USDA: We will not steer people away from meat to protect the environment | Hacker News Reader

USDA: We will not steer people away from meat to protect the environment

washingtonpost.com

21 pointsnoondip33 comments

There is no shortage of meat consumption in the US to the point of adverse health effects - in fact the opposite would seem to be the case. The amount of meat consumed per capita has increased around 54% since 1950 (up to something like an average of 222 lbs per person per year)[1].

There is likely a shortage of healthy vegetable consumption compared to what's been reported to reduce all-cause mortality.[2] Meanwhile beef production uses something like 160x the amount of land per calorie of crops like potatoes, wheat, rice, and around 28x that of other meats.[3]

[1] http://grist.org/article/2010-03-25-corn-ethanol-meat-hfcs/

[2] http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2014/03/03/jech-2013-20350...

[3] http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/among-meats-beef-has-...

Isn't the issue that poor people cannot afford fresh food? The calorie/dollar of veg+fruit is not a good value because in places like NYC or SF the markets are completely gentrified and the prices are astronomical. The other consideration is that the poor cannot live in nice real estate areas -- they live in grocery ghettoes. Take a look at the un-even distribution of places like trader joes around the uS and compare that to wal-mart. TJs is only in NFL metros for the most part (with upscale exceptions proving the rule). All of these public health "concerns" reeek of 1st world problems by weatlthy urban people who don't farm or have extensive familiarity with subsistence living. Remember that food stamps were created for poor white people in rural appalccia. The urban poor have completely different health concerns tied to the economics of real estate and transportation. None of this is served or in the scope of normal by the usda.

Here's the actual price data of U.S. cities compared to the midwest:

http://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/AverageRetailFo...

Obviously real estate and food prices are correlated at the county and/or zip code level and that is a bit of a data challenge in reviewing this linked data.

My point above is that its a hard thing to mandate people eat food X when it might be $10 for 2,000 calories vs $2 for 2,000 calories. Its also a problem if the $10 option pre-supposed you buy in bulk, have access to refrigeration, and use spreadsheets to minimize wastage which otherwsie might be as high as 30% (making it $10 for 1400 calories down the gullet). My understanding of what little research has been done in this area has highlighted that the logistics and economics of fresh fruit/veg are heavily biased towards the upper/middle classes in many ways that are not obviously apparent nor addressed stricly by "guidance" on what is a "better" mix of foods. To use an analogy that people with white priveldge may be more able to understand: if I tell you to pack a weeks worth of fresh fruit and raw meat for a hike in yosemite, which you have to carry, and forbid you from eating anything like nuts/granola/raisins/cliffbars/dried meat, you probably would have a bad time lugging around that backpack over 10,000 ft passes and what not. The reality is that rich white people in the backcountry eat the same crappy food as inner city poor people once they lose access to refrigeration/storage and frequent/convenient resupply options. It doesn matter if you look at a pro bar or a nature valley or a power bar or a snickers. They are all interchangeble in that context and do the job, despite some being up to 7x as expensive. And nobody would call a diet of 8 probars and a pack of beef jerkey a day either healthy or well rounded, but you will survive your trip. Of course, if you eat this diet in a sedentary culture, you're BMI will get out of wack. But that is the power of the explanation.

Current US grocery prices are distorted by farmbill subsidies. Beef, dairy, corn, wheat, soy, sugar, etc are all heavily subsidized by the Federal government's farming policies and tax deductions.

This doesn't change the fact that, relatively speaking, food is more expensive where the cost of living is more expensive and I do not dispute the fact that there are so called "grocery ghettoes".

This also doesn't change the fact that McDonald's burgers are vastly cheaper per Calorie than consumer-packaged vegetables or raw meats, but that is to be expected. The dressing on a salad is almost always more calorie-dense than the salad itself.

Don't Walmart sell fruit and vegetables?

The British supermarket they bought, Asda, is the cheapest major supermarket in the UK and it certainly sells fresh fruit and veg.

https://www.google.dk/search?q=asda&prmd=imvn&tbm=isch#tbm=i...

It's not fantastic quality, but it's very cheap.

yes, walmart is one of the largest us grocers. the issue is that walmart is not in many areas despite being in a much larger footprint than TJs. traders joes, on the other hand, is only in ABC1 demos in the US which means its an upper/middle class niche biz. While wallmart is much more avail than TJ it is still limited to Interstate corridors, which is another form of premium real estate. That link is sort of important to think about. Also, wall mart does not have cheap meat for the most part and its fresh produce is mid-tier pricing. More expensive than say, Aldi.

