Very nice essay..hit quite a few nails on the head. The gist of it is simple...for most of us, the plant-based diet was more about social compulsion and less about actual desire.
I used the Yahoo link to get around the Atlantic paywall.
A few snippets..it's a longish essay:
Making America healthy again, it seems, starts with a double cheeseburger and fries. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited a Steak ân Shake in Florida and shared a meal with Fox Newsâs Sean Hannity. The setting was no accident: Kennedy has praised the fast-food chain for switching its cooking oil from seed oil, which he falsely claims causes illness, to beef tallow. âPeople are raving about these french fries,â Kennedy said after eating one, before commending other restaurants that fry with beef tallow: Popeyes, Buffalo Wild Wings, Outback Steakhouse.
To put it another way, if you order fries at Steak ân Shake, cauliflower wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, or the Bloominâ Onion at Outback, your food will be cooked in cow fat. For more than a decade, cutting down on meat and other animal products has been idealized as a healthier, more ethical way to eat. Guidelines such as âEat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plantsâ may have disproportionately appealed to liberals in big cities, but the meat backlash has been unavoidable across the United States. The Obama administration passed a law to limit meat in school lunches; more recently, meat alternatives such as Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat have flooded grocery-store shelves, and fast-food giants are even serving them up in burgers and nuggets. It all heralded a future that seemed more tempeh than tomahawk steak: âCould this be the beginning of the end of meat?â wrote The New York Times in 2022.
Now the goal of eating less meat has lost its appeal. A convergence of cultural and nutritional shifts, supercharged by the return of the noted hamburger-lover President Donald Trump, has thrust meat back to the center of the American plate. Itâs not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.
Many people are relieved to hear it. Despite all of the attention on why people should eat less meatâclimate change, health, animal welfareâAmericans have kept consuming more and more of it. From 2014 to 2024, annual per capita meat consumption rose by nearly 28 pounds, the equivalent of roughly 100 chicken breasts. One way to make sense of this âmeat paradox,â as the ethicist Peter Singer branded it in The Atlantic in 2023, is that there is a misalignment between how people want to eat and the way they actually do. The thought of suffering cows releasing methane bombs into the atmosphere pains me, but I love a medium-rare porterhouse.
I used the Yahoo link to get around the Atlantic paywall.
A few snippets..it's a longish essay:
Making America healthy again, it seems, starts with a double cheeseburger and fries. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited a Steak ân Shake in Florida and shared a meal with Fox Newsâs Sean Hannity. The setting was no accident: Kennedy has praised the fast-food chain for switching its cooking oil from seed oil, which he falsely claims causes illness, to beef tallow. âPeople are raving about these french fries,â Kennedy said after eating one, before commending other restaurants that fry with beef tallow: Popeyes, Buffalo Wild Wings, Outback Steakhouse.
To put it another way, if you order fries at Steak ân Shake, cauliflower wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, or the Bloominâ Onion at Outback, your food will be cooked in cow fat. For more than a decade, cutting down on meat and other animal products has been idealized as a healthier, more ethical way to eat. Guidelines such as âEat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plantsâ may have disproportionately appealed to liberals in big cities, but the meat backlash has been unavoidable across the United States. The Obama administration passed a law to limit meat in school lunches; more recently, meat alternatives such as Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat have flooded grocery-store shelves, and fast-food giants are even serving them up in burgers and nuggets. It all heralded a future that seemed more tempeh than tomahawk steak: âCould this be the beginning of the end of meat?â wrote The New York Times in 2022.
Now the goal of eating less meat has lost its appeal. A convergence of cultural and nutritional shifts, supercharged by the return of the noted hamburger-lover President Donald Trump, has thrust meat back to the center of the American plate. Itâs not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.
Many people are relieved to hear it. Despite all of the attention on why people should eat less meatâclimate change, health, animal welfareâAmericans have kept consuming more and more of it. From 2014 to 2024, annual per capita meat consumption rose by nearly 28 pounds, the equivalent of roughly 100 chicken breasts. One way to make sense of this âmeat paradox,â as the ethicist Peter Singer branded it in The Atlantic in 2023, is that there is a misalignment between how people want to eat and the way they actually do. The thought of suffering cows releasing methane bombs into the atmosphere pains me, but I love a medium-rare porterhouse.
There are millions of people with that same exact experience.
