The Blindboy Podcast - The history of unsustainable meat

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

The history of unsustainable meat  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Open the bony door, you pony-eyed norris. Welcome to the Blind By-Pak cast. If you're a brand new listener, go back and listen to an earlier episode

to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. Thank you everybody for the kind words about last week's podcast. I received four clods of messages. Last week's podcast was a deconstruction of neoliberal capitalism, which sounds quite wanky. But neoliberal capitalism is the the system which allows very wealthy people to steal public money.

Neoliberal capitalism is why everything feels so chaotic and strange right now and why people are so vulnerable to conspiracy theories and messages from the far right and why people are so vulnerable to blaming each other. We're being distracted while the wealthiest people in the world steal our taxes. They steal our taxes and funnel them into private interests and we experience this as feeling hopeless and powerless. So if you didn't catch last week's podcast, go back and listen to it. Because I did 90 minutes on that exact subject, on the history of how we got to this situation. And it was

a frustrating podcast to record because it's such a massive subject. There's so much that I left out. And Loisie asked me to do a part two, to do a part two to this podcast. And that had been my intention. But I'm having to cram this week. I'm having to cram the recording of this podcast into a short amount of time. The reason being, it was fucking Paddy's Day yesterday. I'd forgotten all about St. Patrick's Day and the fucking parades. My office is in Limerick City. So, for the past two days, there's been parades, there's been marching bands, marching bands outside

my fucking window. So I haven't been able to record in a podcast while a couple of hundred people are playing drums. It's just not possible. It's not possible at all and I tried. I fucking tried yesterday in particular on St. Patrick's Day. I was in my office trying to record and I just I gave up. I gave up and I said fuck it let's be realistic. No one's recording a podcast while there's a marching band outside your window. Just forget about it. So I said why not go down and look at the parade. I'm not a huge fan of parades. Nothing against parades. I can see that other people absolutely adore parades, but I'm just a little uneasy with crowds of that size.

Specifically crowds where you have like thousands of people and they're all going in different directions and you're mingling with a giant crowd. That leaves me feeling dizzy and overwhelmed, but I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. It's just, it's not a comfort zone. But anyway, I went down to look at the St. Patrick's Day Parade. To join the crowds, I walked down as far as Henry Street. As the parade procession was coming towards me.

And I'm there. You know, I'm there with all the fucking people, happy little children, little toddlers up on their dad's shoulders absolutely loving it. When I saw that it made me less pissed off that the parade was impacting my capacity to record my podcast. But then as I look coming up the fucking in the center of the parade in Limerick, there's all these these puppets, the huge puppets now, 16, 17 foot tall, amazing, incredible puppets towering over the crowd, kids loving it. And then behind the fucking puppets, coming up the road, waving at everybody, the fat a dressed as me.

Now, I'm not wearing, I'm in civilian mode now, so I don't have a plastic bag in my head. I'm just there as a regular person, mingling with the fucking crowd. But one of the centerpieces of this year's Limerick City St. Patrick's Day Parade was a fella dressed as me. He was wearing a plastic bag identical to mine, like the red plastic bag. He had the red hat. He was also dressed like St. Patrick's, so it was like St. Patrick blind by on a giant puppet horse and this was one of the centrepieces of the Limerick City Parade. So I'm there in the fucking crowd. First off, the fella dressed as me, he was so confident. He was so confident and comfortable.

He was doing something that I wouldn't do in a million fucking years. I would not be able to put the plastic bag on my head and be blind by in the Limerick City fucking parade. That would freak the fuck out of me. That many people staring at me as I move on a mechanical horse would scare the living shit out of me. So I'm watching some other fella doing a brilliant job at it. You might be thinking, how are you able to do gigs so blind-boy?

Different situation. Up on stage, there's a barrier and you don't really have to look at the entire audience when you're up on stage, but like a parade in the middle of a crowd, different situation, that'd be too much for me. He was waving at people, really confident, fucking fantastic, but then all around me, because I'm in a fucking crowd, then's like oh my god it's blind by it's blind by and then everyone starts waving how are you blind by and then he waves back the cunt waved at me he waved at me and I got a split second of oh

blind by is waving at me how you blind by and his costume is so good, his blind-by costume is so good that I realise, oh shit, everyone thinks it's actually me. They don't think it's a dude dressed as blind-by, they think me, that that's what I'd done with my fucking Monday afternoon is I joined the Limerick St. Patrick's Day Parade. But the absurd reality was, I'm not wearing any bag. I'm there as a civilian with a big grumpy head on me forced to attend the parade because I can't record my podcast. I can't record my podcast because there's a parade outside my window where a fella's dressed like me and because of that

