The Beef Against . . . Beef

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VERMIN. THE WORD reminds most people of cockroaches scuttling across kitchen floors and rats skulking in dark basement corners. But to Jeremy Rifkin, the environmental movement's most prominent polemicist, vermin are big, brown-eyed ungulates that graze the rolling countryside, chew their cud and moo. In his controversial new book, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, Rifkin manages to blame the world's burgeoning population of bovines for a staggering spectrum of ecological ills. In the U.S., he charges, runoff from mammoth feedlots is despoiling streams and underground aquifers. In sub- Saharan Africa, cattle are contributing to desertification by denuding arid lands of fragile vegetation. In Central and South America, ranchers are felling tropical rain forests and turning them into pastures for their voracious herds. "The average cow," claims Rifkin, "eats its way through 900 lbs. of vegetation every month. It is literally a hoofed locust."

According to Rifkin, civilization began a long slide downhill when 18th century British gentry acquired a taste for fat-marbled beef and proceeded to spread that proclivity, like a plague, throughout the Western world. Rifkin's real argument, of course, is not with the 1.3 billion bovines that roam the planet but with modern methods of mass-producing beef that include plumping animals with hormones and stuffing them with "enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people." Although he did not personally visit a ranch or a meat-packing plant, his stomach-churning descriptions of how cattle are treated from birth to slaughter brim with righteous indignation. (A reformed carnivore, Rifkin says he swore off beef 15 years ago after taking three bites of a revolting blue-gray hamburger, then throwing the rest away.)

Such inflammatory rhetoric sends shudders through the U.S. beef industry, which is already reeling from a nearly one-third drop in per capita consumption since 1976 -- the result of popular concern about fat in the diet. Now Rifkin hungers for a more decisive blow. This week he is leading a coalition of environmental, food-policy and animal-rights groups in launching a well-financed advertising campaign aimed at slashing worldwide beef consumption by 50% over the coming decade. Members of the coalition range from the Rainforest Action Network, which blames cattle for "killing the Amazon," % to the Fund for Animals, which criticizes the use of poisons and traps to control coyotes that prey on calves. The International Rivers Network blames cattle for wasting scarce water resources, while Food First denounces the feedlot system for wasting grain that could otherwise be used for human consumption.

Not since he took on the biotechnology industry over the safety of genetic engineering has Rifkin been embroiled in a higher-profile controversy, or one with the potential for greater economic consequences. With so much at stake, it is hardly surprising that environmentalists and meat-industry advocates have locked horns over Rifkin's charges. Among the most notable areas of dispute: