Here's a depressing story: Each spring, meat producers from all over the world get together for a Protein Innovation Summit to sit around a hotel and talk candidly about stuff that bleeds. Mostly they discuss the trends in the meat market and ways to sell more pieces of cattle, chickens, pigs, and whatever insects they use to make hot dogs, but that's not the most depressing part. During the 2012 meeting, they presented a consumer trend report in which they asked ordinary people what descriptors would make them most likely to pay more for beef. The descriptors were terms like "sustainable," "grass-fed," "free range," "locally raised," and "hormone-free," and while those words all have very specific definitions, the descriptor that was far and away the best performer among consumers was "premium."

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"Premium," as far as the food industry is concerned, is a completely unregulated word that companies are allowed to slap on anything, from an actual steak to membranes and gristle stapled together, yet the study proves we're eager to pay 5 percent more for a piece of meat with that nebulous adjective attached to it, because we are, generally speaking, idiots. That also means that all those men in calfskin suits at the summit realized they were wasting their time trying to create sustainable practices for raising livestock because in the end people are more willing to throw their wallets at big words they don't completely understand.