I can't record my podcast that's interrupting me so I'm just there anxious in a fucking crowd while everyone else is pointing at someone dressed as me going are we a blind boy? blind boy over here, over here blind boy and then in my head I'm going that's not blind boy, I'm blind boy but you wouldn't know that because I'm not wearing a bag in my head and to be

honest that fat is a better blind by than me anyway he's doing brilliantly I'd be shit at doing this and then fake blind by moves on with the parade doing a fantastic job and then I'm like stuck I'm stuck in a fucking crowd now see as soon as I'd seen me as soon as I saw me in the parade, I'd gone to the front lines, I'd gone to the very front to get a look at me. And I, you know, I don't like this external praise shit. I was a little bit, I don't know, I was proud the word. That was nice. It was nice that, it was nice that the, I suppose the people

of Limerick, the city of Limerick, wanted to put a fake blind boy in the fucking parade. And I liked having a vicarious blind boy. I nearly preferred that to wearing a bag in my head. Like I'll be honest with you, if I could just do this podcast and write books and then never be seen in public again, even with a bag in my head, I'd do that. So it was actually, it was nice having someone else like five feet away from me, who everyone thought was blind by. I actually really enjoyed that. That a lot of pressure was taking off me. But anyway, because I was down and looking at me in the parade, because me was distracting me from recording my podcast, I got stuck up at the fucking front in the barrier and

then was basically locked in. I now couldn't move. It was about 40 people deep behind me so I'm like fuck it. I'm gonna I'm now gonna have to stay here I'm gonna have to stay at this fucking parade and I can't even go back to my office if I wanted to and of course then when I get stuck ideas ideas for the fucking podcast start coming to me but I'm stuck in a parade. Then more more blind boys come. There was other people, not as good as the main blind boy on the horse. He was amazing. But there was other other members of a marching band that decided that they're gonna dress up as blind boy too. Fair play to them but I'm

stuck now on Henry Street in the parade up against the barrier completely stuck Looking at multiple versions of me Marching past me. I don't have I don't have a bag on and then people beside me are gone I think that the first one was the real blind boy Obviously, they're fake blind boys, but I think the guy on the horse. He was the real blind boy I'm listening to this just saying what utterly, what a bizarre situation to be in. What a strange, strange situation to be in. And if I'd have turned to those people, I wouldn't.

If I'd have turned to those people and said, you know, I'm actually blind boy, they'd have said, fuck off, no, you're not. Blind boy has social anxiety. What would he be doing at the front of the St. Patrick's parade, looking at multiple blind boys for? Why would he be doing that? And I'd have nothing to say. But what I started to think about is when I was stuck against the barrier in the St.

Patrick's Day parade, I wasn't experiencing crowd anxiety, okay? I've done enough exposure over the years, like 20 fucking years ago, I'd gotten a full blown panic attack. Like it would not have been possible for me to have been in that crowd. But over the years I've gradually exposed myself. I deliberately walked through crowds, deliberately, in order to not be afraid

of them. So now crowds are something where like I said it's not a comfort zone but I can tolerate them completely and if I do experience a feeling of being overwhelmed I just look at people's shoes. I try to avoid looking at multiple faces. Loads and loads of different faces is what gets overwhelming. So I looked down at people's shoes. So I was looking down at everyone's feet. And as I was doing it, I remembered something my ma told me about when she moved to Limerick in the 1950s, I believe.

Like the Limerick St. Patrick's Day parade route, it hasn't changed in years. And my ma remembers one year where... So Limerick is... It's known historically as Pig Town. And Limerick City Centre used to have like four baking factories. And these factories had abattoirs.

Now, St. Patrick's Day is always March 17th. St. Patrick's Day is March 17th, right? But Easter Sunday, that changes. Like Easter Sunday, it's the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, right? So Easter Sunday can fall anywhere between March 22nd and April 25th. And Easter is the end of Lent.

And back, back in the 1950s, people took Lent seriously. People would abstain from meat for Lent. But then when fucking Easter Sunday comes around, people are eating meat. It's that simple. So I'm in the St. Patrick's Day parade. I'm looking down at everybody's feet. There's thousands of people in the streets in Limerick.

And when I'm looking down at people's feet, I'm remembering something my ma told me. My ma told me that in the 1950s, if Easter Sunday fell early, so if Easter Sunday was close to St. Patrick's Day, after the parade, the whole city would be covered in bloody footprints. See the abattoirs, there was three or four abattoirs,

they were at the top of the city and they'd be ramping up production in preparation for Easter Sunday and all the the fucking blood the blood from the pigs would trickle down the streets of Limerick and people would walk all over it during the parade and the whole place be full of bloody footprints and then the blood would trickle into the river and the river would be red with pigs blood and everything would smell like metal, like iron. The streets would smell

like iron from all the disturbed blood. And this was a serious industry in Limerick. It ended in the 1970s but Limerick's pork industry really sustained the city throughout the 19th century. It didn't, not just providing people with employment, but limerick ham was famous the world over. It was a delicacy throughout the 19th century. Obviously, it had to be wealthy to afford the ham, but the avatoires would sell the offal and the backbones and the eye bones sell them pure cheap to butchers.

