Enjoy a Steak for the Planet

Only a cultist could look at a herd of cattle quietly grazing a green field and see a planet-killing death machine. Only a cultist could believe that swapping naturally grown meat for a ultra-processed frankenfood grown in a lab is the ‘healthy alternative’, both for humans and the planet they live on.

Yet, this is exactly the dogma we’ve been brow-beaten with for decades. We’ve been hectored and finger-wagged that our steaks are ‘killing the planet’. That we should ‘eat ze bugs’.

Well, finally some scientists are kicking back against the pricks of Gaia.

Former principal research scientist for the CSIRO, Brad Ridoutt, is blunt: Australians seeking an environmentally friendly, healthy diet should keep eating red meat. He has the scientific evidence behind him. CSIRO research shows that the best diets, from a nutritional and environmental perspective, predominantly favour meat-based proteins.

“When we look at the diets in Australia that are most aligned with the current dietary guidelines and have the lowest environmental impact, we find (it is) those that have 60 to 80 per cent of protein coming from animal source foods,” Dr Ridoutt said. “And those diets that have the lowest levels of animal-sourced protein are the worst in many, many ways.”

The current guidelines, in place since 2013, recommend a wide variety of foods from the five food groups, including lean meats, poultry, fish, eggs, tofu, nuts, seeds, legumes, milk, yoghurt and cheese. But, in true Long March fashion, the Climate Cult have white-anted another institution and are set to impose the globalists’ ‘eat ze bugs’ agenda. There are now concerns the revised version will drift closer to the ‘Planetary Health Diet’.

Dr Ridoutt, controversially removed last year from the review of Australia’s official dietary guidelines, is warning against the blind adoption of global advice that pushes people to cut meat. He argues any new guidance must rest on Australian research rather than unreliable international modelling. Ridoutt insisted Australian guidelines have to be grounded in local evidence.

“That takes into account the local food production system, the local environmental constraints and challenges, the local food culture, the local public health nutrition challenges and the sources of widely consumed nutrients,” Dr Ridoutt said.

“That local evidence is far superior to global modelling that is not necessarily specifically relevant to Australia and which is based on broadbased assumptions. I feel the global modelling is unreliable.”

Former Australian of the Year James Muecke, an eye surgeon and ambassador for the Metabolic Health Association, added his voice to the growing scientific resistance. At the same summit he described the anti-meat campaign as resting on flawed and fraudulent science driven by vested interests, ranging from makers of ultra-processed foods to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

He urged Australians to “just eat real food and don’t be afraid of red meat”. “Unlike ultra-processed products, red meat is satiating and difficult to overeat,” Dr Muecke said […]

“The current narrative of discouraging red meat consumption risks increasing poor health outcomes, especially if people turn to, or are directed to, industrially created ultra-processed and synthetic substances.”

Spanish ecologist and livestock scientist Professor Pablo Manzano told the gathering that the climate impact of methane from cows and sheep has been greatly overstated.

“Most of the impact is related to methane emissions, which derive from the fermentation of cellulose – which, in turn, is most abundant in rangelands and in grass-based livestock systems,” said Professor Manzano, of the Basque Centre for Climate Change in Spain.

“It is therefore grass-based systems that get the accusation of being worse for the climate. However, such systems are the ones that better imitate the ecology of wild herbivores.”

In Australia that niche was once filled by giant wombats and kangaroos. Livestock simply occupy the same ecological space. Their emissions should therefore be treated as largely natural and inevitable rather than artificial. Advice to intensify production or switch people onto plant-based diets may actually prove counter-productive for the climate.

Beef farmer and Cattle Australia deputy chair Adam Coffey asked whether sustainability metrics belong in dietary guidelines at all. He noted that the underlying calculations take a myopic view of one-way methane emissions and fail to capture the full picture.

The cult has spent decades insisting a steak is a climate crime and a lab-grown sludge is the path to salvation. Australian data says the reverse. Global models are unreliable. Local evidence is not.

Australians should keep eating their red meat. Both their health and the actual environment will be the better for it.