M.A.H.A. ‘Caca’: America is done pretending about meat
For more than a decade, avoiding meat and other animal products has been idealized as a healthier, more ethical way to eat. But 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. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited and ate at a steak-house restaurant in Florida. He praised the fast-food chain for switching its cooking oil from seed oil, which he falsely claims causes illness, to beef tallow (cow fat). Making America Healthy Again (MAHA), it seems, starts with a double cheeseburger and fries. The campaign against meat hasn’t just disappeared, of course. Go to any major grocery store, and you’ll still see plenty of shrink-wrapped Impossible Burgers. But of late, the food landscape is starting to resemble a 'meatopia'. Americans 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 chickens. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.
YASMIN TAYAG: Making America Healthy Again (MAHA), it seems, starts with a double cheeseburger and fries. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited a Steak ’n Shake in Florida and shared a meal with Fox News’s 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. “People are raving about these french fries,” 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 ’n Shake, cauliflower wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, or the Bloomin’ 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 “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants” may have disproportionately appealed to liberals in big cities, but the meat backlash has been unavoidable across the United States…
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. It’s 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 meat — climate change, health, animal welfare — Americans 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 “meat paradox,” 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 campaign against meat hasn’t just disappeared, of course. Go to any major grocery store, and you’ll still see plenty of shrink-wrapped Impossible Burgers… Plant-based meat once seemed to be on a path to becoming a dinner staple, but its popularity is in free fall due to concerns about its cost, taste, and healthfulness… But of late, the food landscape is starting to resemble a meatopia…
The embrace of meat isn’t just about food, but also about what meat represents: tradition, strength, dominance, muscles — values championed by the right. (There’s a reason that “soy boy” is a common pejorative to describe insufficiently masculine liberals.) Conservatives have long sought to turn meat into a front in the culture wars, even suggesting that Democrats “want to take away your hamburgers.” Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a preemptive ban on the sale of lab-grown meat in his state, describing it as part of “the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish, or bugs”…
All of this is happening amid confusion about what it even means to eat well. The prevailing view among the medical and scientific community has not changed: Reducing consumption of red and processed meats is better for human and planetary health. But as pro-meat figures such as Kennedy and Trump challenge those views — not to mention the institutions that support them — the problems with meat-eating no longer seem as clear-cut. SOURCE…
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