Word: beefing
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...reminds most people of cockroaches scuttling across kitchen floors and rats skulking in dark basement corners. But to Jeremy Rifkin, the environmental movement's most prominent polemicist, vermin are big, brown-eyed ungulates that graze the rolling countryside, chew their cud and moo. In his controversial new book, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, Rifkin manages to blame the world's burgeoning population of bovines for a staggering spectrum of ecological ills. In the U.S., he charges, runoff from mammoth feedlots is despoiling streams and underground aquifers. In sub- Saharan Africa, cattle are contributing to desertification...
According to Rifkin, civilization began a long slide downhill when 18th century British gentry acquired a taste for fat-marbled beef and proceeded to spread that proclivity, like a plague, throughout the Western world. Rifkin's real argument, of course, is not with the 1.3 billion bovines that roam the planet but with modern methods of mass-producing beef that include plumping animals with hormones and stuffing them with "enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people." Although he did not personally visit a ranch or a meat-packing plant, his stomach-churning descriptions of how cattle are treated...
Such inflammatory rhetoric sends shudders through the U.S. beef industry, which is already reeling from a nearly one-third drop in per capita consumption since 1976 -- the result of popular concern about fat in the diet. Now Rifkin hungers for a more decisive blow. This week he is leading a coalition of environmental, food-policy and animal-rights groups in launching a well-financed advertising campaign aimed at slashing worldwide beef consumption by 50% over the coming decade. Members of the coalition range from the Rainforest Action Network, which blames cattle for "killing the Amazon," % to the Fund for Animals...
...cattle could feed the hungry. "Hunger isn't about actual scarcity," declares Stephanie Rosenfeld, a researcher for San Francisco-based Food First. "It's about the maldistribution of resources. People are hungry for different reasons at different times, but quite often the reasons have to do with beef." The link is often very subtle: in countries like Egypt and Mexico, for instance, farmland that formerly grew staples for human consumption is being switched to grow grain for beef that only the wealthy can afford. Indirectly, then, a growing cattle population threatens humans on the low end of the economic scale...
...social causes. We are disgusted with American political culture. As a generation raised on a constant flood of split-second MTV images, we are both accustomed to soundbite politics and sick of it. Although we adore television and enjoy moments of political video ("Make my Day"; "Where's the Beef?"), we also recognize their emptiness. The moments are brief diversions and nothing else...