Podcast

Hog Country

Published on February 13, 2024

In the United States, agriculture plays by a different set of rules than other sectors. With its lax child labor laws and lack of environmental restrictions, the American farming industry operates in a uniquely under-regulated environment. Why? Episode 1 of Barbecue Earth explores the history of agricultural exceptionalism and how it impacts North Carolina residents living close to factory farms.

Transcript

This transcript was not edited prior to publication.

AUDIO (WION): Thousands of Dutch farmers are rallying against the government on their tractors.

AUDIO (CBS): With the Southwest in the middle of a decades-long megadrought, states are facing the biggest water crisis in generations.

AUDIO (SKY NEWS): It’s a conspiracy worth millions: beef washing, with the Amazon at its heart.

AUDIO (FOX): Now, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is telling you that beef should be banned. Beef, the food!

AUDIO (FOX): People know what they want. We don’t want to be eating insects - we want our steak.

HEEWON PARK: Imagine you wake up on a beautiful morning, eat a delicious bacon and egg sandwich and step outside your home. You’re hit with a wave of a horrible smell—a smell unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. It’s windy, and you feel something wet sprinkling onto your skin. What is it? Manure.

NOAH GORDON: This is the daily experience of thousands of Americans who are unlucky enough to have factory farms as their next-door neighbors. And this pollution is the byproduct of our tasty, protein-rich breakfasts, and a big reason why the planet is getting hotter and hotter.

HEEWON PARK: Animal agriculture stands alone. No other sector is so important to climate change, and yet so underdiscussed by politicians and media.

NOAH GORDON: About a third of planet-warming emissions come from our food systems, and meat and dairy production is by far the biggest offender.

HEEWON PARK: In this six-part miniseries, we take a closer look at the stories that lie behind meat — how it shapes our society, our climate, and even our geopolitics.

NOAH GORDON: Oh, and we should add, just like climate politics isn’t about blaming anyone who’s ever put gas in their car, this podcast isn’t about shaming anyone who loves bacon. It’s about exploring how our food systems shape our societies and influence geopolitics – and imagining what a sustainable protein transition could mean for our world and our atmosphere.

HEEWON PARK: We also look to the future of meat, whether that’s lentil burgers or steaks grown in a lab. We explore stories from around the world: from a farmer’s revolt in the Netherlands, to the giant hog farms of North Carolina, to the UN’s strange reluctance to talk about what meat production does to the planet.

NOAH GORDON: But first, we’ll get down in the dirt. In Episode 1, we explore the stories of America’s beloved bacon and the factory farms that produce it.

HEEWON PARK: I love pork as much as the next person, but how is it possible that tens of thousands of factory farms are allowed to defecate on their neighbors’ land and homes, with limited regulation? Where does America’s special treatment of farming come from, and what does it tell us about American climate politics?

HEEWON PARK: From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –

NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon, and this is Barbecue Earth.

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NOAH GORDON: Episode 1 — Hog Country

HEEWON PARK: When you think of American farms, you probably don’t think of massive factories.

PETER LEHNER: Most people may think of a farm as a small-scale integrated operation with some crops, maybe some woodland, some animals of different sorts, and the family running it.

HEEWON PARK: That’s Peter Lehner, he’s the managing attorney of the Sustainable Food and Farming Program at Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law organization. He says the US has a long agricultural history that has shaped our cultural identity.

PETER LEHNER: In the U.S., a couple hundred years ago, more than half the country was involved in agriculture. Right now, it's about 1% of the country is involved in agriculture. But we still have this history, this myth of being a farming nation.

PETER LEHNER: We hear a lot about the family farm. The reality is very different. Most animals, something like 98, 99% of the animals we eat are produced in what are called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

HEEWON PARK: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, also known as CAFOs, are massive industrialized factory farms that were first introduced in the 1950s. Instead of grazing open pastures and fields, CAFO animals live in tiny enclosures until they’re fat enough to slaughter.

LARRY BALDWIN: We're talking about a barn, which for hogs can hold a thousand animals...So we've basically brought the farms into a city-like atmosphere. They're crammed together. They don't get to enjoy what animals on a farm are familiar with enjoying. They don't see the light of day.

