--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A New York City bodega recently started selling what they're calling Lucy eggs. Instead of a dozen or a half dozen, you can buy a little bag with three little eggs in it. The idea got a ton of attention.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: It's not loose cigarettes, but loose eggs drawing people to Pamela's Green Deli. He says the idea to sell the loose eggs came after seeing customers being forced to leave a full carton on the counter. Currently, New York State requires eggs to be sold in packages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And while the price of eggs is cracking wallets right now, Rodriguez tells us he just hopes to help his community one day at a time. Eggs are too expensive. Ask anyone. Ask the President of the United States.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: The eggs. Because I'm hearing so much about eggs, you'll figure it out. You've got to figure something out fast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But on today's show, Vox's Kenny Torrella is actually going to make the case that eggs are too cheap.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Get a load of this guy, will ya?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package. Closer to the action. The best seats. The best suites. Closer to match day and that world-class food. and that world-class entertainment closer to the experience of a lifetime.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Having a night out with your friends is awesome. Dealing with hangovers sucks. Meet Senorita, the THC-infused margarita that lets you skip the booze but keep the vibe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Made with real fruit, organic agave, and Himalayan pink salt, every sip is like a mini getaway. No fillers, no hangovers, just full flavor and a better buzz.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Find your flavor at senoritadrinks.com. Use code VOX20 for 20% off. Must be 21 and over. This product may cause intoxication. This product has not been evaluated or approved by the FDA. This product may contain up to 0.3% THC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kenny Torrella, senior reporter at Vox, our man on the meat beat. It's been a minute. What is going on with the bird flu?
--:-- Kenny Torrella: The bird flu is really bad. This outbreak, which has been the worst in U.S. history, it began in early 2022, and it's only getting worse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to the USDA, avian flu has been confirmed in 146 flocks in the past month, affecting more than 20 million birds.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: The U.S. Department of Agriculture is calling this multi-year bird flu outbreak, the largest unit in U.S. history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The impact hits close to home. Dozens of state and federal agricultural workers dressed in biohazard suits, sanitized boots and gloves are assisting in the euthanization of the entire flock here, 100,000 ducks.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: This strain known as H5N1, it's a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza or bird flu, which has been highly lethal to birds raised for meat and eggs like chickens and turkeys.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, more than 20 million egg-laying hens were killed, either because they became infected with the virus or they were killed to slow the spread of the virus. To put that into perspective, that's 6% of America's egg-laying flock.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Is that why the eggs are so expensive, Kenny? I don't want to make this about the eggs when you just said 20 million of our friendly chickens have died.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But is that why the eggs are so expensive? That's really the only reason why eggs are so expensive, aside from food inflation.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: The bird flu has led to egg shortages across the country. Some stores are even placing limits on how many cartons consumers can buy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can someone explain to me why people are going crazy for eggs? Eggs are now so valuable they become a target for thieves.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Pete and Jerry's Organics had to beef up security after thieves stole 100,000 eggs from their farm in Pennsylvania.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the average price for a dozen of eggs is double now what it was before this outbreak began three years ago.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: All right, guys, today is the day. I know they are going to be $1.99 today. chickens must be on a strike or something because baby ain't no way six eggs is $4.99.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The high price of eggs it's not the only problem related to bird flu because it's increasingly affecting other animals.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Scientists detected bird flu in cows for the first time ever in the United States almost a year ago and since then it's infected almost 1,000 dairy cow herds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's also infecting and killing other mammals like sea lions and seals. And it even killed a cheetah and a mountain lion at a zoo in Arizona not too long ago.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: I don't love it. Yeah, there's not much to love about the bird flu, especially because it's now hitting humans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't love that at all. Tell me more about that.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Yeah, almost 70 people in the US have tested positive for bird flu since the spring of 2022.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, we're not doing mass testing, so it could be higher. But most of them have been people who work with poultry or dairy cows, and most cases have been somewhat mild.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: But there have been a few cases that have stood out and have concerned experts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For example, last month, there was a woman in Louisiana. She had exposure to a backyard chicken flock and also some wild birds. She got the bird flu. She was hospitalized. And tragically, she passed away from the virus.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And in November, a 13-year-old Canadian girl who had no known exposure to wild or farmed birds or dairy cows, she developed a really severe infection and was hospitalized for weeks. She recovered, but it's still a mystery as to how she got it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we're not at like, you know, the pandemic threat yet either. I don't want to freak people out.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: No, we're not. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that almost all of these cases, again, were connected to people who work directly with animals or were exposed to animals who had the virus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At this point, this virus is not going from person to person, which is one of the key ingredients for a virus going from one that just circulates among animals to the next global pandemic.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And H5N1 may never gain the ability to transmit from human to human. But the more that it circulates among people and animals and large farms, the more opportunities that it has to evolve and develop the capacity to become more severe in humans and be able to transmit from person to person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, our fair president, I don't know how much he's said about bird flu. I don't know how much he cares, but he certainly has promised to bring down the price of eggs. The eggs, because I'm hearing so much about eggs, you'll figure it out. You've figure something out.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And since they intrinsically related let me ask how that going so far It gotten off to a rocky start