The USDA should advise on nutrition not on environment, likewise the EPA should advise on environment and not nutrition. So, while I eat little meat, I think they made a good call. It's not in their direct scope. At the same time, the meat producers should be reserved, one day they may find that less meat is better nutritionally and if they do find so, tell it like it is.

Not sure what the WAPO is trying to imply here. It's as if they want the USDA to go outside their scope --you know, not printing newspapers might also be beneficial to the environment, WAPO, but I don't see you ditching printing out of benevolence but rather necessity as fewer people buy newspapers.

On the contrary, the mandate of the USDA is to provide guidance and regulation relating to the meat and dairy industries. As the meat and dairy industries have definite environmental impact, they have space to make recommendations relating to the intersection of the meat industry and the environment.

It's foolish to think that we should all live in tiny, proscribed silos of expertise, and simply ignore all areas which other silos might have some claim to...

That's why we have other departments of the gov't to advise on their proscribed silos of expertise. No, I think this is the right thing to do. Stick to your area of expertise. I don't want gov't departments going rogue using up resources.

They should stick to their scope like nutrition, food safety, etc. They have too few food inspectors as it is.

They are sticking to their scope, actually. They're just not sticking to your baseless claim of what their scope is.

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navid=USDA_MISS...

> Natural Resources and Environment ensures the health of the land through sustainable management. Its agencies work to prevent damage to natural resources and the environment, restore the resource base, and promote good land management.

http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/

"going rogue, using up resources" -- doesn't apply to the USDA, does apply to meat production. And it's not like the industry just shuts up and makes meat, sticking to wasting resources that way; they also advertise and lobby, do they not?

I think there is a distinction between good land management, given conditions, that's to say how to best use land, with the presupposition of it being used, versus saying don't use it at all.

Moreover, the USDA itself is of the opinion that kind of recommendation you're suggesting, it out of their scope. So they disagree. I know people want them to think otherwise, but, they don't think so. I'm glad they have not become an activist department going beyond their scope, in this case.

You can't realistically separate agriculture, nutrition and the environment. Any body that deals with nutrition has to worry about agriculture, and any body that has to worry about agriculture has to worry about the environment. The way people get food is one of the biggest factors in the changing of the environment.

No I get that. But that's for someone like the EPA to regulate, not the FDA to give an opinion on. They should be _unbiased_ as to what constitutes a good diet and nutrition (not conditional recommendations).

Imagine getting medical care and the doctor says, well, yes, there is this cure, but if I put on my accountant hat, it would be too expensive, you know what, instead let me recommend this course of action instead. It's not as effective, but it's better for the budget.

>They should be _unbiased_ as to what constitutes a good diet and nutrition (not conditional recommendations).

This presupposes that there is one "good diet" and it necessarily includes meat, neither of which are true. Also, given, the way the climate is heading, those "conditional recommendations" might be environmental realities soon enough.

>Imagine getting medical care and the doctor says, well, yes, there is this cure, but if I put on my accountant hat, it would be too expensive, you know what, instead let me recommend this course of action instead. It's not as effective, but it's better for the budget.

Health insurance companies do this regularly. They will not cover certain medications until cheaper alternatives have been tried.

No man is an island. Advice and guidelines that don't take context into consideration are useful mostly as some kind of utopian ideal. The various agencies should be working together on things like this. And they sometimes do where their goals overlap. The dietary guidelines are actually an example of that since they're jointly issued by the USDA and HHS.

If the PH in our oceans became so unbalanced they could no longer support any kind of commercial fishing and it became a delicacy would they continue to push a certain percentage of fish as part of our diet? Considering the distortion lobbies create with respect to the balance of democratic power it would surprising if there weren't a certain amount of undue influence.

This is a sad day, this really should have been established... at least the discussion brought attention to the thunderous impact of animal ag on the environment, given that it produces more CO2 emissions than the combined exhaust from all transportation.[1]

Also quite revealing the meat industry's objection,

> The meat industry disputed the claim, and the notion that dietary guidelines ought to consider the environment.

They, of course, didn't dispute the impact, just that people should even consider it in a dietary guideline.

[1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

It's possible that we could run out of food by ignoring the environment.

