I think those who follow my blogs for Meatingplace know this, but let’s be sure.

I am biased and I like meat. I like red meat, white meat, meat that swims and even meat that lives in shells.

I like to eat meat any old day of the week that I like, and I don’t like someone trying to tell me I am a bad person if I eat meat on Mondays.

I did not serve in the military (student deferment during the Vietnam War as I was in college and med school). But if I did, and if I had been told I had to put my life on the line in the jungles of Southeast Asia every day, fighting supposedly to keep America free, but could not eat meat on Mondays I don’t know what I would have done. Yet, that is what several groups in the good old USA want our fighting men and women to endure.

No choice of protein, but fight for our choice of a democratic society.

Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) offered up an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) blocking any efforts to instill meatless Mondays on the military.

It just makes sense to allow our folks in the military to have a choice about their food. Vegetarians and carnivores serve side by side with similar missions.

Meat is not the enemy.

Yet Clearly Veg blasted the good senator who has a 23 year history of serving in the military as proposing “corrupt priorities” after receiving donations to her campaign from agribusiness.

Hey, she is from Iowa. Agribusiness and the Principal Financial Group are likely to be big contributors. That is how it works.

But the Senate passed the NDAA on June 14 without even taking a vote on her amendment.

Fortunately my friend, the Congressman representing Western Nebraska and most of the cows in my home state, Adrian Smith, did successfully get an amendment on to the House version of the NDAA that bans the “Meatless Monday” campaign from military cafeterias.

This bill passed the House vote on June 16.

Congressman Smith said “I am not willing to allow activist groups to tell members of our military, who risk their lives to keep us safe, they cannot enjoy a hamburger or steak on certain days of the week simply to advance an agenda against animal agriculture”.

OK, Douglas Craven, he probably should have included chicken wings, turkey drummies and pork bellies. There are no pigs or chickens where he lives, and few where his constituents live. The cow is king, or queen, in Western Nebraska.

Let us forgive his beef bias and thank him for fighting the anti-meat, anti-animal agriculture and anti-farmer agenda that the anti-whatever groups espouse.

If you did not know it, Meatless Monday is an old concept that was revived in 2003 by The Monday Campaigns in association with that bastion of higher learning, Johns Hopkins University, and also supported by who?

You got it right, the Humane Society of the United States.

Meatless Monday Madness

Join for free* to continue reading.