He stops short of proposing a federal organic beef ration, but just barely. And not surprisingly, he backs up his claim that animal agriculture is boiling us alive by citing the UN report Livestock’s Long Shadow that was thoroughly debunked by University of California-Davis researcher Frank Mitloehner. Mitloehner found that the UN report authors “charged” more tangential emissions to animal agriculture, rather than to other economic activity like driving cars — so the report’s claim that livestock were worse climate villains than anything else was a “classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issues.”

So what’s the real picture? The Environmental Protection Agency found that animal agriculture accounts for less than four percent of American greenhouse emissions (nowhere near the 18 percent the debunked UN report proposed). All agriculture together was responsible for just six percent.

Bittman also lays the blame for deforestation on the backs of meat-eaters. There’s a small problem with that as applied to American meat: We aren’t chopping down forests to graze our animals. Bittman is applying a third-world standard to our first-world bacon.

How does modern American agriculture do relatively well? It’s not by going “organic.” A Stanford University study suggests that industrialization has made agriculture much more efficient. One of the authors even proposes, “We find that funding agricultural research ranks among the cheapest ways to prevent greenhouse-gas emissions.” You read that right: Modernizing agriculture prevents emissions by making food production more efficient, rather than causing “the absolute destruction of everything.”

Of course, when you’re an apostle of the economically illiterate local food movement like Bittman, recognizing that modernization can increase environmental friendliness would destroy your whole worldview. As long as federal regulators don’t take his mythmaking to heart, Bittman is more than free to join British organic movement leader Peter Melchett and the rest of the activists who have nothing to “go on” but “feelings.”

Without lean finely textured beef, or LFTB, the price of manually recovered lean beef trimmings have skyrocketed while the price of fatty trimmings (the raw ingredients for LFTB) have plummeted. As a result of the scare, 650 American workers have been laid off and US beef imports from Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay have skyrocketed.

So what are Americans seeing at the supermarket? Retail ground beef prices hit a record high in March. Taking the equivalent of 1.5 million head of cattle out of the food supply won’t help ease that strain. (Not using LFTB wastes the equivalent of 1.5 million cows’ worth of beef over the course of a year.)

It’s also a divine irony that one of the prophets of the local-food movement, Mark Bittman, helped fuel the “pink slime” scare. Now, instead of consuming more meat from each U.S.-raised animal, Americans will get more of their ground beef from the Southern Hemisphere. When elitist food myths face off, it’s survival of the smuggest.

Food snobs may think that LFTB was the “lowest common denominator” (to quote Marion Nestle), but the evidence suggests that mindlessly bashing food processors isn’t helpful. Americans want their ground beef and buy it in spite of the scare. Unfortunately, they’ll have to pay more for it — while hundreds of other Americans have already lost their jobs.

PCRM is a “physicians committee” in name only: Only 10 percent of its members graduated from medical school, and not all of those even have degrees relevant to nutrition. As the Associated Press points out, the organization has a vegan agenda stemming from PCRM’s stealth animal-rights agenda: Its largest donor is a wealthy animal-rights activist, and PCRM President Neal Barnard is a former science advisor for PETA and used to run The PETA Foundation (now the so-called Foundation to Support Animal Protection).

“PCRM is just another animal-rights group created to spread fear about perfectly safe food that’s not PETA-approved,” said J. Justin Wilson, CCF’s Senior Research Analyst. “PCRM’s Petition for Executive Action should be laughed right out of the White House.”

In its increasingly cheesy attempts to promote veganism, the group has ludicrously compared bacon to cigarettes and its president has claimed that giving a kid cheese amounts to child abuse. “Cherry-picking data, a common PCRM practice, does not mesh with the scientific method,” writes McGill University’s Joe Schwarcz.

“The real reason PCRM created this petition is not to send a healthy message to Americans, but to push their own PETA-like vegan agenda,” Wilson continued. “When it comes to the First Family’s dinner choices, the Center for Consumer Freedom suggests that they trust experts, not evangelical vegetarians who don lab coats to assume credibility.”

The group intends to petition the White House to forbid pictures of the Obamas or other members of the President’s staff eating what PCRM calls “carcinogenic or obesogenic foods.” Meanwhile, media outlets are eating PCRM’s press releases up. More and more, it seems PCRM is adopting the “press slut” philosophy of its comrades at PETA.

What are these evil foods anyway? Given PCRM’s track record, they are any foods with animal products. Whether it is bashing heart-healthy fish, lean chicken, or even milk, PCRM is no stranger to employing junk science to scare Americans to cut animal protein from their diets. The group has ludicrously compared bacon to cigarettes and its president has claimed that giving a kid cheese amounts to child abuse. “Cherry-picking data, a common PCRM practice, does not mesh with the scientific method,” writes McGill University’s Joe Schwarcz.

