A healthy trend, which needs more rather than less assistance from federal health agencies and the USDA.
It’s easy enough to round up the usual suspects, which is what a story in the Daily Livestock Report did last month. It blames the decline on growing exports, which make less meat available for Americans to buy. It blames it on ethanol, which has caused feed costs to rise, production to drop and prices to go up so producers can cover their increasing costs. It blames drought. It doesn’t blame recession, which is surprising, because that’s a factor also.
All of which makes some sense. The report then goes on to blame the federal government for “wag[ing] war on meat protein consumption” over the last 30-40 years.
Is this like the war on drugs? The war in Afghanistan? The war against cancer? Because what I see here is:
- a history of subsidies for the corn and soy that’s fed to livestock
- a nearly free pass on environmental degradation and animal abuse
- an unwillingness to meaningfully limit the use of antibioticsin animal feed
- a failure to curb the stifling power that corporate meatpackerswield over smaller ranchers
- and what amounts to a refusal — despite the advice of real, disinterested experts, true scientists in fact — to unequivocally tell American consumers that they should be eating less meat