And then the working class people of Limerick had access to cheap meat and everybody raised pigs in their back gardens. Regular people would feed and raise pigs in whatever little space they had and then sell those to the abattoirs. Even

more strange is in the 19th century there were these famous gloves, right? They were called chicken skin gloves. They were only made in Limerick. These were luxury items. If they were around today like Kim Kardashian would be wearing them, right? But they were gloves that were made in Limerick in the 19th century. The thinnest gloves that you could imagine and they were sold inside in walnuts, right? So very posh, wealthy ladies would buy this posh, wealthy ladies would buy this walnut with these gloves that were unbelievably thin and they'd cost them more than they'd wear them over their hands to keep their hands soft. Now if you're squeamish or you don't like hearing about animal cruelty, fast forward about 20 seconds. Actually this whole

episode is gonna be speaking about the meat industry. Just a content warning because some people don't want to hear about that at all. So if you're one of these people, this episode might not be for you. That's fair enough. There's nearly 400 episodes. Go back and listen to an earlier episode. So these internationally, incredibly thin gloves that were stored inside in walnuts,

they were made from the skin of unborn cows and unborn pigs in Limerick City. I know it's not nice to hear, but I just find that fascinating. How you can have, how entire industries just disappear they just disappear and people's way of life and sense of meaning disappears and Local craft as fucked up as it is

Some limerick woman in the 19th century made a set of very thin gloves Out of the skin of an unborn pig and these become a worldwide luxury item and that knowledge is just forgotten. That industry is gone. It was an industry that lasted about 150 years and ethics and animal cruelty aside, all of the research that I've done into the history of the limerick pig industry is that it was a sustainable model that didn't exploit the community. Now it exploited pigs, it slaughtered pigs, no crack if you're a pig, but as a capitalist model it was sustainable meat production. Thousands of working class people in full employment,

unskilled and skilled, working in the pig factories and providing jobs that were generational professions passed down from father to son or mother to daughter. There's even a saying in Limerick which is, what's the difference between the Pope and a butcher? A butcher can become the Pope but the pope can never become a butcher because the skills were guarded and handed down. Because the workers were so skilled and valuable, they were unionized. The Limerick pork butchers unionized in 18 fucking 70,

and they went on strike in 1884, brought the whole industry a halt that's collective bargaining that's value that's meaning skilled workers with secure jobs happy with the pay that they're getting in the conditions then you had an ecosystem of local people raising pigs in their own homes out their back gardens the pigs are being fed scraps, they're free to roam, the pigs are eating household rubbish and then a lot of these people were using what available space they had or even community gardens to grow their own vegetables to eat but fertilizing them with the manure from the pigs that they're raising. Very sustainable, minimal environmental impact, a meaningful relationship with

whole food that's organic as a given and then when the pigs are eventually butchered every part of that pig is used. The best meat is sold, the fat is rendered, the skin is used for gloves and clothing, the hairs are made into brushes locally, the offal is then sold to butchers cheaply for the local people to eat, the pigs faces and ears were dried and made into toys for dogs and even the blood in the 19th century. The blood was taken just down the road to a place there's a place in limerick now called the blood mill road because there was a mill there in the 19th century and they used to take the local pig's blood and turn it into fertilizer but then when

that mill closed instead the blood the blood would just trickle down the streets and pollute the River Shannon and turn it red. And I was thinking all this when I was, when I was just standing in the parade. How we once had this industry that lasted 150 years and kept so many people employed intergenerationally and it was solid and it stayed here. And what have we got now? Fucking corporate headquarters of Uber. Loads of people in the city centre are implied by Uber. And Uber have their European corporate headquarters

in Limerick City. And you know why? Because they don't have to pay tax in Ireland. And Uber, the ethics of Uber is very questionable. Uber, Uber don't call their drivers employees, their independent contractors. The exact opposite, the complete opposite of being in a union and having collective bargaining. Giant corporations like Uber try to redefine what a worker is so that those workers and employees can't avail of employees' rights of workers' rights. Instead you're an independent contractor with no rights. And this is what Limerick relies upon for jobs.

Uber, who have no roots here, who could leave tomorrow if the tax rate changed. In 2016, in 2016, Fianna Gael, who are one of the two large political parties in Ireland, a team of investigative journalists found that Uber wrote part of Fianna Gael's election manifesto in 2016. Why is a giant multinational corporation that pays fuck-all tax that's trying to redefine what a worker can be, why is that giant multinational corporation writing the election manifesto of a fucking political party, of a democratic political party? What the fuck is going on? What evil shit is going on? What evil neoliberal capitalist shit is going on? And in Limerick you just

put up with it because if fucking... Uber has got the corporate headquarters in the middle of the city, and because Uber is there, there's cafes that are open, there's people walking about, there's people spending, there's people in the city centre for fucking St. Patrick's Day. And then you see all the Uber drivers and the Uber Eats drivers. The vast majority of them are at the bottom of the system. People from South America mostly, who don't have EU passports.

