The Toxic Chemicals Polluting Our Water: Ken Cook On PFAS, Glyphosate, GMOs & More

Amidst the growing concerns over nutritional safety, there is a pressing need for increased awareness about making informed choices and living in a healthy environment. But how can we guarantee the safety of our food, water, and consumer products? Today, I’m speaking with Ken Cook, the President and co-founder of the non-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG). We delve into the organization's pioneering role in digital innovation. EWG’s user-friendly, science-driven tools empower American families to minimize exposure to potential hazards in food, water, cosmetics, and household products. Recognized as a prominent environmental critic, Ken sheds light on the influence of lobbying on environmental policy and the urgent need to rebuild trust in regulatory bodies. Our discussion covers diverse topics, from harmful chemicals in personal care products to the divergent regulatory approaches between Europe and the US. Ken also addresses agricultural subsidies, the farm bill, and the pivotal role of consumer choices in driving positive industry changes. The episode concludes by highlighting EWG’s Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 lists, advocating conscious consumer choices, and recognizing the significant impact of young people in shaping a positive future. Additionally, practical guidance is provided for informed shopping decisions, encouraging using EWG’s valuable resources. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: INSIDE TRACKER: Get 25% OFF tests 👉insidetracker.com/RICHROLL ON: Enjoy 10% OFF 👉ON.com/RICHROLL EIGHT SLEEP: $250 OFF 👉EIGHTSLEEP.com/RICHROLL GO BREWING: 15% OFF with code RICHROLL 👉GOBREWING.com AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs 👉DrinkAG1.com/RICHROLL WAKING UP: FREE Month 👉WAKINGUP.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  We have a nutrition crisis on our hands. We need more fresh food closer to cities, new ways of growing food that conserve soil, and we shouldn't just keep spending money the way we have been.

• 1:17Rich Roll?

  Today, I'm speaking with Ken Cook, the president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  At least 200 million Americans have PFAS chemicals in their finished drinking water right out of the tap at a level that we consider unsafe.

• 1:31Rich Roll?

  We cover specific ways all of us can make better, more informed decisions about the choices we make at the market, taking advantage of the many resources and guides that EWG provides. It was an honor to host a conversation I think you will find quite edifying.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  There are definitely things you can do personally to dramatically reduce your personal exposure to these chemicals.

• 1:53Rich Roll?

  Like, what are we supposed to actually pay attention to?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean...

• 2:01Rich Roll?

  Why don't we just establish what the Environmental Working Group is?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:06Rich Roll?

  And what your mandate is, so people understand the work that you do, that I've admired and respected for quite some time.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Oh, well, thanks.

• 2:14Rich Roll?

  It's really great to have you here.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Oh, it's my pleasure. It means a lot to hear that, Rich, thanks. Well, we're 30 years old. For 30 years, EWG has been around, doing a couple of things. One, we've always had a strong science base, whether we were looking at pesticides in food, or pollutants in air, or soil erosion. We work on a wide range of issues. We have about 75 people on the staff, a lot of scientists, a lot of lawyers, communications specialists, database programmers, and the whole organization really initially was built to bring fresh analysis to policy discussions. We wanted to shape how pesticides were regulated in Washington, how air pollution was regulated,

• 3:00Speaker 01

  how, you know, we were incentivizing farmers to do the right thing, like grow things organically. Our whole world at that time, this is, again, 30 years ago, right? The early 90s. Our worldview was about public policy. And over time, a couple of things happened. One, policy stopped working. Everyone who casts a glance at Washington can see that for some time, we've been in a real paralysis.

• 3:29Rich Roll?

  Is there a rationale for that, that you can point to?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  In the environmental realm, there definitely is. And I think what it comes down to is, in the 70s and early 80s, right up to, you know, the 1990 Clean Air Act, the environmental community was extremely successful, going to Congress with factual information about pollution problems, the need for regulation, the need to protect wilderness areas, the whole range of environmental issues. And... Congress passed laws, laws turned into regulations, industry had to comply and the citizens and consumers benefited. But after a while, the immune system kicked in in this regulated communities.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  You know, big oil, big food, big ag, utilities and so forth. And the pushback really started, I feel, when George Bush the first signed the Clean Air Act in 1990. My good friend Bill Riley, who was EPA Administrator at the time, made that happen. And I feel like there was a really strong response from, you know, powers that really ranged from the Koch Brothers, who were concerned about what impact it might have on their industry, to utilities. Like, do we really want Republican presidents signing environmental regulation types of laws, big powerful sweeping laws like the Clean Air Act?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  And I think you saw from then on, a huge investment in everything that could be managed to shape public policy. More money spent on lobbying, more campaign contributions, more lobbyists. I mean, to go in some of these rooms that we go into now, Rich, in Washington, where we're fighting over something like the farm bill that's before us this year, that will reauthorize, will freshen up, modernize the law that was last past five years ago. It'll set subsidies, it'll set food stamp rules, it'll do all kinds of stuff. These rooms are now dominated by these super powerful groups, the Farm Bureau, the commodity organizations, the big food companies.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  They have a throw weight that's way beyond what the public interest community has. And so, what we saw beginning in the 90s, as the pace of environmental laws slowed down, we weren't passing them, we couldn't pass the Clean Air Act today.

• 5:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  We couldn't pass the Endangered Species Act today. I don't think we could establish EPA today.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  If Nixon hadn't established.

• 6:03Rich Roll?

  That's frightening. So the stranglehold that K Street lobbying efforts have upon our elected officials who are elected by dint of campaign finance laws that allow these organizations.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 6:21Rich Roll?

  To fund them and an electorate that's based on gerrymandered districts creates, you know, a stagnation or a paralysis against the kind of progress and innovation that I would assume most consumers want and most likely these elected representatives would choose, you know, otherwise for.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think that there's, there's the two realities. One is the reality that you, you face when you meet, get to know some of these members, Republicans and Democrats alike, where they basically are saying, look, I, I'd like to do it, but I can't. I even go so far as to say, I agree with you, but it's not where the party is. The most serious lock, and I say this as an organization that assiduously works to be bipartisan and works with, you know, conservative groups in Washington, it really, it really comes down to a lock on the ideology in the Republican Party that, that it has to be

• 7:26Speaker 01

  against regulation, has to be against climate change, has to be against, you know, constraining agriculture or chemical industries. They bake that in, in the primary process before you even get a run for the office in the general election. And that's the change I've noticed. I mean, we used to lobby with Republican senators and members in the, you know, 80s and 90s and, you know, they, they wanted the same things that Democratic colleagues wanted. They, sometimes they wouldn't go as far. There were conservative Democrats that didn't want to go as far, but the, the dynamic in Washington became so, so frozen, so paralyzed. But then the second thing that happened, so first is the paralysis that shaped the organization.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  The other thing that changed us in the opposite direction, that makes it a good time to be an environmentalist, is all the energy that's.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  You know, been freed up in the private sector to get things done with, without waiting for government regulations. So it's, it's now the case that, you know, consumers learn about things directly on the internet.

• 8:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's matched with consumer enthusiasm for this information and a free, a more free-flowing source, source of that information to empower the consumer's choice.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, look at the people that you, through your work, have empowered. You know, that, you're teaching people, encouraging people, shaping their worldview with information that they freely come to you requesting, and so much better off in terms of following your advice than they would be if they waited for the government to tell them what to do, right? I mean, the whole area of nutrition, to me, has been frozen for many years by the politics in DC. But around that have come voices like yours and others, authentic voices, evidence-based voices, who are showing people another way.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Sometimes drives food companies crazy, drives the nutrition sector, the, you know, formal profession, a little crazy. But, you know, I was debating someone the other day, and nutritionists who said, "We're making too much of these pesticides in food. Maybe we're scaring people off by EWG talking about pesticides in fruits and vegetables." And I said, "Well, you know, we really do try and tell people the most important thing is to eat fruits and vegetables, and the pesticides are the second thing to worry about."

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  But don't, don't substitute an apple for a Twinkie. But my comeback was, where has your profession been that we're still at the place where Americans aren't eating nearly enough fruits and vegetables? That's been the mainstream nutrition community's avowed goal, is to diversify what's on your plate, you know, eat a not entirely plant-based diet, but invest your nutritional energy much more into a plant-based diet. And it hasn't, it hasn't happened. The forces that are making that happen are forces like you and others who are out there basically saying, "Hey, look, there's plenty of evidence here, and if you can't get the school system to respond, or you can't get..."

• 10:47Speaker 01

  The hospitals to respond to the other institutions, there's still a way to make this happen and it's happening around them. So we found that with personal care products. We rate them. We found great companies wanting to do the right thing. We found it with organic food. The organic food sector has exploded now. It's a $60 billion industry. When I first started working on it back in the 70s and 80s, you know, you had to, you really had to hunt for organic food. You usually ended up in a co-op.

• 11:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're in a weird macrobiotic, you're sort of, you know, sawdust floored, you know, hippie, you know, kind of place. Like that, that's where you had to go to get your, you know, quote unquote, like, healthy food and...

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And it looked like hell, usually.

• 11:32Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, it was a far cry from, you know, Erawan.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And now, you know, there are some shortcomings with the organic standard, of course, but, you know, you've got organic fruits and vegetables in every major grocery store. Some stores have their own in-house brands, Kroger, Safeway, others. It's just, that all came about from the outside. That was not the nutrition profession guiding the way. This all came about because people wanted to live a different way.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  Right. As Senator Booker says, "Change doesn't come from Washington, it comes to Washington." So all of this consumer enthusiasm, obviously, shifts markets over time. And there's something to be, obviously, celebrated about that. All of the information that's empowering people with these tools and the work that you do that is very specifically telling people, "Stay away from this. Here's a better option." All these, you know, kind of reports that you generate that help guide these choices are amazing. But I think it's still important...

• 12:37Rich Roll?

  To, you know, reestablish a level of trust in the institutions and in these regulatory bodies, because a lot of that consumer enthusiasm is the result of a loss of trust in the FDA, the USDA, the EPA.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 12:59Rich Roll?

  And you know, you're a watchdog on these organizations and you're also a partner with them to try to produce change, but that lack of, that lack of trust isn't great either. Like, that has to, that has to be somehow repaired.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I completely agree. It's a crisis. And it, you know, it predates the current situation where you have, you know, some, some pretty wild conspiracy ideas that have gripped a big part of the population. It predates that, and I, I think the wearing down of that trust tends to benefit special interests. If the government can't be trusted to do the right thing, maybe we should stop the government from doing anything at all. And you're certainly right. I mean, we, we, when we saw that the regulatory and legislative process was slowing down and not getting us the results, and saw the potential for going, you know, working with

• 13:56Speaker 01

  the private sector directly, we were excited about that, but we've never given up, you know, we spend our lobbying limit every year.

