By Jim Whitt Contributing Editor
I recently received a notification on LinkedIn informing me that I was great fit for a position as a board member for something called Vegan Creator Con. I figured if I eliminated the words vegan and con and kept creator, I might be a fit. So, I went to the Vegan Creator Con website to check them out. I discovered their mission is: “To build the vegan creator ecosystem by developing talent, scaling proven content strategies and partnering with brands and nonprofits to turn vegan curiosity into consistent vegan action.”
I’m pretty sure I would turn vegan curiosity into consistent — if not angry — vegan action if I showed up for my first board meeting and asked, “Where’s the beef?” It was Clara Peller who first asked that question in her little old lady voice in 1984, when she starred in some of the most famous commercials in television history. Those commercials sold a lot of Wendy’s hamburgers.
In the years since Clara attained commercial stardom, eating beef has been unjustly accused of being unhealthy. Beyond Meat and other fake meat products were created as so-called healthy alternatives to real meat but have proven to be part of a fading fad. Ironically, fake meat products are highly processed. And that brings us to the newly updated federal nutrition standards and guidelines, which have literally turned the modern food pyramid upside down. The new inverted food pyramid released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has meat, fats, fruits and vegetables at the top, while whole grains are at the bottom. The new pyramid is just a retro version of the four basic food groups that the USDA recommended from 1956 to 1992: 1) milk; 2) meat; 3) fruits and vegetables; 4) bread and cereals.
I figured the only way I showed up on the Vegan Creator Con radar was the result of AI gone wild — that’s AI as in “artificial intelligence” not “artificial insemination.” There’s no logical rationale in selecting someone with my background to have anything to do with anything vegan. Should Vegan Creator Con decide to add me to their board, I would have to tell them that veganism just isn’t cool anymore. Celebrities who have wandered off the vegan reservation include Beyonce, Denise Richards, Natalie Portman and Miley Cyrus, who offered this reason for her change in diet: “I was vegan for a very long time, and I’ve had to introduce fish and omegas into my life because my brain wasn’t functioning properly.”
At the briefing announcing the new nutritional guidelines, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., had this to say: “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines. We are ending the war on saturated fats.” My favorite line was his message to Americans to, “Eat real food.”
Real food? Roll the tape back to 1987 when the Beef Checkoff funded the “Beef. Real Food for Real People” campaign. Commercials featured James Garner rolling up to a restaurant in a vintage ’59 Chevy pickup to the tune of Old Time Rock n’ Roll. He then walked in and sat down to enjoy a steak. In another commercial, Garner explained how the left side of the brain likes beef for dietary reasons while the right side likes it because it tastes good. He concluded by saying, “The nice thing about sirloin … it makes the whole brain happy.” Note to Miley Cyrus – why not add beef to your diet and make your brain happy!
In 1992, the Beef Checkoff funded another iconic campaign that featured commercials promoting beef recipes with Aaron Copland’s Hoedown from his classic ballet Rodeo playing in the background. Each commercial concluded with a voiceover by Robert Mitchum and later Sam Elliott that boldly proclaimed: “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.”
It’s nice to see commonsense starting to return to the world of nutrition after so many years of nonsense. So, “Where’s the beef?” It’s riding high at the top of the food pyramid where it should be. It’s real food for real people. And it’s what’s for dinner.
By the way, I haven’t heard back from Vegan Creator Con.