If we overfish, there will be no more fish for the FDA to regulate. If we pollute the earth, water and air, there will be less clean earth, water and air with which to grow crops to eat. The crops are fed to the land animals we farm, too, so those are also affected.

There is no government agency dedicated to making sure we have both good quality food and enough ("sustainable") food. The FDA and USDA are concerned with food safety and not availability or quality.

There aren't ecosystems, there is one giant ecosystem that everything is a part of. Until the majority of our food is grown in underground caves, both the FDA and USDA should make an interest in the environment a major priority so we can have the best quality (and most abundant) food possible. But this doesn't happen.

Why? Because the people with the greatest financial incentives to create food will profit more now by caring about the environment less now. Politicians don't get increased campaign funds to make sure your tomatoes are healthier for you. They get increased campaign funds to make sure the tomato seeds are copyrighted by a corporation.

Fish fall through the cracks in a big way because we never needed to "grow" them before. Between 1970 and 2010, fish stocks worldwide fell to 26% of their former levels. About 70% of current worldwide fish stock is overfished or at its limit. But USDA only regulates farmed fish like catfish. The rest is handled by the U.S. Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service. The EPA in collaboration with the FDA sets limits on acceptable levels of contaminants in fish products.

USDA: The United States Department of Agriculture

The U.S. federal executive department responsible for developing and executing federal government policy on farming, agriculture, forestry, and food.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ag...

I always assumed that USDA was some kind of industry body set up to promote the U.S. beef industry. I'm surprised to learn that it actually has other roles!

Wow, it's like there's a government department which sees its job as serving the people instead of ruling over them.

Because the meat worship we have today is totally a grass root movement.

WTF they already pushed carbs for 30 years

turns out cheetos and coke is a vegan diet

that strategy backfired massively, tho

I don't understand what you are saying here. Can you clarify? Thanks.

The last time the feds tried to influence the nations diet, it was a disaster. That disaster involved pushing macro-nutrient consumption away from meat/dairy (fat, protein) and into vegan/vegetarian (carbohydrate) sources. That should be abundantly clear, but you can google it as it is very well known in the usa, see for example this article front page WaPo this morning:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/f...

and for background, an left-wing politics view on usda the old food pyramid that has been discredited

http://www.healthy-eating-politics.com/food-pyramid.html

Thanks for the expansion. Interesting thoughts

The U.S. dietary guidelines discussed in that article encourage more dairy (but low-fat, not high fat) and "Increase seafood intake by replacing some meat or poultry with seafood." The also encourage us to "Reduce intake of refined grains and replace some refined grains with whole grains."

http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2010/dietaryguideline...

Painting them as pushing vegan/vegetarian eating or increased carb consumption doesn't match the facts.

Wrong article--The food pyramid pushed corn based sweetener and other plant-basey carnohydrates grains and gluten based products at the expense of animal protein and (saturated) fat.

It is. Also grass fed. Tasty tasty grass fed.

Meat has always been the food of the rich, of the higher classes and is damn tasty. Meat is also terrific source of proteins, fat soluble vitamins and fats.

It's also a great source of saturated fat and cholesterol. Besides, fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes have all the protein and nutrients you need, so why filter them through an animal's body?

I'm not sure what you're saying. Perhaps if you could say what you mean instead of sarcastically saying something you don't mean, you could communicate more clearly.

If you're implying that a meat-heavy diet is some kind of US government conspiracy as opposed to the sort of diet which people across many cultures and eras have gravitated towards when they were able to afford it then I think a better study of history might be in order.

Thanks for the advice, it's a fairly bad trait.

But then you go on say lots of things about that mirrors you rather than me. I say meatie vs. veggie is not a grass root vs. government issue, and absolutly not a thing that stems from some bad version of cultural darwinism.

The meat loving of today is bad for our health, not only the environment, and to say that any culture in history has been able to afford meat production is in my view not a very accurate view on history.

USDA was the department that bought us the "food pyramid"[1] and somewhat controversial[2] plate[3][4] marketing campaigns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_%28nutrition%29

[2] Controversial due to the details surrounding the including the replacement of a water drink with a dairy drink placeholder. See [4]

[3] http://www.webmd.com/diet/20110602/plate-replaces-pyramid-as...

[4] http://friedmansprout.com/2011/10/04/harvard-vs-usda-dishing...

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