• 14:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Because we refuse to give up.

• 14:06Rich Roll?

  And you are, you're a lobbying endeavor yourself.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:09Rich Roll?

  You're just a nonprofit version of that.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  We're a nonprofit.

• 14:11Rich Roll?

  Your funding is, is contributions and grants?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll tell you exactly where it comes from. We get it, we have about a $14 million budget. About 3 million of that comes from, directly online, from donors who give maybe 20, 25 bucks on average. About 3 or 4 million comes from foundations. Another 3 or 4 million comes from major donors, people of means who write checks above $1,000. And then, a certain amount of it, but not very much, comes from our licensing and certification program, where we, we feel like we have to charge the companies. We can't really charge our, our donors to help a company make money, but, so we, we charge a fee to review their products, review the ingredients, and put our mark on it. It's a modest amount of money, but it's, it, it...

• 15:00Speaker 01

  It pays for the scientists who are doing the work. Instead of having to go to a donor and say, hey, can you help this company out? They want to bring a new product to market. We can't, that's not really kosher. So, so that's the, you know, that's the balance for us. We're still a small organization, but we, you know, we're constantly on Capitol Hill. We're in Sacramento. We're trying to hold these political leaders, these government officials accountable. And we can never give up on that. Even as we see that the private sector can kind of goad things along. I'll tell you, I'll tell you what happened with personal care products. We, for years, we built this database people can go to online and look at the safety of personal care products. It's called Skin Deep. It's the EWG site.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  We have about 80,000 plus products that we rate on there. And we rate thousands of ingredients in those products. And we put it together. This brilliant woman who started the process at EWG 20, almost 20 years ago, Jane Houlihan. She said, if we can show Congress how few regulations are really affecting these ingredients, some of which are worrisome, maybe, you know, make policy change. And some, one of the ingredients was these phthalates. And there was a CDC study that showed these were toxic chemicals showing up in the blood of women of childbearing age. And that's what really got Jane's attention. And the CDC scientists said, well, they might be coming from personal care products.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And we're like, what? Is that an environmental source now? We had never thought of it, Rich. We'd never, we thought of air pollution coming out of smokestacks or, or tailpipes or pollution coming off a farm field or, you know, wafting off of a pesticide spray. No, personal care. That's what they said. And so it was worrisome enough for them to study it. So we built the database and it shook up the industry, but not in the way we exactly expected. We weren't thinking, at least I wasn't thinking at the time, that we'd start attracting consumers. We thought we were going to take this pile of evidence up to Capitol Hill and they were going to say, you know, you're right. We haven't really tightened regulations here since the New Deal.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Maybe it's time for a makeover of the personal care products industry, for the makeup industry. But when we started seeing all these people coming onto the site, and now we get about a thousand people an hour who just go to that one property, Skin Deep, and look up ingredients, they go through their makeup case. When we saw that happening, we thought, well, that's interesting. That's starting to shape the market. It's showing up in Amazon reviews. We were not a consumer-facing group at that point. We were still policy nerds, marching to the agencies in the Hill. And then the next thing we knew, we started getting calls from companies saying, hey, you know, I rate really well in your database. I'm using all clean stuff. Thank you.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I'm glad to have the rating. It was, you know, we rated them no matter what. They weren't giving us any money. And they said, you know, we want to make sure we stay green. Let us know if you're going to make any changes. We want to stick with your program. It's become our marketing. And then the industry started saying internally, well, maybe we should negotiate with these folks on policy issues because a lot of our companies are starting to say, this is an important source of information for our market, for our consumers. So the whole thing turned out to be, you know, sort of a backwards way to go into

• 18:37Speaker 01

  the policy process where we started lobbying with food companies on food issues. We started lobbying with personal care products on our agenda. I mean, we, you know, we met in the middle, but it was progress. And that's how we're passing laws now in California. We're sitting down with the private sector first and saying, hey, we just banned four... Sketchy food ingredients, it'll, well, it'll, if Newsom signs the bill, it's on his desk now, four sketchy food additives that should have been banned long ago and are banned in Europe, but FDA hasn't done a thing.

• 19:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Now they're going to be banned and the food industry by and large came along and said, "Okay, we can live with that."

• 19:18Rich Roll?

  That's so interesting. Yeah, along with this pivot of your, your organization to be more consumer facing with these reports that

• 19:25Speaker 01

  It opened us up.

• 19:26Rich Roll?

  basically inform these decisions. Yeah, it's fantastic.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then they, and those same consumers, they'll send emails, they make phone calls, they're on our email list now, right? So we've kind of found another way to empower them. And the people who are most engaged with our website are often the people who are most engaged and say, "Yeah, I'll, I'll call Sacramento. I'll call my member of Congress in Washington." Yeah.

• 19:48Rich Roll?

  With respect to so many of these products, particularly in the beauty and cosmetic space, as you were sharing that, I was reflecting on my friend Greg Renfrew, who's been on the podcast, founder of Beauty Counter, and she's just an amazing, you know, kind of

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Force of nature.

• 20:06Rich Roll?

  warrior in this space.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:07Rich Roll?

  And her story of realizing when she had babies, that there were thousands of chemicals that were finding their way into all of these products and it was essentially unregulated. There's no burden of proof on the corporate entities to establish any level of safety. It's a sort of react and see approach where if something percolates up and there seems to be, you know, a flare of something negative happening with, as a result of the use of these products, then we'll take a look. To me, the burden of proof is upside down. There should be a burden of proof on these companies to establish some agreed upon level

• 20:49Rich Roll?

  of safety before they find their way into these products. That is not the case. So my, the first part of my question is, is that a pipe dream or is there a way to work towards that? And then secondarily to that, It creates an incentive structure that's also upside down where there's no incentive for these companies to invest in safety.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Quite the opposite.

• 21:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Don't study, you might find problems.

• 21:13Rich Roll?

  Until you address that, it's sort of like you're dealing with symptoms, but that's the root cause of so much of the harm is just the way the whole establishment is constructed from the get-go.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. Now, well, this is, again, the personal care industry and there are lots of them. And you, when you talk to, you know, regular people, it's hard for them to believe in many cases that something that's on the shelf at CVS that you're going to put on your baby, shampoo or skincare or whatever, much less on your own skin, that is going to penetrate your skin, we find these chemicals, we've tested people for them, they are in your blood, hard for people to believe that that happens without government approval.

• 21:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Of the ingredients or the final products. And neither one of them have, as you say, pre-market safety testing. What Greg did, and it was inspiring to us, we've worked with, Greg is speaking at our conferences later this year, we consider her one of our dear friends and an inspiration. You know, when Greg was first talking about Beauty Counter and we were changing, exchanging notes on what we did, we, you know, we basically said, "Look, we will help you any way we can with your standard," but the thing she did was she said, "I'm going to set for my company these tough standards. There are certain things, there's no way I'm going to use it even though it's the standard in the industry, everyone uses it.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I'm going to go beyond that and try and formulate to even safer standards." The fact that she did that and made it work, and she's not alone, I mean, my, our board member Michelle Pfeiffer did the same thing with Fine Fragrance. Amazing accomplishment because that's a, that's a category of personal care product that is completely a black box. You put the word fragrance on a personal care product or a cleaning product and that can hide hundreds of chemicals. And Michelle said, "I'm going to put that name..."

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And then I'm going to tell everybody what all the chemicals are. No one, she could hardly find anyone to work with her. These fragrance houses were like, you're crazy.

• 23:23Rich Roll?

  It's crazy that you can just put fragrance on there and say no more.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Say no more. That's it. That's in law. That's enshrined in law still. But, you know, people like Greg, Michelle, Shazi Visram, I mean, so many other of these brilliant entrepreneurs, that's who we started hearing from. And I'm thinking, you know, they're aiming for the same thing that I'm aiming for. They just happen to be for profit. So I'm going to, I want to take a chance and start getting to know them better and talking to them. And, you know, it's not like we're making products ourselves. We're, we're basically taking a look at their products and saying, hey, you know, this is, this is really good stuff. This meets our toughest standard.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And that, I think, is what is so exciting about being an environmentalist now. It's happening in energy with rooftop solar. Of course, the utilities are fighting back. It's happening with organic in food and now, you know, it advances and to make organic even tougher. The food industry is freaked out about it. They don't like the idea of something springing up that they can't buy or control that would start to shape consumer perceptions about all the rest of the food. It's happening in personal care. It's happening in cleaners. So mainly in consumer-facing sectors, there is this real potential now to drive change deeper and faster with respect to health.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  And I think we'll get there with sustainability. We'll get there with plastics. That consumer awareness, that cultural awareness could not be stopped in the way that big industry was stopping regulation and law. You can't stop the culture.

• 25:08Rich Roll?

  Right. And this realization that you could work hand in hand with the private sector, is that what gave rise to the EWG verification program?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly it, yeah.

• 25:19Rich Roll?

  And is that, I know that's a rigorous sort of standard that you set and companies can, you know, sort of go through that process. And if they successfully come out the other side, you enumerate them in this list. Is that also something that can be put on a label on the product?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 25:37Rich Roll?

  Okay, I didn't, that's actually something I didn't know. And then that's, my broader question is around labeling in general and how

• 25:45Rich Roll?

  You know, that gets weaponized as well.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 25:47Rich Roll?

  Through these greenwashing campaigns.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Gets gamed.

• 25:49Rich Roll?

  To the point where.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:50Rich Roll?

  It's meaningless. And now, you can pick up a product, and there's so many labels on it. It's like, I don't know which one of these I should be paying attention to, if any of them. And so, because there's so many, even if your label is on a product amongst those other ones, it has a diluting effect on it.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's right.

• 26:09Rich Roll?

  Like, what are we supposed to actually pay attention to?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, here's how I look at them. Because I, you know, I know it's in our standard, what's behind EWG Verified.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And I compare the way we make that known to people to the way others do. And some of them are pretty simple. You know, no animal testing, the PETA label is pretty straightforward. But some of the other ones are trickier. What I do is I look to see, have they spelled out in great detail what the standard means? And we do that. We publish it. We've been, you know, when we put it out there, it can be copied then, or, you know, cherry picked a little bit. But we didn't think there was any other way than to have 40 pages of detail about our standard. Secondly, we have staff scientists doing the work. This is not a marketing program like some of these certifications are.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  We have staff scientists who are digging into, you know, tough questions. A lot of these ingredients, because they're not regulated, when you're not regulated, you don't have a battery of studies in some government agency that anyone can look at. It's, sometimes there's no data at all. Or maybe there will be an independent study or an academic somewhere who's studied this chemical as it's inhaled by workers, but hasn't studied it as it occurs in a skincare product.

