How beef climbed to the top of the food pyramid

0:01NPR

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods. You might have seen earlier this month the Trump administration introduced a new food pyramid. The government flipped the old pyramid upside down, literally. Yeah, the new pyramid is inverted. So the widest part is now at the top. And occupying the top row are foods like a thick cut of steak and a wedge of cheese. There's also broccoli and carrots, but fruits and vegetables are given as much importance as what the pyramid labels as protein, dairy and healthy fats. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is arguably the country's highest profile carnivore.

0:48He said in a recent press conference that he's fixing incorrect guidance from previous administrations. Protein and healthy fats are essential, and we're wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines. We are ending the war on saturated fats. The secretary is talking about the fats found in red meat, butter, and cheese. So it looks like beef is back on the menu. But did it ever really leave? Today on the show, we trace the rise of beef consumption in the U.S. to see how the industry and government have long shaped the American diet.

1:29Beef has always been a huge part of the U.S. diet, no matter how the food pyramid looks. Joshua Spetsch dates America's love affair with beef back to the late 1800s. Joshua is a history professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies ranching and meatpacking. My story starts in the late 1800s, and that's when affordable, high-quality beef became a kind of expectation for people. Beef production and consumption used to be local. If you'd lived near a cattle ranch, you had better access to meat than someone living across the country. This changed dramatically in the 1800s. the U.S. government took away land from Native Americans in the western part of the country and opened it up for cattle ranching.

2:11Over in Chicago, meatpackers and railroads built state-of-the-art facilities for processing pigs, sheep, and cattle. Refrigerated rail cars whisked cuts of meats to other parts of the country. And this meant that somebody living far from where the cattle was raised could still eat beef regularly. It kind of goes from what I say is delicacy to daily fare. And the measure of a successful person and a successful man and a successful American becomes your ability to have beef all the time. Joshua says Americans' understanding of nutrition at this time and into the early 1900s was pretty limited. Concerns over heart health and red meat wouldn't become part of the conversation until decades later.

2:51On a September day in 1955, President Eisenhower ate a hamburger for lunch and then felt what he thought was indigestion. He woke up after midnight with severe chest pain. It turned out he had suffered a heart attack. Hannah Cutting-Jones is a food historian at the University of Oregon. She says Eisenhower's heart attack was a wake-up call. For the first time, Americans were really freaked out. He was a middle-aged man. He ate a lot of meat. And they were just starting to come out with this idea of the diet-heart hypothesis, linking diet's high in saturated fat to heart disease and heart attacks.

3:30Hannah says that studies at this time suggested a correlation between the diets of many middle-aged American men and rates of heart disease. Even so, American beef consumption kept climbing. It hit a peak in the 1970s. Americans ate an average of 86 pounds per capita during the decade. So all that counterculture of vegetarianism of the 60s and 70s were no match for the carnivores? No, not according to the statistics. But Hannes' concerns over heart health were on the minds of lawmakers when they set up the first Congressional Committee on Nutrition in the late 60s. Later on, climate concerns bubbled up.

4:05In 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency put out a report saying animals were an important source of methane emissions. For the first time, there was a global consensus that climate change was tied to methane production from the beef industry. It was also around this time that the U.S. government was working on its first official set of dietary guidelines, what would eventually become the first food pyramid. Hannah says the beef industry was really motivated to take back the narrative. It didn't want beef to get villainized as this unhealthy, planet-destroying food. So the industry did two important things.

4:42First, it pushed for friendlier wording and dietary guidelines. This language was incorporated into the first official food pyramid, which came out in 1992. And so they go from eat less red meat to avoid saturated fat, eat less solid fat, things like that that were pretty vague for Americans to understand. And secondly, farmers and ranchers launch an ad campaign to encourage Americans to eat more beef. Since the 1980s, they had been making mandatory contributions to a shared pot of money. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Beef Board oversee this program, and the funds are earmarked for promotion.

5:22The ranchers use the money for radio and TV commercials that started airing in 1992. Another day is drawing to a close, and all kinds of people all over the country are heading home for dinner. What are they going to do there? I'm a child of the 90s, and I vividly remember these commercials. The music is from the ballet Rodeo by American composer Aaron Copeland. Yeah. Rugged American actor Robert Mitchum is the narrator. And one version of the ad intersperses, you know, idyllic scenes of American farmland with suburban families putting dinner on the table. Beef. It's what's for dinner. It's your only option.

6:05And it says the ads were targeted at men and that you can see their effects today. About 12 % of Americans are responsible for about 50 % of beef consumption on any given day. And out of that percentage, most of those are men. We mentioned before that beef consumption peaked in the 1970s. Americans ate around 86 pounds per capita then. In recent years, that's dropped to around 60 pounds a year. Americans eat way more chicken, about 100 pounds per capita. It's just so many nuggets, Jerry, and you can't imagine. Still, Hannah says beef has never really been in serious decline in the U.S. And today, red meat lovers have a new champion in RFK Jr.

6:48The government's dietary guidelines call for Americans to nearly double their protein intake from what was previously recommended. And they mention beef tallow alongside olive oil as a healthy fat for cooking. And despite the declared end to the war on saturated fats that we heard from at the start of the show, The guidelines do keep in place a previous recommendation to limit saturated fats to 10 % of total daily calories. Hannah says this guidance is confusing. How is someone supposed to limit saturated fats while eating more animal protein? The National Cattlemen's Beef Association, for its part, praised the new guidelines as simpler and more consumer-friendly than past versions.

7:28It's worth mentioning that the organization has ties to the panel that reviewed scientific research for the new dietary guidelines. Three of the nine panelists disclose that they received money from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association for research or consulting. We reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services about whether these ties represented a conflict of interest. Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said the panel's conclusions were driven by evidence and scientific rigor. And historian Joshua Spetsch says beef has proven very hard to dethrone as an American symbol. It's now a marker of political identity for some people.

8:03Republicans have talked about liberals wanting to take away your hamburgers. Hamburglers, they call them. For cultural reasons, I think there is no effective substitute. So much of our identity is tied up in what we eat that shifts in diet are very slow. And you know, the guidelines get revised every five years, so things could change again before too long. I hope they address this upside-down pyramid, because is the bottom smaller, but is it the base of your diet? I'm so confused. You're concerned about, like, the structural integrity of this pyramid. Yeah, it might fall over. It's balanced on a single oat.

8:40Yes.