Iowa Senator Wants to Make Sure the U.S. Military Runs on Meat
One U.S. senator’s crusade to block the military from signing on to Meatless Mondays appears to have hit the skids—for now.
Iowa Republican Joni Ernst tried to tack a provision onto the Senate’s military spending bill that would have required the armed forces to provide service members with enough meat to “meet or exceed the nutritional standards in the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” The Des Moines Register reported on Monday. Ernst’s measure would also have explicitly barred military facilities from adopting Meatless Mondays or any other program that would take meat off the table, even if it were for just one day a week. Last year, The Humane Society and the Coast Guard began a partnership to reduce meat consumption by 10 percent at the Coast Guard Academy by 2017.
As of Thursday, the Senate appears to have declined to take up Ernst’s amendment. But you can bet that Ernst isn’t going to let the issue drop. Keep in mind: This is the freshman senator who made headlines, during her campaign, for a commercial in which she bragged, “I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm,” a twisted reference to cutting “pork” in Washington.
Ernst spent 23 years in the National Guard, too, and served in Iraq, so she has—predictably—wrapped her opposition to Meatless Mondays in the American flag. She makes it sound as though going meatless once a week were tantamount to swapping out troops’ standard-issue rifles for water guns.
“The push for ‘Meatless Mondays’ in our military is misguided at best, and goes against dietary guidelines,” Ernst told the Register via email. “Our men and women in uniform should have the option to consume the protein they need, including meat, on a daily basis.”
Surely Ernst knows better than that. The senator’s home state is the biggest producer of pork in the country and the second-biggest producer of red meat. According to OpenSecrets.org, Ernst’s campaign received more than half a million dollars from agribusiness—the same folks who fought tooth and nail against proposals that would have encouraged Americans to consume less meat, not more, in the new federal dietary guidelines.
Lobbying by industry groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Producers Council, and the North American Meat Institute largely succeeded in torpedoing those proposals. Despite all that, the final guidelines, which were issued in January, generally follow current science-based recommendations that call for diversifying our protein intake to include plenty of plant-based sources as well as seafood while cautioning against consuming too much red meat and processed meat, which all too often combine good-for-you high-quality protein with not-so-good-for-you things like saturated fat.
The new guidelines went so far as to conclude that teenage boys and men were typically consuming too much protein and that they should swap out some of that meat for vegetables.
Ernst’s railing against the military’s interest in possibly pursuing more plant-based meals smacks of an outdated association between red meat and “red-blooded Americanism.” The senator's arguments are rooted in the same sort of erroneous thinking that has food companies latching on to protein as the one macronutrient—as opposed to, say, fat or carbs—that’s able to translate into marketing gold. In recent years, food companies have taken to hawking protein-packed products like "brogurt" to a nation of Call of Duty warriors convinced they’re not getting enough of the stuff when they probably are. Yes, we all need protein to survive, but federal research has found the average American man is consuming almost twice as much protein as he needs every day, while women are consuming one and a half times as much.
All this would appear to be lost on Ernst. As Paul Shapiro, an executive with The Humane Society, told the Register: “It makes me wonder if her interest is in promoting agribusiness interests in her state or whether she’s really interested in the health and fitness of the military. The fitness of our military is an extremely important concern and the evidence is very clear that incorporating more plant-based meals is good for fitness, it’s good for health.”
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Original article from TakePart
