Meat us halfway: Culture warriors ham it up over diet advice

Conservatives have long used controversies around meat as a staple of the culture war diet — but is it really a left/right issue?

Sound the culture war klaxon, those Canberra clowns are coming for our steak according to the national broadsheet!

The federal government’s official advice on diets will now incorporate the impact of certain foods on climate change, sparking outrage from farmers who fear it is driven by an “ideological agenda” against red meat.

The piece in The Australian continues with the approach to science we’ve come to know and love in the News Corp stable: “It could lead to consumers being told to reduce steak and lamb chop intakes in favour of alternatives like chicken, which some scientists say has a lower carbon footprint.” Which is true, in the same way it was true that the Oz used to report that some scientists believe human activity is having an impact on the climate — “some” is doing a level of heavy lifting that would have Sisyphus take a sick day.

This is accompanied by an editorial today directing “nanny” to keep her “nose out of the fridge”, a piece that appears to have been constructed by selecting the food references and working backwards:

Healthy it may be, and tasty, but sitting down to a steak or a lamb roast with vegetables and a glass of wine, or milk for the children, followed by a punnet of strawberries or blackberries may not be good enough for the green food police. Think of the greenhouse gas emissions, the waste water, the habitat loss. Add a dollop of guilt to the sauce … Aside from nutrition, the National Health and Medical Research Council is making “sustainable diets” a “very high priority” in revising its 2013 Australian dietary guidelines. But such ideologically driven interference is likely to make many health practitioners, patients and those interested in healthy eating take the guidelines with a big pinch of pink salt.

“Get out the steak knives to set the table” comes the ominous closing line. What, nothing about the rules being a load of bull or leaving a bad taste?

Any indication that it might be advisable to cut down on red meat has long been, well, red meat for the base. In the early days of the Anthony Albanese government, Nationals leader David Littleproud said Labor’s commitment to modest cuts to methane emissions put “the Aussie BBQ under threat”. It follows several years of agitating around fake meat from the Tasmanian Liberals and LNP Senators like Susan McDonald and Matt Canavan, and One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts.

Further back, then Liberal senator Cory Bernardi (ably supported by One Nation) pushed for and got a 2015 Senate inquiry into Halal-certified meat, attempting to establish connections to Islamist terrorism — it failed in that aim but succeeded in cooking up some piping hot Islamophobia. And while no evidence of Halal certification funding suicide bombers was ever found, we did get the shocking revelation that, under Halal conditions, animals are alive at the point they are slaughtered.

Of course, for all the persistent conservative ire aimed at what former UK conservative MP Suella Braverman memorably termed the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati”, vegetarianism/veganism has never split along ideological lines.

Ignoring the really, really obvious historical example of an extremely right-wing vegetarian, the cucks who would have our children never know the joys of a pork chop would be unlikely to find many friends among the “vegan mafia” of Silicon Valley investors in plant-based food companies. This group includes such progressive icons as publication assassin and Donald Trump enthusiast Peter Thiel and (one-time vegetarian) Elon Musk. John Mackey, the strict vegetarian whose Whole Foods empire was the first supermarket change to set humane standards for animal treatment, is also a union-hating climate change sceptic libertarian who complained about “socialists taking over” when he retired in 2022. Meanwhile, we would bet there was a decent number of vegans among the wellness contingent of the COVID-19 sceptics whose vote various hard-right figures have spent the last few years so assiduously courting.

Has the threat of climate change changed your eating habits? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.