It’s finally over — 2020, that is. Suffice it to say that last year was a pain in the neck, or maybe lower on the anatomy than that. It is customary to ask if there were lessons to be learned from the past lest we repeat mistakes by not remembering. I don’t think so, as the last time we had a pandemic like COVID-19 was in 1918. Hopefully, we won’t soon have another pandemic, but if we do it will probably be in 2120 and none of us will be around to suffer through it and, besides, we have 100 years to get ready for it.

However, 2020 seemed to be the year when beef became the whipping boy of scientists and nutritionists alike in their condemnation of its production and consumption. That is where we need to effectuate a change.

How can we make that change and improve our meat industry to help its sustainability and promote its growth? My suggestions are below.

The pace of societal change is now proceeding at warp speed. Witness the facts that just within these past few years we have seen a surfeit of scientists telling our consumers that beef production is both a health and climate demolisher. Nutrition “experts” are saying we should limit our intake of both fresh and processed meat. We are seeing market encroachments of competing plant-based proteins using climate change as a reason for purchase. And climate experts have been excoriating us, saying that the meat industry is a major contributor to the destruction of the earth’s protective ozone layer.

We need to exceed the pace of such “science” by anticipating consumer needs and having answers rather than reacting to the tsunami of scientifically forced change.

Our response to the attacks by the meat naysayers has been almost strictly reactionary. With our faces contorted in rage, we angrily point accusing fingers at those who would dare attack our sources and methods as we defend systems deemed anachronistic and ineffective by scientists as well as a growing cabal of consumers.

We need to not just keep up with change, but nurture it and lead in solving issues that will foster a change in attitude about the meat industry, improving our image with a resultant consumer uptake of our products.

You may feel that consumption will recover from COVID by continuing our past methods. I disagree. We have seen beef consumption decline precipitously over the past 30 years certainly in part due to the almost geometric rise in poultry consumption. If that were the only reason for beef’s decline, we could do something about it. But the decline was coupled with a growing community of educators and scientists denigrating beef’s production methods and their deleterious affect on health and climate. And this is where we fell calamitously short in addressing this decline and creating a positive change.

Our past mantra has been to use a scatter gun strategy of attacking all who would attack us, but this has had little positive effect. We need to change our strategy by concentrating our resources, prioritizing those issues that resonate the most with consumers and concentrating our efforts against those. In my view, this should start with how all parts of our industry can positively effect climate change. With an incoming administration effectively raising the visibility of curbing climate destruction by elevating to cabinet-level status a “Climate Czar,” we face a future of either defending ourselves against attacks or leading in the effort to stop our climate from deteriorating.

Such a strategy would have many tactics, but certainly one that would cause the greatest reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a change in our transportation fleets to a completely biodiesel-powered one. At the same time, we should spend the monies necessary to find a cure for the GHG-affecting cattle belches. With a strategy of curing or at least curbing these two, we could bring consumers back to beef. They genuinely want to eat more beef but are being swayed by those who shame them into eating replacements with a strategy of attacking beef’s climate altering production methods.

We can change this perception with changes in our methods.

It’s finally over: So, what do we do now?

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