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, Doge and the Trump administration fired a number of employees who monitor bird flu, realized they made a mistake, and then hired them back.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: But in bigger news today, Brooke Rollins announced a big plan in the Wall Street Journal to fight bird flu and try to bring down the price of eggs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm sorry, Brooke who? Brooke Rollins.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: She's the new Secretary of Agriculture who has not much of a background in agriculture, more in conservative think tank policymaking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But she does have a new five point plan to tackle this crisis.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Okay, well, what are the five points? Point one is to put $500 million towards increased biosecurity on farms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That includes things like more protective gear for farm workers, requiring them to shower before entering and leaving the facilities. And this could help. It's worth a shot.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: But this has also been a main tactic of the Biden administration. So we'll see if it helps. OK, $500 million for some cold showers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What else?
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Increased funding for farmers who have to call or kill their flocks. Again, this is more of the same. This is something the Biden administration has done for the last three years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK, anything fresh, anything new?
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Yes and no. I mean, one point of the plan is to import more eggs, which is what the Obama administration did during the 2015 bird flu outbreak.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then there are some other ideas like trying to roll back cage-free egg laws, which we're seeing some states already trying to do, and vaccines, which is actually welcome news.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Well, I know President Trump has a history with, you know, vaccinating millions of Americans, Operation Warp Speed, TBT, COVID-19, etc.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But his new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Roberts Floride Kennedy, hates vaccines.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: How does he feel about vaccinating chickens, though?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, thankfully, that's the purview of the USDA.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: So RFK Jr. has no oversight over whether birds get vaccinated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, I am worried that if this does start to transmit to more humans, He will have oversight over the development and distribution and approval of vaccines for people.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: But at least right now, it's in the USDA's hands as to whether we start vaccinating egg lane hens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK, so we've got five points, Kenny, ranging from more showers for people working on these chicken farms to vaccinating millions, hundreds of millions of chickens, potentially.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Do we have any idea when this five point plan from Brooke Rollins would go into effect?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, we've got the Wall Street Journal op-ed. When do we see the money moving?
--:-- Kenny Torrella: It's unclear. There's not a lot of specifics as to when and how this money will be deployed and how fast they'll act on things like expanding vaccine development.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's more of a wait and see situation like the last few years have been with bird flu.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: OK, but this issue isn't going anywhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's cooking in the meantime?
--:-- Kenny Torrella: So some states are taking matters into their own hands.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tonight, the Nevada Department of Agriculture has suspended the state's cage-free egg law.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: As the price of eggs continues to climb, one state lawmaker has introduced legislation that will repeal Michigan's new law requiring all eggs sold to be cage-free.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The idea here is that by suspending this cage-free requirement, it'll give grocery stores more flexibility in where and how they source their eggs.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: But it probably won't work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is one ag economist at the University of Arkansas who said that suspending these cage-free standards could, quote unquote, very slightly address the egg shortage in Nevada.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: But it could exacerbate it in other states because the national egg supply is just so limited.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you shift more to Nevada, you got to take it from another state.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Huh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, ultimately, a big part of the problem here is factory farming itself.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: You know, a typical egg factory farm operation will house hundreds of thousands or even millions of genetically similar animals in just a few barns.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in these barns, the animals, they're in their own waste. They're breathing in toxic fumes from their manure. They're overcrowded. All of this comes together to stress them out and weaken their immune systems.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And one historian who studies animal disease, who I talked to, said that these kinds of conditions create the perfect opportunity for a microbe or a virus like H5N1 to effectively spread through a lot of hosts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This doesn't mean that reverting back to the farming that we had a century ago, where chickens were raised in small flocks on small farms, would fix the problem of the bird flu spread.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: You know, farmers have always been battling disease outbreaks on farms. But the expansion of factory farms really exacerbate the risk.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And because these farms are so big and have so many chickens, if the virus affects just a few really big farms, it can send a shock to the egg supply overnight, which is what has been going on for the last several months.