Frustratingly, political appointees and their hand-picked experts are also determining the future health of our children. Administration True Believers are deciding what is dogma and what is heretical. We’re facing a looming Food Inquisition, and few people seem to notice.
Despite a lack of evidence for the assertion, Kate Clancy, a nutrition consultant, is advancing a vegetarian agenda on the committee writing the newest “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” to be released in 2015. Not because a lack of meat will be healthier — because that would get an argument from the medical community — but rather because it will allegedly mitigate global warming. Meat, she believes, is a key driver in climate change.
If you object to her premise, you are going to be labeled a global warming denier, despite the fact that livestock has little meaningful impact on emissions. Do you know the oft-used environmental/vegetarian metric, "It takes a gallon of gas to create a pound of beef”? Well, that was a made-up rule from a 1980s environmental press release. It takes merely a handful of functioning neurons and a calculator to reveal that it is wildly inaccurate, but that fraudulent claim appears everywhere. That’s the power of cut-and-paste blogging and stacking the search results deck in a Google-driven world.
Our upcoming Dietary Guidelines For Americans could make this guy the enemy.
Clancy also claims that going vegetarian will cure us of droughts, soil erosion, pesticides and antibiotics in water supplies. A bold list for someone whose credentials are in nutrition which (let’s be honest) has just about zero credibility in science. Nutritionists are the people who insisted Omega 3s would save us and saturated fats were killing us - except neither is true - and told us butter was killing us and margarine is safer, which also has no evidential basis. Nutritionists chase fads; that is why so many today recommend cutting gluten.
What is most worrying about the newest efforts to control food behavior is that they politicize science to do it. Clancy knows how to sell an agenda. She worked for the environmental advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, so she knows how fear mongering and raising doubt can be successful. You could call her a food denier.
But, she's not alone in her efforts to scare Americans about the perils of a balanced diet. She was picked because the committee knew what she believed and they wanted an outside expert to say what they had already decided was going to be the end result of their fact-finding.
Alice Lichtenstein, the committee's vice-chair and a nutritionist at Tufts University, also endorses the al-Qaeda approach to getting us, the unwashed commoners, to eat less meat. She highlighted a video released by the Finnish eco-terrorist group “Food Liberation Army” in which they held a Ronald McDonald statue hostage. Later, they beheaded him.
To vegetarian activists, infiltrating government panels, eco-terrorism and scaring children is funny.
For society, it’s less so. Clancy is a social authoritarian and embraces every effort to remove food choice from the public, so it’s actually kind of scary.
If activists get these policies passed, elites are still going to eat plenty of meat, just like they will take airplane flights and eat expensive catered dinners when they talk about how to force us to cut back on air conditioning to solve global warming. If meat becomes hyper-regulated, it becomes rare, and it becomes expensive, and then it will be only for the rich. That is not what the original Progressives, like Teddy Roosevelt, set out to achieve. They wanted to make sure science and technology were going to make for better lives. It was about the future, not the past.
You know, progress.
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