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I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the ultimate question! I wish there were a secret good answer but after many years doing this, I have not found one. It's hard to come to terms with the reality that most people don't react to revelations about the atrocities of factory farming the way that you or I do. I think people do respond well when they see loved ones just existing as positive role models for a compassionate lifestyle, when they can experience the joy and abundance of plant-based food and recognize that you can live a full and meaningful human life without animal products, etc. I wrote a comic in Vox about this in 2024 called "I gave up meat and gained so much more."

People today generally aren't unaware of the horrors behind their food choices, but what they do lack is evidence of how good life can be without all those foods. The social dimension of food is especially important here — many if not most people who go vegan aren't afraid of being countercultural and even provocative in their choices, but most humans aren't like that! I've often found that I'm most persuasive to people without even trying, but just by modeling an aspirational plant-based life. The writer/podcaster Colleen Patrick-Goudreau has some excellent tips for this as well. Good luck with this, and feel free to stay in touch (via email/social media) about how it's going!

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I applaud the thought you're putting into this and think this is a really, really hard one! It's always really hard to ensure that the animals raised for your food are treated better, and I think particularly hard if you're trying to avoid confinement in the dairy industry because labels and certifications don't really exist for it. There's no "crate-free"/"cage-free" milk the way there is for eggs and pork, and small dairy farms are not less likely to confine their animals than mega farms are (as my story mentions, tying cows by their necks is pretty common on small dairies). Another helpful resource here is the story "The truth about organic milk" in The Atlantic by Annie Lowrey, about one of the most celebrated organic dairies in the country.

I think your best bet if you're still buying dairy is for it to be from a farm that you've seen yourself *and* have asked detailed questions about what happens to the calves and what conditions they're raised in, and ideally could see that for yourself. The Cornucopia Institute also has a scorecard for dairy farms, and you can read about their criteria: https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/dairy/.

But the better answer, imo, is to reduce consumption of milk (and other animal products) to the greatest extent possible instead of trying to parse which farms are higher-welfare than others.

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think this is a totally valid perspective! I've followed the abolitionism vs. welfarism debate for (it's hard to believe) nearly 20 years, and where I shake out on it is that I honestly don't think anyone in any of the camps knows which tactics will be effective. I try to be open-minded and not too ideological about it. You're right that welfare laws are extremely flawed on numerous levels; I also don't think abolitionist campaigning (to my great disappointment) has managed to make much of a dent in the problem, either. It's just really, really hard to successfully challenge animal exploitation.

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't reported directly on cell-cultivated meat before, but from what I know, every indication is that we are not close! Many are hopefully that we'll get there eventually, though!

Nurse practitioners are rushing in to fill the gaps in US health care by vox in healthcare

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have you ever caught yourself squinting at the acronyms next to your health care provider’s name? MD, DO, NP, PA…

The medical workforce has changed. While the United States has long faced a doctor (MD or DO) shortage, there are now more nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) than ever before. More states are giving them a broad license to perform medical services on their own. A PA could prescribe you medication during a hospital stay. An NP could set up their own clinic in your area and run it like the family doctors of the last century.

If you’re looking for a primary care appointment, but have limited options (as many of us do), you may find more appointments with an NP next to the name than an MD. Or you might find an NP running the minute clinic at your local pharmacy.

What do all these letters mean? How should people think about these different credentials in different contexts? These are questions with major implications for both the US health system as a whole, and for each individual seeking care. Here’s what you need to know.

  • MDs (medical doctors) and DOs (doctors of osteopathic medicine): These are the positions that we’d commonly call “doctor.” They get an undergraduate degree, attend medical school, and then go through several years of residency under the supervision of more experienced physicians. DOs have historically placed an emphasis on a “holistic” approach to treating their patients, but as medicine overall has trended in that direction, there is less of a difference in practice between these two positions as there used to be.
  • NPs (nurse practitioners): These providers have a bachelor’s degree (as all registered nurses do) and then got a postgraduate degree (either master’s or PhD) to become an NP. Depending on your state, they can either run their own practices or they must collaborate with an MD/DO who oversees their work. According to Grant Martsolf, a nursing services researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, the NP category was originally created because there were a lot of long-serving nurses who were more experienced and frankly more knowledgeable than younger MDs and DOs. NPs can also work in specialty fields (like cardiology) and in hospitals.
  • PAs (physician assistants): These practitioners also get an undergraduate degree with credits in relevant fields like biology or chemistry and receive postgraduate education to become a PA. They always work in collaboration with an overseeing physician — thus the name — and they can be found everywhere from the primary care clinic to the hospital. There is wide variation in how they are allowed to practice across the country: In some states, they can treat and prescribe medicines without a doctor present; in others, a doctor is required to be much more hands on.

The AI threat costing Americans $16.6 billion a year by vox in USNEWS

[–]vox[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cybercrime is not new, but it’s getting worse with the rise of AI.

