Martha Rosenberg

If red meat had a publicity agent, he or she would be fired by now. Publicity agents are supposed to plant positive news about their client and kill any negative publicity. But ever since James Garner, the face of the “Real Food for Real People” beef campaign, suffered a heart attack in 1988, there has been nothing but bad publicity about red meat.

Consider: Mad cow disease surfaced in the US in 2003, with three cows diagnosed with the fatal disease by 2005 and the sources never found.

Chairman and CEO of McDonald’s Corporation, Jim Cantalupo, suffered a fatal heart attack at a company event in 2004.

Charlie Bell, Cantalupo’s replacement as McDonald’s CEO, was diagnosed with colon cancer two weeks after taking office.

Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, books unfriendly to the meat industry, stayed on bestseller lists for years.

Video of abused “downer” cows sparked the largest meat recall in US history, tarring the National School Lunch Program in 2008.

Both Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton flirted with meat-free diets and Clinton’s seems to have stuck.

Martha Stewart, the doyenne of taste and nutrition, broadcast a vegetarian Thanksgiving show in 2009.

What?

More than half of Americans cut back on meat consumption because of the 2008 recession and the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture tried to increase Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) meat allowances to get rid of “the oversupply.”

A world outbreak of swine flu in 2009 was linked, said some news sources, to pig farms and farmers beseeched the press to call the disease the H1N1 flu instead of Swine Flu.

More than 24 workers in pork slaughterhouses in charge of pulverizing pork brains for overseas markets developed a debilitating nerve condition. Some reports called their conditions permanent.

Nutritionists increasingly caution that Americans get too much protein not too little.

Even as medical, cancer and heart groups warn people to cut back or eliminate red meat, the government warns about the dangers of bacteria from undercooked meat on cutting boards and utensils and heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from overcooked meat. Goodbye barbeques.

This week scientists at the Cleveland Clinic announced a new explanation of why red meat may contribute to heart disease. The real culprit,the scientists suspect is “a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the intestines after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease,” reports the New York Times.

Is red meat soon going to be like cigarettes? A habit so stigmatized that people try to hide it and employers and insurance companies overtly discriminate it? Doctors, public health officials and animal lovers may be laud the trend but the publicist for red meat is surely going to be fired. END