The Beyond Beef campaign began in earnest in 1993, opposing the 'cattle culture' of over-production and over-consumption of beef. The beyond beef coalition united a broad spectrum of groups including students, environmentalists, vegetarians, family farming and social justice groups. Extensive campaign materials were produced explaining the environmental devastation, damaged health, global hunger and poverty and animal suffering resulting from the North American meat habit.

The coalition chose McDonald's as it's first major target because they're the largest fast food retail organisation and largest purchaser of beef. The aims of the campaign were simple:-

• That McDonald's :-
  1. Put a vegi-burger on the menu of all McDonald's 9000 North American restaurants as they have done in their restaurants in Holland.
  2. Put 25% of the their local and national advertising budget into promoting this vegi-burger.
• To encourage individuals to reduce their beef consumption by 50%, to eat more organic vegetables, grains and fruits and to promote reform of the current system of ranching and farming.

The campaign recruited teams of four people to "Adopt-a-McDonald's". This involved agreeing to peacefully hand out 1,000 beyond beef leaflets and children's colouring books to McDonald's customers outside the store. During 1993 over 1.5 million leaflets were handed out at 3,000 restaurants in North America.

BEYOND BEEF REPORT

The report includes several sections which look at different aspects of the beef industry and may be of particular interest:-

• Fact Sheet : Environmental devestation
• Fact Sheet : Damaged Health
• Fact Sheet : Global Hunger and poverty
• Quotabe Quotes

The book "Beyond Beef - the rise and fall of the cattle culture" looks in depth at the effect of the population of 1.3 billion cattle on our planet.