• 27:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Well, what do you do? Well, we try and figure out the toxicology and the exposure as best we can in great detail. Takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort, and that's what companies who come into the process, some of whom halfway in wonder why they started, but it's very, it's very tough to get our mark. You don't get to write a check and get it by any means. But, but I think that's the trick. We're in a kind of a Wild West now with certifications, just like the market we're trying to correct, right? There's all these certifiers out there, all these standards out there. Some of them I look at and I don't think they're very robust. I look at the organizations, I don't see a staff of scientists, they're not publishing

• 28:17Speaker 01

  in the peer-reviewed literature, they're not, they don't have PhDs or master's degrees in a relevant discipline. And it worries me that, that those are out there. I can't do much about it except to make our standard, you know, more rigorous and talk more companies into trying to take a crack at it.

• 28:36Rich Roll?

  Other than EWG verification, is there, are there labels out there? I'm just thinking of the consumer, like what, so if somebody's listening to this and they're going to the supermarket later today, which labels are meaningful?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I think the organic label is meaningful. Once you understand what the standard does and doesn't do, I'll give you the example of pesticides. When we've tested and others have tested produce for pesticides, when organic produce is tested, it's very rare to find any toxic chemical on it. So I trust that standard with respect to pesticides or questions about some of the animal welfare issues that we have too. We've been supporting efforts to strengthen animal welfare standards. Nothing in there about energy, nothing in there about labor, nothing in there about packaging. It's just how the food is literally grown. And even there, there are some areas that people take issue with. But I, I bring

• 29:33Speaker 01

  organic food home to my family, to my son and my, my wife. And my wife does the same. The, I think the, the EWG standard is robust. I think some of the retail-based standards are a little less rigorous by some of the chains. I don't want to name any of them, but some of the companies that have announced that they're going to have sustainability standards is sometimes pretty hard. In my view, and our staff's view, to trace exactly what they mean by sustainability, how rigorously they review them, and so forth. So, I wish I could, I don't feel comfortable going down the list, but...

• 30:15Rich Roll?

  I get it, and it's hard, it's hard, because on the one hand, you could have a certification that is good and rigorous, but it doesn't account for all these other things that are also important.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 30:27Rich Roll?

  All of the distribution of this product, and how the workers were treated, you know, this is like, and the onus being on the consumer to figure that out for themselves is insane. Like, we need order to this process.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I'll give you a good example. Some years ago, there was, there was a lot of emphasis on making sure that organic growers had union labor, and that they obeyed, would abide by laws affecting immigrant labor. And, we certainly agreed with that, but our position was, well, we need the bigger fix, so that the whole food system is playing by rules that make sense. We should, we shouldn't have...

• 31:13Rich Roll?

  A piecemeal.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, we shouldn't be letting them cut corners, and we shouldn't expect huge problems like that to just be solved by one, still reasonably small, segment of the food industry. So, in my view, that's where you have to step back and say, hey, we, we cannot step away from the policy process. We need to fix our immigration laws, we need to fix minimum wage, we need to fix all of these things. As a society, we don't work on all of those at EWG. Some issues cry out, you know, public health issues, like gun violence. As a public health advocate, it hits me pretty hard when I read about these outrageous incidents

• 31:59Speaker 01

  of gun violence, but we don't work on that. But, but we, that needs to be worked on at the societal level, and I feel the same way about all aspects of pollution control, food safety, and so forth. We just have to not let...

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Ourselves think that we can shop our way out of these problems. There are some of them that are too big and too rooted. And we don't want to just retreat behind our walls. Whether it's middle class or above can be tempting to do. We all know that temptation and not look at the rest of the world and how it's faring. But the rest of the world, it turns out, does catch up. It's the world we live in. We haven't found another planet yet. And until we do, we need air pollution control that protects, you know, people who are near refineries and near highways. We need protection for farm workers. We need more organic or safer pesticides to protect them in the fields.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  All of these things don't tend to get embraced in individual product standards, or at least at the scale that we need to protect all those people.

• 33:10Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 33:20Rich Roll?

  With the increasing edification and awareness of consumers all across the world comes this broadening awareness of just how toxic our planet is. From the glyphosate that is in our breakfast cereal to the PFOS forever chemical that is found in our drinking water to a shocking extent. That can in turn lead to a sense of despair or paralysis. Like, this problem is too big. There's chemicals of varying degrees of toxicity in everything I put in my body and everything I put in, you know, in my body. What is somebody to do? And, you know, I'm thinking about, have you read Darren O'Leary's book Fatal Conveniences?

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yes, of course, yeah.

• 34:04Rich Roll?

  Of course, he canvases all of this. He has solutions and strategies for how to, you know, make better choices and live better within that. But it's, it is, you know, despairing.

• 34:16Rich Roll?

  To read this and realize that there is almost no product that we purchase that has any contact with our body that we shouldn't have a graver concern about.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need to be aware. And sometimes the awareness itself is too heavy a lift and so people tune out, I get that. Sometimes people who have been in the field a long time kind of burn out because they feel like, "Well, look, we're just not getting the progress we need in Washington or maybe Sacramento. And so I'm just going to, you know, do my very best in my personal life and my circle of friends, my family." I get that. That's, you know, I'm not so far off from those feelings. I went on a vacation earlier this year, it's to Hawaii, and we had just done a study where

• 35:10Speaker 01

  our scientists read through the literature for evidence of these PFAS chemicals, per and polyfluoral alkyl substances. These are the Teflon chemicals, the Scotchgard chemicals, the brand names, that are created in such a way that they never break down, the forever chemicals, the term you used. And we had just surveyed PFAS chemicals in wildlife around the world, looked at over 330 species, and found it in all of them. And so I'm on vacation in Hawaii and I'm, you know, I'm taking a break from work, I'm there with my son.

• 35:50Rich Roll?

  But Hawaii is the front lines of this battlefield. Right. Go ahead, sorry. I don't mean to like...

• 35:56Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 35:57Rich Roll?

  ...your story.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, you know, the first afternoon, we go whale watching, I'm thinking, "Well, okay, yeah, we found PFAS in all those species of whales." And I'm looking at the birds flying around as we birdwatch from our condo and yeah, and then I'm looking at the fish on my plate that's caught fresh in the waters off the coast of Hawaii. And there's this, our footprint is everywhere. The human footprint is ubiquitous on this planet, even in places where no human foot has ever been, right? And so here's my take on it. First of all...

• 36:38Speaker 01

  There are definitely things you can do personally to dramatically reduce by thousands and thousands of exposure events every year, your personal exposure, your family's exposure, your friends, if they'll listen to you, exposure to these chemicals. You have agency to do that. The second thing is, that agency, if it's applied on a wide enough basis, does start sending signals to C-suites and marketers and others, and they start reformulating. Sometimes they do it reluctantly, and there are big fights. Sometimes they resist it, but that force is being exerted out there, and in many cases, it's being felt. The example

• 37:22Speaker 01

  I always give, rooftop solar. The utilities are freaked out about the only competition they've ever had for the past 100 years, which is their former customers putting panels on their roof and now putting batteries there, and they're fighting against it. We're involved in fights all over the country, certainly in California and North Carolina. So, that is being felt. The final thing is, and this is the toughest thing, in a way, that if you stay out of the fight, you're much more likely to give up, I think, than if you get in it, a little bit. So, put a little skin in the game. Pick an issue, pick an organization,

• 38:04Speaker 01

  pick someone whose story you've heard. Maybe it's something you've heard here about PFAS and the work EWG's doing. Maybe it's something an animal welfare group is doing. I don't care what it might be. Put a little skin in the game. You know, make a commitment that you're going to flex some civic muscles, right? You're going to... I don't know what Iron Man is for civil society. Maybe we should invent that.

• 38:30Rich Roll?

  Turning it into your own endurance event.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you train a little bit for it, right? You have some failures, you get some injuries, you fall short, but if we step back and give up...

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Our societal engagement, our civic engagement, then, then nothing will ever change. And even though it's overwhelming, even though we have screwed so many things up, whether it's endangered species, or plastic in the oceans, or PFAS in all of us, it's in newborn babies. We find PFAS in, in babies and lots of other chemicals when they come into the world, and not just here, all over the world. And what is the PFAS, the forever chemicals, do to the body? Well, the weird thing about this class of chemicals is that as they've been studied, we've found more health endpoints. There, it's linked to certain cancers, it disrupts

• 39:22Speaker 01

  our hormone system, it can affect the efficacy of vaccines and other medicines, it can cause other forms of, of damage, birth defects. It's, it's unusual for a chemical to have that many health endpoints. And we, we know that they're there because of studies that were done of the community that we first studied in West Virginia around the Teflon plant that DuPont ran for years. And there was a class action suit, and the brilliant lawyer, Rob Bellot, who's been a dear friend for 20-plus years, he decided to go to the,

• 40:05Speaker 01

  to the class and say, "Look, we've got a settlement offer, but instead of taking the settlement offer in cash, how about we do this? How about we do a study? And we empanel three scientists to look at all the evidence, we collect evidence, we collect blood from all these people, and let's find out if there are links to any diseases." And to their credit, these folks in West Virginia said, "Let's, yeah, let's get to the truth." Well, there's your civic action there. That's, there's your commitment to the long game instead of taking the cash. Yeah. That's, that's like, that's some Erin Brockovich shit. Exactly, exactly. And, and Erin's been a, a close ally for decades too. And she

• 40:47Speaker 01

  works in the same way. And so, that study showed...

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Problems with cancer, problems with the endocrine system, hypertension, all kinds of things that only came about because thousands and thousands of people gave their blood, measured the PFAS levels, and then they gave detailed medical records that allowed the epidemiologists to say, hey, you know, there's a relationship here.

• 41:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, wow, wow, that's powerful.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Biggest study ever in the world of a toxic chemical on human health.

• 41:20Rich Roll?

  Wow. Your critics accuse you of fear mongering.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:25Rich Roll?

