The Lancet’s New Push To Ban Meat

Science is not the answer. It cannot be “because Science” that you ought to give up meat. Which Harvard scientists want you to do in the name of “justice”. And, of course, to save the planet. Which is in no danger and does not need saving.

Justice is not a concept in Science. Science is forever mute on justice. Or fairness. Or equity or Equality. You cannot use Science to justify DIE (diversity, etc.). Though science tells us when Science DIEs, just as when anything DIEs, it dies.

The propaganda: “Landmark study recommends ‘Planetary Health Diet’ for saving lives and the planet“. Experts being narcissists to a man, or especially to a woman, they form the acronym “PHD”, which they are sure will convince you to give up meat. Even though the planet cannot have health.

Realistic, simple dietary swaps can help Americans make a difference in the country’s carbon footprint, a new study found.

Changing how the world eats could reduce premature deaths, save trillions of dollars and slow the impacts of climate change, according to a new landmark report released Thursday by the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission, a coalition of experts in nutrition, climate, economics, health and agriculture from more than 35 countries.

The peer-reviewed paper is “The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems” by some large number of authors. Note the “just”, which does not belong in a journal purporting to be about science.

I do not propose here today to go through this paper (or papers), as it is long and dreary. They say, for instance, in their opening sentence, the covid panic was responsible for “exacerbating existing vulnerabilities”. No. Experts were. Experts did the panic to us, starting with creating the bug. Their second sentence is “However, food systems remain squarely centred at the nexus of food security, human health, environmental sustainability, social justice, and the resilience of nations.” Which also has next to nothing to do with science.

At the end of their Introduction they say “Our assessment of justice integrates three dimensions—distributive, representational, and recognitional—within a human rights framing that includes the rights to food, a healthy environment, and decent work.”

All of this is pure politics. And since Lancet is woke, it is woke politics: progressivism and the commitment to DIE.

So today we will stick to philosophy and some very basic science. We can leave the rest for later, if there is interest.

Now it is obvious man is a meat eater. It is just as obvious that are two sexes. These are two of the kinds of truths that used to form the core backbone of science, the subject which studies the way the world works. Yet obviousness carries no weight in The Science, which is the political branch of science. Desires are brought to The Science, and science is asked to justify them. If it cannot, science is ignored.

It does not follow from the true observation that man is a meat eater that from time to time eats other things that man ought to eschew (a bad pun) meat. It only follows that man is a meat eater. Observation tells us man can eat other things beside meat. But this does not make him a non-meat eater. He remains a meat eater.

And that is as far as this science can take us. Except for the deduction that because man is a meat eater, it must have allowed him to live and thrive by this, which we observe by being here and discussing this. Thus any conclusion that says “meat is bad for you”, cannot be true.

Without heavily qualifying what “bad” means, where and when and how, we cannot trust any statement that says eating meat is bad, for us or the “planet”. We deduce eating meat cannot be universally or always bad. Observation has ruled that out and falsified “eating meat is bad” tout court.

We saw earlier that Thomas Malthus’s theory that all species, man included, breed up to the limit of available food. It is not that creatures out-eat their food supply, it is that food provides the energy needed for breeding. Most have this wrong, and think man will cause mass starvation by eating. And so “destroy” the “planet”. Somehow.

In man’s case, Malthus’s theory needs an addendum (I don’t know if the following holds true for other creatures, but I wonder that it might, and know it does in lab rats). It is true man bred vociferously when food began to be produced in vast quantity. But there came a point when there was more food than man could eat, or rather needed to eat to remain alive and healthy and breed. It was then, when man began eating purely for pleasure in addition to eating to live that man stopped breeding in large number.

This picture is a cartoon of the idea:

Most of the food man eats purely for pleasure is not meat. It is plant based, and processed heavily. That we can process so much raw food into packaged food is proof enough we have excess food, which was done without “killing” the “planet”.

It can be that a person wanting to eat not because of hunger but for reasons of pleasure wanders to the fridge, pulls out a steak, and fries it up. It is much, much, much more likely he will rip open a package and consume concentrated plant matter, loaded with flavorings and other chemicals to delight the tongue.

Whether that plant matter with flavorings and chemicals are bad or good for you is for us today irrelevant. Even suppose it is good or harmless. Little of what is in that stuff has what is in meat, like protein, which man needs in good quantify lest he look like an NPR listener. Those who eat too much for pleasure end up eating extra food to fill the cravings for the necessary materials found only in meager quantities in concentrated processed plant matter.

And that is before considering whether what’s in those packages is good or bad for health in other ways besides consuming excessive amounts of food. I’m telling you now that the evidence “PHD” scientists used to say plant matter is good, and that meat is bad, is of the standard terrible kind I keep going on and on about (wee P-values galore, etc. etc.) in the Class. If there is interest we can go through some of this. Let me know in the comments.

The “PHD” authors are aware of over-eating, but focus on the maladies which accompany this and not on the lack of breeding which results. Crucially, they do not answer why man produces too much food, much of it existing purely for pleasure. Instead they say “The destabilising effect of unhealthy overconsumption on the Earth’s systems highlights the importance of viewing healthy diets not just as a human right, but also as a shared responsibility.”

There is no “destabilising effect” on “Earth’s systems”. This, like many things in The Science, has causality bacward. It is what some would, as we have seen, falsely call “Malthusian”. Their idea that healthy diets are a “human right” and “shared responsibility” means, as it could only mean, Experts must be put in charge of your plate. Experts cannot bear the idea of people not heeding their credentialed advice.

The reason man makes too much bad food, and does not eat simple diets of meat and the like, and thus does not breed, is because he has surrendered himself to pleasure. Having some HR lady scold you for eating steak is the typical bad doctor approach of treating the symptom and not the disease. Which is wholly spiritual. An area which doctors have less experience than auto mechanics. This must be obvious. Our solution to over-eating is to produce drugs which vanquish fat while continuing to allow the over-eating. This happens because doctors are not priests, and we have turned to doctors for our answers instead of priests.

Thus my unhappy, and surely correct, prediction is that if the “PHD” Experts’ solution is adopted, matters will only grow worse. And the planet will be, as now, in no danger.

There is one more point to amplify. It is rather subtle. Man must eat to live. A stupid and obvious point. But we have learned obviousness is not important to The Science. There is a whispery idea in the minds of many Experts (Western) about man in his environment. Is it that man has no environment. That everywhere and in everything man is an intruder. (Unless non-White, of course. In all environmental propaganda, non-Whites are pictured with their hair gently flowing in the wind as they talk about “My people” and their interaction to “the environment.” Always wind.)

Ants are allowed their hills and beavers their damns, but man is allowed nothing. Or, rather, excused nothing. Even gathering his food, necessary for survival, is seen as tainted, not quite right, worthy of condemnation. Something must be wrong with it. It must be studied! In particular, the idea that man could eat another animal, even though animals eating animals is as natural as the sunrise–“Rise up Peter, kill and eat”–fills him with a peculiar kind of suspicious queasiness, even as he downs a hot dog.

Understand, no scientist “studying” the “problem” of man gathering his food would put it like this. But he believes something very like this just the same.

Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. Or use PayPal. Or use the paid subscription at Substack. Cash App: \$WilliamMBriggs. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank. BUY ME A COFFEE.