HEEWON PARK: That was Larry Baldwin. He’s the North Carolina Pure Farms, Pure Water Coordinator for the Waterkeeper Alliance organization. He’s based in North Carolina, one of the top CAFO states in the country. And a lot of hogs means a lot of hog waste, which the industry stores in giant lagoons, or cesspools, as Baldwin calls them.

LARRY BALDWIN: It is a hole in the ground that can be several football fields in size, holding several million gallons of nothing but hog feces and urine. It's exposed, in most cases, to the open environment. The sun beats down on it in the summertime, and it just stinks.

HEEWON PARK: But even that’s not enough to contain all this waste.

LARRY BALDWIN: The amount of waste that is being produced. It's just staggering. The land can't – it can't sustain it. [00:14:55] So what do you do with that waste in the case of the hogs?

LARRY BALDWIN: They take that waste and through a series of pipes, spray it onto a field in the vicinity of the facility itself, under the pretext of being fertilizer, [00:15:09] under the pretext of raising crops. Well, they're not raising crops. It's a cheap method of waste disposal.

HEEWON PARK: But this method of spraying waste comes at the expense of the environment and public health.

PETER LEHNER: Manure on the fields often runs off into local waterways and folks are seeing...whether it be fish kills or nutrient overloads and algae outbreaks, it’s not a great neighbor.

HEEWON PARK: When lagoon waste runs off into local waterways, it not only kills local wildlife, but can also put humans at risk, polluting the air and groundwater. Larry Baldwin says this waste also impacts people’s quality of life:

LARRY BALDWIN: If your listeners have never smelled a hog cesspool, it literally will take your breath away and not in a good way. It will actually make you take a step back. Nobody would choose to live that way.

HEEWON PARK: Not all farms are this damaging to the environment and climate, but for now, this is where a large majority of our meat comes from. Linda Smith lives near one of these hog CAFOs and experiences this smell every day.

LINDA SMITH: On a hot, humid day, it’s just like dense. The smell is just like, dense. You don't even want to step out at all. And don't dare open a window...And it doesn't mean that just in the mornings, sometimes it’s all day long. 9:30 last night, I stepped out to let the dog go for a walk. What hit me in the nose was the smell from the hog farm.

HEEWON PARK: Richie Harding is a local activist and organizer from North Carolina. He says his community is impacted not only by the smell of hogs, but also by the spraying of lagoon waste.

RICHIE HARDING: So if you happen to have clothes on your clothesline, which everyone don't have dryers, then you've got hog fecal matter on your clothes. You get it on your house. You have kids that go to school smelling like hog feces, being bullied and picked on, or things of that nature. You go outside to cook on your grill and you've got to clean your grill because your grill smells like hog feces. It’s so many other things that happens other than just that smell coming through your house—and that smell is horrible. The closer you get to that thing, it's like, It becomes normal for you. And I don't know how the smell of hog feces, why it should really be normal for anyone.

HEEWON PARK: You might be wondering - how on earth is this allowed to happen? Have no locals tried to fight back against these conditions? Of course they have. But oftentimes, the communities most impacted by CAFOs lack the resources to take on the companies that run them, many of which are worth billions of dollars. Here’s Belinda Joyner, a prominent activist in her community.

BELINDA JOYNER: I'm Belinda Joyner. I live in Northampton County, Garysburg, North Carolina, and I refer to the western end of the county as a dumping ground.

BELINDA JOYNER: We are a tier one county, one of the poorest counties in the state of North Carolina.

HEEWON PARK: One study found that hog CAFOs in North Carolina were disproportionately concentrated in low-income communities of color. These CAFOs have multiplied since the late 1990s.

HEEWON PARK: Many people in these communities cannot afford to move out of their neighborhoods. Others do have the means, but choose to stay. Richie Harding says that many in his community hold deep connections to their land and don’t want to be forced out by hog waste from CAFOs.

RICHIE HARDING: In Northampton County, as people went from slavery to sharecropping to farming, people worked to purchase land and they got that land. And in order to be farmers, they had children  to work that land because they couldn't afford employees through sharecropping. They went out and they worked and they were told that there was never any money yet when the crops came in. You may have gotten some credit during the year … to be able to put food on the table or clothes on the back for your children, for your family. But at the end of the year, you didn't get anything. So when they went to farming, they had to fight to keep what they had. They had to do everything they could. And now this is being passed on down to us.

