The results are in. The Obama Administration has buckled under pressure from meat-loving Republicans and backed down from allowing the inclusion of the DGAC’s environmentally sustainable diets recommendation in the 8th edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel offered some common-sense, scientific advice on how to reduce the impacts of climate change on the environment, which forms the basis of the USDA’s updated dietary guidelines. Americans were to be told to eat fewer animal products—especially cow and lamb meat—which have an exceptionally large contribution to climate change and help create a sustainable future.
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) had released its scientific report earlier in the year stating that a “higher consumption of animal-based foods was associated with higher estimated environmental impact, whereas consumption of more plant-based foods .. was associated with estimated lower environmental impact.” This recommendation would have accelerate the trend of diets higher in plant-based foods which are better for the environment and a key element in fighting climate change. As you can imagine, this sent the animal agriculture industry into uproar.
For fossil fuel alone, one calorie from beef or milk requires 40 or 14 calories of fuel, respectively, whereas one calorie from grains can be obtained from 2.2 calories of fuel.
— DGAC Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines
Money is King, Obama Runs Scared
Now, agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, whose agencies are currently at work writing the final guidelines, buried the news in a joint statement that insincerely mentioned that “the environment and sustainability are critically important” but that the nutritional guidelines are not “the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation about sustainability.” They, of course, did not bother to mention what the appropriate vehicle is nor do they seem to care.
It is very disappointing that this decision went in favour of the industry and not in favour of the science because the science is so clear.
— Jillian Fry, a PhD in Healthy Policy and Management, project director at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
The timing of this buried announcement is very revealing in terms of why Vilsack and Burwell decided to ignore the advice of an expert panel that their agencies have traditionally listened closely to when drafting their dietary guidelines. As mentioned on news website Slate.com, this Wednesday saw both secretaries scheduled to testify in front of the Republican-led House Agriculture Committee. The panel’s chairman, K. Michael Conaway, was among the GOP leaders who had a livestock industry-endorsed freak-out over the idea that the administration would dare to consider the sustainability of Americans diets, particularly when doing so would mean telling people to cut down on their meat intake. Rep. Robert Aderholt, the Alabama Republican who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls the Agriculture Department’s purse strings, even went as far earlier this year as to threaten that the department could be subject to budget cuts if it decided to follow the nutrition experts’ advice.
Given that, it appears as though the Obama administration is simply, and disappointingly, unwilling to open up another front in Washington’s climate wars at a time when Republicans are unwilling to accept the scientific consensus about climate change. The climate case for eating less meat is particularly powerful when studies show that animal agriculture is responsible for 11%-15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, at the 2014 UN Climate Summit new estimates tabled put that number between 43-57% as it looks at food production more broadly to also include emissions commonly excluded, which come from land use, change and deforestation, as well as the processing, packaging, transport and the sale of agricultural products, and food waste.
Time is running out as industry and profits dominate our future instead of common sense sustainable practices.
Stephanie Feldstein, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s population and sustainability program, had stated earlier in the year “if the Obama administration caves to pressure from the meat industry in its final recommendations, it’ll be doing a great disservice to the health of Americans and the planet. If we don’t pay attention to how food production is destroying the environment, it will ultimately pull the rug out from all of our other efforts to keep our growing human population nourished and healthy.”
This isn’t the first time the Obama Administration has run scared from the political influence and millions of dollars of lobbying from the animal agriculture industry. During 2007 and 2008, the Obama administration attempted to take action on the concentration of power among the handful of agricultural companies that control the US food supply chain. The USDA proposed the toughest antitrust rules over meat companies since the Great Depression—but the backlash of soaring rhetoric about the creation of a new food system, and the organised resistance marshalled millions of dollars and teams of lobbyists which helped turn back the biggest effort to reform the meat industry since the 1930s.
It is little wonder that it has happened all over again.
The Food Guide Pyramid and MyPlate images influence us—but they don’t have the last word on our diets. Go vegan and help save the animals and the world.
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