Anti-beef claims hard to swallow - Jeremy Rifkin's campaign to change beef consumption and inspection and cooking standards - Column

Insight on the News, March 15, 1993 by Dennis Avery

Jeremy Rifkin, an animal rights activist whose "Beyond Beef Campaign" seeks to cut beef consumption in half, is cynically attempting to use the food poisoning in Washington state to control America's diet.

In early February, Rifkin traveled to Seattle to prey ghoulishly on the city's grief over two children who died from eating undercooked hamburgers. He announced a lawsuit to force the federal government to place warning labels on beef products and a petition to "halt the flow of beef to consumers until all beef has been properly inspected for bacterial infection."

Rifkin boldly added that the days of cooking beef rare are over. He claims he'll force all restaurants to cook beef to 160 degrees. No doubt he hopes this will discourage the eating of beef, as many Americans prefer rare steak.

If Rifkin were serious about consumer safety, he would support beef irradiation, which is still prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration. Irradiation, a process that exposes food to radioactive elements, is a safe way to almost completely decontaminate beef (it leaves no radioactivity in food). It has been approved by most industrialized countries and is endorsed by many international health organizations. Yet Rifkin's group opposes it.

He also announced a nationwide campaign to picket McDonald's restaurants and force them to shift their menus and advertising from beef to "veggie-burgers." He claims his Beyond Beef Campaign is aimed at helping people in the Third World who are being starved so grain can be given to cattle for the rich, and at protecting the environment from cattle, which he calls "hoofed locusts."

Rifkin's claims, however, are false. No one in the Third World is being starved to fatten cattle for rich Americans. The only countries in the world that feed grain to beef cattle, the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, have big grain surpluses. More important, thanks to the "green revolution," which increased the crop yields of many countries, the whole world has the capacity to produce perhaps 200 million tons of surplus grain a year. (The famines you see on TV are primarily due to "mistakes of government" such as wars.)

The only clearing ever of a rain forest for cattle pasture was due to an ill-advised subsidy (long since eliminated) from the Brazilian government. America imports very little beef, and virtually no imported beef is served in our restaurants. (The quality of scrawny rain forest cattle would be too poor for American tastes, aside from the public relations problem.)

Rifkin claims that cattle are forcing global warming by producing methane. Ruminant animals do produce methane, but U.S. beef cattle produce about 0.0003 percent of atmospheric change. (A cow's impact on global warming is almost that of a 75-watt light bulb.)

To sum it up, Rifkin's campaign has no scientific basis. His book Beyond Beef has footnotes, but none offers any scientific proof of his claims. Still, he plays to packed press conferences because reporters know he's always good for a byline, scientific fraud or not.

In truth, Rifkin is an eco-parasite, feeding on the fears of a nation that unfortunately has little understanding of food safety issues. Americans should feel free to choose their diets on the basis of nutrition and preference, not Rifkin's hysterical headline-hunting.

Dennis Avery directs the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.