And how sad is it that workers in 1890 in Limerick City probably had more rights and more power to collective bargain than workers now in Limerick City in 2025. I was still stuck in the parade thinking about all this shit and again visualizing the description of, of, my ma's description of the blood trickling down the streets into the river and people just walking over it, just getting on with their days and smearing the blood all over the streets.

I thought to myself, at least you can smell it, at least you can touch it, at least you can be disgusted by it. Whereas you can't see the blood that's dripping down from Uber and the Uber headquarters, they're built on where one of the abattoirs was. Where one of the abattoirs was 50 years ago. Up at the very top of Bedford Row, a factory called Matheson's I believe it was. And then I couldn't stop visualizing the Shannon River going red, turning red on St. Patrick's Day 50 years ago. And it made me think of in Chicago,

every single Patrick's Day where they'd dye the river green. The city of Chicago dyes its fucking river bright green every St. Patrick's Day. There's loads of photographs of it, and it's probably probably the most famous St. Patrick's Day ritual in the world is Chicago dying its river green. And I got my little my little autistic pattern recognition tingle and I thought to myself I wonder is there a connection between the Chicago River being dyed green and the collapse of the baking industry in Limerick, turns out there fucking is very deep connections. And as soon as I got back to my office,

I started researching this. So here's the thing with meat, whether it be pork or beef, the industry as it is shouldn't really exist. Meat is unsustainable. The meat that we buy in the supermarket is completely unsustainable. You shouldn't be able to buy a steak for a fiver or a ham for eight euros. We shouldn't be able to do these things.

The reason we can do these things, the reason this is affordable is because the model is unsustainable. So we do pay the price, we pay a massive price, but we don't see it directly. The beef industry, for instance, it's one of the most environmentally destructive industries on the planet, right?

There's massive emissions from the cows themselves, methane. There's forests, huge amounts of forests that are cut down, like the fucking Amazon. Brazil and Argentina, massive forests cut down to graze cows. The amount of food and grain that's required to feed a cow, the amount of water that's required to feed a cow, it's a hugely destructive industry. The industry that exists so that you and me can go to the shop and buy a steak for a fiver, that shouldn't really exist. Realistically, meat is probably something that you'd be able to afford once a week.

If the beef was produced, we'd say ethically, sustainably, with minimal environmental impact and travel, then it would be mad expensive and you wouldn't eat it a lot. Like in Limerick, like in Limerick 150 years ago or even 50, 60 years ago. Locally raised pigs were butchered locally by local people, skilled and unionized. Every single part of the pig is used and the product limerick ham and limerick bacon was a luxury item. Limerick ham was on first class, the first class dining carts in the Titanic. Limerick ham was on that. So limerick ham was so expensive that only the wealthiest people could afford it as a treat. And then what was affordable was the offal. In Limerick, people ate packet and tripe,

which is offal, or people ate soups that were made from pork bones. But the actual ham and bacon was prohibitively expensive because it was made sustainably. And you might be thinking, Jesus, that's awful. I wanna buy bacon every single day. You can. The cost of that is environmental destruction and exploitation of workers and animal cruelty.

But if you go back to, you can only have ham once a week because it's so expensive. But with that, you get a sustainable model. You get an entire city in employment, unionized workers, no waste because there's multiple local industries, and probably a healthier, more varied diet that contains more vegetables. So how did we end up in this situation where our meat is unsustainable, completely destroying the planet? And also, like people who work in meat processing plants now, again, they're the people at the bottom of the system.

You saw this during COVID. Some of the workers that got treated the worst were people working in meat processing. Where did all this start? It started in fucking Chicago. It started in Chicago. At the same time that Limerick had a small sustainable baking industry in Chicago from about the 1820s onwards, you started to see the emergence of industrialised meat production

unlike anything that had ever been seen before. That's a big story so I don't want to interrupt this before I begin it. So let's have a little ocarina pause right now. I'm gonna play my stone bass ocarina and you're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit. ["Fizz Loyalty Program"] With the Fizz Loyalty Program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff.

And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. You can bend the notes on this one, I like that. That was the Ocarina Pause. Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash

the blind by podcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. This is a listener funded podcast. This podcast is my full time job. I write it, I research it, I edit it, I record it, I do it all myself. I pay for my equipment, I rent my office,

I pay all my bills through listen or funding. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You listen for free. Listen to this podcast for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Listen to this podcast for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast and I get to

earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Also because this is listener funded I'm not beholden to advertisers. Acast hosts this podcast so because of that you're going to get your algorithmically generated adverts but those those advertisers they can't tell me what to do what to speak about and I can tell them to fuck off as well so go to patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast if you want to directly support this podcast and ideally do it do it on your browser. Don't join the Patreon via the iPhone app because Apple are greedy cunts and they're taking 30%. So some upcoming gigs.

