Kenny Torrella

This is Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what.

To try and do that, we've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling and you get to see people everywhere making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.

And are we getting it? Disclaimer, I'm not a nutritionist or a doctor or dietitian. But generally, what the US government recommends is that people eat around 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight. So just to put out a number there, let's say you weigh 150 pounds. I think that's 54 grams of protein.

The general guidance on this is that if you're eating enough calories and if you're having a somewhat balanced diet, you're going to meet your protein needs. I mean, protein deficiency is not a problem in the United States. Oh, like it may be in other parts of the world. Sure.

In parts of the world in particular, where people have not enough calories to eat, they're just not getting enough food, or they don't have as much access to the variety of foods that we might have in high-income countries like the United States.

So one caveat I'll say is that dieticians do recommend that if you are exercising vigorously, if you're pregnant, if you're elderly, then you do need to eat a little more protein. But men consume about 30% more protein than is recommended. Women consume about 12% more protein than is recommended. Wow.

And year after year, we see these surveys where we find like half or even more than half of Americans say that they're trying to eat more protein.

And I would argue that one of the problems with this obsession with protein is that we're missing fiber. So there's this huge fiber gap is what dieticians call it. Fiber gap. I think they should call it a fiber crisis, but that's just...

We're journalists. We want to add the word crisis to every single problem in the United States. But yes, there is a fiber crisis where about 95% of Americans aren't getting enough fiber as the U.S. government recommends. And that's really important for gut health, for digestion.

Eating more fiber is associated with lower risks of all kinds of issues like, you know, heart disease and certain kinds of cancer. And where does fiber come from? It comes from plant-based proteins like beans and lentils.

Thanks so much for having us.

I want to say like 60 to 70 grams of protein. Okay. Do you think that's enough? I would say yes, but I have no idea.

A few months ago when I was in Whole Foods, I saw ice cream that was advertised as being high in protein. That shows how protein has invaded even the dessert aisle.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I think Samantha was right. Protein has kind of escaped the nutrition wars unscathed every time. I also think there are some cultural factors at play. You know, most protein comes from animal sources, from meat and dairy. About two thirds of the protein that Americans consume comes from animal products.

It's always kind of been associated with masculinity, and men actually tend to consume much more protein than women. You know, I think men are advertised to eat a lot of meat to be manly. I mean, there was a Burger King commercial, I think like 10 years ago or so, was called I Am Man.

And it was all these men kind of joining together, singing this song, saying that they were going to wave tofu goodbye.

And at the end, they all pick up a van and throw it off of a bridge. What? To kind of demonstrate their manliness. It was an advertisement for a Texas double whopper. But we see this also in pop culture. I mean, think of like Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation. He was kind of this hyper masculine figure who was always eating bacon.

Yeah, and I mean, think of the inverse. Like, an increasingly used pejorative, often used by people on the right, but not entirely, is soy boy. So, eating lots of meat is masculine, but then also eating lots of soy products is seen as, like, weak or effeminate.

And a lot of us are getting started on our New Year's resolutions.

you know, men are just as concerned with their looks as women or anyone else. And it just kind of manifests in a different way. A lot of this has to do with diet culture, which for I think a long time, that's been more associated with women. But I think over time, there's increasing pressure on men to be big and strong and kind of an increased interest in in bodybuilding.

Yeah.

Coming up, how protein got political. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene even said that, oh, the government is going to come out and zap people if they eat cheeseburgers. Stay with us.

I actually just recently read a paper, I think it was from an ag economist at Kansas State University. And he wanted to look at whether the rise in news media coverage of the links between like fitness and protein, the importance of protein in fitness and exercise was actually causing people to consume more protein. And he found pretty much no correlation.

But what was interesting is that the study just looked at news media. It didn't look at social media. Oh, that's where it's going down. Right. That is where it's going down. I mean, this kind of content is just like built to go viral, you know. Videos of like sauteing huge steaks with an entire stick of butter.

Right. Eating it raw.

The liver king, I should mention to listeners, actually turned out to be taking steroids.

