ALTERNATIVES

MARINA BOLOTNIKOVA: After nearly six hours of deliberation, two animal rights activists facing misdemeanor theft charges were acquitted by a California jury. The alleged crime — which the activists freely admitted to — involved taking two sick, slaughter-bound chickens from Foster Farms, one of the biggest poultry companies in the US. Prosecutors called it stealing, but the defendants, Alicia Santurio and Alexandra Paul, both members of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), called it a rescue. Santurio and Paul (the latter a former Baywatch actress and longtime social…

FOOD REVOLUTION NETWORK: From the team that brought you PlantPure Nation, From Food to Freedom tells the story of a live-in immersion program in Greensboro, NC with six participants (and two spouses) diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The 10-day program includes biometric testing, physician supervision, and daily meals. As we go through the immersion, we hear from participants of their past struggles living with such a dreaded disease, and we hear of their hope for a better life. We watch firsthand as they suddenly change their diet from a standard American diet to a whole food plant-based…

DAMIAN CARRINGTON: Climate-heating emissions from food production, dominated by meat, dairy and rice, will by themselves break the key international target of 1.5C if left unchecked, a detailed study has shown. The analysis estimated that if today’s level of food emissions continued, they would result in at least 0.7C of global heating by the end of the century, on top of the 1C rise already seen. This means emissions from food alone, ignoring the huge impact of fossil fuels, would push the world past the 1.5C limit. The study showed that 75% of this food-related heating was driven by foods…

JORDI CASAMITJANA: It was the German philosopher Karl Marx who in the 19th century theorised about how people would inevitably revolt when facing the injustices of the capitalist society. He postulated that in a capitalist industrialised society (like the one he and most people in the West were living in at the time), a revolution of the oppressed class against the ruling class would be inevitable. After the publication of his 1867 book “Das Kapital”, his theories influenced many revolutionaries (such as Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, etc.) If the passing of decades…

COLLECTIVE FASHION JUSTICE: While leather has been used in fashion for millennia, its production today is an ethical and environmental crisis. Today, over 1.4 billion cattle stand on once biodiverse land, confined to feedlots and in planted pasture systems until they are slaughtered for food and leather... While at least some of the environmental impacts of leather production are increasingly acknowledged by the fashion industry, little relating to the impact of leather production on animals themselves is considered or reported on today. Therefore, this report highlights the plethora of…

JOEL MEAD: The UK is in the grip of its largest ever outbreak of bird flu. As its name suggests, avian influenza primarily affects birds, but it can also infect humans and other mammals... Though the UK government currently assesses the risk to the wider public as very low, some strains of bird flu can pass to humans after sustained close contact... As a result of the outbreak, mandatory housing of chickens has been in place in England since November 2022. This means that no eggs produced in England are currently “free-range”. There is no defined end to this situation and as of February,…

UC BERKELEY: With the world's population topping 8 billion last year, it's clear that humans have achieved a unique status in Earth's history. We are the only creature that dominate all other organisms on the planet, from animals and fungi to plants and microbes. It remains to be seen whether humans can retain this dominance as we push the global climate to extremes while driving to extinction the very organisms that we climbed over to get to the top. In a new book, a group of scientists and philosophers places part of the blame on an attitude prevalent among scientists and the general…

SMU: Researchers from Singapore Management University (SMU) have released a study that reveals a positive relationship between people's psychological well-being and their willingness to consume cultivated meat. The research, titled 'Higher well-being individuals are more receptive to cultivated meat: An investigation of their reasoning for consuming cultivated meat', which has been published in international research journal, Appetite, provides the first ever empirical evidence to support this correlation. The research also found that individuals' higher willingness can be motivated by the…

KAREN DAVIS: A fellow activist once asked me if I believed chickens don’t mind watching and hearing other chickens being killed in their presence. He asked because a farmer had told him they don’t mind. Was this true? Lest anyone think that chickens don’t mind hearing and seeing other chickens die violently in front of them, or be grabbed by a predator or otherwise traumatized, nothing could be further from the truth. As a chicken sanctuary director for more than three decades, I’ve seen the effect on chickens of a hawk or a fox and the terror those predators inspire in the birds, including…

VEGCONOMIST: A survey of Chinese consumers in four major cities has revealed immensely positive attitudes towards plant-based meat. Conducted by the School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences at Peking University, the research found that a huge 99.8% of respondents would be willing to buy locally-produced plant-based burgers. 85% had already tried plant-based meat, largely due to a desire to try new things and a belief that plant-based products are healthier. Women, highly educated people, and those with a high income were the most likely to buy plant-based meat. Beijing had the highest…