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The human body is constantly evolving, but tripling meat consumption in just over a century is a fairly remarkable update.

What we need in conjunction with these perfunctory fact-checks every time a conservative hallucinates someone coming to take their burger is a deeper interrogation of why meats have become such a foundational part of American meals. This was not always the norm, for either the Indigenous communities or for the majority of working people prior to the 1970s. To revert to the anecdotal once again, over the years I have asked my dad and my aunts and uncles, all of whom grew up on a tobacco farm, how often they ate meat growing up from the 1940s to the 1970s. The answer across the board has been that cuts of beef and pork, and even chicken to an extent, were rare dinner table items because of their scarcity and relative cost. And the Public Health Nutrition study backs this up: While Americans, per capita, were already consuming more meat than the rest of the world in the 1960s, the average person was eating roughly 250 grams of meat per day, or 100 grams less per day than they did in 2007. Go back to 1909, and the average American was eating just 150 grams per day.

The human body is constantly evolving, but tripling meat consumption in just over a century is a fairly remarkable update. This sudden uptick has far less to do with personal choice and much more to do with the way that the federal government has decided to act as a crutch for corporations like Tyson, Cargill, and JBS. Were that crutch ever kicked outby cutting some of the $38 billion in subsidies paid to dairy and meat industries and pushing for the increased presence of labor unions in the warehousesa new future might actually be possible. But, again, this is not the tack being pursued by the White House or Congress.

The reason that not even a trace amount of nuance can be added to this conversation on a national scale is because of how devoted Americans are both to meat and to reactionary culture wars. Meat isnt an organic protein to be devoured in moderation so much as it is a representation of American exceptionalism. Likewise, the need to fact-check every claim furthered by conservative grifters, while worthwhile in moderation, isnt so much a useful contribution to the discourse as it is an attempt to game the SEO and soak up as many clicks as possible from the deluge of Meat+Canceled+Biden Google searches. Aunt Joan is not clicking your CNN link, Larry Kudlow still doesnt know where beer comes from, and the White House is not remotely radical in its approach to climate change, meat, or almost anything else. OK? OK.

Read the original post:
There's No Biden War on Meat. There Should Be. - The New Republic