Hands off the ham

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.