The Beef Parasite of Questionable Existence

People love to engage in discourse about climate change. Especially when ‘engaging in discourse’ really means talking to a wall, except the wall responds with the most ignorant counterpoint possible, and you end up wishing this was a wall that couldn’t talk because at least you could trick yourself into thinking you were doing something effective. Most of Gen Z and many millenials have been exposed to torrents of ‘stay informed’ posts on Instagram, skit after skit from late night comedy about the end of the world, and bleak international declarations about our impending demise. In the eloquent prose of Timothée Chalamet, “Societal collapse is in the air. It smells like it.” Our world’s youngest generations are as well equipped as, if not more so, our newscasters to give us the rundown on climate change news. 

Despite being so well-informed, we lack the power to make the changes we know need to happen. That is, unless we adopt a morally objectionable, logistically nightmarish, and painfully uncomfortable plan that might not even work. But it might work. 

This is a story about what could happen if we — or rather, the U.S. government — decided to combat climate change by lying about it. 

Dolion, a mid-level CIA employee, woke up on May 9th, 2026 with a glorious idea. An idea to take advantage of everything he hated about political discourse, every ignorant comment he’d heard from corporate talking heads, all the sleepless nights he’d had considering his complacency with inaction against an existential threat: Dolion could redirect all those things that frustrated him into an operation that would save the world. His idea wasn’t entirely truthful — in fact, it may have come about because of a sudden departure from his instinct to be honest — but it could be effective. People were dying, and fewer people would die if he lied. Didn’t that justify the lie? Dolion wasn’t entirely sure how to answer the question, so he pushed it from his head and continued with the idea. 

The first meeting Dolion had was with his immediate superior, a member of the leadership team in the Office of Public Affairs. The Public Affairs team dealt with matters of public opinion, making recommendations to the rest of the agency about messaging and public records management. Dolion didn’t particularly like his job, and he especially hated working on projects that felt shallow, even inconsequential. The artificiality of it all was infuriating to him. Nonetheless, his supervisor looked intrigued when Dolion pulled out a small folder of handwritten notes and printed documents and placed it on the table in front of him. He actually looked excited about this project, which isn’t a word his supervisor would have used to describe him since his first day. The tired-looking-but-determined federal employee began to explain his idea, pointing out specific graphs and tables on his papers as they became relevant. His explanation was steady, logically consistent, and extensively planned. His supervisor was nodding along at the beginning, but her entire face eventually froze up. She listened, and she understood. She realized the idea’s potential, and thanked Dolion before making a series of calls that would set the plan in motion.

A couple hours later, Dolion was in a conference room with the CIA director, the president, half of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military, and a rushed handful of a dozen others from federal department leadership. They all listened intently to what the young staffer had to say, their faces showing a range of emotion from intrigue, admiration, and exhaustion. Dolion’s idea was popular, but everyone in that conference room wanted to make sure they could make it work before attempting such a long con — err, no, ‘con; doesn’t sound quite right, too cruel, maybe a ‘project’, that’d be more marketable — before attempting such an extensive project (Dolion emphasized the word ‘project,’ looking quite pleased with himself). Looking around at his now-captive audience, Dolion suggested that they focus on just one environmental issue as a trial run. The government agencies could practice with a smear campaign on red meat consumption, for example, to make sure the country would respond how they wanted them to. Yeah, red meat, that sounds good. We can focus specifically on beef. This seems feasible. Why yes, this is a new suit, thank you for asking. God, we’re so fashionable. Pretty standard bureaucratic talk. 

The group in the conference room agreed beef would be a good initial subject of the project. If it worked, the country would make great strides against disastrous climate change. Red meat, as Dolion had explained in his powerpoint, was arguably the most environmentally harmful food produced in the world. Producing one pound of beef required 1,847 gallons of water, and total beef production released 27 times its weight in CO2 emissions. These facts were what had encouraged Dolion to create the plan in the first place. They didn’t need to lie about everything, and the writing on the wall resembled the inside of a slaughterhouse. If they had to exaggerate to make sure the public responded at all, wouldn’t that be worth it? There was little discussion about what would happen to the meat lobbyists in the US, who would no doubt suffer from a sharp turn in public opinion against red meat. A lobbyist for Tyson Foods had been in the room since the beginning — they had their people everywhere — and she seemed less-than-pleased about the direction the rest of the group had been careening towards. After the meeting, Dolion noticed the lobbyist speaking animatedly with the Secretary of the Treasury in a corner. He couldn’t quite discern what they were saying, but the lobbyist left looking satisfied. The Treasury Department would do what it had to for this project, and the public wouldn’t need to know the details. 

Within a few days, Operation Bovine Ruse (OBR) was underway. The public didn’t know about that name of course; POTUS had announced the Special Committee Against Parasites (SCAP) just a few hours after the CDC’s announcement of a deadly parasite spreading through Brazil’s cow population. Every cable news show was hosting six-person panels to discuss the Brazilian steak parasite. The CDC had been initially reluctant to manufacture studies with apparent proof of the parasite, but the Treasury Secretary stepped in once again. Budget cuts are an astonishing motivator for government employees. Outside of the government, there were even more details falling into place than Dolion could have predicted. Brazil, it had turned out, was a good choice for the operation’s country-of-target for more reasons than they had expected. Right-wingers, who had been quick to dismiss anything medical from the U.S. government since COVID-19, quickly accepted the parasite’s prevalence as gospel, citing the ‘failed socialists of South America’ as the primary reason for the parasite. 

The government had more complex ways of convincing people of the parasite, too. Plenty of people on death row were more than willing to be filmed having their limbs falling off in return for a commuted sentence. The lucky prisoners who had been offered the deal (Dolion thought of them as lucky, at least; it made more sense that way) were often staged in crowded public areas before pulling off the stunt. The limbs themselves had already been cut off by the time the actor was in public; at that point, they were simply waiting for the right time to spill their body parts onto the pavement. The first few public limb-droppings were more minor: fingers mostly, except for one particularly artistic performer who insisted on having his left ear cut off. As the CIA’s production team grew more confident, so did they become bolder with their choices of limbs to fall. The viral — and carefully manufactured — propaganda eventually depicted arms, legs, and genitals falling off of poor ‘parasite victims.’ In one case, all three at once. Upon hearing about the parasite’s limb-losing capabilities, Joe Rogan recorded three podcasts devoted entirely to discussing the steak parasite. Besides their contribution to the public’s general sense of fear, the episodes had also produced golden soundbites that flooded social media: ‘Nobody’s talking about how a goddamn worm is gonna make all our d***s fall off!’ ‘Jamie, can you pull up that clip of the cows stuck in the slaughterhouse? Man, wild stuff.’ ‘It’s entirely possible that the parasite could be, could be in our freakin’ domes already, and the government is just, ya know, waiting to switch that s*** on.’

People had been looking for something, anything, to happen that might make their politics mean something; they collectively found it in a parasite living in cows in Brazil, which served as the perfect scapegoat for everyone to rally against. In the months following the government’s initial announcement, everything was to blame for the parasite — capitalism, socialism, ‘the immigrants,’ poor people, rich people, Brazilian farmers — but only one solution bubbled to the surface of the conversation: Stop eating red meat. 

Who knows where else the parasite might be by now? It was too horrible, too perfect, too manufactured to be true.

Lawrence Hapeman ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at hapeman.l@wustl.edu.

Photo courtesy of WBUR under the Creative Commons