Super Eco

Photo credit: Flickr, Binary Ape

Big Beef doesn't like it when smart people tell the raw truth about the science behind their meat.

In fact, a very deep-pocketed cattle rancher in California, where “happy cows come from,” made quite a beef about an agribusiness critic almost talking about sustainable food at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Michael Pollan, author of the book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto never got the chance to broach the controversial subject at the university. Well, not in the way he'd originally planned to.

Why not? Too much money was at steak stake. University officials promptly pulled the plug on Pollan's long-scheduled lecture on the heels of a threatening letter from alumni and Harris Ranch Beef Co. Chairman David Wood. In it, Wood threatened to yank his firm's donation “because the university was providing an 'unchallenged forum to promote his stand against conventional agricultural practices.'”

Just how much cash buys the power to manipulate Cal Poly's impressive speaker schedule? Only $150,000 in funds headed for—surprise!—a new meat processing factory for the university's prized cattle herd.

Wood also made a stink about a Cal Poly professor's beef with his company's cramped feedlot; the educator doesn't think it's sustainable. Wood does, so he wants us, potential beef-eating consumers, to be leery of university types, with their “thinking,” backed-by-laboratory-science “opinions.” Why would Wood want impressionable, young minds to know that:

1. Beef isn't an essential part of our diet.
2. Neither is cow's milk.
3. Grass-fed, free-range, sustainable beef is available right now, if you look hard enough. (It's not exactly cheap, though.)
4. Industrial-scale beef and dairy ranches gobble up insane amounts of natural resources, fan the fires of global warming with a different, shall we say more fragrant, brand of wind energy, and Big Beef's eco-unfriendly carbon hoof-print only gets bigger ... 

When did the Ivory Tower put open academic debate up on the auction block? Cal Poly and its beef magnate benefactor(s) are messing with the wrong sustainable foodie. Pollan just happens to be a respected "meat scientist," a mass-scale organic lettuce producer and a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for starters. I'd say he knows enough about Big, Bad Beef and the science of agricultural sustainability, not to mention his First Amendment right to freedom of speech, to boldly stand up to this outrage.

So, did he? As reported in The Los Angeles Times, Pollan,
"no stranger to attacks from Big Ag," responded like so, “It's an open threat to the university. The issue is really about whether the school is free to explore diverse ideas about farms and farming."

See? Pollan didn't take the news lying down. Actually, in a way he did. He agreed to nix his solo speech and instead participate in panel discussion, which was held last month.

During the panel discussion, Pollan wasted no time in bringing up Big Beef's pressure to censor him. In response to the moderator's first question ("What is sustainability?"), he said:

"I would be remiss if I didn't address a little bit the circumstances surrounding this event, which I don't think we can let pass in silence. But one of the reasons we're doing the panel and not a conventional speech is that there was a real challenge to the university posed by the government, and what is potentially a real threat to academic freedom. And as much as agriculture is what we want to talk about today, academic freedom under girds the ability to have the kind of conversation about agriculture we want to have."

"You could have a monoculture of a university -- one that only tolerated one kind of thinking - and when the world changes, as it inevitably does, you would find yourself in serious trouble. But when you have a lot of different ideas, and they're all nurtured, and they're all brought into contact with one another as we hope to do today, that is where you get the resources to withstand shocks to the system. And god knows those shocks are coming."

For more of Pollan's remarks, check out the full transcript.

Big Beef: "It's what's for dinner," and it's powerful, scary stuff. Just ask Pollan.