  These chemicals are in such minute doses that, you know, it's hardly something to be concerned about. So I want to give you an opportunity to respond to that. But just to contextualize it, the way that I reframed how I think about this is courtesy of Darren, who said, sure, but think about what you do every single day from the moment you get up until your head hits the pillow. How many products your body comes into contact with, from drinking out of the tap, to the toothpaste, to the cereal, to the, you know, the, the, the plastic container that contains whatever beverage, you know, it's like, you're

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  just, you're just impaled by inputs, you know, hundreds of times a day. So your body is slowly accumulating micro doses of all of these things. And each and each, each, you know, in isolation, perhaps your body could metabolize them and process them without harm, except for the forever chemicals. They're forever chemicals because they accumulate and never go away. But at some point, your body reaches a threshold where the inputs become too much for the body to do anything about. And that's where you start to enter the world of harm. So how do you think about that? What is your, what is your response to that criticism?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it, I, you know, we, we feel it's really important to face that criticism head on because of what we just finished discussing, which is people getting paralyzed. So what would be, it would be a very easy response for people to say, look, you know, This is, I feel healthy now, we're living into our 70s, you know, I'm doing fine. Maybe these doses are too low.

• 43:12Rich Roll?

  I've been using Windex and Clorox my entire life.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:16Rich Roll?

  Tide or whatever.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Of course, you know, a certain, a fairly large percentage of people who are heavy smokers don't get lung cancer either. So, you know, it's interesting. We usually roll out a couple of arguments. Let me go to the one that you so eloquently described. This incredible mixture of chemicals that we know is in us because we've measured it in people's blood. It's not like a model that we've extrapolated. You know, we've done blood testing at EWG, sent it to labs and found hundreds of chemicals in newborn babies. And we know that adults have even more. So the first thing to say is, if you ask industry what that means, they will say nothing. We regulate chemicals one at a time.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  If I want to put a pesticide on the market, I don't care what's already in your body, what's already on the market, what else you might be exposed to if that pesticide and if it's an insecticide. It kills insects through their nervous system. It doesn't give the insects cancer. You know, it kills them right away. So what other neurotoxics do you have, are you exposed to? Are you exposed to lead paint in an old home? Or are you exposed to, do you have trace levels of PCBs in your blood from where you used to live? All of these things, industry's official view is, it's too complex to study. There's, we don't have evidence that these specific combinations because we can never

• 44:46Speaker 01

  really, you know, we can never-

• 44:49Rich Roll?

  There's too many variables.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Model them, yeah. And so, let's just put that aside. Well, real scientists don't put that aside. What real scientists say is, that looks bad. We ought to be doing something about that. So the first, the first thing I remind people of is, we don't really look at the real world, the stew of chemicals you have in you. The second thing I remind people of is- Have you, have you heard recently about a chemical getting banned? And most people have. Pesticides from time to time are banned. There's a whole list of them that EPA has banned over the years. And in every single case, EPA, the pesticide industry, and the companies that made the

• 45:35Speaker 01

  products that had the pesticides in them, in every single case, they said it was safe. Right up until the time it was banned. Mm-hmm. And then it's not safe. Well, it was never safe. The science didn't catch up. The industry pushed back against the regulators. We know that there are chemicals in our bodies now that regulators haven't gotten to, and we know they're of concern. When will they get to them? And maybe you don't want to wait, so I might be accused of fear mongering, but I would say, "Look, there are several chemicals. Glyphosate is one of them. I happen to think you should probably not have in your body. I think you should take steps to avoid it. Don't eat oat-based products that are conventional if they have glyphosate in them.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Eat organic. And you eliminate almost all the dietary exposure right there. Why not do it? And, and recognize that EPA might change their mind on glyphosate at any time. And when they do, unless you've been eating organic, you've been following EPA's advice, and you've been exposed to a lot of chemicals. And then the final, the final thing I, I mention is, look, don't, don't take my word for it. Look at the scientific professions and see what they say. What does the Neurological Society of America say at this point? The president of it has, has come out and gave her a presidential presentation a year

• 47:01Speaker 01

  ago at their convention, and it was on environmental chemicals and the impact they might be having on our nervous system. Look at the Endocrine Society. That's, that's 20,000 or so clinicians, scientists, researchers, and so forth. It's who you go to. If you think you have a, a, you know, some sort of hormone...

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Mediated health problem. That's who you see. You see an endocrinologist. The statements on their website about endocrine active chemicals, synthetic chemicals that are acting in our body and fooling our body into thinking that they are hormones and they're not. And they're causing all kinds of problems. They have a major platform and they work with us all the time to try and strengthen protection against these chemicals that the industry officially, until recently, said, "It's not even a thing." The scientists who study it say it's a thing, but the industries who make it say it's not. I trust the scientists who are concerned about our health.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Same with the Academy of Pediatrics, you know, American Lung Association. All these professional associations have reached conclusions about environmental chemicals that basically comes down to this. We're not doing the job we need to do to regulate these chemicals, as you said earlier, Rich, before they come onto the market. And once we're exposed to them, we're exposed to them in combination with many other chemicals. You probably, as clean as I know you eat and live, if we did a blood draw, I know we'd find PFAS in your body now, right? Because it's probably been there. The half-life is maybe for most of them about four or five years. If you get a fresh dose, four or five years before you get rid of half of that.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Then you would have PCBs that are left over from decades ago when Monsanto put them in electrical transformers to insulate. You'd still have some DDT in your body, even though you've eaten organic probably for, I don't know, decades.

• 49:04Rich Roll?

  When was DDT banned?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  DDT was banned in 1970.

• 49:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  But it's still in the soil and in some places they still grow in those places. So the point really is, look, if there are smart ways you can, in your personal life, avoid these exposures, and that's what EWG tries to do, personal care, food. We go through every room in your house, mattresses, everything. We basically say, "Look, if you are concerned about this, and we think there's reason to be concerned, here are some options you can follow in your everyday life." Sometimes, the options aren't great, because it has to be done by law and regulation, but there are many where you can clean up. And so, why not do that?

• 49:50Speaker 01

  And why is industry pushing back so hard against every single regulation? We're finally about to start regulating, and then I'll open up to your next question. These PFAS chemicals are in water all over the country. We did a peer-reviewed paper that estimated at least 200 million Americans have PFAS chemicals in their drink, finished drinking water, right out of the tap, that at a level that we consider is unsafe. And we think one part per trillion is the most you should have, not billion, per trillion, right? EPA has come out now with a proposal that's very close to where we are.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  They're saying, for a group of these compounds, the legal limit that would require action by the water supplier should be four parts per trillion. So, this is a really important scientific threshold and regulatory threshold that industry is fighting back against very hard. Because if that level is set there, that means the science underneath it is accepted by the agency, and it is, they believe it's that dangerous, it should be basically gone from the water altogether. Industry's fighting back very hard, because what that says is that all along, this stuff has been much more dangerous than industry let on.

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, I read your water and PFAS report, and it's quite shocking, the extent to which this crisis is much larger than one might imagine. 26 million people in hundreds of communities have toxic forever chemicals, these PFAS molecules, in drinking water. You guys estimate there could be nearly 30,000 industrial polluters releasing PFAS into the environment, including into sources of drinking water.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know who's gotten hammered the worst? And these are the people who we should... Be honoring, not dissing with this kind of behavior is first responders, firefighters.

• 51:58Rich Roll?

  They're getting the maximum.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  They're getting hammered because this PFAS stuff is in their ready gear. And for many of them, they go through exercises where you're putting out a liquid fire, a fuel fire. Well, what for years people sprayed on it and still do is chemicals that have PFAS in them. Fire retardants that have PFAS in it that helps put out the fire.

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  The PFAS ends up in the water due to the discharge of industrial pollutants that's not properly contained, stored, and disposed of.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  It's all kinds of sources. It's these abandoned sites that had PFAS dumped in them. That happened in West Virginia. It's the air bases that our military are near where they've done drills and our service members are drinking the toxic water with their families when they're stationed at those bases. It's manufacturers like Wolverine that dumped their excess waterproofing materials in a way that polluted drinking water all over Michigan, on and on. It was carelessness. It was a lack of regulation and oversight. It was a moral failing, I think, on the part of the companies, time and again.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  We only really find out the truth of these things, not through a regulatory process, which should be the way it works, but through litigation. Some trial lawyer takes a company to court and they win a discovery fight. They get documents from those companies that the companies never wanted to see the light of day. Those documents come out and we see, as we saw in the case of DuPont and its Teflon chemical, 3M and its Scotchgard chemical. We see it in the case of fuel additives like MTBE, on and on. We saw it with tobacco. The companies knew. The companies knew, their own scientists knew that these chemicals were harmful.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  And at some point, when the executives were confronted with the decision, are we going to stop making it or make it differently, shift to something else?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  The decision was made, no, there's just too goddamn much money to be made. Let's keep doing it until, until we can't.

• 54:11Rich Roll?

  But if there was ever a bipartisan issue, it's clean drinking water.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  You would think, right?

• 54:16Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:16Rich Roll?

  And, and, and can't we construct, um, you know, criminal penalties that are so punitive that it would, that it would insulate against any, any kind of wayward decision on behalf of a, you know, industry or a corporation to cut corners and pollute in this way?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  I think criminal penalties are totally appropriate. It's been attempted, for example, uh, the, uh, George Bush, the second Bush, his justice department tried to take asbestos executives to court.

• 54:48Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and had difficulty prevailing. Um, but I think it should be, uh, there should be a criminal, uh, element to these executives who see these questions in front of them, this evidence in front of them, and don't do anything about it. But what ends up happening is, once they see the evidence, they try and hide it even longer. Uh, and they try and push back. I mean, if you, if you look at the testimony from, for example, 3M, uh, their internal documents show all kinds of health problems with their chemical that was used in Scotch Guard. Their public statements are, there's no evidence of human harm.

• 55:26Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I think that absolutely should be the case, and I think we should make sure that when this information comes out, that regulators pay attention to it. It helped make the case for these PFAS chemicals, the fact that finally the information came out, and the way it came out was, not because the company submitted it to EPA, but because this lawyer, Rob Bala, in West Virginia, he won the cases. In the civil actions he took in West Virginia, and then he sent the documents to EPA that DuPont and 3M should have sent decades earlier.

• 56:06Rich Roll?

  Wow. In terms of winning cases, I want to come back to agriculture for a minute. The most pervasive prolific pesticide on the planet is Roundup. The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate. And there has been quite a bit of litigation with successful results to establish the harm that this chemical can produce, and yet it persists.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:32Rich Roll?

