S7. E5: Monica Chen: Teaching Your Children Well
“So, you really want the kids to drink the cow's milk because that's the liquid that's available to them if they're thirsty. And we were also told that yeah, you really should be having the kids open up their cow’s milk. I went down through all the tables and said, “open up your milk, open up your milk.
“Or, I was told, we just won't get our funding because this was a school that was a turnaround school, all the kids are on free lunch. And, so this is how we got our funding as a school.”
- Monica Chen
Monica Chen is the executive director of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, an organization that educates and empowers individuals and communities to support just and sustainable food systems. Meaning they go into schools, colleges, and universities and the truth about where their food comes from.
By educating young people about factory farming and equipping them with the tools to oppose it, Factory Farming Awareness Coalition builds both an inclusive consumer base as well as an informed citizenry that supports cultural and legislative change for the benefit of all. To date, FFAC has reached over 220,000 students and is building an army of kids with a mission to change food systems all over the country.
Learn More About the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition
Transcript:
Monica: [00:00:15] So you really want the kids to drink the cow's milk because that's the liquid that's available to them if they're thirsty. We were also told that, yeah, you really should be having the kids open up their cow’s milk. You know, I went down the aisles of all the tables and said, Open up your milk, open up your milk, or I was told we just won't get our funding because this again was a school that was a turnaround school. All the kids are on free lunch, so this is how we got our funding as a school.
Elizabeth: [00:00:47] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask, if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Monica Chen. Monica is the executive director of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition. They educate and empower individuals and communities to support just and sustainable food systems. They go into schools and universities and tell the truth about where their food comes from. Monica, thank you so much. It's really good to have you here today.
Monica: [00:01:50] It is such a pleasure to be here, Beth.
Elizabeth: [00:01:52] I want to get into everything clearly. But let's actually start with how you grew up around food and when animal products and all of that awareness came into your life.
Monica: [00:02:08] Yeah, I grew up in a Chinese-American family. I was born in New York, but grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we were eating what I thought were traditional Chinese foods. I didn't really think that much about where my food was coming from until I was eight years old and I had my very first pet, a guinea pig. She meant the world to me. She was my very first real friend, and she meant a lot to me. I quickly learned that when I told people that I had a guinea pig, the response that I got from people who love me, including, you know, blood relatives, my uncle, for example, they would just say, Oh, you eat guinea pigs in Peru? We're not even Peruvian, but that was like the very first response that people had was they wanted me to know that my guinea pig was edible. That was just such a shock. A little eight-year-old kid. So I really started to just recognize that people have what I immediately perceived as very dysfunctional relationships with animals where they're thinking about things like, this is what it means to love them, but not these animals. Then we want to make sure that you understand that distinction and please don't think too hard about where your food is coming from, because once you figure that out, of course, you're going to have some great concerns about it. So as I got older, I was really able to understand where all that was coming from, that defensiveness. But ultimately, I really realized that my family loves food. They love it a lot, and I love it too. It's just that we've had to have a lot of conversations about why we're eating, what we're eating and where traditions have come from, where what things might matter to us in our culture. I mention all this because Thanksgiving is coming up.
Elizabeth: [00:03:43] So when did you stop eating meat and dairy?
Monica: [00:03:46] I became vegetarian when I was about 12 years old, and the impetus for that was I went to middle school and I met a kid who was vegetarian and I said, Oh, I can do that too. So for me, having that connection was really integral. The same thing happened to me when I was 17 or 18 years old. I met my very first vegan and I just learned that that was something that was possible because nobody had ever really said, this is a possibility. This is my life. So having that example was very helpful.
Elizabeth: [00:04:12] I was thinking today I was walking my dog and I was thinking about people who have been on the podcast. For the majority that I've asked when they've gone vegetarian or vegan, the answer is usually like 18 to 20, 17 to 20, you know, college like late high school or college or like middle school. I was wondering, there's just like two times where we're super open or super aware. I don't know. But literally if I went through every episode, you know, it's like 80 percent fall into those two categories.
Monica: [00:04:43] That's fascinating to me because you know that the target audience of our presentations is this very specific age demographic, and I had not heard that many people were specifically pointing out middle school, high school, college as key areas.
Elizabeth: [00:04:58] This is not scientific, but I ask pretty much everyone who comes on here. I think the middle school thing for a lot of people, including me, it's just you really make this connection like, oh, wait a minute, that chicken is a chicken, you know. Which for some reason when you're a little kid, even if you know, you don't know.
