“A small but highly influential contingent of liberal extremists in our media has fired the opening salvos” in a war against meat, says Gary Taustine in the New York Post. (Hat tip to John Baden).
The first salvo was a New York Times article saying that the meat-packing industry was racist because its workers workers were at high risk of Covid-19. “The slaughterhouse employees currently being put at risk to satisfy our taste for meat are overwhelmingly brown and black,” wrote Jonathan Safran Froer.
The second condemned meat for the carbon dioxide emissions in its production. Writes Taustine:
“Then, this April, the popular food Web site Epicurious announced it would no longer feature beef in any new recipes, articles or newsletters. Editors assured the outlet’s fans this was not some vendetta against people who eat cows. ‘We think of this decision as not anti-beef, but rather pro-planet,” they explained. ‘Our shift is solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders.’ Meat, after all, accounts for 14.5 percent of carbon emissions.”
Taustine’s message:
“Only about 2 percent of the nation identifies as vegetarian, and only 1 in 4 of those Americans is vegan. Yet somehow meat consumption is becoming another bitter political wedge threatening to further widen our impassable divide.”
Image by pasja1000 on Pixabay.
I can say as Robert Frost said,
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
collectivistic regimenting love
by which the modern world is being swept
(written in 1939)
However, the more I know of animal brains and cognition, the more convinced I am that civilized humans should no longer eat mammals and probably not some species of other animals. Killing for such meat is part of our evolutionary heritage, but along with other evolved behaviors, it is rapidly being outmoded by new knowledge and new alternatives. Meat is already being tissue cultured. That meat will become cheaper and cheaper as the process is automated and production scaled up. Millions of acres of degraded grasslands and clear cut forests could be returned to natural areas or timber production. (I am not opposed to the rational killing of trees which is now often opposed by those with the present fashions in “tenderer-than-thou collectivistic regimenting love.”)
It’s not about ethics or the environment; it’s remarkable how little leftist environmentalists care about either of these. Ultimately it’s war of freedom and on human beings, two things the contemporary hates.