The book is a reaction against the prevailing anti-meat narrative. Diana Rodgers, one of the authors, is a registered dietitian and, as one would expect, there is a focus on the nutritional value of meat and its importance to human diet, including a consideration of the costs of having a human epidemic of disease caused by poor diet – over-consumption of energy and poor intake of other essential nutrients.
However, the book also addresses several of the more recent objections to meat and beef in particular such as GHG emissions, water footprint, land use etc.
While the film is really aimed at a layperson audience, the book has extensive references which are a useful summary of sources on many of the subjects that you will hear about from everyone from your Uber driver and vegetarian second cousin to much of the mainstream media.
For many people intimately involved in the world of sustainable beef, there will not be a lot of new material here, but having it collected in one place is certainly useful.
In summary the authors are pleading for "better meat", and they use the terms regenerative and sustainable in describing what better meat is, while not being prescriptive, they are clearly not proponents of more intensive production systems.
They consider that a move to a better quality diet with less carbohydrate and adequate protein intake from pasture fed meat would result in far lower health care costs compared to the current typical western diet.