Why does PCRM push so hard against animal-based foods? Because PCRM is deeply involved in the animal rights movement. PCRM’s president was once a scientific adviser to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and head of the Foundation to Support Animal Protection (a.k.a. the PETA Foundation). PCRM and its affiliated groups get much of their money from a wealthy animal rights activist, and PCRM has received substantial grants from PETA in the past.

That track record drew the justified skepticism of the Los Angeles Times’ health blogger, who noted the real reason PCRM is pushing this petition: PCRM just wants free press to push veganism. What’s the matter, guys, did you have to cut your billboard budget?

The New York Times

So, with the self-respecting omnivores smelling a vegetarian rat, the “defense of meat” was left to—drum roll, please—Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, among others, who said she’d only eat meat grown in a petri dish. (Don’t call it pink slime.) She didn’t say whether she’d retract comparing humanity to a “cancer” or whether she regretted funding arsonists, but perhaps the Times will have other essay contests yet.

Of course, what the Times called “a powerful ethical critique” of omnivorous eating could better be called “nonsense.” The Times’ vegetarian public editor conceded that the essays were “pretty narrow” and acknowledged criticism from a former Stanford professor who reminded the urban elite that Inuit and grassland nomadic peoples need to eat meat to survive. And more simply, who really believes that animals are humanity’s equal? Certainly not the indigenous Americans who killed and ate them. Even PETA doesn’t seem to buy that line.

Not to mention that those “cruelty-free” vegetables come from farms from which a myriad of insects and invasive rodents have been driven out or killed. (That goes for the “organic” farms, too.) And some writers now suggest that plants can even “talk” or “howl.”

So, vegans, what separates “talking peas” from “food with a face”? We find this a very powerful critique, at least if you don’t think humans are “the biggest blight on the face of the earth.”

This weekend saw the celebration of Earth Day, which comes with its own share of diet myths, endorsed by PETA and HSUS. Supposedly animal agriculture contributes more greenhouse emissions than driving, but as our Executive Director told The Daily Caller, that’s based on a sloppy comparison and third-world standards:

If that sounds a little too incredible, that’s because it is: The report’s own co-author later admitted that it uses flawed, apples-and-oranges comparisons in its calculations. Essentially, the report uses a more sweeping accounting for agriculture than it does for other sectors of life.

A much more reliable measure comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, which calculates that all agriculture accounts for less than 7 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Animal agriculture accounts for just 4 percent.

“Organic” green food myths are even more nonsensical. “Organic” methods can’t feed the world and even trying to use them on a mass scale would put an unbelievable strain on the natural world. We continued:

If we did things purely by “organic” means and rejected synthetic methods, we could only support a world population of about 4 billion people. And if you think needing an additional 1.5 million cows to replace “pink slime” sounds like a lot, we’d require 1 billion more livestock for just the U.S. to replace synthetic nitrogen (plus 2 billion acres to plant feed crops for these animals).

No surprise then that British organic movement leader Peter Melchett once said that “Science doesn’t tell us the answers.”

Our Senior Research Analyst also advised Floridians that PETA’s shocking proposal to turn the Treasure Coast into a “no-birth community” for dogs and cats is very much in character. He noted that PETA’s apparent view that “killing is kindness [… is] a strange view of ethics.”

Meanwhile, our HSUS advertising parody video “Lawyers in Cages” has been making the rounds on the internet, drawing tens of thousands of views in a few days. HSUS’s fundraising films might show abused dogs and cats, but most donation money tends to end up supporting factory fundraisers, anti-farmer lobbyists, and the HSUS pension fund. As for HSUS itself, we’ll quote from our video: “PETA with suits and deodorant.”

So, should you swear off poultry to save your bowels? Experts say no. For one, Michael Doyle of the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety notes that “Poop gets into your food […] produce is grown in soil fertilized with manure, and there’s E. coli in that, too.” (We’re waiting for PCRM’s press releases on fecal traces in sprouts and spinach, but not holding our breath.)

Dirk Fillpot of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) found additional problems with the analysis and report. First, he indicates, “[PCRM’s report] assumes that the presence of generic E. coli could only come from contact with feces, when that is simply not the case.” Catherine Cutter of Pennsylvania State University also said that PCRM couldn’t reasonably identify the cause of increased microbial levels.

But surely the presence of E. coli is worrying, right? Wrong. According to FSIS’s Fillpot, “The E. coli identified in the study is not a type that would make consumers ill.”

Facts—they’re so inconvenient, especially when they get in the way of a PR ploy.