HEEWON PARK: This is true for Linda Smith’s land, too. Her home is built on land that’s been in her husband’s family for generations.

LINDA SMITH: His father, his grandfather, sharecropped on that land … That man worked from sunup to sundown, to earn the money to buy this land so he can leave a legacy. So he could leave his family something. He was trying to provide for his future, his kids and their kids and their kids, for generations. So nobody should come in and say, well, it's okay. Because it's not okay. It's not okay. We are there because we wanted to be there. That's where we want to be. That's where we’re going to stay.

HEEWON PARK: Belinda Joyner, Richie Harding, and Linda Smith are all activists for their community, and have attended meetings with their county commissioners and representatives to voice their concerns. But they feel that their government has largely ignored them. Here’s Richie Harding again.

RICHIE HARDING: Not long ago, we were actually in Washington, D.C. We met with the EPA, with the deputy, and some high-ranking officials. We have met with everybody in Raleigh that we could possibly think of, but no one would address anything.

HEEWON PARK: Other North Carolinians have pursued legal action against this farm waste that is spoiling their neighborhoods and overheating the planet. Since 2014, over 400 residents have filed 26 lawsuits against a company called Murphy-Brown, LLC.

NOAH GORDON: Murphy-Brown is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods. And Smithfield is now owned by a Chinese corporation, but it is the  largest pork producer in the entire US, and it has huge influence in the American market.

HEEWON PARK: That was Noah Gordon, co-director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Climate, Sustainability, and Geopolitics program.

HEEWON PARK: In 2018, ten North Carolina residents filed a nuisance suit against Murphy-Brown in a court case called McKiver et. al v. Murphy Brown. The residents argued that the mismanagement of hog waste at one CAFO, where Murphy-Brown was a contractor, was (a) damaging to their health, and (b) created putrid smells that prevented them from enjoying their own properties. They alleged that Murphy-Brown had access to technology that could make the waste disposal process safer and less disruptive to their neighbors’ lives, but refused to implement it.

NOAH GORDON: The jury in the McKiver case ruled in favor of the North Carolinian residents. Murphy Brown had to provide $75,000 to each of the plaintiffs as compensation, and even more in punitive damages. It was a victory for environmental justice.

HEEWON PARK: But this legal victory is the exception to the rule. As of 2023, there have been 26 nuisance lawsuits against Murphy Brown, but only 5 of these cases have actually resulted in any plaintiff compensation and punitive damages. Local activists like Larry Baldwin say that many people who suffer from CAFO conditions are not able to pursue legal action due to the cost. Belinda Joyner says that, even for those who did win their lawsuits, it’s not clear that much changed.

BELINDA JOYNER: Even if you get that money, you still living in the same conditions you was living in before you got the money. You still got the stench. You still don't know what effects it’s going to have on your body. So, nothing has changed except that you got a little bit of money.

HEEWON PARK: We reached out to Smithfield for comment. They claim they’re committed to environmental sustainability and deny that hog farms impact public health, citing a 2020 report by the North Carolina Pork Council. They also say they pay $2 million a year to North Carolina for environmental enhancement projects, and that they’re investing millions of dollars into clean energy technology.

HEEWON PARK: But Gordon is skeptical. He says that North Carolina’s polluting, planet-warming hog industry remains just as powerful as before.

NOAH GORDON: Murphy Brown was initially assigned $50 million in punitive damages. But then North Carolina state law forced the judge to cut this number down to just $2.5 million.

HEEWON PARK: On top of that, the hog industry and agricultural leaders in North Carolina were alarmed by the McKiver case’s ruling. So they pushed the state legislature to pass a bill restricting future nuisance lawsuits against farms. Lehner explains.

PETER LEHNER: All states have what are called right to farm laws, which were originally thought of as protecting, say, a farming operation from encroaching suburbs … But those laws have been expanded and used recently to prevent neighbors from successfully challenging these animal factories next door.

