When talking to a cattleman the other day and trying to answer his question of what's wrong with the industry. I said, "Well there are sixteen things that can go wrong with the cattle industry at any one time. Right now we are dealing with seventeen of them."

For example what should appear in Time magazine recently but a cover story titled "Should you be a vegetarian?"

As a long time reader of Time magazine I have never believed they had all the answers, or that their reporting was always without bias. In fact I have always found you don't want to miss the movies with bad reviews.

I had never written a letter to the editor of any publication but their much ado about nothing required it. Here is my letter.

July 11, 2002

Dear Editor:

As a reader of Time for over 50 years I have had the urge to write a letter to the editor. But like a bad gas pain, I have always gotten over it.

This time is different, no pun intended. Your cover story about vegetarians was more of your bias one-sided opinions than usual. With four percent of your Time CNN poll reporting they were vegetarians and most of them cheating in one way or another, your expounding the idea that we should all crawl into a hole and pull the cover over our heads is preposterous.

Fortunately we have three good things still going for us in this country. Freedom to live in this country, freedom of religion and freedom to eat what we want. Unless you can do better than you have in this article, you will never get it up to five percent.

But then, I understand there is a flat earth society whose members still believe the earth is flat. Your poll probably would also turn up four percent for them.

I believe the information, which the beef industry has been putting out about the nutritional value of beef has helped to inform the public, but the challenge never ends. The Beef Industry has to continue to have a proactive program.