Hands off the ham, BY IRINA SLAV
The ham-handed governments send “scientists” to air their beefs.
Hands off the ham
JUL 26
∙
PAID
Meat is bad for your health. Industrial animal farming is a cruel, inhumane practice. All animal farming for food is inhumane and must be stopped. Animal farming destroys the environment.
For years, these were the talking points of activist groups and meat-substitute producers. Now, the war on meat has gone mainstream. Because of emissions, of course.
The former Dutch government’s attempt to kill the country’s farming industry by mandating what amounted to a cull of farms made perhaps the most noise on social media but it is only one battle in that new war. It’s a war whose front is growing.
In March this year, for example, the Danish Climate Council — an entity that, apparently, advises the government on climate policies because the government is incapable of devising these policies on its own — advised a 33% tax on beef.
It also recommended replacing 65% of the meat that Danes eat with plant alternatives to reduce methane emissions. The advice was based on Copenhagen’s ambition to reduce its total greenhouse emissions by 70% by 2030.
Here’s a wonderful quote from the “head of secretariat at the Danish Plant-Based Food Association.”
“Denmark is a proud agricultural country, where we currently grow feed at 80 percent of the agricultural area. Going forward, we need to focus more on producing food that can be eaten without first going through a cow or a pig.”
To be honest, I don’t think anyone would be interested in consuming food that has gone through a cow or a pig but many remain stubbornly attached to the consumption of the cows and pigs themselves.
That’s because animal protein is important for us. It’s because without animal protein we wouldn’t have evolved the way we did and we wouldn’t have ended up with these large brains that some of us now use to make sure future generations actually devolve thanks to less nutritious diets. It’s the war on energy-dense hydrocarbons all over again only now the target is animal protein. And another one of the biggest global industries.
In May this year, the agriculture and climate ministers of 13 large meat producing countries pledged to reduce methane emissions from agriculture and food systems.
“Food systems are responsible for 60% of methane emissions. We congratulate countries willing to take the lead in food systems methane mitigation and confirm our commitment to support this type of initiative with programs that explore promising methane mitigation technologies and the underpinning research of methane mitigation mechanisms to create new technologies,” said the CEO of the organisation that brought the ministers together, the Global Methane Hub.
How, you might wonder, do we “mitigate” methane emissions from agriculture? Well, according to the Irish government, by eliminating the source of these emissions, i.e. killing cows. Some 200,000 of them. And we thought the Rutte gang were insane.
Of course, Irish farmers politely indicated they were having none of that. The agriculture ministry, which had come up with the idea, backpedalled and said the cull was part of “a modelling document”. Just an idea, in other words. Not an order. If it was ever made official it would be totally voluntary. The noise died down.
Meanwhile, the idea of killing cows to reduce emissions surfaced in France, too. It came from something called Cour des Comptes — the country’s supreme auditing court. One would think auditing institutions would be busy auditing but apparently, the Cour des Comptes can multitask.
In a report, which was also referred to as a ruling by Euronews, the auditing court said that “the state of cattle farming is not favourable for the climate”. Cattle farming in France contributes an estimated 12% of the country’s total emissions. Of course it must be killed.
The French government was on board with the culling idea, it appears. It had already drafted plans to kill 2 million animals by 2035, reducing the total herd to 15 million, and then kill another 2.5 million to reduce it to 13.5 million by 2050.
According to farmers, this would boomerang by increasing meat imports. And this is where the story gets interesting because it falls in the same mould as the Danish plan: slashing the amount of meat people eat. Per the Cour des Comptes, the average Frenchman or woman would do just fine with half a kilo of meat per week.
As someone who consumes more than twice that in a week (and is, statistically speaking, underweight) I found the suggestion as personally offensive as that Danish Climate Council’s recommendation for a 65% reduction in meat consumption.
These suggestions and plans are, in fact, plans to radically change the diets of millions of people — diets that have evolved over centuries and the key word here is evolved — all in the name of emission reduction. Or maybe not.
A while ago I came across a fascinating paper from the University of California Berkeley, which claimed that Global elimination of meat production could save the planet. That’s right. Not reduction. Elimination. Why half-ass it when you can simply put an end to all animal farming in one fell swoop.
The authorship of the paper, however, was no less interesting than the idea argued in it. Per the UC Berkeley release itself, “The work is a collaboration between Michael Eisen, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Brown, professor emeritus of biochemistry at Stanford University and the CEO of Impossible Foods Inc., a company that sells plant-based meat substitutes.”
Eisen, the release added, was a consultant for Impossible Foods. The same Eisen said that “Our work shows that ending animal agriculture has the unique potential to significantly reduce atmospheric levels of all three major greenhouse gases, which, because we have dithered in responding to the climate crisis, is now necessary to avert climate catastrophe.”
