Jeremy Rifkin has been an environmental activist for 25 years. He became a prominent campaigner by leading challenges to the American biotechnology industry over genetic engineering. He is a reformed carnivore, having given up eating meat 15 years ago after chewing half-way through a discoloured hamburger.
His anti-beef campaign attacks cattle culture in its widest sense. He claims beef production increases Third World poverty (countries produce grain for export as cattle feed rather than food for the indigenous population), contributes to global warming through overgrazing and deforestation, involves widespread cruelty to animals, and threatens human life. A diet containing significant amounts of red meat is now thought to be bad for us.
Despite the drop in beef consumption during the past 15 years, Americans still buy an average of 1,200 burgers a minute, amounting to seven billion a year. Carol, Rifkin's wife, is also committed to the campaign. She has been taking the message to schools, saying: "We want to make it hip not to eat hamburgers." She says young people should not be made to feel guilty about meat eating, but they should be made to feel responsibility for cattle welfare and the environment.
Beyond Beef has taken full-page newspaper advertisements which make the controversial claim that "aside from smoking, there is no greater personal health risk than eating meat".
The National Cattlemen's Association has also joined the fray, placing its own advertisement in major newspapers, claiming that, far from destroying the environment, cows help to protect it. Cattlemen and ranchers have begun denouncing Rifkin on local radio call-in shows.
When ABC television's Prime Time featured Rifkin's view of insanitary American cattle production methods, emphasising the role of the deregulatory Streamlined Inspection Service policy, there was public uproar. The pro-meat lobby responded with cries of misrepresentation, claiming every carcass was inspected under the new system. But Rifkin was ready with affidavits from the cattle inspectors swearing to the appalling slaughterhouse conditions they encounter.
Rifkin is now promising "unprecedented public direct action in major American cities" in the spring. "The American people now know about this subject," he says. "It is not going to go away."
Reviews of Rifkin's book have been equally polarised by the anti-beef message. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Colman McCarthy praised the book. "If fresh thinking and well-reasoned arguments can cause conversions, his will do it. Combining reliable research with logical conclusions, he offers enough economic, medical, environmental and ethical arguments to persuade any open-minded person to pass by the meat (en)counter."
But Anne Mendelson, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, called that book "atrocious - one of those maddening books in which dozens of major issues keep getting whizzed in a mental food processor along with non-stop histrionics and virtuoso displays of ignorance in 20 disciplines".
Michael Prowse in the Financial Times wrote: "In calling for the renunciation of beef today, Rifkin is decades ahead of public opinion. In due course, however, I have no doubt that red meat will go the same way as tobacco. We must prepare to apologise for this anti-social and unhealthy habit."
