The campaign against meat, and in favor of meat substitutes, is fizzling in the face of obvious consumer preferences.
Throw a burger — a real one — on the grill, if you can. Watch the flames transform it into a juicy patty. And savor the taste, bite by bite. This is the American way.
According to The Atlantic, the campaign against meat, and in favor of meat substitutes, is fizzling, not sizzling, in this country. “It’s not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating,” Yasmin Tang writes. “A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.” You should not. And the American people, increasingly, do not.
We’ve come a long way since widespread cultural messaging against meat, as well as the mainstreaming of meat substitutes, caused the New York Times to wonder whether it was the “beginning of the end of meat.” Now, meat substitutes are losing ground here. The evidence was already all around us. McDonald’s, that reliable indicator of consumer sentiment, has dropped the plant-based burger from its menu. “I don’t think the U.S. consumer is coming to McDonald’s or looking for a McPlant or other plant-based proteins from McDonald’s now,” company president Joe Erlinger said. That’s no surprise. Even during the past decade of anti-meat agitation, “annual per capita meat consumption rose by nearly 28 pounds, the equivalent of roughly 100 chicken breasts,” Tang notes. It turns out that people like meat. (Which does not diminish the case for abstaining from it on Fridays.)
Despite her qualifiers, Tang cannot resist lumping the resurgence of meat in with a right-coded, pro-masculinity “vibe shift” that has had political manifestations. But it’s not just political. Last week, my pro-meat friend Russ Greene argued in the Free Press that a low-interest-rate environment had helped make businesses and other elites more receptive to ideas and trends that were disconnected from reality, from popular opinions and preferences — and from profit. “When money is free, crazy ideas get funded,” he wrote. “When money has a price, funders and investors want to see a direct link to value.” His focus is mostly on such faddy, and now fading, nostrums as DEI and ESG. But the return of meat, which people like (despite — or perhaps because of — elites’ telling them they shouldn’t), is another example of a flight to value.
One of the main arguments that elites made against meat, and in support of meat substitutes, was health: Meat, supposedly, is bad for you. This presumption was based on science that is now discredited. But if it’s science you want, check out recent evidence that meat substitutes are not the panacea they were sold as. One study of meat eaters vs. eaters of what it called “plant-based meat analogs” failed to “show widespread cardiometabolic health benefits compared with a corresponding meat based diet.” Moreover, as a Daily Mail article put it in a report on the study, the meat eaters “had lower blood levels of sodium” and “more stable blood sugar.” Another study warned that meat substitutes, typically being ultra-processed foods, “may still pose health risks due to negative effects caused by their composition and processing methods,” including increased “risk of heart attacks and strokes,” as one Washington Post analysis of the study put it.
With vibes, interest rates, and health benefits now working against the anti-meat campaign, the environmental rationale endures as its main plank. But the American people have shown repeatedly, much to elites’ chagrin, that they are unwilling to accept top-down, lifestyle-altering diktats that supposedly lead to “green” benefits they will never detect. So here, people continue to like meat. It could be a different story in Europe. So the future of meat substitutes may depend on a continent consumed by environmental mania. If so, it will be another difference between Europe and America. Keep that in mind if you can do your patriotic duty and get to the grill sometime soon.