HEEWON PARK: In North Carolina, as in the rest of America, meat holds great power. The hog industry, like other sectors of agriculture, operates under a unique set of lax regulations, unlike competing industries. Why? How did animal agriculture become America’s sacred cow? That’s coming up next, after this short break.

AUDIO (Council on Foreign Relations Advertisement):  Hello, listeners! I’m Gabrielle Sierra, host of the Why It Matters podcast from the Council on Foreign Relations. Look, the world of international affairs can feel overwhelming and complex. But it also shapes our lives every single day. So, it pays to know what’s going on out there. Why It Matters is a foreign policy podcast for the rest of us. And, with a little bit of humor and a lot of questions, we’re here to break down global topics and bring the world home to you. So join us every two weeks on Why It Matters, wherever you listen.

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HEEWON PARK: Meat. It’s integral to what it means to be American. Sizzling piles of bacon at brunch, grilling burgers on the fourth of July, cutting the turkey in time for Thanksgiving football.

MUSIC (McDonald’s Advertisement): America’s meat and potatoes. McDonald’s quarter-pounder and fries. All-American beef. Golden crispy fries. From the heartland to the highland, it’s the taste that satisfies. From the beef-loving badlands, across this country wide. It’s meat and potatoes, quarter-pounder and fries. America’s meat and potatoes, quarter-pounder and fries. McDonald’s and you.

HEEWON PARK: Meat isn’t just culturally important to the American consumer. It’s politically powerful, too. Agriculture enjoys special government privileges that are best-illustrated through a concept known as “agricultural exceptionalism.” Jan Dutkiewicz, professor of political science at the Pratt Institute, explains:

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: Agricultural exceptionalism is a term that describes the different way that agriculture is under-regulated compared to other industries...Agriculture will have differentiated sets of regulations governing things like, for instance, be it nitrogen emissions or be it the age of laborers, who can work in fields, or how labor can be structured or paid. So very often, agriculture gets to play by a different set of rules than other industries.

NOAH GORDON: For example, in 2019 the EPA created an exemption so that farms don’t even have to report air emissions from animal waste. And if we aren’t tracking emissions, it’s hard to reduce them.

HEEWON PARK: Obviously, any government wants to ensure its citizens have enough food. But what explains our special political deference to the agricultural sector? In order to understand the roots of agricultural exceptionalism, we need to go back to the early 1900s. Here’s Noah Gordon.

NOAH GORDON: In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act became law under then-president FDR, as part of his New Deal. It set a uniform minimum wage, required overtime pay, and limited child labor.

HEEWON PARK: While the Fair Labor Standards Act was revolutionary for most American workers, it didn’t do much to help people working on farms.

NOAH GORDON: In order to get this law through Congress, FDR needed votes from the Southern Democrats. So he struck a deal.

HEEWON PARK: Southern congressmen wanted to preserve the plantation system. A system that was rooted in a history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and white supremacy.

NOAH GORDON: If there was no exemption for the farming industry, that would mean all agricultural workers would have to be given fair labor rights.

HEEWON PARK: Many of those farmworkers were Black, and the Southern Democrats didn’t want them to be included in fair labor laws and gain pathways toward economic freedom. One way FDR appeased them was by exempting agricultural workers from the Fair Labor Standards Act. Dutkiewicz says the impact of this original New Deal exemption can still be felt today in farming’s lack of regulation in, for instance, child labor laws. The minimum labor age of agriculture is lower than many other American industries.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: So because of agricultural exceptionalism, the age at which children can work in agriculture in most states and the age at which they can operate heavy and dangerous machinery, is much lower than it would be in other industries. For instance, I'm sitting here at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. There's absolutely no way that a 14 year old would be allowed to mop the halls here during the day. It would quite simply be illegal. And yet there are 14 year olds using highly caustic chemicals to clean very sharp blades at processing plants overnight. There are stories, of course, of children as young as 12 who are getting up before dawn to work the fields, for instance, picking berries in Southern California... all of this, we might think it's immoral, but it's perfectly legal because of exceptions to labor laws, which are afforded to agricultural producers and farmers.

HEEWON PARK: We’ve been talking so far about how the meat industry can harm the people working in it,  roughly 40 percent of whom are undocumented immigrants. But the lack of government regulation on agriculture’s emissions also threatens the stability of our climate. Lehner and Dutkiewicz explain.

