Agricultural News
NCBA Works to Keep Meat on the Menu for U.S. Military
Sun, 26 Jun 2016 18:37:16 CDT
A recent attempt to introduce "meatless Mondays" into the diets of active servicemen and women has been thwarted, but Colin Woodall, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, says animal rights groups like the Humane Society of the United States are continuing to push their vegan campaign at the Capitol.
"It's a concern because this a program that's based on a political agenda and not on any fact or science," he says.
Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., recently introduced an amendment to the 2017 Defense Department appropriations bill to prevent a "meatless Mondays" campaign from ever being applied to U.S. military installations.
Woodall says NCBA is hoping to have the same type of success in the Senate.
"We are currently working with the senate to try to find an amendment strategy similar to what we saw in the house," he says. "The timing on that is a little less clear then where we were with the house right now, but there is a lot of motivation to try to this."
Updates in dietary guidelines continue to include beef as a healthy protein option, and Woodall says it's important consumers understand that there's science-based research backing those recommendations.
"I think one of the things we need to do is every time a 'meatless Mondays' campaign comes up, that we take full advantage of it to show the nutritional benefits of beef in the diet and also make sure people understand that we're just talking about the consumer having choice," he says. "We're not forcing them to eat beef every single day - that's not the request. What we're trying to do is just make sure that they can make a choice based upon all the real information out there and not the made up information that we see from campaigns such as 'meatless Mondays.'"
Listen to Woodall talk more about efforts to overcome campaigns like "meatless Mondays" during the latest Beef Buzz.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today's show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
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