Yeah. And what was interesting about the case of the liver king is that I found that a lot of the social media around things like the carnivore diet or the caveman diet was

a lot of it is kind of trying to appeal to this bygone era when times were simpler and we didn't have to deal with the modern trappings of computers and processed foods and we should just get raw meat and eat it like our ancient ancestors. There's really kind of this rejection of modernity, which is also interesting because modernity has also given us this abundant amount of meat that we now have.

Right. Yeah. Americans are eating more meat than pretty much any country in the world. But a lot of this kind of all meat diet is kind of speaking to this desire for people to trim the complexity of the modern world down to these simple tenets. You know, the liver king had like nine simple tenets and a lot of them were actually normal, like, you know, sleep and bond with your friends and family.

But one of them was also eat raw liver. Yeah.

Yeah, I think the right has really kind of taken it up as this increasing part of their culture war. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene even said that, oh, the government is going to come out and zap people if they eat cheeseburgers. Just totally nonsensical stuff. But it speaks to the base somehow.

It's not uncommon for right-wing politicians to kind of conjure up totally fictional threats to meat consumption. And I think some of that... has to do just with the fact that people like meat. You know, it's a very calorically dense food. It tastes good. So any kind of assumption that it's going to be taken away from you is this threat.

But I also think it's kind of been baked into the mythology of America's founding in some ways. You know, you have images of like the cowboy on the open range. So that's always been kind of tied to the American identity, often in more subtle ways, but it can get really overt sometimes on the campaign trail.

I think one, I want to say, like, I don't want to criticize anyone for eating, you know, more protein than what the U.S. government recommends. I mean, I think ultimately a lot of this protein obsession is people just trying to be healthier. You know, America has pretty high rates of chronic diseases like heart disease and certain forms of cancer.

So I think the protein obsession is maybe part of a larger problem. search for a kind of healthier way to live. I mean, ultimately, I think there's kind of general consensus among like nutritionists as to like what we should eat and usually does not fall into any of these kind of more fringe short-lived diets.

It's kind of general advice, like try to eat a balanced diet where you're eating enough calories every day. You're eating lots of different colors, different fruits and vegetables and whole grains and a variety of kinds of protein. It's kind of the common sense stuff that a lot of us probably grew up hearing.

But I think a lot of people, and that's evidenced by the Maha movement, feel somewhat wronged or duped by American food regulators and food companies, and they're searching for some way to fix that. And I don't think eating tons of more protein is going to do it, but I understand why people gravitate towards that.

Seven and a half million chickens, to be exact. How many people does it have? 270 people. Wow.

That's right. You must be some kind of math prodigy. I didn't know that, Sean.

Yeah, and I talked to a few folks in Malcolm. One of them stood out. Her name's Carolyn Bittner.

She moved to Malcolm in 2008 to become a pastor at two churches. She's now retired. And she told me that she really likes small-town rural life and that neighbors are kind to each other. Except this one neighbor, Fremont Farms of Iowa. That's the farm that has 7.5 million egg-laying chickens.

And as soon as I got to Malcolm, I understood what Carolyn was saying. There's the smell. The stench of manure hung in the air. And the closer you got to Fremont Farms of Iowa, the stronger and stronger it smelled. It was overwhelming.

Damn. Yeah, livestock farms generate nearly a trillion pounds of manure each year. And fumes from that manure creates terrible air pollution, which is linked to nine times more premature deaths than coal-fired power plants.

Well, there's just simply way too much manure for it to all serve as fertilizer. So often farmers will over apply manure, which one, it smells really bad, but it also leaches into water, contaminates drinking water and other issues.

On top of that, other research has found that living near a factory farm is positively associated with risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, and people who live near them also report higher rates of headaches, depression, anger, and respiratory symptoms, such as asthma.

Well, Carolyn moved to Malcolm for a job. She didn't know that there were also seven and a half million chickens in town. Huh. And I've heard that from other people, that maybe they moved there and they didn't know, or maybe they've lived there for a lot of their lives and the factory farms started coming in in the 90s and the early 2000s and they had no choice but to just deal with it.

You know, Carolyn has tried to speak up for years and tell the farm about how terrible it smells. She's also spoken up at permit hearings, too.

