Our way of life
Jeez, Nebraska, take a chill pill. You can’t make us eat your damn beef.
Nebraska’s governor Pete Ricketts railed Monday against a proclamation by the governor of neighboring Colorado that encourages people to avoid meat for one day a week, calling it a “direct attack on our way of life” and signing a pro-meat declaration of his own.
Well the beef-producing “way of life” has some horrendous environmental fallout, so maybe that should be part of the picture. The fact that something is a “way of life” for some people doesn’t mean it’s harmless or beneficial for all people or for the environment that all animals (including us) depend on.
“If you were to get rid of beef in our country, you would be undermining our food security, an important part of a healthy diet, and also destroying an industry here in our state that’s very important,” Ricketts said.
Activists haven’t sought any similar measures in Nebraska, but Ricketts said he wanted to push back preemptively against their ideas “to make sure they don’t get any traction”.
You have to eat meat for every meal every day, god damn it, because you owe it to Nebraska.
One thing that shocked me when I moved to Nebraska (and remember, I was in Oklahoma and Texas before) was how much they eat meat. My students said they ate meat every single meal, three meals a day, seven days a week. Mostly beef. It made me feel positively nauseous to think about. Even in Texas they take a break from beef now and then. And when I talk about the environmental downsides of beef, some students swear it is not possible for them to live without having steak every day. ??? WTF ??? I can’t imagine. I rarely eat beef. When I eat meat, it’s usually fish or chicken.
My husband and I don’t call Ricketts Dr. Evil for nothing. First, he looks like Dr. Evil. But he also deserves the title in many more ways.
Meat lobbyist propaganda. Ricketts has obviously never been to a factory farm or a slaughterhouse, he’s like the little kid who thinks food comes from the grocery store or McDonald’s. Nebraska has a vast amount of agriculture that has nothing to do with meat production, but clueless politicians are not interested in facts or reality.
I tend to have meat every day, usually for dinner. A dinner without meat is just … Why?
Having a freezer full of venison was super convenient during the lockdowns, ’cause it meant not having to go to the store.
Ricketts also says legalizing marijuana will kill your kids. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/nebraska-governor-pete-ricketts-claims-042652687.html Like alcohol does I’m sure, probably just like that. I’m sure the legalization of marijuana will be wide open though, no age limits, no restrictions on driving under the influence, things like that. It will be a chaotic pot fest with everyone high all the time, kids dying left and right.
@3 All those animals are just waiting for you to eat them, right? Standing in line for it I bet. Eating meat is not difficult to deprogram from, but why? :P
twiliter, #2, Nebraska is like the number 3 producer of corn in the entire country. We also do soybeans and milo, as well as large fields of sunflowers. So, yeah. But the image most Nebraskans have of themselves is the rough, tough, silent, sunburned, and leathery cowboy riding the range. Western Nebraska is dominated by cows because it is too dry to be good farmland, but overall, I imagine we get more of our state income from corn.
But it’s an image. And that image must be protected at all costs. I was surprised when I moved here to discover how similar Nebraska is to Texas in attitude. Such a non-charismatic state, one people know little about, and they have a really enormous ego.
twiliter@4,
Someone should point out to him that if they legalize pot, beef consumption will skyrocket.
I for one welcome a future when vat grown chicken doesn’t cost $35 per burger and think we might actually be able to make better steaks than you can get off a real cow (even if you have to 3d print the t-bone).
Maybe I’ve been in the city too long, there seem to be more pot smokers and veg-heads than ever, not that that’s a bad thing given the alternatives… ;)
@8 There’s a glut of meat alternatives already, some of it actually resembles meat in both taste and texture, but yeah it’s a little pricey. For my money, I’ll stick with veggies that are not trans-veggies. ;)
Yikes.
Funny enough, I just ordered a piece of beef today for the first time in about a year and a half. I was making an order for a friend, and he ordered four beef cheeks; since I had been the one that first introducted him to consuming beef cheeks, about a decade ago, he said: “Aren’t you going to order one for yourself, too?” And I thought: Yes, I remember that delicacy, and if I eat one cheek of one head of cattle once in a year and a half, that’s not going to sink the planet.
