TWO MEATY ISSUES
In America, burgers get political,
According to the latest attack line launched by some conservatives, supporters of the so-called “Green New Deal” are waging war against one of America’s noblest and most treasured national institutions: the hamburger.
“They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers,” former White House aide Sebastian Gorka said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.”
In fact, Joseph Stalin was unambiguously pro-hamburger: In the 1930s, he sent his food supply commissar on a research mission to the United States, which resulted in kotleti, a Soviet rip-off of the classic ground-beef burger, being popularized throughout Russia.
Also, and more relevant to today, none of the Democrats backing the Green New Deal, which seeks to radically overhaul the U.S. economy to cut greenhouse gas emissions, have actually suggested outlawing beef consumption, or, for that matter, seizing pickup trucks. But Gorka’s hyperbole — which was met with chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” — demonstrated how Republicans have turned environmentalists’ recommendations to eat less meat into an all-out culture war in which nothing less than American freedom is at stake.
First, they came for your guns, the argument goes, and now they’re coming for your sausage links.
Blame it on the farting cows. The nowinfamous quote appeared in a since-retracted fact sheet that the office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, put out at the start of February, stating that the resolution’s authors aimed to reach net-zero emissions, rather than zero emissions, within 10 years “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” OcasioCortez’s spokesperson told the Washington Post that the remark was clearly intended to be ironic, but it was too late: President Trump and the right-wing media were already declaring that the Green New Deal was going to eliminate cows and airplanes altogether.
In reality, the resolution calls for the government to work collaboratively with ranchers to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions “as much as is technologically feasible.”
Quickly, the idea that Democrats were cracking down on an all-American tradition had gone from being an internet meme to an actual talking point. Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee chomped on burgers at a news conference criticizing the Green New Deal.