November 9, 2010 San Francisco

Laurie David, well known as the producer of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, appeared at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club to talk about her new book, ‘The Family Dinner”.

As part of the discussion, focused primarily on the benefits of sit down family dinners, Laurie David touched on food issues related to health, diet, meat consumption, and climate.

“Every single thing that we all care about crosses the dinner plate. I mean this is the perfect place where all these issues come together. And the kitchen is the greenest room in your house to start practicing and teaching these values.”

“…our appetite for meat has become gargantuan and absolutely unsustainable”

Selected Excerpts:

“I am a meat reducer. And I honestly – I really hate labels, because they put this pressure on you. You don’t have to put a label on yourself, you just have to find healthier ways to live”

“Today thirty five percent of what we eat everyday is fast food. We’ve doubled our spending on buying food away from the home, and food that’s almost always higher in fat, salt, and sugar. Our obsession with sugary drinks has also doubled in the last three decades, about 10% of the calories our kids consumer every day, the building blocks of their brain, bones, liver and heart, come from soda. And our appetite for meat has become gargantuan and absolutely unsustainable, and what was once a weekly treat is now often inhaled at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I mean it’s impossible to respect what you are eating when you eat so much of it. ”

“Most of us in this room consume 150 times as much chicken as our grandparents did. And 99% of our meat and dairy comes directly to us from filthy factory farms that are devastating our air and water, and where animals are force fed food that is unnatural to their systems, pumped with hormones and antibiotics to make them get bigger faster so they can be slaughtered quicker and sold to us to keep up with the growing demand. That is what we are eating and feeding our kids”

“Animal products are the main source of saturated fats which contribute to a whole host of diseases, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that diet related illnesses is now America’s top killer. We are in the midst of a tsunami of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, allergies. Yale University scientists recently reported that child obesity has tripled over the past thirty years, so today over half of all American kids are now officially classified as overweight. And overweight people have more heart disease, cancer, and are three times more prone to suffer from diabetes.”

“A 2009 Gallup study found diabetes hits one in nine Americans. But that number will soon be outdated. The CDC just released figures warning that by mid century that figure would go to one in three. One in three. So that’s like, look to your right and to your left, one of the three of you will have diabetes. I means that is a huge percentage of our population with a serious, chronic and expensive disease.”

Report by James George