No Low Too Low: Food The New Front In The Ever-Expanding, Ever-Phony Climate/Culture War
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National Review, though, was getting at something different: food as a front in the nation’s ongoing culture war, a proxy for larger issues of character, morality, and patriotism. The magazine’s finger-pointing at “the radical left” notwithstanding, it was the right that pioneered the use of food to smear its opponents—in this case, to frame liberals and progressives as “elite” pushers of the nanny state. The strategy took hold in the 1990s and evolved over the ensuing decades, as what we eat and how it’s produced became a national debate, and as culture clashes—over affirmative action, gay marriage, school curricula, abortion, and so on—seeped into every corner of our lives.
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The Food Network launched in 1993, driving an aspirational entertainment industry that turned cooking into a spectator sport. That same year, Chipotle was born, marking the rise of the fast-casual restaurant. Farmers markets cropped up around the country. Fusion cuisine, from fajitas to Chinese chicken salad, was everywhere. The food blogger crawled from the digital swamp, and people gathered on message boards to trade tips on where to find the best barbecue or tacos in town. The US Chamber of Commerce declared 1999 the “year of the restaurant.” To the right’s new Kulturkrieger, eager to recast themselves as populist champions of “real America,” all this gustatory fuss proved irresistible. Painting coastal liberals as out-of-touch elites rhapsodizing over French cheese and expensive wine was a natural extension of the “limousine liberal” line of attack used by earlier generations of culture warriors.
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Climate change, though, is where the game is really changing for meat. The food sector, top to bottom, generates nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And the meat industry alone, by some estimates, accounts for nearly 60 percent of all greenhouse gasses produced by the food system. We cannot address climate change without changing how we produce our food, and that will likely involve reducing the amount of meat we eat. The issue of climate change began to emerge in the national consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the role of agriculture in climate change, including animal agriculture, was not a significant part of the public conversation back then. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the 2006 book that galvanized the food movement in America, author Michael Pollan mentions climate change only in passing, noting that, “We seldom focus on farming’s role in global warming, but as much as third of all the greenhouse gasses that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.”
Over the last decade, though, as the effects of climate change became increasingly observable across the country, from extreme drought and heat to heavy rain and floods, it was no longer possible to ignore agriculture’s role. The wild weather hit farmers hard, forcing the conversation about climate change into areas of the country that have been most resistant to accepting its reality. At the same time, new reports, from the UN and other international authorities, drove media coverage of the myriad environmental problems with industrial meat. Cow burps, which release a significant amount of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, became a hook for endless news stories. Plant-based burgers and nut-milks began snatching market share, with proponents crowing (prematurely, as it turns out) about putting an end to the meat industry.
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https://thefern.org/2022/12/how-food-became-a-weapon-in-americas-culture-war/
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