Abetting the Minions of Meat
Abetting the Minions of Meat
I keep turning up in the Yale Daily News lately. I don’t read the Yale Daily News– but well-intentioned friends and colleagues point such things out to me, as they did last week.
It’s not necessarily surprising I should turn up in the Yale Daily News from time to time. I’ve been at Yale for 25 years, and along the way have been involved in some fairly significant things.
For instance, the current US Surgeon General is not just a former medical student of mine, but a former advisee who lists me as one of his mentors, of which I am, of course, proud. When Dr. Murthy was consigned to a protracted confirmation purgatory by the gun lobby, I campaigned publicly on his behalf. The Yale Daily News took neither apparent notice, nor interest.
Some years ago, I led the development of what has since proven to be the world’s most robustly validated nutrient profiling system. When it was launched in 2007, it made the front page of the New York Times. But it did not, apparently, impress the Yale Daily News; they made no mention of it.
In 2014, I collaborated with a then Yale medical student to publish a review addressing diet and health that has gone on to be the most down-loaded article in the history of that journal (nearly 97,000 downloads, and counting). It resulted in a major story in The Atlantic– but, nada in the Yale Daily News.
I even rescued an elderly neighbor who got lost in the woods. He was missing since the day prior despite a full-scale police search, helicopters and all. When I found him, and helped him out of the woods, it was, predictably, covered by pretty much all of the news outlets in Connecticut, both print and television, but – you guessed it- no mention in the Yale Daily News.
There’s more, but only my Mother would be interested. You get the idea; I’ve done some good stuff, and the Yale Daily News has consistently not given a hoot.
I would never have thought twice about that, except that lately, they can barely seem to make it through a news cycle without me. Alas, the coverage is all negative.
What have they covered? They reported that I wrote a blog in the 3rd person about my self-published fantasy/adventure novel (which, by the way, my Mother and I think is very good) when the publisher suggested it. In a bizarre story in The Guardian allegedly about the history of sugar, which the writer got substantially wrong, I was horribly misquoted on a topic that was never on the record in the first place. The Yale Daily News never even asked me if I said what I allegedly said (I did not), but they did repeat it, and built a story around that, too. Most recently, I challenged the propriety of a local grocer’s ads for maximizing meat intake, and linking it to ‘invincible’ health against all evidence. That third item was in the Yale Daily News last week.
Of course, it’s possible that I have, indeed, suddenly launched into a phase of utterly random bad behavior. My wife has not noticed. My children have not noticed. My staff has not noticed. None of the dozens, and indeed hundreds of colleagues I work with routinely in my various roles, all around the world, has noticed. But the Yale Daily News, thank goodness, has noticed- and they are doing the world a favor by pulling these nefarious shenanigans out of the shadows!
Possible, but not very probable.
A far more probable explanation is that none of this is in any way random. Rather, YDN’s negative interest in me began exactly when I took a prominent, public position in support of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Report; when I campaigned for the inclusion of sustainability in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans; and when I confronted the cabal working to undermine these very things, and peddle more meat. That’s the common element in this otherwise random coverage: meat. All of these stories were pitched to the Yale Daily News by the same small group of people connected, in cyberspace at least, to one another- and the interests of the meat industry.
What has Yale got to do with it? Why should the Yale Daily News get involved? Well, some rather high-profile media attention to the assault on the Dietary Guidelines process, and in particular on efforts to undermine including sustainability, traced the funding of it all to a billionaire couple with ties to the beef industry, to Enron, and – yes indeed- to Yale.
That this imperils my reputation in front of my own community is really just my concern. But that these actions, however inadvertently, aid and abet the minions of the meat industry conspiring against such timely priorities as sustainability in our national dietary guidelines- is relevant to everyone in that community.
-fin Dr. David L. Katz;www.davidkatzmd.com; founder, True Health Initiative
