How beef climbed to the top of the food pyramid

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darienne Woods. You You might have seen earlier this month, the Trump administration introduced a new food pyramid. The government flipped the old pyramid upside down, literally. Yeah. The new pyramid is inverted. So the widest part is now at the top. And occupying the top row are foods like a thick cut of steak and a wedge of cheese. There's also broccoli and carrots, but fruits and vegetables are given as much importance as what the pyramid labels as protein, dairy, and healthy fats. Health secretary Robert f Kennedy junior is arguably the country's highest profile carnivore. He said in a recent press conference that he's fixing incorrect guidance from previous administrations. Protein and healthy fats are essential, and we're wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines. We are ending the war on saturated fats. The secretary is talking about the fats found in red meat, butter, and cheese. So it looks like beef is back on the menu, but did it ever really leave? Today on the show, we trace the rise of beef consumption in The US to see how the industry and government have long shaped the American diet. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Indeed. Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes with Indeed sponsored jobs. Claim your $75 sponsored job credit now at indeed.com/indicator. Terms and conditions apply. This message comes from ServiceNow. People should do the creative work they actually want to do, not boring busy work. Now with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business. IT, HR, and more. So your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Get started at servicenow.com/ai-agents. Beef has always been a huge part of The US diet no matter how the food pyramid looks. Joshua Spetsch dates America's love affair with beef back to the late eighteen hundreds. Joshua is a history professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies ranching and meat packing. My story starts in the late eighteen hundreds, and that's when affordable, high quality beef became a kind of expectation for people. Beef production and consumption used to be local. If you live near a cattle ranch, you had better access to meat than someone living across the country. This changed dramatically in the eighteen hundreds. The US government took away land from Native Americans in the western part of the country and opened it up for cattle ranching. Over in Chicago, meatpackers and railroads built state of the art facilities for processing pigs, sheep, and cattle. Refrigerated railcars whisked cuts of meats to other parts of the country. And this meant that somebody living far from where the cattle was raised could still eat beef regularly. It kinda goes from what I say …