BOOK REVIEW : What’s the Beef? : BEYOND BEEF: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, <i> By Jeremy Rifkin, (Dutton: $21; 353 pp.)</i>

By now most news-watchers, and some who ignore all the news they can, have been at least dimly exposed to the idea that the rich representation of meat in Western diets is a banner of regress rather than progress, a priority that has disastrously skewed both our own agriculture and the choices of developing nations. Meanwhile, one of the few rational perceptions to emerge from the Babel of current health/nutrition exhortations is that people eat better when they use meat as a modest adjunct (at most) to a diet centered on grains and vegetables. The time should be ripe for a far-reaching book on the most obvious crystallization of these issues and more: the beef industry.

Well, here is Jeremy Rifkin’s “Beyond Beef,” which no one could accuse of not being far-reaching. If it were also lucidly argued and decently researched, it would probably be the striking contribution to food-policy debate that it claims to be. As matters stand, it is atrocious--one of those maddening books in which dozens of major issues keep getting whizzed in a mental food processor along with nonstop histrionics and virtuoso displays of ignorance in 20 disciplines.

In all fairness, I must also say that certain of Rifkin’s concerns deserve to be the concerns of everyone and that at moments he zeros in on them to some effect. The best material is to be found in about the middle third of the book. Here and in scattered places elsewhere, the author enumerates some bleak realities, all of which hint that the world does not owe us five hamburgers a week and that we have not done well by acting as if it did.

Many of these vexatious truths have been heard before, but they are well worth repeating. Cattle are large animals requiring great amounts of pasturage and water and exacting a mighty ecological toll where those requirements are not comfortably met. From Idaho to Kenya, people are raising these creatures in unrealistic numbers on terrain that cannot absorb their impact.

Topsoil loss and water degradation are immediate local consequences. More broadly, unsustainable cattle populations (1.28 billion worldwide, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization statistics Rifkin draws on) are a factor in lowered water tables and spreading desertification, notably but not exclusively in sub-Saharan Africa. At a truly global level, they contribute significantly to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. (The reasons range from the well-publicized forest burning in the Amazon to the natural production of methane in the animals’ digestive systems.)

These ills do not exhaust the litany of what must be done to keep beef moving through our supermarkets and fast-food restaurants in the amounts we consider adequate--about 65 pounds per person a year in the United States is the average given in a National Food Review article cited by Rifkin. To satisfy modern consumer preferences, cattle are “finished” for a longer or shorter period on grain or soybean-based feeds whose store of energy is largely wasted by coming to us not directly but through animal intermediaries that burn up most of the available calories for their own metabolic needs. This diversion of valuable crops is disastrous in developing countries that can ill spare land and fuel for the luxury of raising livestock feed.

The resulting products materialize in front of us at an extraordinarily low cost to American consumers. The sheer speed and volume at which they rush off the factory production line strikes some observers as threatening to both the safety of meat workers and the USDA’s ability to inspect for food safety. The mechanized butchering does, however, do a phenomenally good job of insulating us from any memory that the packaged jigsaw pieces in the supermarket were ever attached to anything alive. Hamburger, as Rifkin well points out, is even more tactfully dissociated from its origins than the other beef options, having been “disassembled into indistinguishable matter” before we set eyes on it.

Such is the gist of Rifkin’s most telling points--but unfortunately they are a lot more telling in summary than in the 40 scattershot chapters of “Beyond Beef.” What should make perfect sense on the merits of the case turns into an outrageous muddle in the hands of the district attorney.

Not one sentence of this very noisy and self-righteous tract suggests that the author has ever seen a cow or steer or talked to a farmer. This does not stop him from holding forth at length about “the cow” and “the bull,” or furiously proclaiming how to redeem the thousand sins of American agriculture in order to rediscover “the bovine.”

By contrast, penetrating studies of meat production like Orville Schell’s “Modern Meat” or the Corn Belt section of Mark Kramer’s “Three Farms” are about what their authors have seen by going into real barns, feedlots, sales offices or town banks and following around real human beings who make a difficult, uncertain living working with livestock. “Beyond Beef” is all about its own moral indignation, a quality that does not require getting manure on your shoes or trying to understand someone else’s point of view. What does an oracle like Rifkin do when called on to describe a bull or cow on the hoof? Why, he pastes together some grand mythic archetypes with a paraphrase from a chapter titled “Ungulates” in a popular survey of mammalogy.

Getting your information from books is all very well if you know how to use them. Rifkin, however, is a truly awful researcher. The problem here is the same inner compass needle that points him toward “the bovine” rather than concrete animals in concrete situations. Not for this author the tedium of arguing from particular evidence to general conclusions by connected steps. Rather he looks to his sources--especially cultural histories that draw on many kinds of complicated primary material to construct a thesis--to reinforce preformed value judgments involving nothing less than the role of cattle in world civilization from the pristine Stone Age to the debased present.

The result is a scholarly disaster. Far out of his depth in agronomy, religion, anthropology, medicine and the history of ideas, Rifkin takes them all on in a blitz of reference notes. There are entire chapters that do little but rehash material from one or two secondary sources, with no sign of independent perspective on what the authors meant to do.

