Greg Gutfeld at his hilarious and satirical best . . .
My favorite lines:
The LA City Council just adopted a resolution for meatless Mondays. This is while around most of this awful brutal world they have meatless weeks and months. They'd be happier with 'please don't let me starve Mondays.'
and
How hilarious is it that the left accuses the right of invading their bedrooms just as they climb onto your plate.
and
This is Solindra for your belly which is why I feel like throwing up.
If you haven't yet heard, the Los Angeles City council has declared the first day back to work each week to be "Meatless Monday." According to one source,
Councilwoman Jan Perry, who also supports the banning of new fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles, said the new resolution is just one part of a new "good food" agenda for the city.
I don't necessarily have a problem with private entities pushing for less meat consumption. I might disagree with some of their claims (as I did here), but at least we can put all our facts on the table. One fact that is often forgotten in meat debates is that it isn't sufficient to look at the amount of energy (or crops) expended to get beef. We also have to look at what we get. Most people really like the taste of meat.
Almost no one looks at their iPad and asks, "how much more energy went into producing this than my old Apple II." The iPad is so much better than the Apple II. We'd be willing to accept more energy use to have a better computer. Likewise a nice T-bone is so much better than a head of broccoli. I'm willing to accept more energy use to have a T-bone than a head of broccoli.
Now, if my T-bone consumption is imposing costs on others, let's talk about that. But, here the focus would be on the issues causing the externality (e.g., CO2) not on meat per se.
The real trouble comes when city governments (rather than private entities) start making symbolic gestures (here's my take on what symbolic gestures imply about government). Even more troubling is when a council-man or -women presumes to know better than a land-owner or restaurant owner how their land and capital should be used. See this Reason TV video for an interesting account of developments in LA.
First Lady Michelle Obama hopes to curb childhood obesity by teaching children about nutrition and exercise. "There's no expert on this planet who says that the government telling people what to do actually does any good with this issue," she says.
This piece in Time on food labels is frustrating. In trying to help consumers “make sense” of food labels, they only confuse the situation – making several unsubstantiated claims and linking to dubious sources to support other claims.
For example, here is what they say on the label hormone free:
There is a long list of health concerns tied to hormone-filled meat, from prenatal developmental problems to early puberty and infertility. Though the evidence isn’t always reliable, some studies have shown growth hormones from certain foods can disrupt human hormones and can even contribute to breast and prostate cancer.
If you click through to all three of the links they provide above, none actually shows what the piece purports they show. The first link is to an advocacy website for “sustainability,” which in turn mainly references some European Union reports but not any actual studies published in peer-reviewed journals. The second link is to a website about cancer, which discusses the correlation between meat eating and cancer, but says nothing about how added growth hormones used in meat production relates or does not relate to cancer. The final link is to a scientific study that has nothing to do, as far as I can tell, with the use of subtherapeutic hormones given to cattle in feedlots. Ironically, the scientific paper is about chicken meat, but broilers in the US are not given added growth hormones, so I’m not sure what the link has to do with what the authors are claiming.
Now, I’m not saying there are no problems with hormone use. For example, there is evidence that growth hormones can lead to less tender beef. But, generally these are concerns about eating quality not safety.
Another example is when the piece discusses pesticide use it says:
If a food product has the USDA Organic certification, it’s usually pesticide-free, too.
That statement is absolutely false. Organics can use a long list of “natural” pesticides, many of which are just as toxic as synthetic pesticides.
Why is it so hard for Time to put out on objective piece on food labels? It goes to show how much misinformation there is on food floating around that even when one wants to “set the record straight” they can’t find a good place to turn.