23 Feb 2012 Eating meat, with a side of internal conflict
Here’s a new food truth: Meat eating is not the simple pleasure it was in previous generations. It’s as we have become schizophrenic about meat: As the reasons to reduce or eliminate meat consumption increase, so do the sources of particularly tasty morsels of animal flesh.
Even as millions of Americans continue to gobble down gourmet burgers, dry-aged steaks, chef-driven charcuterie and bacon-wrapped everything, they’re regularly forced to consider the potential consequences of their actions.
Environmentalists want us to think about the greenhouse gases that meat production creates. Humane advocates want us to consider the suffering of animals. Doctors want us to ponder the health implications.
And the medical community would like us to understand the potential fallout — otherwise known as antibiotic resistance — of pumping farm animals full of drugs.
“We’re schizoid, as a culture, on meat eating,” notes writer Michael Pollan, who has grappled with this own internal conflicts on the consumption of animal flesh. “We love the taste and what having lots of meat has always signified — status, wealth — but at the same time it’s hard to overlook the high cost of meat-eating: to the environment, to the workers, to the animals and to our own health. It’s no wonder we’d be conflicted.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that we’ve reached this point at which meat eating has become almost as polarizing as religion.
Groups such as PETA, Compassion Over Killing and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine have been promoting vegetarian or vegan diets for years, if not decades. An entire generation of eaters, has grown up with the idea that not eating meat is better for them and the world they live in.
What’s more, some of those groups have been targeting kids almost from the moment they started to make decisions about their diets. People such as Neal Barnard, a physician and president of the PCRM, make no apologies for it. He compares current anti-meat campaigns to those that discourage underage smoking: It’s important to hit ‘em while they’re young.
“If a kid, like me, found a pack of cigarettes when he was 11,” Barnard says, “that kid is more likely to grow up as a smoker as opposed to a kid who never encountered them at all.”
PETA, in particular, has actively targeted young eaters with its Peta2.com Web site, which launched in 2002 and has more than 500,000 e-news subscribers. The site has little interest in promoting the health-care savings or potential long-term health benefits of a vegetarian diet. Instead, it adopts a pop-culture approach to make meat-free eating seem cool and “cruelty-free” to animals — or, at the very least, contrarian to the adult world, which in itself might appeal to the more rebellious.
The idea, says Dan Mathews, senior vice president of campaigns for PETA, is not to take an elevated intellectual approach in trying to appeal to youth, but to play up factors important to young eaters. Like looking good, or sex, or celebrities.
PETA even works with television producers to insert anti-meat messages into various programs, such as an episode of last season’s “Real Housewives of Miami” in which Lea Black annoys her fellow South Beach sun-bunnies by pooh-poohing a pig roast.
“Being realistic, we realized we had to go to a lower common denominator” to hit the youth market, says Mathews. “They want to look good. They don’t care about something that will take decades to affect them,” like heart disease.
But the anti-meat and reduced-meat messages are not coming just from animal-rights organizations with an agenda. Cookbook authors, activists and even the federal government have embraced an idea that might have seemed radical a generation or two ago: We don’t need to eat as much meat as we used to.
Pollan, in his “In Defense of Food” (Penguin, 2008), famously wrote that we should “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The following year, author Mark Bittman espoused essentially the same idea in “Food Matters” (Simon & Schuster, 2009) by noting that we should “eat less meat and junk food, eat more vegetables and whole grains.”
More than two years later, the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of Health and Human Services issued the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which recommended that we “reduce the intake of calories from solid fats”. Translation: Eat less meat.
It’s not easy to quantify how those messages have influenced meat eating in the United States. According to a poll conducted last year by Harris Interactive for the Vegetarian Resource Group, about 5 percent of Americans identified themselves as vegetarian, and another 33 percent are “eating vegetarian meals a significant amount of the time.”
In 1994, a poll conducted for the Vegetarian Resource Group led the organization to estimate that “0.3 to 1 percent of the population is vegetarian.”
Perhaps more telling are numbers culled by the America Meat Institute from Agriculture Department data. They show that consumption of red meat is down across the board. Americans, for example, ate 56.9 pounds of beef per capita in 2010, compared with 62.4 pounds in 2005. Our pork consumption per person also dropped, from 46.5 pounds in 2005 to 44.8 in 2010. Even our taste for chicken has dulled: We ate 55.5 pounds of chicken per person in 2010, off from 60.5 pounds five years earlier.
The numbers might trend toward a vegetarian lifestyle, but the fact is, Americans still down an estimated one-sixth of the meat eaten in the world. Where does this drive come from?…..