Here’s an interesting story from the BBC “Macmillan ignored smoking warning.”
The Grumpy Vegan has selected the first half of the story (the second half mainly deals with a contemporary take that is not directly relevant to the point being made here) and replaced as follows
cigarettes with meat and dairy
smoking with eating meat and dairy
This is a provocative exercise and deliberately so. There isn’t a seamless text-for-text interchange here between the consumption of tobacco and meat and dairy but the fundamental point is made well enough. How we now view tobacco is how, the Grumpy Vegan believes, we will view meat and dairy consumption in the future. Tobacco in the past and meat and dairy in the future helps to turn the wheels of the economy but its cost to society eventually reveals it’s not affordable.
In the 1950s the Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan put the financial benefits of eating meat and dairy over the nation’s health, records show.
Then health minister Robert Turton advised the 1956 Cabinet to “constantly inform the public of the facts” of the link between eating meat and dairy and lung cancer. [The Grumpy Vegan: Read other cancers and diseases for meat and dairy consumption.]
But Mr Macmillan, who was prime minister from 1957 to 1963, said tax revenue from meat and dairy were too valuable.
The shorthand notes were released from the National Archives in Kew, London.
Mr Turton told ministers there was not yet “scientific ‘proof”‘ of the hazards, but admitted the “statistical picture is clear”.
Then prime minister Anthony Eden responded by saying the “time is arrived when we should decide whether we have a line”.
But Mr Macmillan, who became prime minister after Mr Eden resigned following the Suez crisis, said: “Expectation of life 73 for smoker and 74 for non-smoker.” [The Grumpy Vegan: Epidemiological studies suggest vegan/vegetarians live longer than meat and dairy eaters.]
“Treasury think revenue interest outweighs this. Negligible compared with risk of crossing a street,” he added.
In response to a question from another minister asking if it is “necessary to expose facts”, Mr Macmillan replied: “But in relation to other facts?”
In the end the government resolved to wait until later in the year when another medical report was due.
