{"id":777912,"date":"2025-03-26T08:46:09","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T12:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=777912"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:47:25","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T14:47:25","slug":"maha-my-america-is-done-pretending-about-meat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=777912","title":{"rendered":"M.A.H.A. ‘Caca’: America is done pretending about meat"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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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\u2019t just disappeared, of course. Go to any major grocery store, and you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

YASMIN TAYAG:<\/strong> 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 \u2019n Shake in Florida and shared a meal with Fox News\u2019s 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. \u201cPeople are raving about these french fries,\u201d Kennedy said after eating one, before commending other restaurants that fry with beef tallow: Popeyes, Buffalo Wild Wings, Outback Steakhouse.<\/em><\/p>\n

To put it another way, if you order fries at Steak \u2019n Shake, cauliflower wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, or the Bloomin\u2019 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 \u201cEat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants\u201d may have disproportionately appealed to liberals in big cities, but the meat backlash has been unavoidable across the United States…<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Many people are relieved to hear it. Despite all of the attention on why people should eat less meat \u2014 climate change, health, animal welfare \u2014 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 \u201cmeat paradox,\u201d 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…<\/em><\/p>\n

The campaign against meat hasn\u2019t just disappeared, of course. Go to any major grocery store, and you\u2019ll 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…<\/em><\/p>\n

The embrace of meat isn\u2019t just about food, but also about what meat represents: tradition, strength, dominance, muscles \u2014 values championed by the right. (There\u2019s a reason that \u201csoy boy\u201d is a common pejorative to describe insufficiently masculine liberals.)\u00a0 Conservatives have long sought to turn meat into a front in the culture wars, even suggesting that Democrats \u201cwant to take away your hamburgers.\u201d 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 \u201cthe global elite\u2019s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish, or bugs”…<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 not to mention the institutions that support them \u2014 the problems with meat-eating no longer seem as clear-cut. <\/em>SOURCE…<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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