“when I moved to Nebraska (and remember, I was in Oklahoma and Texas before) t”
CHRIST! are you authoring Satan’s travelogue or something?
Luckily, as omnivores, and thinking beings, we can choose what has to die for us to live. Some of us anyway. :P
Befuddled Australian here. I can understand beef at lunch or dinner, but what is the breakfast dish of beef? And is it good for you?
Arcadia, steak. Around here, steak for breakfast is a usual thing. I can’t fathom it, but then, I can’t fathom a lot of things Midwesterners do, and I’ve lived here most of my life.
Pliny, that sounds like an idea. Traveling through Satan’s Kitchen, or something like that…maybe I should author that. I certainly have the experience. :-( I was dragged to Oklahoma kicking and screaming when I was 10 (for some reason, my parents assumed they had a right to tell me what to do) and I’ve been trying to get out of the plains ever since. Something always seems to happen.
Breakfast steak. Yikes. My face is horrorstruck, you’ll just have to trust me on that.
I can’t fathom breakfast steak, and I’ve eaten kedgeree.
My brother briefly was a passionate advocate for the “carnivore diet”. Because our ancient ancestors had easy access to plentiful meat! Yeah, right.
Steak and eggs is kinda meh. Corned beef hash, however, is grrrrreat. Especially when it’s cooked super crispy with a poached or sunny-side-up egg on top. Kinda need a nap afterward, though.
But yeah, pork is a generally superior breakfast ingredient. Bacon, sausage, eggs benedict, and so on.
Steak and eggs is not so uncommon as a breakfast dish. And then there’s corned beef hash. Most other common breakfast meats (sausage, bacon) are pork.
My mother ate meat with every meal her whole life. More veggies wouldn’t have helped with the glioblastomas that killed her. She did love her veggies too, and grew a lot of them.
I eat typically American quantities of meat, but it’s almost all local, pastured meat. My dad raises pastured beef too, happy little dairy castoffs browsing old orchard.
I’ve eaten beef with breakfast, as above, but I don’t usually eat breakfast. I tend to avoid sugar and carbs instead – which is what most breakfast foods are full of. Get old, eat less or get fat.
Nebraska beef might start out browsing scrubland, but it almost all ends up in filthy feedlots sucking down corn by the bushel to get fat. Most corn grown in the US is for cattle feed. It makes for marbled steak… from sick cattle.
#6 iknklast
You guys grow Milo? What next, Nutella??
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#16 arcadia
How’s this for a coincidence – I am having kedgeree tonight for dinner. Yum!
We eat a lot of meat here (pork and beef) because we are fortunate enough to be in a situation where we can raise and cure it ourselves. Animals have good lives around the farm. If not for that, I’d be pretty close to being a vegetarian. Commercial meat industry is despicable.
My daughter would very happily work on a Nutella farm.
I had to look up milo twice. No cats were harmed.
Our word is sorghum. And, once again, it’s for animal feed.
I remember Dukakis making the joke that if the Pilgrims had landed in California, New England would be a national park. It’s hilly and stony here. But it rains a lot more regularly than it does out west, so though large scale agriculture isn’t great in most parts, New England is a great region to pasture animals. Since the bottom dropped out of the dairy market, that’s what a lot of farmers have turned to.
“Have you got anything without steak?”
“Well, there’s Steak Egg Sausage and Steak, that’s not got much steak in it.”
I live in Wisconsin and while I enjoy cheese myself if someone else doesn’t I don’t have a cow about it.
I’m sure Ricketts is next going to demand that the University of Nebraska change their team name from Cornhuskers to something beef-oriented, or else he’ll have some verbal sophistry available to explain how it’s already that way. Can’t upset the Sacred Football.
Sackbut, the Huskers could go back to their original name, The Bugeaters. After all, ‘bugs’ (insects) are technically classified as animals, so at least it would be meat.