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: OK, so the culprit is factory farming, but also the norm is factory farming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and it rarely grabs the country's attention.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: You know, we're only doing this show because of this outbreak and how it's affected egg prices and the egg supply.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there are millions of people in rural America who have been dealing with the public health effects of factory farms for decades.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And many have been sounding the alarm, but no one's really been listening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I spent the last several months talking to them for a series for Vox.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And you're going to hear from them when we're back on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Aww.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Not anymore, says Built Rewards. Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community, and Built wants you to go out and do things in the community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members every month.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: When you ready to travel they say Built points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining built slash explained That J dot com slash explained
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Every day, millions of customers engage with AI agents like me. We resolve queries fast. We work 24-7 and we're helpful, knowledgeable and empathetic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're built to be the voice of the brands we serve.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Sierra is the platform for building better, more human customer experiences with AI.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No hold music, no generic answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's in your life kit? I'm asking.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: They didn't ask that. Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Instead, you can listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, Each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Let's go, birds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained. Kenny Torrella, Meatbeat, Vox.com.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Factory farms are in the spotlight because of expensive eggs and bird flu. And you've been reporting on them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So let's start in Malcolm, Iowa. Malcolm? Yep. In the middle? Yeah, it's actually in the middle of Iowa.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: I went there in September. It's this tiny, sleepy town about 75 miles east of Des Moines.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's just a couple hundred people. There's a post office, a bar and grill, a lot of cornfields.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And on the surface, it's a generally quiet and peaceful small town, except it has millions of chickens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Seven and a half million chickens, to be exact.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: How many people does it have? 270 people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What? Okay, so that's like roughly what, off the top of my head, like 28,000 chickens per person?
--:-- Kenny Torrella: That's right. You must be some kind of math prodigy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I didn't know that, Sean. I'm Asian.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Yeah, and I talked to a few folks in Malcolm. One of them stood out. Her name's Carolyn Bittner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was probably a few days after I moved in that I smelled anything. She moved to Malcolm in 2008 to become a pastor at two churches.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: She's now retired. And she told me that she really likes small-town rural life and that neighbors are kind to each other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Except this one neighbor, Fremont Farms of Iowa. That's the farm that has 7.5 million egg-lane chickens.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: It's not close to my house, but when they move manure, the stench is sickening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And just last night, there was stench.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: The stench of manure hung in the air, and the closer you got to Fremont Farms of Iowa, the stronger and stronger it smelled.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was overwhelming.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: I love to hang my clothes on the line to dry. And sometimes in the morning when I put them out, the air is clean because the wind is going the other way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if the wind shifts while they're out there, and especially if it shifts while they're still damp, I bring them in.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Not smelling fresh and ozone-y, but smelling like chicken shit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Damn.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Yeah, livestock farms generate nearly a trillion pounds of manure each year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And fumes from that manure creates terrible air pollution, which is linked to nine times more premature deaths than coal-fired power plants.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: This isn't like a happy story where like a trillion pounds of manure gets turned into a trillion pounds of fertilizer and recycles and closes the loop and all that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, there's just simply way too much manure for it to all serve as fertilizer.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: So often farmers will over-apply manure, which, one, it smells really bad, but it also leaches into water, contaminates drinking water, and other issues.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On top of that, other research has found that living near a factory farm is positively associated with risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And people who live near them also report higher rates of headaches, depression, anger, and respiratory symptoms, such as asthma.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, that sounds worse than awful, Kenny.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Why would you want to live here in Malcolm, Iowa, next to the manure?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, Carolyn moved to Malcolm for a job. She didn't know that there were also seven and a half million chickens in town.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Huh. And I've heard that from other people, that maybe they moved there and they didn't know, or maybe they've lived there for a lot of their lives, and the factory farms started coming in in the 90s and the early 2000s, and they had no choice but to just deal with it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, Carolyn has tried to speak up for years and tell the farm about how terrible it smells.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: She's also spoken up at permit hearings, too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What has she said? How's that gone?