Monica: [00:05:17] Yeah. One of the things that I think is extraordinarily empowering in choosing to not eat an animal product isn't just in necessarily in that quote unquote chicken that you're saving, but the social pressure that or impact that it has on other people around you. So, one of the examples I give is, say, after a presentation, you're going out to Burger King and you're the only person who orders the Impossible Whopper. What impact does that have on your friends? Conversely, right, what if everybody orders the Impossible Whopper? If you're truly honest with yourself, right, how do you feel about ordering the Cow Burger? Right? So there is that social impact as well that I think we really need to start articulating a little bit more so that we can understand that it's not just about this animal that we're saving at our meal, which is often how it's positioned.
Elizabeth: [00:06:03] I think too, like you said, Oh, you met a kid who is vegetarian. I think nowadays that's so, it just happens so much more often, right? There's just a lot more kids with a lot more awareness. But let's wait and get to them after we get to you a little bit more. I heard you dropped out of high school and then I heard what you did when you dropped out of high school. Will you talk about that because it just says so much about who you are?
Monica: [00:06:26] Well, I've had a somewhat strange educational history. I I went to a couple of different high schools. I went to Waldorf, which is Rudolf Steiner inspired. I went to my regular public high school and then I just got tired of what we call the banking method of education, which is where you are taking information, just putting into your brain and you're not truly like processing and you're just regurgitating it out again, so by the time I was in high school, I was excellent at taking standardized tests, multiple choice tests. I can read pretty much anything, memorize it for about an hour and then just like, spill it all back at you. The problem with that is I just didn't love learning anymore. There was nothing particularly meaningful about what I was doing, which is, I guess, why you're saying it's indicative of what I'm doing now, because having meaning and purpose in my life has always been very important. I'm not just going to do something because we're supposed to for no reason without some greater purpose.
Elizabeth: [00:07:28] So you're this kid. You're like an uber overachiever surrounded by uber overachievers, right? Everyone's like taking tons of AP classes and doing everything you can to get into college and you're in competition with eight trillion kids doing the exact same thing.
Monica: [00:07:44] Mhm.
Elizabeth: [00:07:45] But in that level of where you're just being fed all that, it's pretty just astonishing and outstanding to step back and say, You know what, I'm not doing it and I'm out.
Monica: [00:07:54] Yeah, yeah, it was pretty rare. A lot of my friends were immigrants themselves to the United States, whereas my mother was born in Taiwan, but she moved here to the United States when she was younger. My dad was actually born in New York, even though he's Chinese as well. So there's a lot of pressure on first, immigrants like Chinese families to go into very specific careers and achieve a certain level of educational excellence. I think that because my parents had sort of done that already, they had been engineers and they just got it, they saw through it right away that it wasn't actually making them feel fulfilled or happy. Or I mean, what is the point of life if you're just going to exist, at least for them. So they were very supportive.
Elizabeth: [00:08:39] Ok, that makes it a little more understandable that they were supportive. So what did you do?
Monica: [00:08:44] I read a book called The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn, and she's also, I believe, the founder of Not Back to School Camp. She, along with other champions of the unschooling movement such as John Taylor Gatto, who was the New York City teacher of the year. I believe that was his award title many times. They have just been really encouraging students to stop going to school because there are many problems with the history of schooling. That might not be the most interesting thing to everybody on this podcast, but there is a there's a lot of very problematic things about the history of education and why we teach what we teach and how we teach it, and how it has not changed. So they really encourage students to take some time to learn and pursue interests that are actually of value to the student. So the example that I have given in the past is that in my AP U.S. history class, we just went chapter by chapter, a new chapter every single week and we just spat out everything for these various exams to prep for the AP test. I remember being fascinated by the history of the conformity of the Germans during World War Two, and we just had no time to delve into that. I remember asking, like, can we learn a little bit more about this? This is fascinating to me. It was a no, there's no time. So I did want to learn more about that. So when I dropped out of high school and I created my own school, which was called the Levasseur School for those who get the Harry Potter when Guardian Lovisa rising out of school reference, I decided to learn more about that. I wanted to take a psychology class at my local community college. I wanted to learn more. That led me to think more about therapy and then hypnotherapy, and then I started going to various other places to learn more about these different things. The point is just that once I finally had a spark again, like some interest in what I was learning, then that led to other interests. I think that a lot of parents are concerned that, Oh, my kid won't have interest. Kids have interests. You've just got to give them some time to delve into it and then they'll find things that relate to it.
Elizabeth: [00:10:52] When you created your own school, was it a combo of like home school and community college?