It hasn't gone that well. I mean, nothing has changed. If anything, it's gotten worse because the chicken farm now has more animals than it did when she first moved in 2008. And a lot of this just comes down to public policy. And there's also usually pretty lax rules around how they handle that collective trillion pounds of manure.

The bird flu is really bad. You know, this outbreak, which has been the worst in U.S. history, it began in early 2022, and it's only getting worse.

And she told me that while Fremont Farms is doing fine, the town is kind of disappearing.

It seems so. And, you know, I've talked to a bunch of people in similar circumstances. You know, there are thousands and thousands of these huge factory farms across the country.

One person I talked to, her name is Sonia in Minnesota. She says that fights over big dairy operations and pig factory farms near her have torn her community apart.

Dang. Yeah. And there's Edith in Worth County, Iowa, who told me that a lot of her neighbors won't speak publicly against the factory farms near them.

Yeah, RFK Jr. over the years has really criticized factory farming. In fact, for 20 years, he was the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is this group that does really great work to combat water pollution from these huge farms. But I have my doubts that he's going to really do much to shake up the agricultural status quo here.

Yeah, that's right. He's in charge of HHS, which includes the US Food and Drug Administration, but it's the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency who are really in charge of regulating farms and all of this pollution.

Maybe. I mean, maybe if we get to a point where we're rationing eggs. Even then it's a maybe? I mean, you know, in 2009, over 10,000 Americans died from swine flu, which originated in pigs. And... Today, pig factory farming looks exactly like it did in 2009. So it's hard to say what, if anything, could push the country to really rethink how we raise animals for food.

And I'm not even sure a major bird flu pandemic could do it.

That's true. We've become really accustomed to cheap eggs and other animal products. And I think visiting Iowa and hearing stories from people like Carolyn... you come to realize that there is a cost to these cheap eggs and other products. There is a cost to the environment. There's a cost to people who live in rural America near factory farms.

There's a cost to the animals who are treated really terribly. So yeah, there's always gonna be this tension and trade-off You know, we can opt to eat fewer eggs. We can eat egg alternative products like plant-based eggs. We can also use this as an opportunity to learn more about the factory farming system and maybe rethink how we produce food.

I hope that's the one kind of silver lining of this terrible bird flu outbreak is that it gives us time to pause and think about how we might raise food in a more humane and sustainable way.

This strain known as H5N1, it's a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza or bird flu, which has been highly lethal to birds raised for meat and eggs like chickens and turkeys. You know, more than 20 million egg-laying hens were killed either because they became infected with the virus or they were killed to slow the spread of the virus.

To put that into perspective, that's 6% of America's egg-laying flock.

That's really the only reason why eggs are so expensive, aside from food inflation. The bird flu has led to egg shortages across the country. Some stores are even placing limits on how many cartons consumers can buy.

And the average price for a dozen of eggs is double now what it was before this outbreak began three years ago.

The high price of eggs, it's not the only problem related to bird flu, because it's increasingly affecting other animals. Scientists detected bird flu in cows for the first time ever in the United States almost a year ago. And since then, it's infected almost 1,000 dairy cow herds. But it's also infecting and killing other mammals like sea lions and seals.

And it even killed a cheetah and a mountain lion at a zoo in Arizona not too long ago.

Yeah, there's not much to love about the bird flu, especially because it's now hitting humans.

Yeah, almost 70 people in the U.S. have tested positive for bird flu since the spring of 2022. We're not doing mass testing, so it could be higher. But most of them have been people who work with poultry or dairy cows, and most cases have been somewhat mild. But there have been a few cases that have stood out and have concerned experts. For example, last month there was a woman in Louisiana who

She had exposure to a backyard chicken flock and also some wild birds. She got the bird flu. She was hospitalized. And tragically, she passed away from the virus. And in November, a 13-year-old Canadian girl who had no known exposure to wild or farmed birds or dairy cows, she developed a really severe infection and was hospitalized for weeks.

She recovered, but it's still a mystery as to how she got it.

