In a poll 8.6 percent of the 3,000 Americans surveyed said that during a typical week, they ate no meat (poultry and fish excluded). Some 56 percent ate meat one to four times a week, and 31 percent ate it five or more time a week.

A later poll asked the same questions, plus an additional one: Has the recent publicity linking processed meats to an increased risk of cancer caused you to change your eating habits? It turns out, about 30 percent of respondents said “yes”. But the results showed that Americans’ meat-eating habits haven’t shifted much.

However, there is a subtle shift, owing to the information out there about the health effects of meat eating. A lot of people are saying that they want to eat less meat, and they are increasing consumption of vegetables, regardless of age, income or education. ( adapted from the NPR website)

As a trending vegetarian, who eats meat on occasion when my wife, a stellar cook, takes the trouble to cook it (she knows how I feel, of course), I wouldn’t eat beef or pork if l lived alone, but defend the right of others to do so. However, what comes out of all this is the fact that people are oblivious to so much that will do them harm. It took decades for cigarette smokers to get the message, and you still see people hastening their own deaths by lung cancer. Getting messages through and changing lifetime habits in human beings is a long and arduous process, and in the case of beef, telling people that beef-rearing is a major cause of climate change and ruins the environment seems just too much of a stretch, although true.

Are we doomed?