Monica: [00:10:57] I did take quite a few community college courses while I was unschooling. That's not necessarily common. There are kids who unschool starting in kindergarten and don't follow any prescribed curriculum. Home schooling is different from unschooling because in homeschooling there's normally some kind of course, or series of books that you're reading and there's like very prescriptive time, perhaps that you're studying math and then reading or something like that and there might be an instructor. With unschooling It's truly student driven.
Elizabeth: [00:11:24] So then you go to college.
Monica: [00:11:27] Yeah, I went to UC Berkeley and I was already vegan at that point because I had attended my community college where I'd met my very first vegan. I loved meeting her because I started to realize that there were so many cool clubs such as, you know, Students for Justice in Palestine. They were working to institute in a sustainable environment along with thirty seventh parallel, all these things that don't exist in high school, right? I just started to meet people who had these interests and then more folks that I met just started to say to me that, Oh, I don't eat meat. It was because a lot of them had just sort of made a connection between you know, the environment and the climate crisis and animals. Any subject that sort of sparked my interest, there was some kind of connection to animals. So I was just meeting more people who realized that we shouldn't be eating animals. I went to UC Berkeley and I was really determined to find similar groups of folks and that's how I got involved with what was then called the Berkeley Organization for Animal Advocacy. The president of that organization at the time was Katie Cantrell, who then became the founder of Factory Farming Awareness Coalition.
Elizabeth: [00:12:35] It wasn't right away that you came to the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition. I mean, you had some years.
Monica: [00:12:41] This is about 2010. So I didn't think that there was a place for me at all. I also was aware that activists don't get paid very much if they ever get paid at all. So it's very worried about surviving, living. But I I did a lot of different things after I graduated from college. I co founded at the time, a little school called Wild Child Free School, which was helping to take various homeschooled students around to the parks and experience nature. Then I was a third grade teacher on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico.
Elizabeth: [00:13:13] You did teach for America too, right?
Monica: [00:13:15] Mm-hmm. Yep, I did.
Elizabeth: [00:13:16] What compelled you to teach for America? Was it because of your experience?
Monica: [00:13:20] Yeah, I've been really fascinated by education and how we teach, and I wondered what it would be like to be a classroom teacher. At that point, I'd already been a teacher in various settings that were more informal, but I wanted to learn what it was like to be a classroom teacher and really understand the pressures that teachers face, the standards that they must meet, any restrictions that they had, also where they had freedom. What would happen if you could just close your door at the end of the day? So I just really want to immerse myself in that experience at the time.
Elizabeth: [00:13:49] When you were on the Navajo reservation, was that through TFA?
Monica: [00:13:53] Mm-hmm. Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:13:54] So were you there for two years?
Monica: [00:13:55] I was. I barely survived, but I did that.
Elizabeth: [00:13:58] I don't know anybody who did TFA, who doesn't say, well, I barely survived. They really did barely survive.
Monica: [00:14:05] Yeah, being executive director of an organization where everybody's remote, where they're all in different states, where we're going through a pandemic, is extraordinarily stressful. But nothing compares to my experience being a third grade teacher on the reservation.
Elizabeth: [00:14:21] Well, you talk about that a little because I want to get to the food part of that too, but talk about just the whole experience. Then let's get to the food and connect it to what you're doing now.
Monica: [00:14:32] I definitely went there as an outsider. I just had a lot to learn. I found it very challenging to also be working for the Bureau of Indian Education, they’re called BIE schools, as opposed to a local county district school. So being part of the Bureau of Indian Education, you're housed within the Department of the Interior, so you're essentially working for the federal government. I really did feel that any, you know, education reform, any directive immediately sort of trickled down to us. I worked at what was called a turnaround school, which was, I think, the new fancy term for failing school. There just wasn't a lot of faith in teachers at that point to teach. So we started off with this curriculum called Reading Mastery, where I would read a sentence and the kids would read a sentence such as, ‘the dog was white’ and then would prompt me to ask the question. What color was the dog? Then they told me to snap my fingers and I would get in trouble if I snap my fingers too high or too low. Then it said in the script, the kids must respond with white and then you went on, it is that scripted. We had reading, then we had reading intervention time and then we had math and then we had math intervention time and everything was just around, basically just math and reading. We were very discouraged from teaching other subjects.
Elizabeth: [00:15:56] Wow, that's so depressing.