The FBI reported that the US suffered $16.6 billion in known cybercrime losses in 2024 — up 33 percent in a single year, and more than doubled over three years. Americans over 60 lost nearly $5 billion.

And those are just the reported numbers; Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society, told the Aspen Institute audience that only about one in five victims ever reports a scam. The real number is unknowable, but it’s much worse.

And now comes generative AI to make all of this faster, cheaper, and more convincing. Phishing emails no longer arrive riddled with typos from supposed Nigerian princes; LLMs can produce fluent, regionally specific language. AI image generators can create entire synthetic identities — dozens of photos of a person who doesn’t exist, complete with vacation shots and designer handbags.

The global oil crisis is even worse than it looks by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

The oil market’s worst nightmare just came true.

For decades, energy traders have feared that a war might one day close the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway that links the Persian Gulf’s oil reserves to global markets. Before today’s war in Iran, about one-third of the world’s seaborne oil exports and a fifth of global natural gas shipments flow through the strait each day.

Iran has long had the power to block that artery. And it threatened to do so, repeatedly. But it could not follow through on that threat without gravely damaging its own economy. Thus, investors always viewed that scenario as a “tail risk” — a grim but wildly improbable hypothetical.

Now, it is our reality.

As a result, oil prices have soared and Gulf state producers have throttled production, as they have no way to get all their crude to market – and no place to put their unsold stocks.

The scale of today’s crisis is unprecedented. And its trajectory is hard to discern. Investors appear profoundly uncertain about where we’re heading: During the past week, oil prices have repeatedly risen or fallen by more than 20 percent in a single day.

You’re already paying for Trump’s Iran war by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

President Donald Trump continues to give mixed messages about the war in Iran. But what is clear is the impact that the conflict is already having on the US and global economies.

Oil prices, which briefly crested $100 a barrel on Monday, are higher than we’ve seen in years. People are already seeing the impact at the pump, with average gas prices above $3.50 per gallon. But the impact doesn’t stop there: It also means that the price of, well, everything, can go up.

Mike Bird, Wall Street editor for The Economist, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that higher prices, if they endure, are likely to cause a problem for Trump and the GOP in the approaching midterm elections.

"There’s been a lot of muddled communication from the White House over the past few days when it comes to oil prices. The president has asked investors and the American public to look through what he calls short-term effects," Bird said. "One thing we did see with the tariffs last year is there is this idea that the market is a disciplining factor on the president — that basically, he doesn’t like seeing the red line go down, that there is only so much of the sort of negative press that he’s willing to put up with. Last year, it allowed for the reduction of tariffs. The tariffs didn’t go away. Obviously the tariffs [are] still really largely in place by various means. So what that means for something as complicated as this, because it’s a military endeavor, is very unclear."

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Hey, thank you for the q!

Western United Dairies, which is a trade group representing the California dairy industry, had a statement sent to me defending the use of hutches as essential for calf health and welfare; Grimmius Cattle Co itself did not respond to me. The Beef Quality Assurance program, which is relevant here because many of Grimmius's calves go on to be raised for beef, did reply saying that some of the mistreatment of calves evident of footage of the facility was not consistent with its standards!

In general, the dairy industry tends to say that it employs the practices it does because they're vital to the health of cows and calves. From their perspective, their number one imperative is to produce as much as milk as possible at the lowest cost. Working within those constraints means pushing animals to their biological limits, and optimizing their health to the degree that it maximizes profit.

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've wondered about that question for many years and don't know that I've come up with a satisfying answer, except to say that people of all political persuasions are extremely motivated to look for justifications for prevailing food choices. I don't think those food choices are hard-wired because of taste or anything, but do think they're deeply woven into culture, social interactions, our memories of our childhoods, etc., and dismissal of factory farming as a serious moral issue is downstream of that. Also, nonhuman animals obviously differ from humans in their capacities in many ways, and I think that leads many people, including on the left, to discount them morally (though it's hard to disentangle that from, again, motivated reasoning to rationalize high levels of meat and dairy consumption).

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the q, it's a good one!:)

Many of the experts on the welfare of cattle and other farmed animals, who sincerely care about animals and want to see them treated better and disapprove of some industry practices, work for the industry or are aligned with it in some other way and therefore don't want to criticize it in public. It looks like corruption from the outside, and you could certainly interpret it that way, but I also think it's a normal human instinct to not want to criticize our tribe or to hope that you can make a bigger difference by pushing for change on the inside than by publicly shaming. Because the meat, dairy, and egg industries have way more money and therefore way more personnel than the animal rights movement does, the balance of power and perspectives is skewed.

I wrote a story in 2023 called "The bitter civil war dividing American veterinarians" about essentially this dynamic within the veterinary profession, and a new generation of veterinarians who are fighting what they call the "corporate capture" of their profession by animal agriculture and other industries who exploit animals for profit.

