Knowledge Not Included: Providing the Information Consumers Need
On a flight from Dallas to Bozeman, I kicked back as much as I could in my airplane chair, closed my eyes while resting my head on a neck pillow, and listened to my favorite podcast, “This American Life.”
This American Life has a self-explanatory title, it’s a weekly podcast (which is basically a radio show) about life in America and is produced by Chicago Public Radio. It takes a topic every week then breaks up the show into a few different segments on the topic. This week, the episode was titled “Stuck in the Middle” about “people caught in Limbo using ingenuity and guile to try to get themselves out.”
Audio of the podcast in question is included below.
The opening act featured an interview from a mom, Rachel, who had two sons close in age, Elias and Theo. Elias decided he doesn’t want to eat meat anymore because he loves animals and requests that the whole family follows suit. He gets upset when Theo doesn’t comply to his wishes. Theo says Elias shouldn’t tell him what to do just because he thinks he’s the “The God of Food.”
This story is relevant to the topic “Stuck in the Middle” because Rachel is stuck in the middle of her two sons. This segment goes on to share stories of Theo claiming he will lie to his brother about eating pepperoni pizza, and that he’s going to eat meat when Elias isn’t looking at a party. It’s actually quite comical, but I feel for Rachel.
On the one hand, I’d want to tell Elias to suck it up and eat meat like a regular guy. But, I mean, when your elementary age son says he doesn’t want to eat meat anymore and cries when explaining why because he loves animals so much, how can you argue with that? And while pondering these scenarios in my head on my flight, I realized how relevant this is to our food system today.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, meat requires murder; whether we like the terminology or not, meat requires murder. How is it my place, as a meat enthusiast and semi-rancher (I say semi because I’ve got a desk job, I just help when I can), to tell someone whether or not they should eat an animal if it goes against their morals? I can’t — and even if I did, they wouldn’t listen because you can’t argue morals.
In my opinion, Rachel can’t just make her son eat meat if he has an emotional, moral reason why he doesn’t want to.
The other big thought I had was how funny it is to me that Theo thinks so highly of his older brother that he would lie to him about eating meat.
I never had an older sibling, but I did have an older cousin, Jana, and wow did I want her to think I was the coolest thing since sliced bread. As a kid, if she said anything, I would agree with her blindly.
“I love this song!” she’d say as she turned the radio up in the car.
“Me too,” I’d say in agreement not knowing what some of the words in the song even meant.
“I don’t like olives,” I remember hearing her say one Thanksgiving.
Although I loved black olives, I couldn’t help but agree, “ewh, me neither.” And I didn’t eat another olive until four years later.
I can 110 percent promise you, if Jana had told me she didn’t want to eat meat, I would’ve gone along with it as best as I could until she decided she wanted to change her diet back or until I grew older. And I can also promise you that if deep down, I still wanted to eat meat, I would’ve done it in private and lied if she ever brought it up.
I guess you don’t realize how influential you are on your younger relatives, and how much of an impact your decisions make on them.
This is a huge takeaway from the podcast: set the right example.
However, the big thought I had after listening to Rachel, Theo, and Elias’ segment was this: Rachel didn’t have the tools to correct some of Elias’ misinformed opinions.
One portion of the segment featured Elias talking about how sad he got thinking about the endangerment of Giant Pandas and a certain type of Leopard.
She asked how he thought people treated animals, Elias answered, “well, most of them, not very nice. Like, think about lambs, they get killed for nothing,” then Elias began to weep.
First off: who in the world is eating panda and leopard? No one in the United States, I hope, seeing as it’s illegal.
Second off: Lambs are killed for something.
According to the USDA, from January to July 2021, 72.5 million pounds of lamb were harvested in the US. That’s 72.5 million pounds of nutritious meat sent out into the world for people to eat.
And that’s just data on protein consumption, that’s not including wool production which is actually a benefit for sheep seeing as over time, if not sheared (i.e. shaved) can build up and cause extreme discomfort for the animal.
If Rachel had been provided with the correct information to correct her son, he may have a better understanding of the animal agriculture industry. He may not change his mind and morals, but he may learn exactly why livestock is raised for human consumption and usage.
This is a prime example of why we have ag communicators. Here we have average consumers who, I’m assuming, don’t know much about agriculture other than what they’ve been told. And what have they been told? False information, or rather, half-truths. They haven’t pulled back the curtain to see what really goes on behind the scenes or why it’s even happening. All they see is a heartfelt graphic posted to Instagram, or a short clip produced by PETA.
We need to get to that average consumer; we’ve got to make our target audience that moveable middle. It’s time we realize that when someone walks into a grocery store, they don’t get a kit explaining to them how the products they’re buying are sourced or even why they’re sourced.
Contrary to many gadgets found on Amazon or at Target, batteries (or rather, knowledge) are not included when purchasing food — it’s our job to fix that.