My next gigs are in New Zealand and Australia, right? I'm off there next week. They're sold out. I can't wait to come. I'm still open to guest suggestions. So if there's people you want me to speak to as Sydney Melbourne part and fucking

Auckland give me a shout then after that limerick that's sold out There's a gig in cabin there around fucking May but at the normal out announced that yet, right? then I'm allowed to announce that yet right. Then I'm off to the England England and Scotland there in June. I can't wait for that all right. There's not a lot of tickets left for this tour but I'm going to be in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex and Norwich. I cannot wait for that tour and again if there's

people you want me to speak to at any of those locations give me a shout and I'll bring them on as guests. September 19th I'm up in Derry. I love Derry can't wait to go back to Derry. Some people would be like can you call it London Derry as well? No I can't do that because the name Derry, the name Derry means Dira. It's a very, very old name. It means oak wood. So by holding on to the name Derry there, it lets us know that that the area where Derry is was once an oak wood. Oak was a very, very important tree to indigenous

Irish people. We got great use out of the bark and also we got ink from the fruit that grows on the on the oak tree. I think only they're like little hazelnuts that grow on oak trees and I think sometimes a wasp, a wasp gets into one of these and when that happens you can make ink out of it. So that's why I call it Derry Derry because it means Dira and oak wood and that name there tells us something very important about biodiversity and the land. And when you call it London Derry it means fuck all. Although what it could mean so English canonisation did

like destroy a lot of our forests and cut down a bunch of our trees to build ships for the English Navy. So I'll call it London dairy if it means how are you we're from London and we cut down all your trees for the life. We're from London and we cut down all your trees for the laugh. We're from London and we're the reason that this isn't an oak wood anymore. London Derry. I'm okay with that when the name rats on itself. So anyway, I'm in Derry in September. And then I just announced a Vicar Street gig in September there today on the 22nd of September. Long way away, but if you want to come to one of my wonderful Vicar Street gigs,

now is your chance. So now I'm going to tell you the story of the history of industrial meat processing in Chicago in the 1800s. So by about 1860, Chicago was an emerging city. Chicago is, it's kind of in the middle, in the middle of the United States. Just there on Lake Michigan. By 1860, the West of North America hadn't been fully colonized yet.

You've got the South obviously, and you've got the East Coast. Fucking New York, Boston, Philadelphia. Chicago's in the middle with Lake Michigan. And loads of railways that travel to the East Coast and to the West Coast. And Chicago starts to work as like a distribution hub for all of America. Before 1860 in America, people were not eating meat every single day. No fucking way. They'd be lucky if they ate meat once a week. It took eight hours to fully butcher a cow and the cow had to be local. It had to, it

couldn't travel any great distance. It had to be local. It had to be fed locally and had to be butchered locally. Getting a steak was a long process that was expensive and complicated. Chicago changed that in the 1860s. There was this whole this area of marshland and they developed it into what was called the Union Stockyards. So cattle was being raised in the plains to the west,ows were being raised and pigs and sheep and the plains to the west, in the wild west, right? 1860. And then the cattle and the sheep and the pigs were being brought on trains to Chicago and all the animals now were kept in this, in pens in this huge area called

the Union Stockyards in Chicago. And then the cattle live was delivered to fucking New York or Philadelphia or wherever via railroads. But that was still very expensive because if you're traveling live animals across the United States in 1860, a big long journey via rail, you have to feed the animals along the way. So if a cow is traveling from from Colorado all the way across to New York, it's still very expensive. But then something changes. The refrigerated rail car gets invented.

So a rail car that has ice in it and you can keep meat cold on a fucking train. So now what happens is cattle is being sent from the West to Chicago, and now it's being butchered in Chicago, and freezing meat is being delivered to the East Coast. The ability to freeze meat, to freeze your meat, and keep it fresh for weeks, or for as long as it's fucking frozen. That made meat affordable now. Now it was cheaper.