Monica: [00:15:58] Yeah and it's funny because TFA’s motto or the slogan that we're supposed to get behind is that one day all students will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. I think that when you're really in that system, you are confronted with the realities. I had students that lived in homes that were missing walls. I had students that had to go and stay in motels in the nearest town and then somehow get to school in the winter because their homes were so cold that they couldn't actually stay in their houses, they had to go to this motel. I saw the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. It was extraordinarily difficult to witness. What was, I think, the most challenging aspect of all were all the ways in which I saw, continuing to exploit this poverty. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. There is poverty here as well. But to really see that at scale in such a rural area, it was very common out there for people to be renting furniture, for example, which ultimately means you're paying a lot more for furniture if you just buy it outright.
Elizabeth: [00:17:02] Sure.
Monica: [00:17:03] You know, things like that. It was painful to see and how this relates to food is that I saw what we were feeding our children and we made a really big deal out of celebrating certain aspects of culture. But we did celebrate Thanksgiving as a whole school and it was actually a really significant holiday where all the families would come to the school that day and we would offer the feast and it would be Turkey. So Thanksgiving, you know, the history, the native people, the pilgrims, they did not actually eat turkey. There's, of course, the terrible history of genocide in this country. Yet in this school, it's not like we were offering a plant based alternative or something like that, what was available was the turkey. It was very popular as well. What was also available was the cows milk, and that was also very problematic to me because I know that a lot of native people are lactose intolerant. Many, many people struggle to digest lactose because it's meant for baby cows that milk, but that was the option that was available.
Elizabeth: [00:18:10] You had to encourage them to drink milk every day, right?
Monica: [00:18:13] Yeah, that was really painful. So at my school there were boarding students, so the students who stayed over at the school overnight and during the weekdays. Then there were the students who just came to school every single day. But no matter what, they had breakfast and lunch at minimum at the school. We always offer them cow's milk and we only had a single water fountain anywhere near the cafeteria and it wasn't even in the cafeteria. So you can imagine the stress of me supervising lunch, for example, and if one kid wants to get water, then you worry like all the kids are going to get water and then you're worried about chaos. So you really want the kids to drink the cows milk because that's the liquid that's available to them if they're thirsty. We were also told that, yeah, you really should be having the kids open up their cows milk. I went down the aisles of all the tables and said, Open up your milk, open up your milk. Or I was told we just won't get our funding because this again was a school that was a turnaround school. All the kids are on free lunch and so this is how we got our funding as a school
Elizabeth: [00:19:13] And most of them are allergic to it.
Monica: [00:19:16] Yeah. That was very painful for me as an educator because I was under constant pressure to have my students reach, quote unquote proficiency, and I knew how important learning time was. There was actually, you know, I remember at certain points. We were wondering, can we cut down the amount of time on transitions to reduce the amount of time at recess and at lunch? My kids were missing class because they were going to the bathroom all the time because they were drinking cow's milk and their stomachs were always gurgling and they were going in the bathroom and my room smelled terrible, pretty consistently. So that was also just painful on another level.
Elizabeth: [00:19:52] So did this whole experience. I mean, it's the first time you really connected, like what we're doing in our schools and our institutions with food. Did it stick out to you as something you wanted to make a difference with?
Monica: [00:20:04] Mm-hmm. Even when I was at community college, I was already working on initiatives to bring plant based foods to the campus cafeteria. When I was teaching environmental education, I used to take the kids into the garden and encourage them to make their six plant part burrito and have a connection with the food that they were growing. But sometimes it just felt a little bit like a scam because we'd make a big deal out of it. But then we would go into the cafeteria and serve Sysco food or something like that. But yeah, I would. I'd say that this experience was very impactful because I had all my young, youthful ideals going into that. I was already vegan, right, so to be who I am and being told that I need to encourage the kids to drink cow's milk. Of course, that caused a little bit of a crisis for me, just trying to figure out what am I doing? Why am I doing it? For which end.
Elizabeth: [00:20:56] I love the fact that you were like, I don't like education, I'm out of here. Then everything you did after that was like, I'm getting back in there and I'm fixing this. You came back in with a real mission.
Monica: [00:21:09] Mmhmm. I studied education for both my undergrad, and I also have my master's degree in education. So honestly it was the subject that I just found the most interesting because it had impacted my life so much and because I knew how much it mattered. Students are spending so much time in school. That's a significant time for us to be shaping young minds, changing hearts, and I really recognize the power that teachers have because I've had really great teachers in my life as well. So I strongly believe that we have a lot of problems on this planet and that this next generation is going to be really critical. I want to also provide them with hope because I definitely was growing up at a time when we were first, I think, really starting to take climate change seriously, and I understood it right away.
