Meat and Its Enemies

By Andrew Stuttaford

Thursday, May 27, 2021

 

Alarmed by chatter that Joe Biden was plotting to take my burgers away, I hurried online for reassurance. A journalist in the Guardian wrote that this was just scaremongering and along with the Washington Post traced the burger panic back tothe Daily Mail, which had run speculation (with caveats) that “Biden’s climate plan” could limit Americans to “just one burger a MONTH.” This was based on a single academic study, but the Mail was given its opportunity by what was described in the subheadline of a recent story in Vox as a “burger-shaped hole” in the president’s climate proposals.

 

The author, Sigal Samuel, fretted that

 

if Biden is serious about staving off climate disaster, our meat system is not something he can afford to ignore. At least 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from animal agriculture. That’s largely because ruminant animals like cows emit a lot of methane, and producing feed requires using energy and clearing forests that would otherwise be trapping carbon.

 

According to the Environmental Pro­tection Agency, the entire domestic agricultural sector (from steaks to soy) in the U.S. accounts for about 10 percent of our greenhouse-gas emissions. But the overall size of our market (including imports), particularly for beef — and activists’ fondness for the hairshirt — means that climate warriors will, sooner or later, indeed be coming for your burger, or at least trying to make it much more expensive. On some estimates, more than half of the greenhouse gases arising out of livestock farming can be attributed to beef and a lesser offender, lamb.

 

Samuel mentions various ways to assist in remedying this, ranging from “meatless meat” to putting seaweed into cattle feed. (This reduces bovine, uh, emissions, although there’s a debate over how much.) Yet Samuel then cites Chloë Waterman, a program manager at Friends of the Earth. Waterman is “skeptical that relying on carrots rather than sticks can help the U.S. fix its food system at the speed demanded by the climate emergency.” “Carrots,” eh?

 

Meat-eaters who brush off concerns about the threat to their meals are too complacent. No, burgers, chops, and steaks will not be banned, but in all probability they will be rationed, if by price rather than by law. The prospect that increasingly onerous — and undeniably regressive — greenhouse-gas taxes might be imposed on meat is far from remote.

 

There are countless reports to choose from (just google “carbon,” “meat,” and “tax”), and countless different rates of tax. For example, in a New York Times article from 2018, Richard Conniff relates how researchers at France’s Toulouse School of Economics have settled on a “relatively steep” greenhouse-gas tax on beef, which would raise the retail price by about 40 percent. This could operate as a “test case” (an ominous choice of words) made politically more palatable by the ability to switch to, say, pork or chicken, which have a smaller carbon footprint.

 

But “smaller” does not mean small. Rather than jeer at the Arby’s crowd, Colonel Sanders stans should be aware that Conniff also reveals that the Toulouse researchers have calculated that a (presumably subsequent) tax on chicken could hike prices by between 15 and 32 percent. And it is not looking so good for that vegetarian eating — vegans, avert your eyes — an egg. The same data indicate a tax-driven price increase of 23 percent. Dairy, plus 26 percent under this scheme, is no refuge, either.

 

Conniff notes how one of the co-authors of the French study “readily acknowledged that the proposed carbon tax on beef has no chance of becoming reality, ‘not even in Europe’ and certainly not in the United States.” I doubt I would have agreed with that prediction even when it was made, but witnessing the once unimaginable inroads made by climate campaigners over the last few years in other areas has only reinforced my belief that climate taxes on meat, beginning perhaps with beef but not ending there, will be on the menu before too long.

 

After all, in their beef with beef, the climate warriors are not alone. Public-health activists, a formidable community, have for decades railed against the perils of many kinds of meat. Taxes are sometimes included as part of their prescription, too. The authors of a study from 2018 suggested that, in the U.S., health-care considerations could justify taxes of 34 percent and 163 percent on red meat and processed meat (bacon!), respectively.

 

The war against tobacco took a far more aggressive turn after the concept of “passive smoking” was successfully deployed to make the argument that smokers endangered the health of others, not just themselves. A similar logic is being used to demonize meat-eating as a menace to the planet and, therefore, everyone on it. The conclusion to which that logic leads is the adoption of coercive measures, of which taxation looks like the most obvious first step.

 

Then there are the vegetarians and vegans. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, together these two groups amount to around 8 percent of the U.S. population. That number has remained more or less unchanged for some years, although, in what may be a sign of things to come, the percentages (into the very low double-digits) are somewhat higher for those between the ages of 18 and 49. How much the meat-averse are willing, to use a slightly unfortunate phrase, to live and let live when it comes to the carnivorous is unclear. (That 16 percent of liberals, a word that no longer means what it should, told Gallup that they were vegetarian or vegan is not comforting.) At the very least, they would surely not object to — and many would support — efforts to rein in meat-eating in the name of combating climate change. For true believers, this will add a further layer of righteousness to what is already, to almost all of them, a moral cause.

 

It is quite possible to accept, as I do, that human activity is making some contribution to changes in the climate, while considering that the conviction that global warming will lead to catastrophe owes more to a form of religious fervor than to any reasoned attempt to follow the #Science. If that is the case, forbidding or restricting the eating of certain types of food is hardly without precedent. It does not hurt that tucking into meat is easy enough to include within another familiar religious theme — that “excessive” self-indulgence is not only sinful but will also trigger retribution — which has long been a key subtext in global-warming narratives, especially those in which ancient millenarian thinking is so evidently a major influence.

 

The fact that establishing rules governing what people eat is also a powerful instrument of psychological and social control is no coincidence, nor is the opportunity that climate-related asceticism offers for virtue-signaling by the elites. Take, for ex­­ample, Eleven Madison Park, a promi­nent and very pricey Manhattan restaurant that will now feature an exclusively plant-based menu. Daniel Humm, its chef and owner, reckons that “the current food system is simply not sustainable.” Curiously, his London restaurant will still be serving red meat.

 

In a New York Times article describing Humm’s move, some commentators stressed the example he was setting. There have been many other such “teaching moments,” from “meatless Mondays” in New York City schools to the decision by (old) Amsterdam’s city council that meals served at its events would be vegetarian (unless specifically requested otherwise), all designed to “de-normalize” meat-eating. And, yes, this too is reminiscent of the approach applied to smoking.

 

The war on meat will do little, if anything, to alter the impact that we may be having on the climate, particularly if increased economic development elsewhere will, as is typical, be accompanied by the consumption of more animal protein, not less. In the end, that probably will not matter overmuch, and neither, I suspect, will anthropogenic climate change — at least to the degree that many now expect. As with previously anticipated apocalypses, it is likely to disappoint the faithful. That said, the way to prepare for whatever the climate may have in store is not a scientifically fruitless and — thanks to its inevitably destructive effect on the wealth creation essential to fund any defenses we may need — counterproductive asceticism, but rather through adaptation and technology.

 

That is true of food, too. To the extent that scientists and food technologists can develop nutritious, cost-competitive, and tasty plant-based or lab-grown alt-meat or, aided by creative cooks, conjure up treats out of another much talked-about option, protein-rich insect-based grub, good for them. It only widens consumer choice, for carnivores, flexitarians, vegetarians, or vegans. (Never mind that not many vegetarians and, in theory, no vegans will stoop to entomophagy.) The same can be said of chefs, such as Humm, trying to turn vegetables — vegetables — into gourmet fare.

 

But the welcome availability of a growing range of alternatives (I’d try them) should not become a pathway to the prohibition or penal taxation of “real” meat, a pleasure that has benefited our species for millions of years.