--:-- Kenny Torrella: It hasn't gone that well. I mean, nothing has changed. If anything, it's gotten worse because the chicken farm now has more animals than it did when she first moved in 2008.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of this just comes down to public policy.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: The problem is that the deck is stacked against Carolyn and people like her because usually local, county, and state permitting regulations are really lax.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're really friendly to the meat, dairy, and egg industries.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: They allow these massive factory farms to come in to be built really close to people's homes, to churches and schools and businesses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's also usually pretty lax rules around how they handle that collective trillion pounds of manure.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And she told me that while Fremont Farms is doing fine, the town is kind of disappearing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The population here in Malcolm has been declining since I moved in.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Partly, I'm sure, it because of the smell It just not a very pleasant place to live anymore
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Malcolm cares more about this farm and the revenue it brings in than it does the people who might bounce It seems so.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And, you know, I've talked to a bunch of people in similar circumstances.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, there are thousands and thousands of these huge factory farms across the country.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: You know, there are wounds in this neighborhood that, frankly, will never heal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One person I talked to, her name is Sonia in Minnesota.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: She says that fights over big dairy operations and pig factory farms near her have torn her community apart.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Deep, deep wounds in this neighborhood.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And, you know, a wave of the hand is now met with, you know, a wave of the middle finger.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's how things operate.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Dang. Dang.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and there's Edith in Worth County, Iowa, who told me that a lot of her neighbors won't speak publicly against the factory farms near them.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: People are afraid to speak out. They'll lose friends. You know, they'll lose money, opportunities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Small business people really have to watch it because even if they support being against factory farms, they'll lose business customers.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Okay, so not only are we killing millions and millions of chickens and not even eating them because of bird flu, and not only are eggs more expensive across the entire country, but just living near these farms is a shit show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Trump says he wants to do something about the price of eggs. He's got Elon Musk at his side.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: I don't know what his diet is, But he's also got RFK at his other side.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that dude's always going on about factory farms and agriculture in the United States and how we need to fix it.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: I spent a lot of my career suing factory farms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I probably sued Smithfield more than any other attorney, Tyson's, Purdue.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Is there an opportunity to hit reset right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, RFK Jr. over the years has really criticized factory farming.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: In fact, for 20 years, he was the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is this group that does really great work to combat water pollution from these huge farms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I have my doubts that he's going to really do much to shake up the agricultural status quo here.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Because he wasn't put in charge of agriculture?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, that's right. He's in charge of HHS, which includes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: But it's the agriculture department and the environmental protection agency who are really in charge of regulating farms and all of this pollution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like what you're saying, Kenny, is that the only way this would actually change and there be enough attention on factory farming to actually achieve political change would be if there were something as catastrophic as like a bird flu pandemic maybe i mean maybe if we get to a point where we're rationing eggs.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Even then it's a maybe? I mean, you know, in 2009, over 10,000 Americans died from swine flu, which originated in pigs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And today, pig factory farming looks exactly like it did in 2009.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: So it's hard to say what, if anything, could push the country to really rethink how we raise animals for food.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm not even sure. a major bird flu pandemic could do it.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: So that leaves us where? It's on us, the consumers, to make different choices.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's true. We've become really accustomed to cheap eggs and other animal products.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And I think visiting Iowa and hearing stories from people like Carolyn, you come to realize that there is a cost to these cheap eggs and other products.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a cost to the environment. There's a cost to people who live in rural America near factory farms.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: There's a cost to the animals who are treated really terribly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So yeah, there's always going to be this tension and trade-off.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: You know, we can opt to eat fewer eggs. We can eat egg alternative products like plant-based eggs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We can also use this as an opportunity to learn more about the factory farming system and maybe rethink how we produce food.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: I hope that's the one kind of silver lining of this terrible bird flu outbreak is that it gives us time to pause and think about how we might raise food in a more humane and sustainable way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kenny Torrella, Vox.com. He also makes music.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: In fact, all of the music you heard on today's show came from Kenny, who goes by Torello when he's dropping beats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kenny's reporting was supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from the Builders Initiative.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: And Vox's future perfect fellow, Sam Delgado, assisted with Kenny's reporting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you, Sam.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Miles Bryan produced this episode, Amina Alsadi edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, Andrea Christensdottir, and Patrick Boyd mixed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, and it's Today Explained.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Go Barts!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Deal? Yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now you can do that, do that with the all new Acrobat.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: It's time to do your best work with the all new Adobe Acrobat Studio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show comes from Mercury.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: What if banking did more? Because to you, it's more than an invoice. It's your hard work becoming revenue. It's more than a wire. It's payroll for your team. It's more than a deposit. It's landing your fundraise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The truth is, banking can do more.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Mercury brings all the ways you use money into a single product that feels extraordinary to use.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Visit mercury.com to join over 200,000 entrepreneurs who use Mercury to do more for their business.
--:-- Kenny Torrella: Mercury, banking that does more.