So, in short, rather than finding evidence of widespread harmful contamination of store-bought chicken with toxic feces, PCRM seems to have found some traces of bacteria that federal regulators say won’t make consumers ill that might be linked to chicken feces but might not. We think that sounds like par for the course for the group that absurdly believes giving children dairy products is child abuse and compares bacon to cigarettes.

Of course, the principal objection to the recovered beef, which is essentially scraps that might otherwise be wasted, is that it is “the lowest common denominator.” And while nobody is calling ground beef the pinnacle of culinary achievement, perhaps grossness isn’t the right measure by which to judge safe foods. For instance, gelatin snacks are made from ground up animal bones, yet kids always seem to have room for them. Or should these also be removed from the cafeteria?

Indeed, one of the cheerleaders of this latest scare, Mark Bittman, once touted a cookbook called (in French) Yuck! It’s Good: Delicious Cuisine from Repulsive Foods. Haven’t heard of it? The book was written by a French chef who prides himself on making traditional foods from otherwise refused foods, including less commonly eaten meats. Based on the article, Bittman himself appears fond of cow’s tongue, hardly an everyday food free of “yuck factor.”

So what’s the difference between a “real butcher” and a beef processing company? Both use whatever meats they can get off the cow without compromising food safety. The butcher surely sells his “artisan” products for more money, enabling food snobs to smirk over their acquired tastes for ox tongue and blood sausage. The company uses machines to pick the cow clean of meats that even the most precise butcher can’t get, and then uses a technique to make the trimmings healthier by decreasing the amount of fat.

Apparently one of these things is good, and one is so bad hundreds of workers must lose their jobs and a million more cows must die. The foodie world expects no less.

In principle, the ideal study would take 100,000 people and randomly assign some to eating several servings of red meat a day […]. But that study, even with any amount of money, in many instances is simply not possible to do. Most people don’t want to stay on any prescribed diet […].

That’s right: A week after headlines warned of a cheeseburger apocalypse, a principal study author concedes that a better study design — namely, one that doesn’t rely on mere memory recall — is “not possible.” Given that the National Cancer Institute has called an increased relative risk of less than 100 percent “small and … usually difficult to interpret,” and in light of the admitted weakness of the study design, perhaps we should take the study’s claim that eating red meat is associated with a 13 percent increased risk of dying with a grain of salt.

Of course, that doesn’t stop Willett from making further — and demonstrably inaccurate — claims. He asserts:

It is pretty clear that people back in the 1950s, eating all this red meat, were not living very long compared to how long we’re living today. Red meat consumption has gone down; poultry has gone up […]. Red meat is not the whole picture, but the reduction probably has been a contributor to the reduction in mortality rates that we have today.

There are several problems with this reasoning. First, Chicago Mercantile Exchange data show that people didn’t cut red meat consumption below 1950s levels until 2007, when the present recession started. It’s not likely that just a few years of low beef and pork eating could change health patterns over decades.

And when you consider other possible causes of increased longevity, Willett’s idle speculation collapses. For instance, people are much more likely not to smoke, infant mortality has fallen significantly, and the roads are much safer than they used to be. There simply isn’t support for the researcher’s claim, other than the latest flawed study.

In fact, there’s even a term for it: “speciesism.”

Bruce Friedrich, a former PETA Vice President who now holds a senior position with Farm Sanctuary, promoted a film examining this so-called “speciesism” at the Huffington Post this week. He’s not an outlier in his view among animal rights activists: PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk has claimed “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” and the head of the Humane Society of the United States (which gives just one percent of its budget to local pet shelters) told an animal rights philosopher that he became vegan after he realized he was being a “speciesist.”

In the real world, the view that “speciesism” is some equivalent to racism or sexism is recognized as bunk. One biologist notes that it is impossible not to put humans before at least some animals:

The vegan militia have forgotten that to get their cruelty free vegetables, the land has already been cleared, all competing species have been killed or driven out, those that remain are poisoned (even by organic farmers – they just use “certified organic” methods of pest control or even other animals like ladybugs). We put humans first every time we clear a field, dig a foundation, fence and spray our crops, and burn diesel to harvest and bring them to market.

This isn’t the first time a scientist has noted that human survival depends necessarily on at least some animal death: One Oregon State University scientist even proposed that if the goal of a food system were to kill the fewest animals, omnivore eating might even be necessary. All those bunnies, voles, and insects you kick out of cropland, even with “organic” pesticides, add up. One Australian expert even thinks eating vegetarian might be “the worst possible thing you can do” if your goal is a “cruelty-free” diet. Hopefully that’ll be some food for thought next time Bruce Friedrich hits the salad bar.