No, we're not. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that almost all of these cases, again, were connected to people who work directly with animals or were exposed to animals who had the virus. At this point, this virus is not going from person to person, which is one of the key ingredients for a virus going from one that just circulates among animals to the next global pandemic.

H5N1 may never gain the ability to transmit from human to human, but the more that it circulates among people and animals and large farms, the more opportunities that it has to evolve and develop the capacity to become more severe in humans and be able to transmit from person to person.

It's gotten off to a rocky start. You know, Doge and the Trump administration fired a number of employees who monitor bird flu, realized they made a mistake, and then hired them back. But in bigger news today, Brooke Rollins announced a big plan in the Wall Street Journal to fight bird flu and try to bring down the price of eggs. I'm sorry, Brooke who? Brooke Rollins.

She's the new secretary of agriculture who has not much of a background in agriculture, more in conservative think tank policymaking. But she does have a new five point plan to tackle this crisis.

Point one is to put $500 million towards increased biosecurity on farms. That includes things like more protective gear for farm workers, requiring them to shower before entering and leaving the facilities. And this could help. It's worth a shot. But this has also been a main tactic of the Biden administration. So we'll see if it helps. Okay, $500 million for some cold showers.

Increased funding for farmers who have to call or kill their flocks. Again, this is more of the same. This is something the Biden administration has done for the last three years.

Yes and no. I mean, one point of the plan is to import more eggs, which is what the Obama administration did during the 2015 bird flu outbreak. And then there are some other ideas, like trying to roll back cage-free egg laws, which we're seeing some states already trying to do, and vaccines, which is actually welcome news.

Well, thankfully, that's the purview of the USDA. So RFK Jr. has no oversight over whether birds get vaccinated. Of course, I am worried that if this does start to transmit to more humans, he will have oversight over the development and distribution and approval of vaccines for people. But at least right now, It's in the USDA's hands as to whether we start vaccinating egg-laying hens.

It's unclear. There's not a lot of specifics as to when and how this money will be deployed and how fast they'll act on things like expanding vaccine development. So it's more of a wait and see situation like the last few years have been with bird flu.

What's cooking in the meantime? So some states are taking matters into their own hands.

The idea here is that by suspending this cage-free requirement, it'll give grocery stores more flexibility in where and how they source their eggs.

But it probably won't work. You know, there is one ag economist at the University of Arkansas... who said that suspending these cage-free standards could, quote unquote, very slightly address the egg shortage in Nevada, but it could exacerbate it in other states because the national egg supply is just so limited. So if you shift more to Nevada, you got to take it from another state. Huh.

Yeah, ultimately, a big part of the problem here is factory farming itself. A typical egg factory farm operation will house hundreds of thousands or even millions of genetically similar animals in just a few barns. And in these barns, the animals, they're in their own waste. They're breathing in toxic fumes from their manure. They're overcrowded.

All of this comes together to stress them out and weaken their immune systems. And one historian who studies animal disease, who I talked to, said that these kinds of conditions create the perfect opportunity for a microbe or a virus like H5N1 to effectively spread through a lot of hosts.

This doesn't mean that reverting back to the farming that we had a century ago where chickens were raised in small flocks on small farms would fix the problem of the bird flu spread. You know, farmers have always been battling disease outbreaks on farms. But the expansion of factory farms really exacerbate the risk.

And because these farms are so big and have so many chickens, if the virus affects just a few really big farms, it can send a shock to the egg supply overnight, which is what has been going on for the last several months.

Yeah, and it rarely grabs the country's attention. We don't really talk that much about factory farming. You know, we're only doing this show because of this outbreak and how it's affected egg prices and the egg supply. But there are millions of people in rural America who have been dealing with the public health effects of factory farms for decades.

And many have been sounding the alarm, but no one's really been listening. So I spent the last several months talking to them for a series for Vox. And you're going to hear from them when we're back on Today Explained. Aww.

Malcolm? Yep. In the middle? Yeah, it's actually in the middle of Iowa. I went there in September. It's this tiny, sleepy town about 75 miles east of Des Moines. There's just a couple hundred people. There's a post office, a bar and grill, a lot of cornfields. And on the surface, it's a generally quiet and peaceful small town, except it has millions of chickens.