Welcome to GRILLED

People know meat. They eat it almost every day, sometimes more than that.

But very few understand what it takes. From our land, our water, our climate, our animals, our health, our farmers.

Because meat is big business, one of the very biggest. Our farms are now factories, our foods are products, and our politics serves a system that benefits a few giant multinationals whose names most people couldn't tell you.

GRILLED exists to change that. It is a new investigative journalism project focused on food systems and the meat industry. How it operates, how it evades accountability, and how it continues to grow even as its impacts mount and its costs fall on the rest of us.

It's important to appreciate the scale of what we're talking about. Cows, pigs and other livestock represent nearly 60% of world's mammals by weight. Humans make up another third. Wild animals - every elephant, wolf, whale and mouse on earth - just 5%. There are more than twice as many poultry as all other birds combined. Three quarters of all agricultural land exists to feed our appetite for meat.

The footprint is gargantuan. Animal agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation, the biggest source of methane, responsible for a third of global warming, and one of the largest sources of water pollution on earth. More than 100 billion animals are slaughtered every year, the vast majority kept in extreme captivity, with lives that are brief and brutal.

And yet the industry behind it all faces remarkably little investigative scrutiny. That's the gap GRILLED is here to fill.

I'm Zach Boren, I spent the last decade at Unearthed, Greenpeace's independent investigations team, uncovering the dirty tricks of some of world's dirtiest industries: fracking, toxic sludge, pesticides, meat. My work has featured on the front page of the New York Times and the Guardian, and has been covered by the BBC, the FT, the Times and many more.

Our launch investigation reveals what the EU's most powerful farming lobby said about the European Green Deal when it thought no one was listening. The documents are an extraordinary insight into how the livestock industry exerts political influence.

If you want to follow what comes next, sign up below. I'll be in your inbox when there's something worth reading, which - given what this industry gets away with - is more often than you'd think.