Comedy as a Climate Solution: On the Stand

The People v. Big Meat & Dairy

What happens when you put the meat and dairy industry on trial — and hand the courtroom over to comedians? A packed house, for one.

On June 3rd, the Better Food Foundation headed to the 2026 Hollywood Climate Summit, held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater and the Ebell of Los Angeles. Alongside Re:wild, we co-presented On the Stand: The People v. Big Meat & Dairy — a comedian-lawyer mock trial putting decades of meat and dairy industry messaging on the docket.

From “Got Milk?” to the misconceptions still shaping what people believe about food and health, nothing was off-limits. And the room was full.

The Case Against Big Meat & Dairy

The premise was simple: the People had charges to bring, and the industry had some explaining to do. Over the course of the trial, the prosecution laid out its evidence — three exhibits that drew as many gasps as laughs.

Exhibit A: The dairy industry has spent more than $100 million since 2008 cracking down on plant-based products that use dairy terms like “milk” and “cheese.”

Exhibit B: Big Meat has poured millions into lobbying for labeling laws designed to force plant-based companies to rebrand away from anything resembling “meat.”

Exhibit C: The industry has funded disinformation campaigns framing plant-based alternatives as “fake” and “ultra-processed” — even as many conventional meat and dairy products fit that description themselves.

Serious stuff. Which is exactly why we wrapped it in comedy.

Meet the Court

The trial brought together a courtroom full of comedians and experts, each playing their part:

• ⚖️ Presiding: Judge Kasaun Wilson
• 🗣️ For the People: Joanna Hausmann & Esteban Gast
• 🛡️ For Big Meat & Dairy: Anna Garcia, Milana Vayntrub & Joey Bragg
• 📋 Expert witnesses: Suzie Hicks the Climate Chick & Rev. Dr. Christopher Carter

The defense did its best. The expert witnesses held the line. And the audience? They were all in.

Why Comedy?

Because humor is one of the most effective tools we have for inviting people to question what they’ve taken for granted.

Facts alone rarely change minds. People tend to dig in when they feel lectured or judged — especially about something as personal as food. But comedy works differently. It lowers the stakes. It catches us off guard. When our defenses drop, real conversation begins.

On the Stand wasn’t about telling anyone what to eat. It was about creating a room where people could laugh at the marketing they’d absorbed their whole lives — and then quietly ask themselves whether it ever held up.

That’s the opening we’re after.

Food Is a Climate Solution — and Stories Are How We Get There

Shifting toward plant-forward food is one of the biggest, most accessible climate solutions on the table. But the path there isn’t paved with data points and dietary guidelines alone.

It’s paved with stories.

The summit served up a full plate of food-systems storytelling — proof that the conversation about how we eat is happening across comedy, film, and the table itself. On the Stand was just one course. How Food Tells Our Stories with The Tiny Chef and Maggie Baird, and Chew On This: LIVE Doc Pitch, offering up to $50K for the next great food-systems film. The throughline across all of it: when we change the narrative, we change the conversation. And when we change the conversation, behavior follows.

Comedy, film, characters, courtrooms — these are the vehicles that carry an idea past someone’s defenses and into their imagination.

🌱 And the summit menu? 100% plant-based — and genuinely delicious food served by Chef Chris Tucker and Cena Vegan. Because the most persuasive argument for plant-forward food isn’t a statistic, it’s a great meal that happens to be better for the planet.

An Invitation to Storytellers

If you’re a comedian, writer, filmmaker, or creator, consider this your invitation.

The sustainable food movement doesn’t just need more facts. It needs more storytellers willing to make those facts land — to make them funny, human, surprising, and impossible to ignore. On the Stand was proof of concept: a packed house, real laughter, and a roomful of people leaving with a question they didn’t walk in with.

Let’s change the conversation about food.

The Science Behind the Laughs

Using comedy to move people on a serious issue isn’t just a hunch — it’s backed by a growing body of behavioral science.

Researchers have found that comedy can lower people’s defenses, making them more open to accepting new ideas and new ways of thinking or acting.^[1] When we laugh, our mood lifts and we become less inclined to argue back, which creates an opening for a message to land that a lecture never could.^[2] Climate communication scholars describe this not as “dumbing down” the science, but as “smartening up” the approach — meeting people where they are and bringing them together around a topic that usually divides them.^[3]

The effects are measurable. In one climate-comedy program, 90% of participants reported feeling more hopeful about climate change afterward, and 83% said their commitment to taking action was more likely to last.^[4]

The research also offers a useful caution: humor is best understood as the door-opener, not the whole argument. A meta-analysis of 89 studies found that humor has a modest direct effect on persuasion on its own — its real strength is in capturing attention, building affinity, and sustaining hope, especially when it’s paired with a substantive point.^[2] That’s exactly the logic behind a mock trial: the laughs get people in the room and on your side, while the “evidence” delivers the message.

🎥 Watch On the Stand: The People v. Big Meat & Dairy on YouTube

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On the Stand: The People v. Big Meat & Dairy was co-presented by the Better Food Foundation,  Re:wild, and Context Collab at the 2026 Hollywood Climate Summit.

References

1. Borum Chattoo, C. (2017). The Laughter Effect: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Change. Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University. ↩
2. Walter, N., Cody, M. J., Xu, L. Z., & Murphy, S. T. (2018). A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Minister Walk into a Bar: A Meta-Analysis of Humor Effects on Persuasion. Human Communication Research, 44(4), 343–373. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqy005 ↩
3. Boykoff, M., & Osnes, B. (2019). A Laughing Matter? Confronting Climate Change Through Humor. Political Geography, 68, 154–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.09.006 ↩
4. Osnes, B., Boykoff, M., & Chandler, P. (2019). Good-Natured Comedy to Enrich Climate Communication. Comedy Studies, 10(2), 224–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/2040610X.2019.1623513 ↩