And Chicago started to develop the industry of meat processing. So cattle is coming from the West and stopping in Chicago where the cattle is being slaughtered and butchered in these new factories that contain disassembly lines. Multiple people working on an assembly line, killing and butchering a cow in about 10 minutes. What used to take 8 hours now takes 10 minutes. But at the same time Chicago is getting an influx of incredibly poor refugees from Lithuania and Germany and Ireland. All these really, really dark poor peasants from Europe are pouring into Chicago and they're

working in these giant meat factories in the 1860s. Now this is the height of laissez-faire capitalism. So the only thing that matters is the profits of the factories. So as you can imagine, the workers, they're dying. They're getting injured. They're getting their hands chopped off in machinery. They're getting sick from being around rotting meat. They have no workers rights whatsoever. So they're working 16, 17 hour days, there's children working there, initially on the East Coast in like fucking New York and Boston. Most people won't eat frozen meat. The idea of eating meat that's frozen and that comes from halfway across the country, people aren't into it like this. How can it be fresh just

because you froze it? But eventually people start eating their frozen meat and demand goes up and up and up. The factories get bigger, more people are employed, more cows are brought in, more cows are being raised in the West. And now Chicago by about 1890 is disgusting. The unions, like you're talking about a couple of square miles thing. The unions, like you're talking about a couple of square miles of cows just being butchered with no safety standards, no environmental regulations, nothing, absolutely nothing. People are living in slums beside the slaughterhouses. People on the east coast of America now are able to buy cheap meat it starts to impact fucking cuisine like if you look at the difference between Italian

American food and Italian food like meatballs and spaghetti there's no such thing as meatballs and spaghetti in Italy that's Italian American food Italian American food was all about showing off not just Italian American food was all about showing off. Not just Italian American food. Jewish American food. Fucking Irish American food. Corned beef and cabbage. You ever go to a Jewish deli in New York, like Katz's Delicatessen,

and you see the size of the sandwiches and the meat? You ever go to any restaurant in fucking America, and the portion sizes are two or three times what you'd eat in fucking Ireland. That has ideological roots in the meat factories of Chicago. Immigrants from poor European countries who had fuck all. Italian immigrants, Irish immigrants, Jewish immigrants from fucking Lithuania. They had nothing in their own countries and their food was austere and frugal. And then when they get to America and start identifying as being American, their cuisine

changes to be about...plenty. Pasta and tomatoes becomes pasta and meatballs. Because there's a sudden influx of affordable frozen meat coming in from Chicago via the refrigerated rail cars. An unsustainable meat industry is emerging where workers are treated like absolute shit. They're dying. There's no health and safety standards and the environment is being destroyed and there's horrendous pollution in Chicago where blood and entrails is just dumped into the Chicago River. The other thing that this does and this is what capitalism, capitalism

The other thing that this does, and this is what capitalism, capitalism strips, it strips things of their meaning by turning them into commodities. So for the first time, people are eating meat with no relationship to the animal whatsoever. Steaks are just arriving and you're not even seeing a butcher shop. When we buy meat now, there's no relationship with an animal whatsoever. That's deliberate. Capitalism doesn't want us thinking about animals. Doesn't want us thinking that our food might have had emotions or feelings or a glimmer in its eyes. It's stripped of all meaning except for taste. Taste is the only meaning that you can get from meat now.

But where are all the cows coming from? We'll say 1870. The cows that are going into Chicago and getting butchered in the Union Stockyard. Where are those cows coming from? They're coming from the fucking West. The Wild West. The cowboys. The ranchers.

This is where the cows are coming from. But indigenous people live in the West. Quote-unquote American Indians live in the fucking West. Most of the cattle is being raised in what's called the Great Plains. This absolutely gigantic flat area that covers a huge part of America, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico. Fucking huge area of flatland and grasslands. It hasn't been fully colonized by Europeans yet. What's there? Indigenous Native American people, many different tribes and fuck tons of buffalo, wild herds of buffalo, millions on the Great Plains. Buffalo are their American animals, also known as bison. They're

like wild cows. They herd. But what you have is the humans that are living there. They've been living there for 10,000 years, 15,000 years. You've got different groups of people like the Pawnee or the Cayenne or the Blackfoot. And their entire culture and civilization is based around these buffalo. Now, the colonizer mindset is to say, these people are primitive. These people are backwards.

But if you read the studies, these people were first off, they were taller than Europeans and they were physically healthier than their European counterparts. They lived in tepees like tents made from buffalo hide and they moved with the buffalo herds, their rituals, their medicine, their clothes, their mythology, their stories, their folklore. Everything, fucking everything is the buffalo. And they were healthy, successful people who had a civilization that worked for them and they had a sustainable way of living with the fucking buffalo. Often by hunting the buffalo off cliffs.

But their relationship with their, it wasn't just a food source, their relationship with the buffalo was one of intense meaning. It was the meaning in their lives and in their stories and in their mythology. So when the cattle industry starts to expand, the ranchers and the fucking cowboys, buffalo become a problem. Buffalo are grazing grass that could instead be used for herds of domestic cattle and ranches. While buffalo are also a pain in the arse for railroads, America's starting to expand its rail over the California. Buffalo herds, they go onto the rail tracks and buffalo are so big they're fucking huge that it can derail a train. So in 1870,

buffalo start going extinct. Hunters, the government sent fucking hunters to kill as many buffalo as possible just for the crack, just for the sake of it. But also the US government, they also don't want indigenous people. They're trying to get indigenous American people to live on reservations. They don't want the US government in 1870, they don't want fucking the Pawnee or the Cayenne to be travelling with the herds of buffalo. They want these people living on small reservations where they can be contained and watched. So the US government starts to kill buffalo as a way to ethnically cleanse genocide the fucking indigenous people.