So, two people who receive money from a company that sells meat substitutes find, by using climate modelling, that ending all meat production would do wonders for global emissions. A shocking outcome of no doubt rigorous scientific work. It would no doubt do wonders for the profits of Impossible Foods and its peers. And they need these profits. Desperately.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that shares offered by Impossible Foods to its employees had plummeted by 89% since 2021 when it offered them. The company also delayed its IPO even though its CEO demonstrated confidence that the plant-based meat substitute market is just starting to grow.
Fellow meat substitute producer Beyond Meat, meanwhile, saw its stock plummet from close to $240 per share after its listing in 2019 to just $10.26 as of early May this year. As of close of trade on July 25, the stock stood at $15.53. The trend reflects five consecutive quarterly declines in revenues, Reuters noted in a report.
In the same report, Reuters wrote “Plant-based substitute meat burgers and sausages made by Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and other producers, often selling at prices comparable to real meat products, have failed to catch on with consumers as much as many investors had expected, with decades high inflation adding to pressure on demand.”
Given all the hype around plant-based substitutes one might reasonably wonder why they failed to catch on with consumers. Well, wonder no more, because here’s ABC sketching the production methods of these meat substitutes. For those with strong stomachs there’s plenty more on the subject but I get queasy reading about meat-flavoured soil fats and coconut oil used to imitate meat so I’m not going into this.
The industry right now appears to be catering almost exclusively to vegans but executives admit meat-eaters are the great prize. How are they going to win that prize? You’ll never guess.
"We're growing and the way we will keep growing is we will get more and more nutritious. We will keep the prices down whilst perhaps animal products will need to go up in price and we will make the whole experience better and better," says the chairman of v2, an Australian substitute producer.
How might someone make animal products more expensive in a perfectly innocent, nay noble way? Why, by taxing them to save the planet and reducing their production, also to save the planet. And our lives, too, because eating meat regularly is very bad for you.
The idea of taxing meat to discourage consumption has been floated before, repeatedly, in the EU and now it is being floated again by “a group of leading scientists”, who called on Brussels to revise its food strategy.
The revision, apparently, would involve a greater focus on plant-based foods, fish and seafood, but only from sustainable stocks, plus “moderate amounts of low-fat dairy products and limited red meat, processed meat, salt, added sugar and high-fat animal products.”
The report was produced by an entity called the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies — an EU project that is “part of the Scientific Advice Mechanism of the European Commission (SAM), which supports the College of Commissioners with high quality, timely and independent scientific advice for its policy-making activities.”
So, the high-quality, timely, and independent scientific advice is to make meat more expensive, force people to eat more cereals, potatoes, and salads with a little low-fat yogurt now and then, and, of course, responsibly caught trout or whatever. Oh, and taxes won’t be a problem for people because governments can “return the tax proceeds to citizens appropriately.”
Fun fact, in the 194-page report, the phrase “healthy and sustainable” is used 66 times. The phrase “sustainable and healthy” is also used 66 times, for a total of 132 mentions of the words “sustainable” and “healthy” together. “Profit”, on the other hand, is only used 8 times throughout the document.
It is quite difficult to picture a massive plant-based food manufacturing industry showering politicians and bureaucrats with billions to create a market for their products, the reason being they apparently don’t have these billions.
What, to me, does not seem so difficult to picture is some people/banks/asset managers with billions to invest in a huge plant-based meat substitute market that is not materialising fast enough and that’s making them understandably nervous.
One such investors says as much: "I would say I'm absolutely guilty of expecting things to happen quicker than they are playing out, but my belief in the scale of the opportunity is unwavering,” Phil Morle, a partner in a firm called Main Sequence Ventures, told ABC.
Main Sequence Ventures, by the way, was set up by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation to invest in plant-based meat alternatives. Wonders never cease.
Down here, we call this sort of, erm, public-private partnership “pig guts”. I guess it comes from the local recipe for chitterlings, which calls for braiding the intestine, the full phrase being “These people/firms/agencies/whatevers are twisted like pig guts”. The stink that emanates from roasting chitterlings (some call it aroma, I don’t) is also on point.
There is a running joke among meat-eating individuals that if vegans and vegetarians need meat substitutes they are not really true vegans and vegetarians, heh-heh. It’s not a funny joke. I’ve know vegans and vegetarians who either don’t like meat or make a stand against animal cruelty with their dietary choices. That’s fair enough for me.
The key word, of course, is “choices”. Vegans and vegetarians make a conscious choice to not eat meat. For the majority of us who do eat meat, this choice is about to be taken away forcibly, for our own good, of course, and the good of the planet.
It would be not at all for the good of a whole new industry that is trying to make it big but can’t, not without strong government support in the form of regulation and subsidies, combined with what effectively amounts to partial bans on certain foods with a view to discouraging their consumption. Sound familiar?