriously,

but I'm here to talk about something

that's become very important to me in the last year or two.

It is about food, but it's not about cooking per se.

I'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow.

I'm not a vegetarian -- this is the old Nixon line, right?

But I still think that this --

(Laughter)

-- may be this year's version of this.

Now that is only a little bit hyperbolic.

And why do I say it?

Because only once before has the fate of individual people

and the fate of all of humanity

been so intertwined.

There was the bomb, and there's now.

And where we go from here is going to determine

not only the quality and the length of our individual lives,

but whether, if we could see the earth a century from now,

we'd recognize it.

It's a holocaust of a different kind,

and hiding under our desks isn't going to help.

Start with the notion that global warming

is not only real, but dangerous.

Since every scientist in the world now believes this,

and even President Bush has seen the light, or pretends to,

we can take this is a given.

Then hear this, please.

After energy production, livestock is the second-highest contributor

to atmosphere-altering gases.

Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas

is generated by livestock production --

more than transportation.

Now, you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts,

but methane is 20 times more poisonous than CO2,

and it's not just methane.

Livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation,

air and water pollution, water shortages and loss of biodiversity.

There's more.

Like half the antibiotics in this country

are not administered to people, but to animals.

But lists like this become kind of numbing, so let me just say this,

if you're a progressive,

if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green,

or you're looking for organic,

you should probably be a semi-vegetarian.

Now, I'm no more anti-cow than I am anti-atom,

but it's all in the way we use these things.

There's another piece of the puzzle

which Ann Cooper talked about beautifully yesterday,

and one you already know.

There's no question -- none --that so-called lifestyle diseases --

diabetes, heart disease, stroke, some cancers --

are diseases that are far more prevalent here

than anywhere in the rest of the world.

And that's the direct result of eating a Western diet.

Our demand for meat, dairy and refined carbohydrates --

the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day --

our demand for these things, not our need, our want --

drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us.

And those calories are in foods that cause, not prevent, disease.

Now global warming was unforeseen.

We didn't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility.

Maybe a few lung diseases here and there,

but you know, that's not such a big deal.

The current health crisis, however,

is a little more the work of the evil empire.

We were told, we were assured,

that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate,

the healthier we'd be.

No. Overconsumption of animals, and of course, junk food,

is the problem, along with our paltry consumption of plants.

Now, there's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here,

but the evidence is that plants -- and I want to make this clear --

it's not the ingredients in plants, it's the plants.

It's not the beta-carotene, it's the carrot.

The evidence is very clear that plants promote health.

This evidence is overwhelming at this point.

You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer.

Not bad.

But back to animals and junk food.

What do they have in common?

One: we don't need either of them for health.

We don't need animal products,

and we certainly don't need white bread or Coke.

Two: both have been marketed heavily,

creating unnatural demand.

We're not born craving Whoppers or Skittles.

Three: their production has been supported by government agencies

at the expense of a more health and earth-friendly diet.

Now let's imagine a parallel.

Let's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy

while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy,

knowing all the while that the result would be

pollution, war and rising costs.

Incredible, isn't it?

Yet they do that.

And they do this here. It's the same deal.

The sad thing is, when it comes to diet,

is that even when well-intentioned Feds

try to do right by us, they fail.

Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness,

or they are puppets of agribusiness.

So when the USDA finally acknowledged

that it was plants, rather than animals, that made people healthy,

they encouraged us, via their overly-simplistic food pyramid,

to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day,

along with more carbs.

What they didn't tell us is that some carbs are better than others,

and that plants and whole grains

should be supplanting eating junk food.

But industry lobbyists would never let that happen.

And guess what?

Half the people who developed the food pyramid

have ties to agribusiness.

So instead of substituting plants for animals,

our swollen appetites simply became larger,

and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged.

So-called low-fat diets, so-called low-carb diets --

these are not solutions.

But with lots of intelligent people

focusing on whether food is organic or local,

or whether we're being nice to animals,

the most important issues just aren't being addressed.

