Meat eating: The latest culture war
Meat eating is America’s “new culture war,” said Andrew Freedman in Axios .com. In recent weeks, food website Epicurious.com announced it would publish no new beef recipes and the celebrated New York City restaurant Eleven Madison Park announced its switch to a meat-free menu. These developments only added to “baseless conservative media panic” that President Joe Biden’s climate plan calls for cutting meat from Americans’ diets. Biden isn’t banning meat, said Zack Beauchamp in Vox.com, but the “grain of truth” in that right-wing rumor is that any plan to combat climate change must address meat consumption. “There is no way for humans to consume meat in the way we do without abetting catastrophic warming.” Raising beef cattle is energy-intensive and, combined with the methane gas released by the digestive processes of hundreds of millions of farm animals, creates more than 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In future years, we may look back at this pivotal time “as the meat wars’ Fort Sumter.”
Americans will never accept “canceling beef,” said James Hohmann in The Washington Post. Yes, producing plant-based foods leaves a smaller carbon footprint—cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans, according to Epicurious editors—“but beef tastes more than 20 times better.” Eating chicken and seafood also has environmental costs. Meat lovers like me might accept eating less beef, or more sustainable beef, but going vegan is not on our menu. Instead, let’s focus on limiting methane and carbon dioxide by reducing use of fossil fuels. In Africa and China, poor people’s health and life expectancy improved when meat was introduced to their diets, said Grant Addison in WashingtonExaminer.com. So while there can be “good and noble reasons not to eat meat,” spare us the “pompous and shallow” virtue signaling by restaurants and foodie magazines that cater to wealthy urban elites.
Fine—let’s keep fancy restaurants and the federal government out of this, said Jennifer Barckley in TheHill.com. Animal agriculture causes mass deforestation, uses a quarter of the world’s scarce freshwater supply, and produces billions of gallons of polluting animal waste a year. As plantbased meats become more common and sales increase, “a viable alternative to the all-American beef burger is increasingly within reach.” The reasons for reducing meat consumption are clear. “It’s up to us.”