And this is well fucking practiced because Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell did this in Ireland in the 1600s. Oliver Cromwell cleared our forests to put cattle there and also sent wolf hunters, killed all the wolves, the wolves in Ireland for two reasons, because wolves were eating cattle and because of the Irish indigenous relationship with wolves, the mythology of wolves, the wolf as a symbol of a freedom fighter fighting the British, fucking Cromwell killed all the wolves and get rid of the forests. So the Yanks killed the buffalo to ethnically cleanse the indigenous Americans

and to destroy their language, their culture, and to remove their sense of meaning with their food source and the land. Get rid of the buffalo and then you take away their meaning and we can make them, we can put them on fucking reservations then. These people who've been moving with stories around these buffaloes for thousands of years. Let's kill the buffalo. Israel does this too. Like Israel, after the Nakba of 1948, Israel in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, Israel had a big thing about planting forests. Israel loved planting forests, right? And on the outside you'd think, oh that's quite environmentally friendly. But what Israel were

actually doing is Palestinian villages that could have been there for thousands of years. When Israel took it over, they bulldozed the village and then built a forest over it, planted a fucking forest, so that if anyone was to even return to the site of the village, they'd have no relationship with the land whatsoever. The landscape had been changed permanently, so the connection and the meaning with the land is gone. That's how the US committed ethnic cleansing and genocide on indigenous people, especially the quote unquote plains Indians, by killing the fucking buffalo, killing the buffalo to remove meaning and relationship with the land. And the Plains Indians,

they had a sustainable model of meat consumption there. So the buffalo were cleared to make way for giant farms full of fucking cattle that were sent to Chicago. Chicago now by about 1900 is absolutely fucked. Capitalism has run rampant. Abuse of animals, workers are dying, people are getting food poisoning. The environment is being destroyed

and we're seeing the modern industrial model of unsustainable meat as an industry. We're seeing this now. But at the same time, a new type of journalist emerges called a m raker. And a mock raker was like an early type of investigative journalist. And a fellow by the name of Upton Sinclair, who was a mock raker journalist, he went into the stockyards of Chicago and pretended to be a worker, but he was actually a journalist.

And he spent about six months living amongst the filth and poverty of the meat industry in Chicago. And then he wrote a book. The book was called The Jungle. Now Upton Sinclair was a socialist. He wanted the workers to unionize. So he wrote this book. And this was 1904. And the book was just about, it was gore. It was a gore book. It was a bestseller. It became really, really popular because people wanted to read about the, the pravity of the

meat industry. You're literally talking about stories of men falling into machinery and their bodies being mixed up into meat that get turned into hot dogs and then people eat it. Or floors, floors full of, there was no toilets, floors full of human shit and piss and rat piss and everything you can imagine.

And this being sweeped up into meat and that being packed into hot dogs. People bought this book, The Jungle Jungle like it was a horror novel. It was sensational but it wasn't sensationalized. Upland Sinclair was telling the truth. And even if you try and get this book now, and this is the sad thing about meaning, if you try and buy The Jungle now, all that the front cover is all images of jungles. The front cover is removed from the meaning that this is about urban industrial meat production. Anyway, this book, it eventually makes its way to Teddy Roosevelt the president. This book caused

such a stir that people like stopped eating meat from Chicago. They were like this is disgusting. It led to the first federal food safety laws. It led to regulation. Regulation of the meat industry. It led to unions. Unionization of the workers. That book there, The Jungle, is an example of why The jungle is an example of why journalism is so important as a cornerstone of fucking democracy. Because you see, the immigrants, those immigrant workers who are working in the meat factories, who are dying, and their families who are living in shit and squalor and blood and guts, those people don't have any voice. They have no voice and they are, in the eyes of the wealthy meat factory owners, they're disposable.

Get rid of them, there's new immigrants coming. But a journalist had the ability to tell wealthy people who had power and a voice and political clout and then things changed. The meat industry became regulated, still unsustainable and horrendous, but not as bad as children getting their hands chopped off and 16-hour days. And the other issue was the environmental impact. So in the Chicago River, so much blood and guts and othel from the stockyards and the meat factories went into the river

that the years and years of dead animals went to the bottom of the river and the river became known as Bubbly Creek. So the river literally bubbled with decomposing gases of othal and this became known as Bubbly Creek. And it caused pollution problems, river pollution problems and sewage problems in Chicago for fucking years. And then eventually in the 1960s, the Plumbers Union. So when the Plumbers Union used to have difficulty with the Chicago River, specifically the sewage system because it was so fucked up for years and years because of the meat industry. In the 1960s, the plumbers union used to try and find where sewage leakages were happening. So what they did is they used to put green dye into the Chicago River and then they'd follow the path of where the dye is and then they'd figure out where the sewage leaks were.

