Word: rifkin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...since he took on the biotechnology industry over the safety of genetic engineering has Rifkin been embroiled in a higher-profile controversy, or one with the potential for greater economic consequences. With so much at stake, it is hardly surprising that environmentalists and meat-industry advocates have locked horns over Rifkin's charges. Among the most notable areas of dispute...
...Rifkin's critics -- and there are many -- regularly accuse him of taking a nugget of truth and enlarging it beyond reason in ways calculated to raise public fears. "Beyond Beef is about the worst book I've ever read," exclaims Dennis Avery, director of Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Indianapolis. "It establishes Rifkin as the Stephen King of food horror stories." Among other things, Rifkin raises the specter of beef contaminated with viruses, including a bovine immunodeficiency virus that he provocatively labels "COW AIDS," though there is no evidence that the virus can infect...
...Rifkin is using beef as a metaphor for all that has gone rotten in the modern world, wrongs that he attributes to a metaphysical loss of humans' | sacred relationship to nature. And cattle, because of their prominent role in ancient mythology and their haunting presence in prehistoric pictographs, lend themselves well to this moralistic exercise...