  So what does the landscape look like in terms of eradicating this ingredient in pesticides? And why is this such a difficult hill to climb? Particularly given that it has become, because of consumer interest, something that people are aware of in a way that maybe 10 years ago only a few people knew about. But a lot of people are aware of glyphosate and its potential harm.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  No, well, I have a colleague, Carrie Gillum, a journalist who manages the new lead, our journalism program at EWG. She's written a couple of books on this. One of the other common things about glyphosate and the chemicals we just discussed is a very clear corporate record that they knew there were problems and they worked assiduously to cover them up. They tried to criticize scientists that were doing independent research showing problems with glyphosate. When their own studies turned out to have surfaced health problems, they rewrote them and doctored them and so forth. Big scandal there, in my view. The situation now is sort of like this.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Most of the Roundup is sprayed on crops that have been genetically engineered to resist its plant-killing properties. And the benefit to a farmer is, years ago, you'd have to go out and plow a field and plow under the weeds, or you'd have to time your weed killer application to before the crop came up. Well, once they were genetically engineered to resist this one chemical called glyphosate, that's trade name is Roundup in the can. Then you could go out and you could plant your fields and if the crops were coming up and you had a big operation and you didn't get to it right away, you could go and spray that field and it would kill the weeds, but the corn and the soybeans and the cotton was fine.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  So this was a boon for farmers and that's why it's used so widely.

• 58:31Rich Roll?

  Sure, but also along with that, with the genetic modifications, that eliminates any concern about using this pesticide sparingly.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:44Rich Roll?

  So these foods, that's the thing with GMOs, it's not the modification of the food itself as much as it is the resistance to the pesticide, which means those foods are going to be much more rife with, you know, greater amounts of these chemicals in them than the organic version.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  That's right. And people are exposed, especially in rural areas where this is sprayed in the springtime, it's in the air, it's in the rainwater. There's, I think, evidence that's pretty compelling to me from the NIH that these populations have elevated risk of certain cancers, very similar to the groundskeepers that have won some of the cases. These tended to be homeowners or someone who was a professional groundskeeper who sprayed around it from a backpack sprayer and they did it routinely and they were exposed to a lot of it. Maybe, probably didn't wear enough protective gear or maybe it spilled on them or just from the amount they used it in an orchard or around their farmstead or wherever it

• 59:45Speaker 01

  might be, around a school. Those folks had an elevated exposure even compared to a lot of farmers and that elevated exposure, we could deal with that if we, you could keep glyphosate on the market, but you would have to dramatically change the formulation of it and you'd have to make sure that people use protective gear and so forth. That's high risk. For the farm population, we can't use it at the scale we're using it and not expose farm families and rural communities. And then the final exposure route is in food, which in a fashion that we've done a lot of work on, that you might not expect. But it has to do with how the pesticide is used.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  You said it just right. This is, in a way, sort of like the OxyContin of pesticides. Once you get a big market for it, something that you thought was for acute application, acute care, hospice care for OxyContin, right? Small market, thirty, forty million dollars. But suddenly, they're prescribing it so widely, it's a billion-dollar market.

• 1:00:53Rich Roll?

  Well, it's vertically integrated with the seed. So you create an entire marketplace.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The whole system works. So what they did was, eventually, they said, "Well, what are some of the other applications we could have?" And this is where the food exposure happens. When they spray corn and soybeans and cotton, it's early in the season, and for the most part, the seed has not even formed. So you don't see high levels of glyphosate in those, in corn, cotton, and soybeans. Where you see it, and we've found it in our tests, is in oats. And the reason you see it is because they spray the oats because they haven't been genetically engineered to resist it. They spray it at the end of the season to kind of dry out the crop.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  While the seed head is fully ripe, ready for, almost ready for harvest, makes it much easier, makes it uniform for the farmers to go through the field and harvest the oats, especially in Canada, where we get most of our oats. And so our studies showed that dietary exposure is largely confined, not entirely, but largely confined, to oat-based cereals, chickpeas, a few other types of grains where it is sprayed with EPA's blessing, in the case of the imported oats and chickpeas here and other things, with EPA's blessing, towards the end of the season, and it's literally in the food. Shouldn't be. We should eliminate that use right away.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  We have a petition with a bunch of food companies before EPA NOW to...

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Requesting that the agency disallow these end of season uses. For the rest of it, it's a, you know, the litigation is playing out for these, for the people who have been exposed. I think more and more farmers are going to come in and start suing too. And here's the dilemma, here's the, what Monsanto, or now Bayer, basically says is, if the cost is too high, we'll go bankrupt. We won't be able to pay anyone a settlement. And so we have to be able to keep making and selling glyphosate in order to make the money we need to make to pay the people that we've agreed to settle because they've been

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  harmed by glyphosate. Okay?

• 1:03:15Rich Roll?

  That's its own, that's, that's like some kind of Kurt Vonnegut novel narrative.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  It is, and, and you see it time and again with, with these kinds of chemical situations, chemical exposure situations, where the, the companies basically plead, well, you know, let us keep making it and, and maybe we'll try and do something about the harm. So-called injunctive relief, we'll make changes in the label or how we formulate it. But we have to keep making it because that's how we make enough money to pay the claims. It's heartbreaking, right?

• 1:03:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that, that, that would be enough to, to disenchant me from your field of work.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Well, they're, I, I-

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  It's very despairing, you know?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  There are plenty of reasons to think that we can significantly reduce glyphosate exposure for most, for a big part of the population that gets it through food, and then, you know-

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  EPA just has to take a stronger stand on its field use and its use in residentially. We think that all of this stuff should be taken out of the Home Depots and the Targets and other parts of the economy. It shouldn't be allowed. Now, there are more dangerous weed killers out there, I have to say. If you look at it just from a toxicological standpoint, there are some very worrisome weed killers that would probably take their place. So you do have that kind of whack-a-mole phenomenon that's been long at work. I mean, think about the whole system. We got rid of DDT and we brought on organophosphate insecticides. They killed a lot of people. Now we've moved from

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  the organophosphate to the neonicotinoids, and we're very worried about the impact they may be having on wildlife and human health.

• 1:05:14Rich Roll?

  But it's the enemy you know.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  It's the enemy you know.

• 1:05:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and obviously, these things live on a spectrum of harm. On the red alert side, with respect to glyphosate, the actionable takeaway, or the immediate takeaway for somebody who's listening to this, is to pay greater attention to the oats that they purchase and consume. And that's a real easy, immediate fix. Like, anything that you purchase that has oats in it, pay attention to the label, and that would be a reason to go organic on that and that alone.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. And we've also seen some evidence that some of the suppliers and some of the buyers of conventional oats, like cereal companies, they've announced that they don't want to have glyphosate in their system anymore, even if it's conventionally grown, right? That's positive. Some of the testing we've done suggests that the levels are going down in conventional oats. This is all consumers. Government didn't lift a finger. Government's on the side of Monsanto and Bayer saying, "No problem." But consumers are saying, "You know what? I just..."

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Call me crazy, but I just, I just don't want that little bit of weed killer in my breakfast.

• 1:06:29Rich Roll?

  How much of the oat harvest is funneled to livestock feed? Is that part of it, or is that mostly soybean?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  I think there is some feeding of oats to livestock, but not, that's not the primary feed. Depending on the animal, right? So if it's cattle, it's corn and a mixture of other, other field crops. Oats is not a, it's too expensive to feed to animals unless it's an emergency situation or leftover or something. So it's, it's mostly the oats grown for, for food use. And Canadian farmers got the go-ahead from their government to spray, round up at the end of the season. We don't have many, many acres of oats left in this country. It's all gone to corn, soybeans.

• 1:07:20Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Why is it that, that the EU is so much better at this than the USA? When you look at the European Union, they're way ahead of the curve. They're not perfect, but in terms of the number of chemicals that they have banned in consumer products, it's, it make, it casts an embarrassing shade on where we're at.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  It's not, you're right, it's not perfect. I mean, there's

• 1:07:48Rich Roll?

  There's thousands that they've banned, right?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, in personal care products, there, it looks like they're starting, it looks like they're trying to take a tougher strand, stand on PFAS with glyphosate. I think they, I think the jury's still out, but it looks like they might approve with restrictions, use of glyphosate in the EU.

• 1:08:07Rich Roll?

  I thought there, are there certain countries within the EU that have already banned it though, right?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the EU-wide, I think they're, they leave it to the countries to make their decisions. But why is it better? You know, it's, it's such a good question. I, I think each culture in each of those countries gives you some indication as to why they feel that basically this modern technology is not to be trusted. And, and as a consequence, they They are willing to say, "Look, the facts may not all be in. We may still have some legitimate, open scientific questions, but the weight of evidence tells us that we should act with precaution, that we should probably not allow these chemicals

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  in proximity to people, whether it's in food, or in air pollution, or what have you." Now, there are areas where the US has taken a stronger line, and, in a way, the EU caught up to us on environmental law and regulation from the pace we took in the 70s, which was amazing, but it has slowed down. And I think now, what you're seeing in Europe is a sense that these chemical economies are not the rigid, inflexible, thumbs up or thumbs down kinds of propositions that they're made out to be in the US.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Like, when PCBs were discovered to be in wildlife and people all over the world, and this is in the late, early 1970s, Monsanto said, "Well, we can't get rid of PCBs. We won't have an electrical grid. We won't have electricity anymore. DDT, the same thing. We'll starve. We won't be able to have food," etc. And over time, we see that there's a resilience when you send a strong regulatory signal, "Hey, figure out another way to do it." And at the human level, I've talked to I don't know how many people in industry, often not on the record, who are more in the engineering end of the continuum, not the business end.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  These are the problem solvers for these companies. And they say, in effect, "Why didn't you tell me you wanted safe? I'm an engineer. Give me the spec. You said you want it cheap. You wanted a lot. You wanted it to have these criteria. If you wanted it safe, tell me what the safe spec is. I'll try and hit it." But I think in Europe, what you see is a sense, maybe because they've been at this game longer, they've been producing food longer, they've had, it was the center of the industrial revolution. I think there's a sense of, you know, workers' jobs are at stake, that could be a factor

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  if we ban something, if we change the supply chain, if we go to electric vehicles, all these questions are there for them. But I think they have a sense, a longer historical arc about resilience than we have in this country. We still think the new thing is what's been in front of us for not very long, and we dare not deviate from it because we don't know what's beyond that. But in fact, most of these pesticides used in agriculture have been around since Sputnik. You know, it's old technology, we're just hanging on to it. In Europe, I think there's a willingness to say, "We need to invent our way out of this. Life's too important."

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  And so, we're going to regulate with the evidence we have, even though industry complains it's not enough, we haven't looked at this, we haven't looked at that. I think in Europe, there's a much more open attitude toward erring on the side of precaution.

• 1:11:59Rich Roll?

  So, it's more of a perspective than it is a particular model of checks and balances?

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Rich Roll?

  Or a way of navigating through this problem?

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Rich Roll?