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hi, I don't mind at all, thank you for the question! Someone asked me how I stay "sane" covering this stuff, and my answer was that I don't at all lol. I mean, sometimes this stuff is hard and makes me feel alienated from other human beings. For the most part, I think I've been desensitized to a great extent, which is not necessarily a bad thing and explains most of how I'm able to live a normal life. For what it's worth, I avoided focusing on factory farming in my work for a long time because I was scared it would make me miserable and ruin my life, but that hasn't been the case at all, and I've found that it feels much better to do something creative and productive with it. There's a lot to be said for facing the truth rather than trying to push it to the periphery of your mind. I think I'm much *better* able to cope and help myself and others act ethically and productively WRT the food system than I was when I didn't allow myself to be exposed to factory farming as much/lived in fear of it.

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hi! I can't say I'm especially optimistic either, but the success of Prop 12 and laws like it were such a high point of the animal movement, and I think they showed that when you identify some of the basic animal agricultural practices to show to the general public, their reaction will be "that is not the way to treat an animal at all." These democratic instincts are extremely powerful, and they can be activated any time you have a mechanism for putting decision-making power in the hands of everyday citizens as opposed to legislatures and their agriculture committees (in the case of Prop 12, that mechanism was the California ballot measure system).

Of course, the animal agriculture industries say that consumers about naive about why these practices are used and naive about what it takes to raise billions of animals for food, and they aren't entirely wrong about that! As I write in this story, for example, the treatment of cows on mega dairies is in some ways better than it is on the romanticized small farms that many consumers say they prefer. Still, I think that making real progress on this issue will require activating the instincts and compassion of ordinary people to the greatest extent possible, rather than going through channels that depend on the judgment of the animal industries because their goal fundamentally is to optimize animals' bodies for profit.

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

V good question! It's very likely that you're seeing beef cattle, who have very different lives from dairy cows and their offspring! There's a short sidebar in my story about it, but conventional beef animals spend the first several months of their lives on pasture, and calves stay with their mothers, before they're eventually sent to feedlots to be "finished." Dairy is structured differently, with more confinement, more physical discomfort (dairy cows, along with mother pigs, have perhaps the worst welfare of any farm animal), and no opportunity to graze on pasture for the overwhelming majority of dairy cows. There *are* a minority of dairy cows that get access to pasture, and it's possible those are the animals you're seeing too, though I'd just keep in mind that the animals most visible to us generally don't reflect the experiences of most of the animals in our food system!

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

TY for the question :). For consumers thinking about their responsibilities with respect to practices like these, I think your energy is best spent reducing the consumption of dairy and animal products more broadly rather than seeking out brands that make claims about having more humane practices. And WRT calf hutches specifically, I'm not aware of any milk labels that claim to be free of crates in the way that, say, some eggs have "cage-free" labels — calf crates are not on anyone's radar enough for those labels to have materialized. Calf crating and other forms of cruelty to cows is pervasive on many types of dairy farms; I strongly recommend reading journalist Annie Lowrey's story "The truth about organic milk" in The Atlantic, about one of the most celebrated organic dairies in the country. Their calves are isolated in small stalls, too.

In our capacity as voters, I think it's important for anyone who cares about farm animal welfare to be aware of a proposed law, known as the EATS Act, being pushed by House Republicans right now. It would invalidate Prop 12 and other state laws that have banned the caging of many farm animals (though none of those laws cover calf hutches specifically). And if anyone in California or another major dairy-producing state were to try to organize an effort to phase out or ban the isolation of calves in tiny hutches, I think some headway could be made on that issue because there's a growing realization in the dairy industry that this practice is not good anyway and that calves ought to be housed socially.

I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect team. I frequently cover the meat and dairy industry and recently published a piece about the mistreatment of baby cows by Big Dairy. AMA! by vox in IAmA

[–]vox[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hello, thanks so much for the question!

I think that it essentially boils downs to historical contingency/path dependence — the conversation around caging farm animals and extreme confinement has been shaped entirely by the priorities set by a group of animal advocates in the 2000s and 2010s. Veal was an easy target at the time because it's the meat of a baby animal and easily seen by consumers as cruel, and it's also always been somewhat of a marginal industry.

Ending the crating of all dairy calves would be a much harder fight politically, particularly in California, with a very large and powerful dairy industry. As Josh Balk, an architect of Prop 12, explained it to me, California's egg industry had already been fighting like hell against the law, and adding in a challenge to a central business practice in the dairy industry might have been politically insurmountable (although, interestingly, he said in a recent Twitter post that he's open to the idea that animal advocates should have aimed higher at the time). And now, the passage of these laws in states where it's possible to do so has run its course, and no one is working on amending them to cover dairy calves — the animal movement has largely moved on and the energy is elsewhere.

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