Study Suggests Labeling Beef as “High Climate Impact” to Reduce Consumption
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The war against red meat continues. A recent study investigating the possible impacts of so-called climate impact menu labels finds that such labels may prove “an effective strategy to promote more sustainable restaurant food choices.”

The study done by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and the Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis finds that customers may be more persuaded to choose more “climate friendly” options on menus that include a warning against how beef farming supposedly contributes to global warming.

“In this randomized clinical trial with 5049 US adults, 23% more participants in the high–climate impact label condition ordered a sustainable (ie, non–red meat) item and 10% more participants in the low–climate impact label condition ordered a sustainable item compared with the control group,” the study claims.

The study made some highly dubious claims about the meat industry’s role in climate change, which used to be referred to as global warming.

“Animal-based food production, primarily driven by beef production, is responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs) and is an important modifiable contributor to climate change,” the study claims.

The study used a large fast-food company as a model in its testing. One menu featured items without climate labels, another menu had red labels under beef options noting “high climate impact,” and a third menu featured chicken, fish, and vegetarian meals and green labels stating that such options were “low climate impact.”

According to the study, people who looked at the red anti-meat labels were 61 percent more likely to choose something besides beef. People who were given the green propaganda menu were 54.4 percent more likely to choose a “climate friendly” option. Slightly less than half of those responding to menus without a climate label still avoided choosing beef.

So, it seems if you frighten people with red labels warning against the consumption of red meat, you can goad people into virtue signaling against choosing a hamburger in favor of a more “sustainable” meal.

“The main takeaway is that both labels effectively increased the proportion of participants who ordered a sustainable item, but the most effective was the high climate impact label on the red meat item,” said Julia Wolfson, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Wolfson was a member of the team who produced the study.

Yup. That’s the way fear works.

A climate and health professional who was not involved in the study, Kristie Ebi from the University of Washington, suggested that climate labeling of food is akin to warning labels on cigarettes, which Ebi says have “been improved in terms of their effectiveness.”

And, since the study’s menus were fast-food items, simply not choosing beef didn’t necessarily mean that alternate choices were healthier, as the study suggests.

“This suggests that fast-food restaurants need further encouragement to provide healthier food choices,” Ebi said.

Indeed, even the study’s authors realize that the survey has some flaws.

“This was an online study with a hypothetical food choice,” said Wolfson. “It will be really important to see in the future if these results and the magnitude of these impacts would be replicated in real-world settings where people are making real choices, they are spending their real money and they are then having to really eat the foods they select.”

This new study is symbolic of the ways that the climate cult seeks to rewrite our lives by taking away things that we enjoy, such as red meat, and replacing it with options that we may not want. Recall that in 2019, a European marketing group proposed imposing a “sin tax” on red meat to discourage its consumption.

Many European nations, including Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K., have already considered enacting a value added tax (VAT) to the purchase of meat — none, as of yet, has crossed that barrier, but it appears to be only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, globalist groups such as the World Economic Forum continue to suggest that we can be “conditioned” to find sources other than red meat to fulfill our protein needs. More weeds and bugs, anyone?