Leadership Quote by Mike Johanns

It’s the kind of line that tries to disinfect a messy politics with the bland antiseptic of “I’m just like you.” Mike Johanns, talking as a politician, doesn’t lead with data or ethics; he leads with appetite. “People enjoy our meat and our poultry” frames industrial animal agriculture as a simple, consensual pleasure, not a contested system with regulation, subsidies, labor issues, animal welfare fights, and periodic food-safety scares. The sentence wants the reader to stay in the grocery aisle, not the policy arena.

The pivot - “as I do as a consumer” - is the real tell. Johanns (a former USDA Secretary) is not merely a consumer; he’s a governing actor in the machinery that makes “our” meat possible. Declaring himself a consumer is a strategic costume change: it shrinks the distance between regulator and regulated, between public interest and private preference. It’s also a subtle inoculation against criticism: if he eats it too, how could the system be suspect?

The possessive “our” does double duty, wrapping industry in patriotism and community. “Our meat” evokes farmers, heartland identity, and national self-sufficiency, smoothing over the reality that modern meat is as much about consolidation and corporate supply chains as it is about pastoral imagery.

In context, this reads like a preemptive defense of the status quo - a way to keep the conversation on enjoyment and normalcy when the surrounding debate is usually about risk, responsibility, and who pays when things go wrong.