We’ve been hearing about the importance of eliminating meat for a long time, no matter what the media say today.
We’ve been hearing about the importance of eliminating meat for a long time, no matter what the media say today.
T he media like to play this neat trick in which they highlight some conservative hyperbole about Democrats, and then pretend the entire underlying concern that motivated discussion of the topic is nothing but a wild conspiracy theory cooked up in a vacuum.
Take the issue of meat.
“Biden is not coming for Americans’ Big Macs, chicken wings or bacon,” the Washington Post informs us. CNN ran one of their typically idiotic chyrons yesterday: “BIDEN PREPS ADDRESS TO NATION AS GOP CONSPIRACISTS SPREAD FALSE CLAIMS ON MASK-WEARING, BEEF AND BOOKS TO ATTACK HIM.” All of this concern was prompted by a Daily Mail story suggesting Joe Biden would need to limit America’s meat consumption to meet his climate-change goals.
However, Biden’s climate-change goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 100 percent from 2005 levels isn’t achievable without severely restricting factory farming. As a recent Science study found, food-system emissions alone make the Paris Agreement’s target limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius unreachable. And Biden argues that his climate plan exceeds those targets. “Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth,” another Science study tells us, per the Guardian.
Of course, while the media gaslight on the issue, we’ve been hearing about the importance of eliminating meat for a long time. For a decade now, the United Nations has been urging a global meat-and-dairy-free diet. The topic has been one of the hobbyhorses of left-wing political outlets like Vox. “Let’s Launch a Moonshot for Meatless Meat,” popular New York Times columnist Ezra Klein proposed last week. In a 2018 documentary of Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestselling anti-meat book, Eating Animals, co-narrator Natalie Portman explains the immorality of consuming meat.
Bill Gates’s recent book is titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Reviewers lauded the book’s “effective approaches” and “its bracing mix of cold-eyed realism and number-crunched optimism.” The Associated Press says the book is a “calm, reasoned, well-sourced explanation” on how society can deal with a crisis of survival. One of the main ideas in the book is a severe cutback on meat and dairy. “I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,” Gates explains. “You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time.”
In 2019, CNN put on a Dantesque town hall to talk about the “climate crisis.” Here’s how the network described it in one of its pieces:
For a whopping seven hours, 10 Democratic candidates for president on Wednesday outlined what they would do to address the earth’s changing climate.
One issue that sizzled: Beef production.
It’s peculiar that such an esoteric topic, supposedly the purview of conservative conspiracists, should come up so prominently on the network. The CNN reporter offers quotes from various candidates opposing any legal restrictions on meat consumption, but then decides not to quote an exchange in which Erin Burnett asks the future vice president, Kamala Harris, if she would “reduce red meat specifically.”
Her answer: “Yes, I would.”
Then, of course, the Green New Deal’s goals — embraced by the Biden administration as the aspiration for its own policies — include the long-term hope of getting rid of “farting cows.” Now, granted, I’m not a farmer, but my assumption is that most bovine engage in this activity. The Green New Deal plan also calls for “farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas free, food system that ensures universal access to healthy food.”
Further, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Urges Kids to Save the Planet by Ditching Meat and Dairy,” is not a headline cooked up in the imagination of conservatives. The congresswoman says, “Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like, let’s keep it real.”
Is Ocasio-Cortez a member of the Democratic Party in good standing or is she someone we shouldn’t be taking seriously? Let us know.
Getting rid of “hamburgers” is not one of Biden’s policy prescriptions. No one should claim otherwise. We are, however, in the normalization stage of the meatless idea, an aspiration of most environmentalists. That’s the goal. The media want to mock and gaslight those who point out that restricting factory farming is a popular topic on the progressive left — it reminds me of the games they play with “defund the police” — because it’s still unpopular among most Americans. As with many things, they want it both ways.