Food Fight: Competing Visions for America’s Health
MAHA Pushback
Now that RFK, Jr. has teamed up with Trump to make Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) the new, if slightly less significant national slogan, the left will try to undermine the one thing that seems to unite both sides of the aisle — health. This alliance is more of a threat to the Democratic ticket than either candidate was alone and as sure as the sun rises, the Democrat party and the media will do everything it can to discredit the Trump—Kennedy stance against chronic disease.
But demonizing meat and animal products is not the answer.
Take, for example, Time’s August 27 story with the headline, “What If Ultra-Processed Foods Aren’t as Bad as You Think?” The article goes through the same type of mental gyrations I wrote about in a previous piece, splitting hairs over the definition of processed food arguing, for example, that a gummy bear and a can of beans are technically both processed. So how could a consumer possibly discern which would be the more nutritious choice?
The backlash on social media channels was so fierce that the title of the article was updated the next day to read “Why One Dietitian is Speaking Up for ‘Ultra-Processed’ Foods.”
The processed food industry is comprised not only of products common sense tells us are not healthy, such as Doritos, sugary soft drinks, and Snickers bars, but also a slew of vegan products that are marketed as healthy, such as non-dairy alternatives to milk, cheese and yogurt, beefless burgers, and dairy free ice cream. Vegan food options are often filled with artificial ingredients and highly processed seed oils, things Kennedy and his allies, such as Dr. Casey Means, have marked as contributors to chronic disease.
A strictly animal free diet also supports the lie that cow farts will destroy the planet, promoting a rationale for Democrats to further their Green New Deal initiatives. This includes increased regulation that makes survival for independent farmers, in particular, even more tenuous.
MAHA Requires Meat
Alternately, Kennedy’s vision of saving the environment and simultaneously cleaning up people’s palates involves renewing the soil, which, through regenerative agriculture, must involve cows. Farm waste is recycled into the land and carbon sequestered for soil health. Several studies find that with appropriate regenerative crop and grazing management, ruminants not only reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions but also facilitate the provision of essential ecosystem services, increase soil carbon sequestration, and reduce environmental damage.
Still, the left will continue to insist that all virtuous, caring people must stop eating meat. Mainstream media will continue to prime the pump to thwart any food policies that prevent the Green New Deal from achieving its end goal — complete and total government control over the means of production, or as many like to call it, socialism.
Beans, Beans Are Good For … Not Much
An opinion essay in the New York Times last month entitled “How to Make a Nation of Meat Eaters Crave the Humble Bean” offers another example of the type of pushback we can expect against Kennedy and Trump’s efforts to stop yet another avenue of anti-democratic control.
The essay’s author, Bee Wilson, doesn’t exactly offer a compelling case for beans nutritional superiority or its environmental benefits. She only says that beans, “along with peas, lentils, and other legumes, are everything meat is not in sustainability terms.”
Never mind that many studies conclude that one of the best food categories to decrease incidents of malnutrition is animal-based products.
Or that the protein from all beans and legumes are considered “incomplete proteins” because they lack one or more of the nine essential amino acids found in animal-based protein that can only be taken in through food. That’s not to say they are nutritionally useless. But without mixing beans or legumes with another grain that contains one of its missing amino acids, you’ll not get the full benefit of the building blocks of muscle, skin, organs, and other tissues.
Furthermore, a 2016 study found that diets that focus on reducing carbon are often less healthy than their carbon emitting counterparts.
The key to human and planetary health is improving the sustainability of food while ensuring adequate nutritional needs for all. Bottom line: beans do not cut it.
Bean Eaters Are Not Born – They’re Created
What’s more illuminating is Ms. Wilson’s progressive view of human nature. She states that “no one is born loving hot dogs or disliking broccoli and Brazil nuts; our food preferences are learned.” Tell that to a mother trying to feed broccoli to her two-year-old.
Like most loyal lefties, Wilson’s hypothesis assumes that humans are only a byproduct of learned behavior. There is no nature, only nurture. Everything — including one’s gender — is determined through socialization. It reminds me of Simone de Beauvoir’s declaration: “one is not born a woman, but becomes one.”
We learn arithmetic, but 2+2 still equals 4. Unless, I suppose, you ask a progressive. They might try to tell you it equals seven and even do a pretty good job of convincing you it’s true. Just like a person with XY chromosomes can be a woman.
As someone who doesn’t eat that much red meat, but is far from a vegetarian or vegan, I enjoy bean dishes as much as the next tree hugging hippie. I’ll happily plow through some homemade hummus. There’s nothing quite like a side of sauteed spinach and white beans with loads of garlic and, as the author comments, “crispy sage.”
But I refuse to equate, as the author does, mashed potatoes to this plate of gaseous turmoil. Plus, she invalidates her own argument by suggesting that beans should replace potatoes, a vegetable, and not a bloody, juicy honking piece of red meat.
Vegetables, beans, and legumes can be a wonderful supplement to any health diet. But for most, they should not be the sole source of sustenance. Talk about carbon emissions.
You’ll Eat The Food We Prefer!
Ms. Wilson also states, “To start seeing beans as something to crave, you need to imagine them as desirable.” In other words, we will shame and guilt you into eating beans. Just like Covid vaccinations.
She also claims that “once little-known foods, from pesto to tofu and gochujang, have been welcomed gratefully onto American tables in recent decades.” I would contest the fact that tofu has been “welcomed gratefully” onto American tables. Maybe in neighborhoods like Brooklyn and in select microcosms of states west of Nevada, but for the most part, people still equate eating tofu with ingesting cardboard.
Progressives make for very poor historians. They conveniently ignore the lessons of Stalin, Hitler, and Zedong. Forced change — including Kamala’s federal ban on so-called “price gouging” on food — cause nothing but misery and suffering and is almost always based on false logic and a desire for power.
Food and the environment can be used as a tools of control, something Trump and now Kennedy are trying to prevent. Could Americans do with less McDonald’s and more homemade meals around the family dinner table? Of course. But demonizing meat and animal products is not the answer. Educating people on proper nutrition and weaning them off of addictive carbohydrate heavy diets would go a long way in ensuring the health of both humans and the planet to achieve MAHA’s goals. You can’t do that without meat and the farmers who provide it.
READ MORE from Jennifer Galardi:
Can America Afford To Be Healthy Again?
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