Yes, They’re Coming for Your Burgers

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

 

“All food is not created equal,” New York City mayor Eric Adams inscrutably intoned this week. “The vast majority of food that is contributing to our emission crisis lies in meat and dairy products.” This indictment accompanied the mayor’s efforts to extirpate animal proteins from city-run facilities, where “meat is increasingly missing from the menu,” according to the New York Times.

 

Adams’s boosterism for a “plant-powered diet” supplements his efforts to expand a program he inherited from former mayor Bill de Blasio, which is now designed to reduce the city’s carbon footprint by 33 percent in 2030 by cutting back on protein purchases. Adams scolded his fellow environmentalists for devoting most of their carbon-cutting efforts to curbing the combustion of fossil fuels. “But we now have to talk about beef,” he insisted. “And I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation.”

 

Adams’s self-image as a bold truth-teller notwithstanding, the conversation he’s just now joining is equal parts raging and insular. Participants in that conversation do not, however, evince the courage of the convictions they present only in the company of like minds. If you disagree with the premise that limiting your meat consumption is the only way to save the world, advocates of a meatless future insist that no one is arguing for that sort of thing. That’s just rank paranoia.

 

A recent essay in the New Republic by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg presents a perfect illustration of the backward causality typical of activists who insist that the only way to arrest catastrophic climate change is to limit the public’s protein intake but also insist that it’s madness to believe anyone wants to limit your protein intake. They decry the “insipid” and “ridiculous” accusations from conservatives who assume that policies designed to limit the public’s consumption of meat represent an effort to reduce the public’s meat consumption.

 

Your steak has been turned into a “culture-war issue” by the people who notice and, most importantly, resent this effort to impose new cultural standards on the public from above. The prosecutors of the culture war are the conservatives, whose “darker fantasies aren’t just about threats to a dietary staple but about threats to the liberty, bodily integrity, and masculinity of American men,” they write. Remember, it’s the conservatives here who have lost touch with reality.

 

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg’s condescension isn’t innovative. Activists for whom meat consumption represents an assault on the Eden into which we were conceived often insist that the logical conclusions of their theology are fantastical inventions of their opponents. “Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joked in a 2019 conversation with the New Yorker’s David Remnick. Her flippancy was occasioned by the revelations contained in the literature around the Green New Deal, upon which literate Republicans “pounced.” Those reactionaries on the right had egregiously interpreted the resolution’s language around collapsing the American agricultural system down to “local scale” to limit emissions from livestock production to mean what it says.

 

The Green New Deal’s explicit articulation of the problem posed by meat production and its implicit remedies for your heedless consumption of animal flesh wasn’t groundbreaking. It drew from a decade of activism dressed up as scientific inquiry.

 

In 2018, the U.S. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted that “targeting the demand for meat and other livestock products” so as to reduce the amount of meat consumed in Western nations by 30 percent was a crucial environmentalist goal. Writing in the journal Nature, Oxford researcher Marco Springmann claimed that the world must give up 75 percent of its beef, 90 percent of its pork, and at least half the eggs it consumes if a global catastrophe is to be averted.

 

“We are facing a growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases, and a climate change crisis, both of which are linked to high meat consumption,” Harvard University’s Nutrition Department chair Frank Hu claimed. Even Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have been in on this game, alleging that Americans who continue to consume meat despite the availability of palatable alternatives are “difficult to distinguish from sadists.”

 

But don’t you dare conclude that those who denounce this menacing and unnecessary pastime, which makes you into a burden on your neighbors and is destroying the planet for us all, want to curb your consumption habits. That would make you the crazy one.

 

Even the New York Times article that lends a superficially authoritative gloss to Mayor Adams’s quirky hangups conveys the impression to any sentient reader that limits on your meat intake — voluntary or otherwise — are a crucial public-policy goal. “To have 20 grams of protein from beef — that’s kind of a meal’s serving of protein — is like burning a gallon of gasoline,” said Richard Larrick, a professor of management at Duke University.

 

Ah, yes. Who among us hasn’t tucked into a hearty 0.7-ounce filet mignon and felt at once satisfied but also wracked with guilt over the damage that sinful delight is meting out to the planet?

 

Given the environmental strain represented by cattle relative to the modest calories beef provides, according to Princeton University’s Timothy Searchinger, “anything that reduces beef in particular has huge greenhouse gas benefits.” But you’re ill-advised to conclude that “anything” means, you know, anything.

 

We’re confronted with the curious condition in which these activists evince a religious conviction in the righteousness of their crusade against meat, but those convictions dissolve into cowardice whenever their advocacy makes contact with a skeptical audience. Suddenly, these stalwart anti-meat crusaders transform into satirists, ruthlessly mocking those whose only offense is to notice their advocacy and evaluate it critically. In one narrow sense, advocates of a less filling future are correct to mock their critics for taking them seriously. They’re not serious people.