PETER LEHNER: Right now, the U.S. climate policy is very much focused on fossil fuels. It largely leaves out agriculture in a regulatory sense.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: From the latest research, we can say quite safely that global food systems contribute somewhere between 30 and 33% of global greenhouse gas emissions...And then out of that, we know that livestock specifically contributes somewhere between 14 and 16% of greenhouse gas emissions, and most of that is due to methane.

PETER LEHNER: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas over 80 times as powerful as carbon dioxide over 20 years. But what most people may not know is that actually agriculture produces more methane than the oil and gas sector. Cows are constantly belching methane. Manure lagoons, where the manure’s festering and releasing tremendous amounts of methane. And yet there's no regulations or limits on that methane the way there is on other sectors of the economy.

HEEWON PARK: Gordon says that another reason agriculture has such a big climate impact is that it uses so much of American land.

NOAH GORDON: More than half of US land is used for agriculture, according to the USDA. That’s land that can’t be used for, say, carbon-storing forests. And producing a calorie of beef takes 50 times as much land as a calorie of peas. But even leading climate policymakers, like US climate envoy John Kerry, are not willing to say that our meat consumption is a big part of the problem.

HEEWON PARK: Dutkiewicz points out that all of this raises a certain question.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: So if you look at something like agricultural exceptionalism or particular laws that allow, for instance, for various abuses of factory farming, that allow for child labor, you'd think that the easiest way to regulate this would just be to pass a federal law which prohibits the behavior, right?

HEEWON PARK: But regulating agriculture is no easy task. Dutkiewicz says one big reason is agriculture’s power at the state level.

HEEWON PARK: Although agriculture is not that big a contributor to national GDP, it is quite important to local economies. That means agribusiness holds a lot of economic influence in big agricultural states, which often play important roles in federal politics.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: You have states, for instance, like Iowa, that are extremely important in the primary process. They're extremely important in the Electoral College, and in those states, the agricultural lobby really packs an outsized punch, making it extremely difficult to (a) regulate agriculture in Iowa or (b) be seen as a politician who wants to regulate agriculture, because the agricultural lobby can really mobilize not just at the federal level, but at the state level, to do things like shift voters to the other party, or shift voters away from candidates in crucial states.

HEEWON PARK: Larry Baldwin says this is true in North Carolina, too. The meat industry there also wields a lot of financial and lobbying influence over political leaders.

LARRY BALDWIN: We have state politicians who either used to be or may still be CAFO owners themselves. The CAFO industry, whether it's hogs or poultry, have basically a stranglehold on our General Assembly.

HEEWON PARK: Baldwin says the National Pork Producers Council has a very active lobby in the North Carolina General Assembly. And both pork and poultry invest lots of money in the political system. But agriculture’s economic influence isn’t the only obstacle to moving away from agricultural exceptionalism. Dutkiewicz says culture also plays a large role.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: Agriculture has a very significant and strange place in the American psyche and the American mythos. The average American eats, depending on which statistics you follow, somewhere between 220 and 260 pounds of meat every year.

HEEWON PARK: Compare that to India or Ethiopia, where the average person eats less than 10 pounds a year.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: Americans are also very tied to a notion of consumer sovereignty, which is to say that they like the idea of seeing themselves as being able to exercise their freedom in the market, spend their money however they want, buy the commodities they want, eat how they want, live how they want. Americans in general don't like the idea of agriculture being regulated or trampled upon. They don't like the idea of large government telling farmers what to do.

HEEWON PARK: And on top of that, the question of meat and diet is particularly susceptible to culture war debates. You just need to hop on any social media platform for a few minutes to see this battle playing out.

AUDIO (Michael Knowles Show): Bill Gates wants to take away your hamburger – he does, he just said that!

AUDIO (Fox News): So get ready – you can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled brussel sprouts and wave your American flag. Now, I’m making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thinking is stupid!