Elizabeth: [00:22:00] So then you end up at FFAC.
Monica: [00:22:04] Mmhmm.
Elizabeth: [00:22:05] So is it kind of like, everything comes together. Everything you've been doing, veganism, education, schools, school food? Did all the lights go on for you?
Monica: [00:22:14] Literally every aspect of my career before this has connected to FFAC. I also worked in prisons. I also worked in health like sexual health, LGBTQ health, I worked in mental health, suicide prevention and crisis support services. Every single one of these experiences, along with everything I just said, relates to what we do at Factory Farming Awareness Coalition.
Elizabeth: [00:22:39] So now that we got here, let's talk about the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition. Well, first of all, will you explain what it is?
Monica: [00:22:45] Yeah. So for over a decade now, we've been delivering educational programming primarily at the high school and college level, but also you know earlier and then also to some corporations, to faith and values based communities and so on. At this point, we've reached over two hundred and twenty thousand students. There's a myriad of places where we have staff that have just been going out there giving presentations and our classroom content.
Elizabeth: [00:23:12] So kind of take me through it. So I'm a kid. I'm in high school. You come into my health class or what classes are you coming into?
Monica: [00:23:22] We go into every single subject. But yeah, let's say that you are a freshman in high school and we go into your health class. So in that class, you learn about the basics of factory farming and you learn about the public health implications relating to pandemics. You learn about nutrition as well. So that's because that's what's needed in the health class. You might also see us again in your 10th grade English class. You might see us in your 11th grade environmental science class.
Elizabeth: [00:23:48] What are you saying in my 10th grade English class?
Monica: [00:23:50] It really just depends on what they're reading. If it's related to philosophy, it's just, it can be related to why are we eating animals? It's been very fascinating to read Socratic style seminars with students and just go deep.
Elizabeth: [00:24:04] But that's what I want to know. Take me in. I'm in 10th grade English.
Monica: [00:24:07] Ok.
Elizabeth: [00:24:08] You come in and so how are you even introduced?
Monica: [00:24:12] So, Well, I mean, we are the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, so we need to go over the basics of what factory farming is and just how prevalent it is.
Elizabeth: [00:24:22] Yes.
Monica: [00:24:23] There are always folks that say, I have this idealized version, but we're saying ninety nine percent of the 10 billion land animals farmed in the United States come from these factory farms. We go through what's happening and it's hard to hear, right? We will talk about what happens to male chicks, and what happens to broiler chickens. A lot of kids unfortunately don't always know how we get cows milk. They think that the cows are just magical lactating machines. So we go through that process. We learn about pigs and these awful gestation crates. Then we'll say, what feels like it is not OK to do to animals? Of course, the kids are like everything that you've just said right from, you know, cutting off a pig's tail without any anesthetic, debeaking, of course, that's not acceptable. So then we say, OK, well, what is acceptable to do to an animal? That's where it gets really interesting because the kids have a lot of different ideas about it. Sometimes they'll be really quiet and you can sort of just make a joke and say, so everybody here is vegan? Everybody is just saying it's not OK to kill animals like, let's have a real conversation. Then they'll say things like, Well, the animal should be living a really happy life and then we should kill them, and it's like, OK, well, why should we kill them? It'll be something like, because they're tasty. Then we'll talk about pleasure. Sometimes I'll give an example of, say, I was raised in a culture where I just got a tremendous pleasure like a hundred times the pleasure of you eating bacon. I got from kicking dogs and hearing the cracking of the ribs, every time I kicked a dog and I heard the ribs cracking, one hundred times more pleasure. Is that justifiable? No, it's not. But it's my culture. We will talk about culture. When did something become culture? What are the aspects of our culture that we're not so proud of anymore? Misogyny, for example, right? So it's really interesting to delve into this and ultimately to hear the students articulate for themselves why it's not OK to be eating animals and why it doesn't actually make sense.
Elizabeth: [00:26:24] Honestly, if you came into my 10th grade English class, I was already vegetarian, but I would have probably gone vegan if I had this experience. What a privilege for the kids to be able to actually have these conversations. And what a privilege, just to be able to go in and talk to these kids, right? Because. You're not telling anybody to go vegan, you're just talking about what happens.
