Wendy’s debut of their now-iconic “Where’s the Beef?” commercial in 1984 had everyone uttering this trendy catchphrase, a growly verbal tag immortalized by 81-year-old Clara Peller as an old lady demanding more meat from her fast-food hamburger. The commercial run ended a year later when her relations with Wendy’s turned bitter after Peller repeated her famous catchphrase in a 1985 ad for Prego spaghetti sauce, declaring, “I found it!”.
No one was actually looking for any beef
But in the 1980s, no one was actually looking for beef because we were warned to look for other foods to eat. Meat became insidiously associated with heart disease. Americans soon after the rest of the world were being led along by the idea they’d forgotten their plant-based legacy of fruits, vegetables, and grains. Most prominently when American Senator George McGovern announced his Senate committee’s report, called Dietary Goals, at a press conference in 1977, expressing a gloomy outlook for the meaty American diet.
“Our diets have changed radically within the past 50 years,” he explained in 1977, “with great and often harmful effects on our health.” These were the “killer diseases,” said McGovern. The solution, he declared, was for Americans to return to the healthier, plant-based diet they once ate. The word plant-based was odd for Americans to hear when most were accustomed to red meat, eggs, and butter.
Food Disappearance Data
McGovern’s justification that our ancestors lived on fruits, vegetables, and grains, comes mainly from the USDA “food disappearance data.” Food’s ” disappearance ” is generally defined as an approximation of supply; most of it is probably being eaten, but much is wasted. These are rough estimations. Who knows?
Yet researchers like Mary G. Enig, in The Oiling of America in 2000, wrote that since the early part of the century, when the Department of Agriculture had begun to keep track of such food “disappearance” data—the number of various foods going into the food supply—several researchers had noticed a change in the kind of fats Americans were eating. Butter consumption was declining while the use of vegetable oils, especially oils that had been hardened to resemble butter by a process called hydrogenation.
This data from the early 1900s, which is what the McGovern committee studied, accounted only for the meat, dairy, and other fresh foods shipped across state lines. Meat, cow or eggs produced and eaten locally were not included. Not included at any length in the McGovern committee report were the effects of cigarette smoking on heart disease.
Cigarette smoking was actually leading to heart disease
Cigarette smoking in the US increased rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s. In the US in 1950, per capita, cigarette consumption was 3,522 cigarettes, compared to 1.485 in 1930 and 54 in 1900. Cigarette smoking was considered the epitome of cool and glamour, and success. In the 1950s the first reports of the health effects of cigarette smoking appeared and the increases in tobacco consumption were slowed down by a number of studies linking lung cancer to smoking and heart disease. By 2015, cigarette consumption was reduced to 1,078 per capita.
Past mistakes
We are learning today that our historic shift to fruits, vegetables, and grains and further the increase in low-fat products, which were made up of unhealthy oils, sugar and later high fructose corn syrup, was an error and is actually heart-unfriendly. This contributed to Worldwide obesity tripled since 1975, with more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, considered overweight in 2016. Of these, over 650 million were obese.
This should surprise us when in 2019 the EAT-Lancet Diet, a Commission of scientists presenting a global planetary health diet, is encouraging us to embrace plants as a source of protein, as the McGovern Committee had in1977. The Commission recommends cutting back meat consumption by 80 percent while consuming at least 125 grams of dry beans, lentils, peas, and other nuts or legumes per day.
We’ve moved from a 1977 recommendation to eat less meat and more grains, yet we had no evidence mankind survived on plants, to a 2019 recommendation to, well, do the same as we recommended in the 70s. The common denominator? Don’t eat meat.
Why not the beef? Just. Eat. Right