  It's about values, not some system that we could look at that they have that we could model here.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Well, law by law, what you see is their culture expressed in law, in many cases, right? So, it's sort of what the point you're making. You really have to look at each specific thing they're doing, how they're regulating PFAS, how they're looking at glyphosate, how they're looking at cellphone radiation. In all of those cases, the common difference is often a posture of precaution that we don't have here. We think that chemicals and technologies are innocent until proven guilty. In Europe, it's more of a, "Hmm, okay, you invented something cool, it does this thing for your company and for the economy, and consumers like it."

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  That doesn't mean we shouldn't take a closer look.

• 1:13:01Rich Roll?

  Sure. I have to believe that part of that must be their connection with the long tale of history.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:08Rich Roll?

  The uninterrupted, you know, generation after generation, you know, contact with the earth. And because we're a newer country, built upon innovation and progress and forward momentum, we have less of that, you know, as part of our values.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look at the GMO labeling debate, right? We were involved in that in the US here. We, you know, we have a really weak labeling system here. And I always used to get in debates with these industry, food industry people who were saying, well, you know, the cost of food's gonna go way up. I mean, we just, if we have to put those labels and people start changing their behavior. So my first thought was, am I really hearing a food industry executive worried about food prices going up too high? But my second thought was, what could we possibly learn from France and Italy about food?

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  They seem to have labeling there and whenever I go, I seem to be pretty darn happy with the quality and quantity of the food, especially the quality of it. The whole notion that it would be a camel's nose under the tent against technology to tell people on a label that it's genetically modified, whether you're worried about it or not. I'm, I'm, I come down where you do. I haven't seen the evidence yet that the actual genetic modification is dangerous, although I don't trust Monsanto to tell us if they did have evidence. But I am worried about the pesticides that go with many GMO foods. But why wouldn't you tell people who want to know that about their food, give that to them in a straightforward way on the label?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  And industry spent tens of millions of dollars.

• 1:14:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and any resistance to transparency is gonna evoke suspicion. And the food industry is, if it's known for anything, it's known for its devotion to a lack of transparency.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly right. And I think this is the thing that the internet has introduced into our lives. It's what has made EWG, the fact that people could go online and... Consult lots of different sources. I mean, we have people coming to us who have read the same academic papers we have now. They may not be toxicologists or chemists, but they've gotten the gist of it that in the abstract or maybe in the article itself that there's a concern with these PFAS chemicals. And that level of awareness and information could only be possible if it was coming to you right in your home on your laptop or your phone or your iPad. Because, you know, these aren't people who are going to go back

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  to school and brush up on biology and chemistry and toxicology. It's just the transparency that's permitted through the exchange of information online and misinformation, fair to say, has changed everything. And that has, you know, industry running scared.

• 1:16:07Rich Roll?

  As you mentioned earlier, every five years, the farm bill comes up for a vote. That vote is end of this month, right?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think they'll make it. I think they'll have to push it off.

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  It's always getting pushed, right?

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Rich Roll?

  And with this, you know, contentious piece of legislation are a number of agricultural subsidies and other kind of add-ons and tag-alongs that are worthy of exploration and discussion. So I'm interested, first, maybe, you know, explain what these ag subsidies are, what is, you know, up for debate right now, what we should be concerned about, and just the system at large and how these subsidies contribute to, you know, further entrenching a system that is leading us astray.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the subsidies have been around 90 years. They started during the New Deal, and it was a, basically, an emergency response to the conditions of destitution and...

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Extreme poverty in farm country that actually grabbed farm country a full decade before the depression hit the rest of the economy.

• 1:17:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's it's to ensure it was it was born out of a desire to create stability amidst the farm industry and to ensure an adequate supply of food to fend off starvation and hunger.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Rich Roll?

  Like, it's it comes from a very good place.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Rich Roll?

  But it has metastasized into something altogether different.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  That's right. From those from those laudable beginnings, now we have a system that basically spends tens of billions of dollars and sends your dollars, taxpayers' dollars, and sends them to an increasingly narrow group of farmers who grow a handful of crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice. Those are the big subsidized crops because they are the larger acreage. I mean, we we have a fairly small acreage relative to those of fruits and vegetables in the US, and we import fruits and vegetables on top of that. But, you know, the the corn acreage is, you know, it's not quite the size of California.

• 1:18:21Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  You know, ninety-plus million acres, probably California's over a hundred. So you're talking about lots of acreage and hundreds of thousands of producers. And over time, from over those ninety years, the subsidy system has been embedded in land values. It now helps prop up input prices, knowing that you're going to get a check every year based on the amount you produce. The more you produce, the more money you get from the government, is central to business planning every year on thousands of farms across the heartland. And what this means is that huge amounts of money are going to a fairly small number of people.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  We we publish the names of all the recipients on the EWG website and the amount they receive.

• 1:19:08Rich Roll?

  Mm.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  And we published it since we go back to 1995. And since 1995, we have sent almost half a trillion dollars to those farmers, right? And seventy percent of the money goes to ten percent of the recipients. About twenty percent of the money goes to one percent. So it's it's quite a pyramid. It's concentrated. Because the large farmers get more money. In effect, taxpayers are helping them keep their businesses alive and growing so they can buy out their neighbors. So we're, in effect, party to this process of consolidation in agriculture. So that's, that's one issue.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  And the farm bill, every five years, sort of modifies the rules under which those subsidies are distributed. I should mention a couple of other things. It also establishes this, the food stamp program, formerly known as food stamps, it's now called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That's the bigger price tag, but it, it benefits many more people, right? It's about, it's a big part of the farm bill. And then there's all these environmental and conservation measures that are reauthorized that we fight over in the farm bill, and then rural development and so forth. But the big-ticket items are SNAP, the food stamps, commodity subsidies, and crop insurance,

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  and, and conservation. So this farm bill fight that's coming along now, like the previous ones, they have to renew these programs every five years, or they get in trouble. Sometimes you're right, they don't, they don't make their deadlines, so they'll extend them for a period of time, but they really have to go back and rewrite the law, because the underlying law will expire. And so what the public interest community has been doing, really, since the seventies and eighties, is, has been coming forward and, and being part of the horse trading. So you have advocates for nutrition assistance to low-income people going in there and saying,

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  "Okay, if you're going to give this much money to farm subsidies, you've got to help out urban populations with the SNAP program, and rural populations, low-income people everywhere." The environmental community, starting in the mid eighties, and I was part of this generation, it's kind of how I cut my teeth as an environmental lobbyist, we came in and said, hey, all this money that's being spent on agriculture, it's just, it's plowing up lands, causing erosion, more pesticide use, damage to wildlife, wetlands, water quality, we need to have conservation benefits attached to these programs, and we need to have money to help farmers at least correct some of the damage. So that, in legislative

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  terms, it's like a mosh pit, where all these interests come together, and horse trade to get, every five years, a farm bill passed. And so this year, we're pushing again to hang on to a substantial amount of money that was added in the Inflation Reduction Act that would invest a lot in climate smart farming. So that's our number one priority. Something like seventeen, eighteen billion dollars would go out to farmers, but it would help them manage nitrogen on their lands, help them with cover crops, help them do all kinds of things that they should be doing anyway. We don't regulate them to do it, so our bargain is we'll share part of the cost of it, at least that's the position in

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  the conservation community. If you want to save your wetlands, we'll give you some money to set that aside. We're not insisting that we regulate you from making productive use of it, if it's legal. And so, this farm bill process now is adding some very exciting, potentially, new elements. And one of them is, a lot of us are making the case that it's time to invest in more fresh fruits and vegetables for kids, let's move in the direction of supporting that, let's improve the quality of nutrition assistance if we can, we want to maintain the benefit, make it better like we did during COVID. We would

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  also like to see USDA putting their muscle behind plant-based foods. We have spent

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Tens of billions of dollars to prop up through crop subsidies that grow the grain that the cattle eat and the chickens eat and the hogs eat. We've spent billions of dollars helping build facilities and supporting facilities that manage this meat industrial complex. We've promoted it at USDA. You know, we should be telling people to eat less meat. They're, you know, they're told instead, eat a balanced diet, which is at this point for most Americans, way out of balance, way too much animal protein. So there's a legislation that's been introduced that we hope becomes part of the Farm Bill.

• 1:24:20Rich Roll?

  Is this the, this is the legislation that was authored and sponsored by Senator Booker?

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  And Congressman McGovern, yeah. And on the House side, great, both great champions of environment and consumer health, low income assistance programs, just, and they're stepping into the Farm Bill. They're both on the agriculture committees, right? You don't think of them as ag types, but they, they're there because of the breadth of this jurisdiction. So they've introduced the plant-based, no, the Peas, Legumes and Nuts Today Act, the Plant Act.

• 1:24:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I don't know how I feel about that title. I was, I did a, I did a podcast, this is a quick aside, indulge me, but I had Arnold Schwarzenegger on the podcast the other day.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Rich Roll?

  And he's got a lot to say about how we communicate in the environmental space, you know, in terms of how you connect with people and get them excited.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Rich Roll?

  Language is important.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is important.

• 1:25:19Rich Roll?

  The Plant Act is good, how it breaks down.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  How it breaks down, yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a little, yeah, it's corny, so to speak. But you know, the, the point is that we haven't begun to invest in making sure that people who are growing for this Emerging sector of plant-based foods that they're getting the same, potentially getting the same fair shake or same benefits that a highly subsidized farmer is getting. At least, don't tilt the field against them. In rural areas where we have a chance to invest in infrastructure through loans and other means to help plant-based food companies spring up, we should be doing all of that. So it's a whole range of things in the bill,

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  and it'll be a fight to get them in and get money behind them. And so, you know, that's the, it's a perfect example of, I mean, most of your listeners are probably not going to be riled up necessarily about corn farmers getting too much money. But what they might get riled up about is the, is the prospect that if we don't, if we don't act in a fairer way, we're not going to have enough money. We'll give it all to the corn farmers or soybean farmers. We won't have enough for, to invest in organic transition, to help plant-based technology get better. And it needs to get better because some of the products that are coming out now are not very nutritious. We should work on that. We should be investing

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  in, you know, all kinds of rural enterprises that will support this sector. That's, it's the, it's the, the fight over the money really comes down to bringing other values to the table and having political clout behind them to say, hey, you know what? We know you're going to get this big piece of the pie. We're going to try and impose some limits on the biggest recipients and do other things. But we're also in there to say taxpayers deserve a different investment portfolio in agriculture than they get in this farm bill. And if you want to see what that portfolio looks like, go to the farm subsidy database. It'll take you straight to EWG and you'll see all of these farmers getting money going

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  back to 85, sometimes tens of millions of dollars for individual farming operations. You know, they ought to be able to support themselves at this point, and we should be able to use some of that money to improve the quality of what we eat.