The original insights of Alfred Crosby’s “Ecological Imperialism,” a densely argued survey of how European flora and fauna (from fruit trees to tuberculosis bacilli) followed voyagers and colonists around the globe, are pummeled into a chapter called “Ecological Colonialism,” a simple-minded pastiche of Crosby’s material. The only two citations from other works in this chapter turn out to be passages that are conveniently quoted (in exactly the same form) from the same sources by Crosby. That sort of piggyback scholarship would look phony in a freshman term paper.

Often Rifkin’s sources are pretty shaky reeds in themselves, or he rifles them for ammunition with no idea of what he is talking about. A less naive researcher would smell something counterfeit in, for example, a quotation attributed in somebody’s history of witchcraft to “the Council of Toledo in A.D. 447,” supposedly showing how Christianity demonized the bull-images of older religions. (There were several dozen Councils of Toledo, none in 447.) Apparently unacquainted with the meaning of a condition--peritonitis--that a study reports to have been found in cattle approved for commercial slaughter and sale, Rifkin doesn’t consult a medical dictionary before explaining it to other people in print. He just quotes the garbled definition of “peritonitus” from the study in question, the 1990 Government Accountability Project. Apparently not having heard of the satirical poet John Gay, the author of “The Beggar’s Opera,” Rifkin ignorantly informs us (in another pickup quotation borrowed from a fine book by the cultural historian Keith Thomas) that in 1716 “John Gray (sic) admonished Londoners ‘to shun the surly butcher’s greasy tray . . .’ ” (This actually comes from a passage in Gay’s “Trivia” on how not to end up with spots on your clothes while jostling through the streets on foot.)

The author’s use of numbers is as loopy as his way with other evidence. He is one of those polemicists who ransack all manner of statistics in order to come up with shockers. But statistics are the most meaningless evidence of all without careful definitions and comparisons. Only a mountebank would stun people with the news that “cattle take up nearly 24% of the land mass of the planet.” Packed nose to nose? Standing three feet apart? No--”nearly 24%” refers to the amount of ground throughout the world permanently or occasionally used as pasturage and rangeland for cattle. Would we say that cattle “take up 60% of Wyoming?”

Rifkin is also a master of numbers thrown around with carefully manipulated or omitted reference points--for example, the assertion that we now have “about 100 million cows in the United States, nearly one cow for every two and a half Americans.” Directly following the statement that world cattle populations are increasing, this looks like a local example. In fact the number of cattle in this country has declined by about 30 million since 1975.

There is a reason for the essential footlessness of “Beyond Beef”: Rifkin is really not interested in either cattle, people or “the human-bovine relationship” except as pegs for pronunciamentos. What he ultimately advocates is “the elimination of beef from the human diet.” This mission in itself has a stage-managed quality. An honest writer telling us to stop eating beef would either sketch in the general context of the meat industry in order to explain concretely why beef deserves to be eliminated more than pork and chicken, or frankly argue for a vegetarian diet, a goal with practical (as well as ethical) benefits understood by many. Rifkin does neither. He just noisily chooses one beast as the prop for a top-heavy soapbox.

It’s a procedure that strikes me as demeaning rather than dignifying for the animal in question. But obviously Rifkin needs something to be the key to all mysteries about the world’s ills and how to fix them--for that is the real subject of this book. Through “the cattle complex” he reduces all history to a tale of spiritual awareness and life-affirming forces--chiefly represented by matters he doesn’t know much about, such as prehistoric agrarian societies, the Mithraic religion or modern India--pitted against “ruthless acquisition,” “utilitarianism,” and “power relationships.” Everything he has ever had an opinion on (e.g., sexism) manages to swell the bill of indictment (with great sanctimoniousness he pronounces beef “a tool of gender discrimination”).

By the time the author is done, he has shoehorned the sum of civilization into two parts. The much larger one resembles an inexhaustible series of “wanted” posters, the other a Renaissance painting of peace and righteousness embracing on pearly clouds. For Rifkin, there simply are no nuances or distinctions in between.

And just what will we find in the pearly cloud scenario? I think an advocate with a sense of responsibility might say that if affluent Western societies ate less beef or no beef at all, we could make a wiser use of many resources and perhaps gain ground against some forms of ecological damage. This isn’t good enough for Rifkin. With no ifs, ands or buts, he promises that rising above beef eating will bring about a “grand restoration of nature on every continent.” In the western United States we will see elk and buffalo ranging among verdant grasses and pure waters. “Wildebeest, elephants, zebras, rhinos and lions will roam again over the open savannas” of Africa, while formerly displaced Third World peasants will return from urban-slum exile “to their ancestral lands.” In sum, “moving beyond beef” heralds “a new chapter in the unfolding of human consciousness.”

If no evidence is forthcoming about why any of this should ensue, it doesn’t really matter. Rational evaluation of ills and remedies isn’t the point here. Beating up on swarms of muzzily understood fall guys is. Rifkin is one of those who know no way to express convictions without elevating them to angry pseudo-religions, dogmatic milkshake-of-human-kindness recipes full of damnatory benevolence. More’s the pity. The case to be made for removing beef from pride of place in the American diet is a powerful one. Its outlines emerge in “Beyond Beef” in spite of rather than because of Rifkin’s efforts.