HEEWON PARK: So, as a result of meat’s economic, political, and cultural influence, agricultural exceptionalism remains strong.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: Certainly the USDA has not been very willing to try to proactively regulate agriculture, for instance, to achieve emissions targets or other environmental goals. The USDA has this very unique, and in a sense, sort of oxymoronic double mandate. On the one hand, it's the regulator of agriculture, which is meant to pursue the interests of the state and the public in regulating agriculture, be it in terms of environment, labor, public health, and so on. And yet, on the other hand, its other mandate is to promote agriculture, which means production, promoting agricultural consumption domestically, and promoting the export of agricultural goods.  Obviously, these two often are at odds with each other.

HEEWON PARK: But we are seeing signs of progress when it comes to sustainable agriculture in the USA. For example, consider the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is a major law that Congress reauthorizes every five years. It provides billions of dollars of government money. About ¾ of the money goes to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, formerly known as food stamps. But the most recent Farm Bill, from 2018, also invested money in programs for agricultural conservation. Here’s Gordon again.

NOAH GORDON: Some of these Farm Bill programs can help cut emissions. For example they encourage farmers to plant cover crops so that soils store more carbon. And the climate community hopes that Congress will pass a new Farm Bill in 2024 that does much more to address climate change.

HEEWON PARK: The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, or IRA, gave another boost to climate-smart agriculture. According to Lehner and Gordon, the IRA is seen as the most significant piece of climate legislation in US history.

PETER LEHNER: This was the first time Congress had ever linked agriculture and its contribution to climate change.

NOAH GORDON: The IRA mostly focused on promoting clean energy, but it also provided $18 billion for “climate-smart agricultural programs”, like rotational grazing so that cow manure is spread evenly across a pasture rather than concentrated in one spot where it produces lots of methane.

HEEWON PARK: Still, on balance, the US government does much more to subsidize and expand highly polluting meat production than it does to reduce agricultural emissions. Lehner says apart from “food stamps”, most of the Farm Bill goes to farming subsidies.

PETER LEHNER: And those are largely based on commodities and subsidized crop insurance. A lot of these subsidies end up going to the grains that are used as animal feeds – about half of our cropland is used not for food that people eat, but for food that animals eat. And that's very highly subsidized.

HEEWON PARK: And, as Lehner adds, the current US agricultural conservation programs  don’t go nearly far enough.

PETER LEHNER: That's all voluntary. It's a slow process. The programs are oversubscribed, which is to say there's not enough money to get all the farmers to do this. And so we're not transforming agriculture nearly as quickly as we need to be.

HEEWON PARK: Dutkiewicz says the promotion of these pro-climate initiatives is helpful, but the USDA is still failing to get at the root of the problem of our agricultural system. It’s focused more on plant roots than animal stomachs.

JAN DUTKIEWICZ: By far the single biggest contributor to agricultural greenhouse gas emissions are ruminants. Which is to say, cows, sheep, goats, animals with a multi chambered stomach. Now, there are quite a few people in the  industry who think that we can actually reduce those emissions without reducing the amount of beef and dairy we consume, through interventions such as genetically modifying cows stomachs, introducing feed additives that inhibit methane into cows diets and other interventions of this sort. The problem is that all of these interventions are experimental. We have no idea what the political economy or even viability would be like of scaling those to the global level. And quite simply, their total impact is insufficient to seriously decrease the amount of total emissions from ruminant production.

HEEWON PARK: So in the US, agricultural exceptionalism continues. The meat industry is largely left out of the climate conversation and spared from meaningful regulation. But across the Atlantic in the Netherlands, something different is happening.

HEEWON PARK: Coming up next in Episode 2, the story of climate activist Johan Vollenbroek, his push for nitrogen regulations on agriculture, and the backlash from a right-wing farmers’ movement. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –

NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –

HEEWON PARK: – and you’ve been listening to Barbecue Earth.

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HEEWON PARK: This episode was written by Noah Gordon and me, Heewon Park, and produced by me with assistance from Emily Hardy, Daniel Helmeci, and Tim Martin. Music was composed by me and artists on Pixabay. Legal review was done by Korieh Duodu and Kate Logan, and fact checking by Ryan DeVries. Thank you to Megan Wiegand and Lindsay Maizland for editing support, Emily Hardy and Daniel Helmeci for research support, and Amy Mellon, Jocelyn Soly, and Amanda Branom for their graphic design work.

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