• 1:27:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's certainly not about maligning any, you know, the farming community or any individual farmers. It's about innovating new ways to disperse that money and some sense-making around, you know, the allocation of funds. I have nothing but incredible admiration and respect for Senator Booker shouldering the responsibility of, you know, kind of pushing this forward in interesting ways. I find it to be very laudable, and I had the opportunity to participate at an event with him a couple of weeks ago in New Jersey at Ethos Farm. Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't know if you've ever been to Ethos Farm. No, I have not. I've heard all about it. But it's an incredible regenerative farm. Yeah.

• 1:28:32Rich Roll?

  Where this doctor, Dr. Weiss, you know, purchased this land and also houses his medical practice, so his patients have to come onto the farm to be seen and treated. And they are prescribed the food that is grown on the farm. It's this food, it's this sort of cyclical food is medicine kind of system that's really beautiful. But in spending the weekend talking to and listening to Senator Booker and Dr. Weiss, I learned a lot about the challenges of trying to operate one of these farms. And I've also visited Apricot Lane, you know, the biggest little farm, the Chesters. Yeah.

• 1:29:12Rich Roll?

  And I couldn't help but think that we need better resources and support allocation for the regenerative movement. Yeah. Because I think each and every one of these regenerative farms seems to be operating as an island unto itself, and it's difficult, right? Oh, it's very tough. But this is the way, we need more of this. We need more energy, we need, you know, funding, and we need, I feel like, you know, if somebody wants to convert their conventional farm into a regenerative farm, that, you know, a fleet of consultants show up to tell them exactly how to do it and how to pave a path towards

• 1:29:55Rich Roll?

  economic viability forward, because it has to operate, you know, from a position of financially... Of course. Financial soundness, obviously, right? But right now, it feels like, and I don't know, you probably know better than me, that those resources are lacking.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  They are.

• 1:30:14Rich Roll?

  And I couldn't help but think, as you're talking about the farm bill, that there's an opportunity to take some of that funding and divert it for that purpose.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, you know, I, look, I, on the Cook side of the family, my father's side, there are a lot of farmers. I've spent a lot of time on my uncle's cow-calf operations growing up. I get it. And when I go and tour farms, you know, I love the technology. I love how they're managing their fields. And it just blows my mind, and the level of financial responsibility they have on top of all the technology they have to master. I got a lot of time for a working farmer who's doing that, at whatever scale they're doing it. What this comes down to is bringing a different set of values and objectives into the policy

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  debate that wasn't there before. And, you know, the powers that be don't like that.

• 1:31:15Rich Roll?

  But that's a private sector opportunity, perhaps.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  It is, yeah. But I think government can play a role, providing research, providing technical assistance, providing sometimes support for farming practices that are regenerative. That's what climate smart farming has the potential to do. And we have billions of dollars, potentially, to spend on over the next 10 years, so it could really make a huge impact. We have to, you know, we have to monitor it. We can't assume that it's going to make an impact until we know for sure. But that's really the, that's what Senator Booker and Jim McGovern and lots of other reformers in the Congress are talking about, is let's, let's take a look at this money we've invested.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  And again, it's half a trillion dollars since 1995. And I defy you to find a place in rural America where you can really definitely see the payoff for that huge investment. And so it's fair for people to ask, you know, outsiders, urban folks, or people who aren't large farmers but live in rural areas, it's fair for them to ask, look, Can't we do better? Can't we do some, try something different? We have all these problems in rural America. We need jobs. The farms that are getting bigger, we're muscling people out of farming and replacing them with chemicals and equipment. Whereas we still have a nutrition crisis on our hands.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  We need more fresh food, more closer to cities. We need to have new ways of growing food that conserve soil, replenish it, you know, build soil carbon where we can. All of these ideas deserve consideration and we shouldn't just keep spending money the way we have been on, you know, corn and soybeans and honey.

• 1:33:06Rich Roll?

  And it's back to the incentive structure. We need incentives that would drive a farmer to make the choice to convert his or her land into regenerative practices. We need, you know, it's not just about supporting these people. It's like, what are the macro decisions that can be made that are going to drive people towards the solutions that we know work and pave a better future?

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, from my standpoint, this is where I think consumers are really, the more, the more we move in the direction where these foods become available, and organic is the perfect example, the more that pulls the sector along. I'll talk about it this way. Organic, you know, not too many years ago, before it was a federal standard, it was managed by the states. They all had their certification programs. And in 1990, a group of people, I was one of them, got together and we passed a law that established a federal standard. It took over 10 years to get the regulations out.

• 1:34:06Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Because there was such opposition, because the, you know, the, the big players, they didn't want, they didn't want a grocery store that had one component that looked like it was healthier or better than the other. That was the big talking point. And our view was, why don't we just give people choice? So, people seem to want organic. Well, now it's grown from a few hundred million dollars to a 60-plus billion dollar industry. And... And if that were the only impact, it would still be great. But there's a bigger impact, which is you see all over California now, the influence of organic growing techniques filtering into conventional farms.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  They're using different pesticides, they're using them differently in terms of timing. We still are way too addicted to pesticides in the state of California where, you know, the biggest fruit and vegetable grower in the country as a state is located. But we can, we can trace the, the impact that organic has had. It's proven itself to, in the marketplace. It's food that people want, they're willing to pay a little extra for. And once you send that signal, you can't unsend it. That, that's, that, when regenerative becomes real and takes off and is, and is, you know, has a set of standards behind it, I think we'll begin to see more widespread change.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  We have a ways to go on that, but that's the key. And then the resources should follow. Um, you know, we, we should have a food system, if we're investing in it as taxpayers to the tune of billions a year, we should have a, a food system that's moving in the direction that we want. And the farm bill's the place to do it.

• 1:35:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  Cory Booker and Jim McGovern and others are, they're gonna, they're gonna fight. And it's gonna be a fight. Let me tell you, I've been in lots of them. I, this'll be, I think my 11th farm bill.

• 1:36:04Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  And, uh, people fight for every penny. And it's, you know, you just have to make the case that, look, um, politics are such that if you want to get this bill on, through the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate, you have to make some concessions to the people who aren't on the ag committee.

• 1:36:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:25Rich Roll?

  That's the truth, right? Unfortunately.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:28Rich Roll?

  Um, I wanna, I wanna turn our attention to, uh, some practical stuff.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33Rich Roll?

  You know, as I said earlier, obviously, all of these things lie on a spectrum. Um, I wanna help people get their heads around, um, some choices that they can make to snap them out of whatever paralysis they might be experiencing as a result. of the heaviness of all this subject matter.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49Rich Roll?

  Um, if there's one thing that the EWG is probably known for more than anything, it's the

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Dirty dozen?

• 1:36:55Rich Roll?

  The dirty dozen, of course. Um, I mean, I, I suspect like that page on your website gets more traffic than anything you probably have ever done, right?

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  It gets a lot.

• 1:37:05Rich Roll?

  Everybody, people know about this, whether they are familiar with EWG or not.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's everywhere. Well, the story of that is interesting. Um, this was back, we, we started doing this really, the thinking goes back 20 years. We, we were evaluating pesticides in produce. And, you know, we looked at the levels and we looked at the inadequate regulations and we, we basically felt that people needed to know about pesticides in their food. And USDA publishes data every year because they test food.

• 1:37:37Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  So we were using those data to rank the, the, the crops and the pesticides. And there are lots of different ways you could do it. We've picked a couple of different ways. But the real insight was when we, and I credit my co-founder of EWG, Richard Wiles, brilliant environmentalist and, and thinker, uh, who's now helping sue oil companies to hold them accountable. So he's continued his brilliance beyond EWG. But Richard had a very simple thought, which was, well, what about the people who can't find or afford organic?

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  As the alternative, if you're worried about pesticides in food. And he was one of the country's leading pesticide experts at the time. And we were very tight with a guy named Phil Landergan, a great public health doc, a medical doctor, pediatrician, um, who, uh, has had a huge impact on, on public health. And he's did a lot of work on pesticides, has done over the years. And he, he once observed to me, you know, can, organic is like private school for food now. This was in the early 2000s. It's great if you can find it, great if you can afford it, but not everyone can. So informed by that, Richard said, well, why don't we look at the

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  USDA test results and see if there aren't some fruits and vegetables that even if you can't find them organic, at least for the consumer, we don't know what's been sprayed in the field, but at least what's in the fruit or the vegetable, what are the pesticide levels? And so, we did months and months of analyses and we basically came out and said, you know, there's a dirty dozen that, you know, because it's alliterative, if you can find these organic, you should find them. If you're worried about pesticides, not everyone is, but if you're worried about it, sometimes they have, you know, multiple pesticides on every batch that USDA tested.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  But there's another group of fruits and vegetables that because of the timing of when they're sprayed, remember I mentioned that the oats are contaminated with glyphosate, but the corn isn't because of the timing of the spray. Oats are contaminated right before harvest, corn is sprayed before it's hardly sprouted. The type of pesticides mattered, the amount that was used, and we saw this divide or this continuum. There are lots of fruits and vegetables, my favorite example is always bananas. And if you've been to banana plantations in the Caribbean or anywhere else, you know that they spray pesticides on them, they bag them in many cases and spray pesticides.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  There's a growing organic banana industry too, but you peel it off, it doesn't, those pesticides that they use don't penetrate the flesh of the fruit. So bananas and a few others in that list were clean. So, we just said, look, our job here is to give choices to people who have these concerns, and they're not crazy to have the concerns. You're not crazy to be worried about these chemicals in your life. Industry will tell you, don't worry about it, you're not crazy. And we went over some of the scientific organizations that, if it's crazy, then they're crazy. We just decided, let's lay it out there and tell people, here's the Dirty Dozen.

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  Apples are always on there, strawberries are always on there, a few others that occur, peaches oftentimes, because it's tough to grow peaches in Georgia without using pesticides. So they tend to have more pesticides on them. And then there's this whole 15 set of fruits and vegetables that are pretty clean even if they're not organic. It was that, industry went crazy. They accused us of scaring consumers, accused us of trying to force organic down everyone's throats. Really what we were trying to say is, look, this is information that's been developed by EPA. The government's not going to act on it. Some of these pesticides have been on the market for 40 years.

