Where's the beef? Meet Frank Mitloehner, well-compensated cheerleader for the meat industry

 

Photo credit:  UC Davis

Headline:  New York Times, 10/30/2022

In 2019, three dozen leading researchers sounded a stark warning in a prominent scientific journal: To fight climate change and improve human health, the world needed to dramatically cut back on eating red meat. 

The findings were quickly attacked by Frank Mitloehner, the head of an agricultural research center at the University of California, Davis, and a prominent critic of the journal’s research. 

The report’s authors were spreading a “radical anti-meat agenda,” Dr. Mitloehner wrote on Twitter, where he led a backlash under the hashtag, #yes2meat. “Their so-called planetary diet is a quasi-vegan diet,” he said, calling the findings “anti-livestock.” 

According to internal University of California documents reviewed by The New York Times, Dr. Mitloehner’s academic group, the Clear Center at UC Davis, receives almost all its funding from industry donations and coordinates with a major livestock lobby group on messaging campaigns.