What do you believe in the world of today’s misguided messaging? When it comes to politics, you’re on your own. Washington has become such a political soap opera, it’s pathetic. But how about our world of meat production? Meat is bad, meat is good, fake meat, global warming, sustainability, USDA dietary guidelines—there are activist groups on both sides of every issue, but when it comes to red meat and livestock, the activists come out of the woodwork against our industry.
Raising livestock and producing meat is what we do, and we’ve become pretty good at it. However, those groups that are attempting to sway the world’s opinion on meat consumption are at it again. Fact is, a large portion of our global population can’t even afford to buy animal-based protein. And for some of these groups, protein is protein, whether it comes from animals or plants, which we all know are different. Animal protein offers much more in terms of nutritional benefits.
Last week the North American Meat Institute caught wind of a new 50-page report coming out from a new group called, EAT-Lancet Commission. This group gathered 37 of the world’s “foremost experts” to propose scientific targets for what constitutes a healthy diet from a sustainable food system. These targets for healthy diets and food production will define a safe operating space that ensures human health and environmental sustainability. It’s beginning to sound like a United Nations initiative that will focus on global warming and tell us all how to live.
These folks have scheduled events over the next month to promote their report, which will be published in The Lancet, the oldest scientific publication in existence. These events in Oslo, Jakarta, New York, Melbourne and Rome sound more like a fashion show than an environmental sustainability or nutrition conference. Their focus is on these questions: What is a healthy diet? What is a sustainable food system? What are the trends shaping diets today? Can we achieve healthy diets from sustainable food systems? And, How? What are the solutions and policies we can apply? It makes me nervous when these groups want to create their own consensus, then have government implement their ideas of what is good for us.
As you might imagine the meat industry will receive another black eye as the report is expected to be extremely negative. One of the report’s authors is Dr. Walter Willett, the director of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It’s been reported that the school has received between $450,000 and $1.5 million from companies/groups that promote a vegetarian diet or products. As usual, show me the money, and we’ll show you the motivation.
Preliminary discussions suggest they will recommend that meat be eaten only once a week or limited to a quarter-ounce a day—not a quarter-pounder a day. One of their policy recommendations will be a meat tax to control our bad behavior, just like the sugar tax on soda pop some municipalities got away with. It costs a lot of money to live in a utopian society.
Have you noticed these groups say they will rely on science to guide them and their outcomes?
And remember, there is lots of questionable science out there being used to create policy, which eventually becomes a law.
We all know that red meat is one of the best protein sources and it tastes good. But the true benefit is that it is primarily raised on forage on non-tillable lands that only ungulate species can utilize. We finish livestock on grain concentrates because it makes the meat better, and reduces production time and overall resource use.
I’m sure EAT will play the climate change card; they always do. They’ll say that livestock contribute 18 percent of the greenhouse gases, as published by the United Nations a dozen years ago. Credible researchers from University of California-Davis found livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gases to be only 4 percent, much lower that the entire transportation industry.
Also, recent research from McMaster University in Canada, where scientists quizzed over 218,000 people in 52 countries about their eating habits, found that those eating the highest levels of dairy and red meat saw their chance of early death fall by 25 percent, and fatal heart attack cut by 22 percent. Speaking at the European Society of Cardiology conference in Munich, Germany, Dr. Andre Mente said, “Our findings on full fat dairy and unprocessed red meat do challenge conventional thinking.”
So, get ready for another salvo to be fired at the beef and meat industry. I don’t get it; these small well-funded groups constantly attack the meat business. Then, on the other hand, demand for meat is growing as quickly as global incomes. Go figure. — PETE CROW