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  And then suddenly they're off when EPA wakes up or does the right thing. But meanwhile, you can avoid them. You can avoid them with conventional foods. So get the Dirty Dozen Guide for pesticides and produce, and on the back of it is the Clean 15. It's a little card. And that alone, that was our introduction, Rich, to the power of consumers to change markets. Because people were saying, thank you. I can't, where I live, I don't have organic, but I'm shopping from this Clean 15 side of your card now. Or, you know, I can find organic some of the year, but not, you know, I'm not crazy about berries, whatever it might be, that they had organic options for. That wasn't working for them either.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  This gave them a choice, and it also reinforced our philosophy at EWG, which is, we're about trying to give you choices. We'll give you the information, we're not going to wag our finger at you if you're not 100% organic. We're not going to wag our finger at you if you don't, you know, haven't gone through your whole house and replaced every item that we've identified that has chemicals in it. We live in the real world too, and we don't want you to move to a yurt in a mountain meadow and think that's the only place you can survive. We want to give you options for the real world. So, take a look at your food supply. Take it our, look at our food scores page, look at processed foods there. We rate the nutrition, we call out the contaminants. Look at the Dirty Dozen, look at our shopper's

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  guide that's the equivalent for personal care products, Skin Deep. In all of those areas, we've really tried to do our best to empower consumers who live in the real world. And we, you know, if you can give up five personal care items because you've just been primping too much in front of the mirror, that's good. But if you're going to use some personal care items, here are some options that are healthier, in our view.

• 1:43:39Rich Roll?

  Right. And I would encourage everybody to go to the website ewg.org. And there, you have just a litany of these reports. And you can search by product, by category, and find all kinds of resources to help guide those choices. So, everybody has their homework. And that homework can be as extensive as you would like, because you have almost an unlimited, you know, sort of database there. But in terms of synopsizing that, you know, before we kind of round this out, we talked about the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15 in the food category. But if a mom is worried about the products that she's going to lather

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  on her infant, or, you know, somebody's thinking about the shampoo or the face cleanser that they're going to be using.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  The sunscreen.

• 1:44:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sunscreen, that's a whole thing, right?

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Rich Roll?

  What are just some top level, you know, points you'd like to make about the bigger harms that you can avoid that can drive the healthier choices when you go to the store?

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, first of all, start in one area and work your way out. You don't have to change everything at once. Don't punish yourself. Make this, gamify it, you know, make it something where you give yourself some, a pat on the back for some wins. So, start with food, start with our food scores database.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  Go through your, don't throw out your food. Eat the food, these are chronic risks. Eat the food you've already bought and paid for. But when you shop again, shop a little smarter.

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  All that Captain Crunch and the conventionally grown oatmeal?

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  The sugar stuff is a little different, yeah. But even, but even that, I mean, you may want to throw it out. Maybe you can afford to throw it out. But, but it is a chronic, a chronic risk. So what we're basically saying is, over time, you need to make these changes. Know this also, I mean, whether you start with food, whether you start on our Skin Deep database with your personal care items. What I can tell you from our experience over the past, certainly 20 years of our 30 years of existence, things are changing. There are options out there now that were not there certainly 10 years ago, but in many cases, five years ago.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  The impact smart, healthy shoppers are having in the marketplace is profound. We hear it every day. Companies are struggling in some cases to reformulate. Some of them are coming into our program and reformulating their products completely because they want our seal. Some of them are just doing it because they want to score better in Skin Deep or one of our other systems. And that's, that's what you should feel hopeful about. Every time you make a better choice, you send a signal to the marketplace economy that safer choices are a good thing. Make more of them. And these executives move around from company to company.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  They see consumer trends in food and they might go to work for a, you know, a restaurant chain, or they might go to work for a personal care product or a cleaning product company. They have this in their head that transparency from the internet, source of information like EWG and there are others out there. We're proud of ours, but there are others out there is, is starting to drive changes. At such a scale that companies are adapting and whole markets are changing. What we're seeing with sunscreens, you know, oxybenzone was in all sunscreens. Now it's dramatically reduced. We started working on sunscreens pretty much alone 20 years ago.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  And we raised concerns about oxybenzone for health and also for the impact that was the studies were emerging on coral. And it's moving out of sunscreens. So my view is that if you are a conscious consumer and find sources you trust, you can verify, we welcome anyone to come to EWG and if you have questions, send us the questions. But once you do that and start changing your behavior, I'm not telling you you won't get cancer. I'm not telling you your child won't develop a rash.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  That's all still, you know, much, much too granular to predict from this level of this conversation or from our databases. What I can tell you is that the aggregate impact of those consumer purchases is changing the economy. And that's hopeful. And, and when someone, and this is my, maybe my closing point, when young people come to me now and ask me for career advice, you know, when I was coming up, I wanted to be Ralph Nader. And the model was, you know, pretty narrow. Go to law school, join a public interest group, go into government, be a crusader. And I still strongly recommend people take a look at, at public service in some form

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  or another, whether it's non-governmental or wherever. But I, I tell people now, look, there are so many companies out there where creativity and a drive to do things better and differently, sustainably, in health.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  That is such an exciting development, just in, you know, my professional life. Take a look at that, too. Maybe go to business school and try and change the world that way. Maybe, you know, devote yourself to athletics and from that, bring this enormous crowd around to healthier living and plant-based diets. You know, there's lots of ways into this. Just take that first step.

• 1:49:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would, I would only add to that the hopefulness that I've seen and experienced when I speak to young people who are making career decisions based upon their ability to drive meaningful impact. And that's also a seismic shift from the mental calculus of my generation around which careers to pursue, which I think is amazing and bodes well for the future. And I think on top of that, there's something beautifully empowering and agency instilling about realizing that your choice can and does make a difference in the sense, or in

• 1:50:15Rich Roll?

  the same way that, that change comes to Washington. Consumer choices drive capital markets. So it's easy to point a finger and say, "They want you sick," or "They want this and that," or whatever. But these industries respond to what people want. And we have seen a shift in what people want and the choices they're making around food, skincare, et cetera, everything that we've talked about today. And that has moved the market in ways that probably might even astonish you who's steeped in this, right?

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  It does.

• 1:50:51Rich Roll?

  So within that, there is that place of hope. And within the hope, there's agency. And, and, and also, you know, a responsibility to be more mindful about those choices because each choice is a vote that you're casting for

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  It matters.

• 1:51:09Rich Roll?

  the better world of your imagination, right? And there are things that you can do, and you are providing the resources to help guide those choices.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  We're certainly trying. And, and you know what it all comes down to? When I started out, you know, in the, in the, in the 70s, really, as a working environmentalist, the whole, the whole goal, the whole framing was around what we were against.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  What we had tried to stop, things that were going wrong, things that we needed to end, we need to stop paving over wilderness areas, we need to, you know, stop building dams, we need to stop erecting petrochemical plants and stop spraying so many pesticides, on and on, the whole environmental framework. And it's, it made sense.

• 1:51:59Rich Roll?

  Damage control as opposed to future casting.

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  Now, it's shifting to what we're for. And it's, that's what's so exciting to me about environmentalism now, is as it's expressed often in the private sector, not only, but often in the private sector, there's, there's a way for you to be for something that can make change happen, again, much more rapidly and much more deeply than any government regulation ever could. We are changing the power sector here in this country now, not primarily through regulation, we're, we're greening the power sector with resources that are being offered to utilities

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  and other companies to build electric vehicles, green up the grid and so forth. Big pressure on these utilities to deal with distributed solar and other sources of energy because those are competitors. Well, this all came about because public interest groups working with people in the private sector said, hey, we can do this in a different way. We're, we're for energy, but just this kind of energy. We're for energy generation, but not generated that way. We don't want coal plants, we want solar panels, we want, we want windmills. That being for something is so obviously positive and uplifting of, of human nature

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  and young people that I'm, I'm excited about environmentalism now, even though we obviously are still up against it, it's a dire time.

• 1:53:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but the key that unlocks all of it, is it not, is creating and convincing people that it is The most economically viable solution to the problem they face, right? When the green choice is actually the best economic choice, that's when the problems at the macro level get solved and the decision makers come on board, right? And we're seeing more and more of that with these companies that are established upon this set of values. When they succeed, it creates greater success or a path for success for these other companies. And I think being able to communicate that message to Governor Schwarzenegger's point

• 1:54:19Rich Roll?

  is really important, especially in terms of developing consensus and the bipartisan support that's necessary at those legislative and regulatory levels to make the decisions that we need in order to perpetuate the groundswell of movement from the bottom up.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's got to be bottom up. And that's why, you know, whenever you see this positive connection to, you know, being able to make change happen and create the new normal economically and socially, not through regulation. Again, my folks are fighting for regulation every day. Don't get me wrong. We're at EPA, we're in Sacramento, wherever the case may be. We haven't given up that fight. We're still against a lot of bad stuff. But this way of approaching solving environmental problems now that has the cultural throw weight we didn't have before is what makes a difference.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  That, you know, you can't plausibly say as a utility executive that solar panels are kind of a hobby anymore. You can't say that organic is, you know, it's fine if you're into that, but it's not a big deal. You can't say that cleaning products that have dramatically lower off gassing are, you know, are an oddity. They're not. This is all happening. And so the folks who are listening to this, thank you for listening, first of all, and thank you for modeling so much of this, Rich, in all that you do. But the fact of the matter is, we can make this, we can make this progress only if we do it.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  Intentionally and make all those small decisions, just add that little twist of agency and say, "I'm gonna buy this instead of this. I'm gonna support this instead of this," and move the ball forward that way.

• 1:56:21Rich Roll?

  Beautifully put. I think that's a great place to put a pin in it for today.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Thanks, brother.

• 1:56:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. I think the work you do is just so meaningful and powerful, and you were very eloquent in how you explained all of it today.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  You're very kind.

• 1:56:38Rich Roll?

  So I'm at your service. If people want to learn more about you and EWG, obviously, go to ewg.org. And if they want to get involved, if they want to support, what is the best way?

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Best way is, you know, we get on our email list, find out what we're up to. Sometimes we're fighting it out in California, sometimes in DC. Sometimes we're just sending you our latest tips, our latest science. We have a paper coming out, had a paper just came out that looked at off-gassing of chemicals from home cleaning products. It was eye-opening.

• 1:57:13Rich Roll?

  Fun nightstand reading before you go to bed, right?

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, a little shop, a little change in your shopping cart, and those chemicals go away. Those exposure events are gone from your life, and that sends that signal to the market, "Hey, people want more of this, less of that."

• 1:57:28Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Thanks so much.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  Take care.

• 1:57:31Rich Roll?

  Come back and share a little more with me.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  Anytime, anytime.

• 1:57:33Rich Roll?

  Cheers. Peace.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

• 1:58:12Rich Roll?

  If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at ritual.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering

• 1:58:55Rich Roll?

  by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Salis. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.