No time for casting stones

This past week has been filled with excellent dialogue about marketing, food labeling and production styles. While I would really like to go on with my concerns about who this group or that group in beef production is partnering with, I would rather show that “developing sustainable strategies” is only one of the challenges we face.

More importantly, I received two phone calls from concerned dads of teenage daughters regarding their dietary choices and I don’t think they are the only worried parents out there.

Our oldest daughter is about to finish her degree in human nutrition at Texas A&M University. She has received a solid base of training that closely follows the nutritional advice that her dad has given her since she was old enough to start eating on her own. In a nutshell, she fully understands the benefits of consuming moderate amounts of all food groups including milk, meat and eggs and has the scientific knowledge to support what dad has been preaching for years.

The dads calling me are genuinely concerned about choices their daughters are making, sometimes encouraged by coaches to remove certain food groups such as meat. The science is more clear than ever that the athlete receives extremely high benefits from milk, meat and eggs not only in preparation for physical activity but also in recovery and repair from the same.

The following, gleaned from the Diet Doctor, spells it out:

“Young athletes have an increased requirement for high quality protein and amino acids derived from natural sources like red meat to provide for their normal growth, as well as the added demands of training.”

Honestly though, the most important discussion to be had with teenage girls about proper meat consumption stems from this Australian study:

“When we looked at women consuming less than the recommended amount of red meat in our study, we found that they were twice as likely to have a diagnosed depressive or anxiety disorder as those consuming the recommended amount.

“Even when we took into account the overall healthiness of the women’s diets, as well as other factors such as their socioeconomic status, physical activity levels, smoking, weight and age, the relationship between low red meat intake and mental health remained.”

The other front where I see that we are continually losing ground in the meat consumption battle is thanks to the growing myth that cattle are somehow bad for the environment. A quick internet search will land this:

“Because eating lots of meat—especially beef—will make it harder to feed a growing global population while meeting key Sustainable Development Goals on climate, forests and water, it’s important to recognize the subtleties in the changing U.S. diet.

“Beef production requires about seven times more land and emits seven times more greenhouse gases as chicken per gram of protein. (A shift toward plant-based foods would be even better for the environment: Beef production is 20 times as land- and greenhouse gas-intensive as beans, for example.)”

So for starters, something that is always left out of that conversation is the fact that the land cattle graze is not suitable for growing other crops. When cattle graze, they improve the forage base and grazing land removes excessive fuels that become serious fires like those we have battled the past several years. So what is the environmental impact of big fires to the environment? What is the value of cows reducing that fire load?

When it comes to water use that is the greatest myth yet. We have the same amount of water on earth today as we did when Jesus Christ walked with us 2,000 years ago. Furthermore, and most importantly in my mind, beef is the most nutrient dense food substance found on earth. A 3-ounce serving of beef supplies more of what your body needs in terms of all nutrients than anything else you can consume.

At the end of the day, the real story is that beef improves planet and human health unlike any other part of food production. I think all segments of food production are important and must work together but when it comes to ranking them, nothing compares to a cow.

With the growing body of misinformation about beef production, it appears to me that addressing those issues would be the most valuable use of our time and energy rather than continually throwing stones at other fellow producers.

“A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.”—Ecclesiastes 3:5.

Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].