Monica: [00:26:50] Yeah, and we're really realistic about what our students will be able to do immediately after seeing our presentations. We do surveys and eighty eight percent of them, of our many thousands of data points do indicate that they want to reduce their animal product consumption. But I'll be the first to tell you, I have no idea if that actually happens because I know the reality of where our students are coming from. I'm aware of food access issues. I'm aware that they are not the primary purchasers, but what I always really try and stress, and I'm sure that you talk about this as well, is that you don't have to be a self-identified vegan to try the Impossible Burger one time. You don't have to be perfect or this way or that. But I do believe that every single student after our presentations is less mean to the vegans in the class. They understand the arguments at least. We have been able to reach a lot of students who want to do more. They want to be advocates, they want to take initiative, so they join what we call our student advocates program and that is very comprehensive. We go through essentially a full course on the impacts of factory farming so that our students can go to the sustainability director of their college and say this is the school's climate action plan, we need to reduce our carbon emissions. Here's how we can do so by promoting plant based food options and this is how we're going to get actual buy-in from students. We will train the students so that if they are talking about immigrant rights, that we can make those very clear connections between who's working in slaughterhouses and the late night cleaning crew.
Elizabeth: [00:28:19] When a student becomes an advocate. Have you seen successes that that advocate has made within his or her school or university or college? Or like, do you get the feedback on, Hey, our school is not ordering food from whatever anymore, that kind of thing?
Monica: [00:28:35] Yeah. So after our students, during the actual institute, which might be the 16 week spring semester or the eight week summer intensive, they get a lot of training and they also attend project hours, so they're able to get special coaching and support. So if a student does want to promote default veg on their campus, we can help them through that. Realistically, though, I have never seen a project like that's institutional change happen in a single semester, which is why it's been so critical for us to not think of our programming as a single unit of a semester. We've had to think about this as we're not just recruiting students to be with us for a semester. We are recruiting advocates to be part of our network for life. So we are continuing to offer those coaching support hours even after that first summer intensive. We are offering professional development. We are working with other organizations such as the Better Food Foundation to support us with default veg campaigns. I don't know if you're familiar with those.
Elizabeth: [00:29:32] No. Will you talk about those?
Monica: [00:29:33] Yeah, default veg or the corporate counterpart green by default is really interesting and such a simple concept. It's basically saying that instead of the meat option being the default in the corporate catering policy or in your club foods or what's available at the cafeteria, it's the opposite. Everything is vegan and then you have to opt into the meat option. So what's brilliant about this is there's less resistance sometimes because you're not taking away choice.
Elizabeth: [00:30:02] Right?
Monica: [00:30:03] The meat option is still there, but you have to opt into it. There's plenty of research showing that people go with the default. When your phone rings, it probably makes the same sound that all the other iPhones, for example, have. That's just one of our campaigns, but that's one that we've got specific support and partnership with a better food foundation on.
Elizabeth: [00:30:20] So these kids, though, I mean, you're kind of creating like this army of world changers, in terms of our food systems.
Monica: [00:30:28] Yeah, that is our goal. What's also really key is that many of our students do not come to us as animal rights activists. They are students that are just learning about some of these things, and they might be plugged into other movements, such as Sunrise, which focuses on the Green New Deal and the environmental movement. It might be students who are focused on other issues that are more broadly social justice related. What I think we do a really good job of is making sure that there is a connection to factory farming and these other movements.
Elizabeth: [00:30:59] Do you still go to the schools?
Monica: [00:31:01] I actually gave four presentations this week.
Elizabeth: [00:31:06] Oh, really?
Monica: [00:31:07] So, that's just very, very small compared to some of our staff. But I actually love it.
Elizabeth: [00:31:10] Give me a couple of the highlights of things that have happened when you've gone into schools.
Monica: [00:31:15] Sometimes a lot of students come to our presentations wearing bacon costumes that day, just ready to fight us, right?
Elizabeth: [00:31:23] Stop, really?
Monica: [00:31:24] Yes, right? We're tapping into something into their ranching family history. Again, some of the issues that I see associated with, like meat and protein masculinity, right?
Elizabeth: [00:31:35] Yeah.
Monica: [00:31:36] We don't go in there, we never say like, go vegan, you should feel bad. Be ashamed. We're talking in a much more neutral tone. We're thoughtful about our language. We talk about how we're not here to show bloody images to make people feel bad. We're trying to raise awareness because again, we're talking about the ninety nine percent of where animal products are coming from. Yeah and to hear a student who has spent a summer working on dairy and say, actually, I don't want to drink dairy anymore. That's nice.
Elizabeth: [00:32:06] That's awesome. Monica, thank you. To learn more about Monica and to learn about the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything, we are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click become a member. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Pokey, Bethany Jones and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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