Now, don't get me wrong.

I like animals,

and I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production

and to churn them out like they were wrenches.

But there's no way to treat animals well

when you're killing 10 billion of them a year.

That's our number. 10 billion.

If you strung all of them --

chickens, cows, pigs and lambs -- to the moon,

they'd go there and back five times -- there and back.

Now, my math's a little shaky, but this is pretty good,

and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long,

but you get the idea.

That's just the United States.

And with our hyper-consumption of those animals

producing greenhouse gases and heart disease,

kindness might just be a bit of a red herring.

Let's get the numbers of the animals we're killing for eating down,

and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left.

Another red herring might be exemplified by the word "locavore,"

which was just named Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Seriously.

And locavore, for those of you who don't know,

is someone who eats only locally-grown food.

Which is fine if you live in California,

but for the rest of us it's a bit of a sad joke.

Between the official story -- the food pyramid --

and the hip locavore vision,

you have two versions of how to improve our eating.

(Laughter).

They both get it wrong, though.

The first, at least is populist, and the second is elitist.

How we got to this place is the history of food in the United States.

And I'm going to go through that,

at least the last hundred years or so, very quickly right now.

A hundred years ago, guess what?

Everyone was a locavore, even New York had pig farms nearby

and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion.

Every family had a cook, usually a mom.

And those moms bought and prepared food.

It was like your romantic vision of Europe.

Margarine didn't exist.

In fact, when margarine was invented,

several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink

so we'd all know that it was a fake.

There was no snack food, and until the '20s,

until Clarence Birdseye came along, there was no frozen food.

There were no restaurant chains.

There were neighborhood restaurants run by local people,

but none of them would think to open another one.

Eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic.

And fancy food was entirely French.

As an aside, those of you who remember

Dan Aykroyd in the 1970s doing Julia Child imitations

can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide.

(Laughter)

Back in those days, before even Julia,

back in those days there was no philosophy of food.

You just ate.

You didn't claim to be anything.

There was no marketing. There were no national brands.

Vitamins had not been invented.

There were no health claims, at least not federally sanctioned ones.

Fats, carbs, proteins -- they weren't bad or good, they were food.

You ate food.

Hardly anything contained more than one ingredient,

because it was an ingredient.

The cornflake hadn't been invented.

(Laughter)

The Pop-Tart, the Pringle, Cheez Whiz, none of that stuff.

Goldfish swam.

(Laughter)

It's hard to imagine. People grew food, and they ate food.

And again, everyone ate local.

In New York, an orange was a common Christmas present,

because it came all the way from Florida.

From the '30s on, road systems expanded,

trucks took the place of railroads,

fresh food began to travel more.

Oranges became common in New York.

The South and West became agricultural hubs,

and in other parts of the country suburbs took over farmland.

The effects of this are well known, they are everywhere.

And the death of family farms is part of this puzzle,

as is almost everything

from the demise of the real community

to the challenge of finding a good tomato, even in summer.

Eventually California produced too much food to ship fresh,

so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods.

Thus arrived convenience.

It was sold to protofeminist housewives

as a way to cut down on housework.

Now, I know everybody over the age of, like 45 --

their mouths are watering at this point.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

If we had a slide of Salisbury steak, even more so, right?

(Laughter)

But this may have cut down on housework,

but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well.

Many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable

except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad.

I, for one -- and I'm not kidding --

didn't eat real spinach or broccoli till I was 19.

Who needed it though? Meat was everywhere.

What could be easier, more filling or healthier for your family

than broiling a steak?

But by then cattle were already raised unnaturally.

Rather than spending their lives eating grass,

for which their stomachs were designed,

they were forced to eat soy and corn.

They have trouble digesting those grains, of course,

but that wasn't a problem for producers.

New drugs kept them healthy.

Well, they kept them alive.

Healthy was another story.

Thanks to farm subsidies,

the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress,

soy, corn and cattle became king.