Beef Is What’s For Dinner
We eat beef every Saturday night for dinner.
Saturday is usually when I go food shopping, which includes a stop at our local butcher. I ask him what he has this week as a matter of habit more than necessity. He always showcases filets, rib eyes, and strips both prime and choice. There are tri tips, flank, hangers, and short ribs.
If he has veal chops, I usually buy a couple of those. Along with my Saturday dinner choice, I might plan to have beef once or twice more during the week. The cuts are not as expensive as Saturday’s dinner choice, but they are just as beefy.
I write all of this so you will understand that I am not vegetarian. Both my wife and I eat beef (in my case prepared rare at most and black and blue at best) a couple of times a week. There is something else you should know that we hardly ever use processed food. We don’t use jar sauce or frozen dinners. I make my own guacamole, salsa, and kimchi.
Again, I tell you all of this because cultured lab grown beef, or any other would-be protein would probably never enter my home. That doesn’t mean I want the Free State of Florida to ban it either. And that is even before the two companies that the FDA authorized to “grow” such meat have sold one ounce in a supermarket. Two restaurants in the country briefly had it on their menus but cost and consumer demand just weren’t there.
Is there a place for lab produced food in the American diet? Maybe but if I were a rancher, I wouldn’t worry about it. Like many things in our overly political society, this has been caught in the culture wars. “Real men eat real beef” is the slogan the Florida state government could use. Actor Sam Elliott could be hired to reprise his role as the beef spokesman.
The Democrats I don’t believe have been caught up in the frenzy yet, but I expect that to happen shortly. They should not take the bait. Lab meat is something that will probably be a non-issue for the time being and even in the future.
Though government approved, the cost of culturing the animal cells in a lab is still too expensive to make for our market. But we shouldn’t write off the process all together. I thought we were a capitalist economy. The government’s job is to determine if it is safe to eat, not whether it should be eaten by the public.
The two reasons to forbid people from consuming it are to make a political statement and to protect supposedly the ranching industry. Both of which are not a government function. One of the reasons for our lack of competitiveness sometimes is because we are more concerned with politics than economics.
Markets are ruthlessly efficient. Bad ideas only prosper because the government decides to choose favored companies and industries to help. The only thing the government should be concerned with are monopolies.
Four giant companies control 85% of the U.S. beef market. Politicians are not worried about the family ranch but rather the deep pocket industry and their lobbyists. Two of those companies are not American owned.
Deep down the Free State of Florida has once again shown that they are not too concerned with their citizens, including the small ranchers and farmers, as much as a couple of big companies that have no problems throwing billions into the political arena. It isn’t only the state but the Feds that continue to not hold monopolists’ feet to the fire.
I am still going to eat my naturally produced beef on Saturday. I don’t need a government mandate to force me to do it. Neither does anyone else need the overarching hand of government in their menu choices either.
