Where’s the Beef?

By ART CULLEN

First Barack Obama was coming for your guns. Didn’t happen. Then President Donald Trump said the socialists were going to take away our energy. The lights are on after 100 days, although it got dicey in Texas for awhile (and no, it wasn’t the wind turbines that caused the ice storm).

But whoa, Nellie! We hear a Hamburglar will steal your right to beef before you can say “pass the ketchup.”

Since I don’t even own a BB gun, I was not alarmed by Obama. Since I barely have enough energy to get out of bed, I ignored Trump’s warning. But I can get worked up if you have your eyes on my ribeye.

Turns out Fox News had to eat crow and retract a story claiming that Joe Biden will foreclose your divine (it’s in the Bible) right to slay a fatted calf. It was a Big Lie like all the rest — that your property rights will be denied for the sake of the Topeka Shiner; that the election was fraudulent, except in Iowa where Trump won in a rout; that Obamacare would divorce you from your doctor.

This lie started in The Daily Mail, which of course is British so it should know what Tom Vilsack is thinking. The Daily Mail insists that meat consumption will have to be cut 90% to meet President Biden’s climate goals, citing part of a University of Michigan study.

Meanwhile, here is what Vilsack is really thinking about: cow farts and pig poop. He wants more cattle on grass as part of a system with reduced emissions resilient to extreme weather. He is proposing money for methane digesters on hoghouses to power farms and sell dry compost — and getting a ton of flak from the left for it.

After Biden’s first 100 socialist days, Tyson is running full tilt cranking out pork and turkey from Storm Lake with non-union labor. Hoghouses are going up everywhere, spreading up the Missouri into South Dakota. Chicken hind quarters were only 69¢ per pound at Fareway last week.

There are a fair number of NRA members deeply suspicious of Obama and Hillary, who also want cleaner rivers and lakes, more grass buffers for habitat and limits on livestock confinements. They know the difference between BS and apple butter.

And they sense the real threat to their way of life — including Saturday night sirloin — is an ossified oligopoly food system that teetered on the brink of collapse last spring when its workers were overcome by COVID. Meat prices shot up 50% when the Waterloo and Sioux Falls pork plants shut down for a week. There was no way they could let the squeal go out of Storm Lake. For the first time in my life, meat counters were empty. The system failed. We have wrung the diversity out of the food supply chain. Just a few producers and packers stand, and when one of them falls, we are all the hungrier.

The “take away your meat” scare belies the fear felt in the quarters of Big Meat from an unsustainable system that crashed up against its limits.

Livestock can be sheltered humanely for efficient food production and better protection from disease. We can finish a lot more cattle on grass for the benefit of the planet. We can enhance food security with more diversity in production and open, competitive markets. Almost everyone in the Midwest understands those basic facts.

So when the meat scare is propagated, it makes the messenger look stupid. It’s not going to sell, just like the idea that wind turbines kill geese. We know better.

Eventually, the stupidity becomes obvious to the semi-zealous. The rush on bullets turned out to be a ruse from the ammo makers. It took a lot of shine off the gun lobby as the dues-paying members figured out they were getting played so prices could take a nice run. Dues are drying up as a light is shined on the rats in the corner office at the NRA.

The more lies they tell, the worse they get.

Eventually, people figure it out. Even the QAnon shaman who crashed the Capitol wearing a horned helmet realized he got duped when they didn’t serve organic in jail.

Vilsack reassured the public that USDA is all about meat. Biden gave a shout-out to cover crops in his address to Congress. That’s real progress for everyone. In Iowa, Republicans and Democrats are working to strengthen small meat processors. Despite several fish kills in Northwest Iowa rivers this spring, including the Floyd and Des Moines, from floods of manure nothing will be done to prevent the next one. People do care about that. They do care about antibiotic resistance and viral pandemics inherent in our system. They want reasonable solutions based on science and reality. When there is enough BS, they begin to think it stinks. That can have consequences.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing as editor of his day job at The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2021

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