And this was the Plumbers Union. Then one year they did it and it happened to be near St. Patrick's Day. And everyone noticed, ah the river is green, this must be for St. Patrick's Day. Now the Plumbers Union were like, that wasn't the intention. This river has been fucked up from the meat industry for years.

So we'd dye it green to figure out where the sewage leaks are. But you know what? For the laugh, every St. Patrick's Day, we're gonna dye the river green. So that's what they started doing. But who paid for it? The Plumbers Union.

The Plumbers Union of Chicago paid for it every year. Now why would they do that? Loads of the plumbers were Irish, obviously, because Chicago is a working class Irish city, historically. But when a Plumbers Union, this massive union of workers who have rights, when they, if they put their hands into their pockets and create this giant spectacle every single year, we dye the river green. It's a show of power. It's soft power. There's a little threat behind it.

Look how powerful we are. We're the plumbers union. We can dye the river fucking green. If we stop working, if we go on strike, this city goes back to being polluted. We're essential, we're important and we deserve rights. We deserve rights and good working conditions. But of course that was the 1960s. And then we know that Reagan and his neoliberal policies, he dismantled a lot of unions. He made unions not as powerful as they were in the 1960s. So even the dying of the River Green has lost meaning now. Now we just think it's aesthetic. Oh, Irish Americans, Paddy's Day, dying the River Green.

It means the same as McDonald's in America. McDonald's died their milkshakes green on Patrick's Day. That literally means fuck all. That means fucking nothing. That's McDonald's, the capitalists, trying to sell green milkshakes. But the real history of dying the river green in Chicago, it's a show of power for unions. It's about workers' rights, unions, collective bargaining, and not being exploited. That's what it means. And these people just happen to be overwhelmingly of Irish descent.

And to circle it back to Limerick. What does Chicago and the Green River have to do with Limerick and the pork industry? That's what destroyed the Limerick pork industry. The Limerick pork industry was small scale. It was sustainable. It employed the whole city. But it wasn't massive, full industrialization. It wasn't machinated.

It required skilled people. And they had value and they had meaning. And because of that, they had rights. But the cost of all of this is that the meat wasn't that affordable for everybody. But the Chicago model, the Chicago meat model, sure that undercut the Limerick fucking, the Limerick bacon industry, that destroyed it all.

Couldn't compete and then eventually everything shut down. And now, now you can walk into your supermarket in Limerick to buy your steak and if you look at the back of it, it might come from fucking Argentina and it costs a fiver. That shouldn't exist. That simply shouldn't exist. Argentina and Brazil are cutting down rainforests for giant farms with hundreds of thousands of cows and workers are being exploited and then the meat is sent halfway across the world and we're able to buy it for a fiver.

That shouldn't exist. There's a huge cost, a massive cost, and the cost is human rights and the complete destruction of the environment. So that's all I have time for this week. I suppose this is a bit of a part two from last week's podcast. I'm talking about the same system. I am talking about...in the 1900s you had liberal economics. You had an economic model where the economy is treated like a wild animal. Profit is the only thing that matters. And capitalists can do whatever the fuck they want, whatever they want. And then in the 20th century this was carteled via regulations on business and workers had the right to unionize. And then from the late 70s onwards you get neoliberalism.

The rebirth of these 19th century ideas of unfettered capitalism, with the only thing that matters is profit, where you view the economy like a wild animal. And then regulations get dropped. You've got companies like Uber redefining what a worker can be. Unions don't exist anymore and beef from Argentina costs a fiver. So this is a bit of a part two from last week in a way. What I wanted to focus on more and in greater detail was alienation and meaninglessness. How capitalism Capitalism removes us from meaning.

The food we buy doesn't have meaning. It's just commodities. And also the work that a lot of people does doesn't have meaning. It's a thing that's done to collect wages. And this system results in a feeling of alienation, powerlessness.

I didn't explore that fully this week because I didn't have the fucking time. Two days were taken off me because of the parades. So I'll revisit those themes when I have the time to put in the research and the writing and to deliver it properly. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect to a snail. Dog bless. Can we unlock the power of nature to tackle microplastics? At the University of British Columbia, we believe we can. Dr. Orlando Rojasin team at the Bioproducts Institute are finding cleaner ways to clean microplastics from our drinking water using filters made of natural renewable materials.

At UBC, our researchers are answering today's most pressing questions. To learn how we're moving the world forward, visit ubc.ca slash forward happens here. With the FIZ loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with FIZ. Switch today. Conditions apply.

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