'Mad Men's' Lessons on Food Policy

The heat-and-serve meals seen on "Mad Men" don't often inspire me to much food policy thought, but I did appreciate "Mad Men's" very own Soylent Green moment this week when, upon learning what brand of dog food his puppy was eating, a focus group attendee cried out, "Ponies! They make it out of ponies!" After which the dog food company executive calmly observed to the surrounding Sterling Cooper staff that horse meat seemed to have acquired a bit of a branding problem.

Likewise, the meat we eat also suffers from a branding problem, namely that we don't think about it enough in terms of farmland usage. Farmers will have to continue to produce larger crops of fruits, grains and vegetables because the world's population is still growing rapidly. At the same time -- with oil reserves continuing to dwindle and people moving toward alternative energy sources -- more farmers are also going to devote land to growing crops for biofuel. Added to the staggering environmental costs that Mary pointed out is the fact that, at a time when the demands on farms are expected to increase, meat represents a significant investment not only in terms of grazing land but in the large tracts of land devoted to growing food for livestock.

Of course, like Domenica, I don't have any intention of giving up on meat anytime soon -- especially since I only recently got the hang of properly roasting a chicken. (The trick, apparently, is to not burn it.) But, thinking of meat in terms of its potential trade-offs for other land uses could generate a much healthier attitude towards how often we eat it.