This episode discusses the way the Canadian beef industry has been quietly funding academic research and, unsurprisingly, getting results that paint beef in an environmentally favorable light . We talk about how this echoes what the tobacco industry was doing for decades, and ask why this isn’t a bigger scandal.

We also ended up in a bigger conversation about why truth matters, and why what happens in academia isn't just an elitist problem, but actually affects what the rest of us believe, what we can imagine, and how we fight.

Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute recently suggested that animal advocates who oppose “cultivated” meat “lack empathy” for animals. In this episode we respond to that characterization directly, explaining why our concerns about this technology are structural and political, and calling for a good faith engagement with all sides of this argument, because the animals need for us to get it right.