Shortly after denouncing Meatless Mondays, Todd Staples resigned to head the state’s oil and gas trade association.
By Jim Hightower • Previously published on Other Words
Check out this blue-ribbon specimen: Todd Staples.
Carefully cultivated by corporate agribusiness powers, he’s served as the state agricultural commissioner for the past eight years. But the vast majority of Texans don’t know his name and had no idea he was a state official. That’s no surprise, considering he’s primarily been a behind-the-scenes operative for Big Food.
Staples suddenly sprang from obscurity in September, unleashing a screed against an innocuous school cafeteria initiative called “Meatless Mondays.”
The practice is a “carefully orchestrated” and “anti-animal agricultural” campaign staged by people hell-bent on brainwashing school children, he shrieked in an op-ed widely published in Texas newspapers.
Staples wailed that it’s a devilish plot “to eliminate meat from Americans’ diets seven days a week — starting with Mondays.”
Then Commissioner Meathead doubled down on dumb by proclaiming that the Meatless Mondays cabal could deprive our poor school children “of their only source of protein for the day.” That might be sad — except it’s a lie.
Beans, eggs, milk, cheese, nuts, legumes, tofu, and quinoa are perfectly good sources of protein, readily available in Texas. Shouldn’t an agriculture commissioner know that? But then, Staples — who took more than $100,000 in campaign cash from the meat peddlers — has been the commissioner of the state’s agribusiness, not agriculture.
And now he’s neither. Shortly after denouncing Meatless Mondays, Staples resigned. He didn’t quit out of embarrassment for his silly red-meat rant, but to preside over the Texas Oil and Gas Association.
He can change one tinfoil hat for another, but he’ll always be a goober.