Our Imperial Diet

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. - Jonathan Swift

I opened Netscape today to find myself greeted by an advertisement: "Is red meat good for your heart?" and the accompanying image of a slab of unspecified red meat dangling precariously from a fork. I thought: what a great image for our country. We’ve convinced ourselves that what is bad is somehow good. Fat, is good. The problem for so long – that we failed to realize – but which the good people at Atkins and South Beach have made manifest to all, is that there was never a problem.

Nevermind that the dietary powers-that-be told us not so long ago that red meat was the worst thing we could possibly eat. Did we listen? Some of us did. Most didn’t. It’s just too darned good not to be good.

So with food, life. In elementary school my 5th grade teacher told us about our country, how we were the great giant-killers, first expelling the Brits, chinking the armor of the greatest empire of them all; then, when the Nazis (never the Germans) thought they could take over the world — and almost did — who else saved the day but the reluctant heroes on horseback and amphibious landing vehicles? Who prevented those sinister Japs from stealing the Pacific? And who (I grew-up up North) abolished slavery, an empire of chains and whips? We did, of course. We’ve been told all our lives that empire is bad, just like red meat. But the craving just won’t go away. We know it's bad for us, but hell, we like it.

And what if it were really truly good for us? What if conscience was a lie, something cooked up by people-you-wouldn’t-like-if-you-met-them – you know, the ones who spoil everything?

Sometimes you’ll get people to tell you that yes, it is bad, but there is no other option. We should stay away from red meat, but, well, people just keep killing cows.

So what am I saying? Nothing that you don’t already know, haven’t already heard.

We need a diet. We have to stop eating red meat and pretending that its not only good for us but for the cow too.

David Hahn can be contacted at dhahn@clarku.edu