NYU’s Institute of Public Knowledge is hosting the launch of Practicing Food Studies, edited by Amy Bentley, Fabio Parasecoli, and Krishnendu Ray. I wrote the Foreword. We will all provide brief perspectives on our quarter century of teaching food studies. For information and registration, click here. For 30% off on the book, click here.
Meat arguments: health, climate, taxes
If only meat were just a food and not the flash point for concerns about health, climate change, and tax policy. But it looms large in all such debates.
According to reports, meat is linked not only with a higher rate of cancer but also with type 2 diabetes. Does this make logical sense? It could, especially if meat eaters take in more calories and are fatter than non-meat eaters.
We’ve heard so much lately about how farm animals contribute to environmental problems and climate change, but Nicolette Hahn Niman writes in the New York Times of “the carnivore’s dilemma.” It’s not the animals themselves that contribute to climate change, it’s the industrial methods of raising them that are the problem. She ought to know. She and Bill Niman run the free-range ranch in Bolinas, California highlighted in Time magazine last August.
On the other hand, Princeton professor and ethicist Peter Singer argues in the New York Daily News that meat is so bad for health and the environment that it ought to be taxed.
How to deal with all of this? Push for more humanely and sustainably raised farm animal production, dont’ eat meat if you choose not to, and if you do eat meat, just don’t eat too much of it.
Update, November 4: I forgot to include Jonathan Safran Foer’s piece in the New York Times magazine on why he is against meat.