America Is Done Pretending About Meat

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 ’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. 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: “Could this be the beginning of the end of meat?” 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. 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 thought of suffering cows releasing methane bombs into the atmosphere pains me, but I love a medium-rare porterhouse.

Read: The meat paradox

Indeed, lots of people who self-identify as plant-eaters don’t really eat that way, Glynn Tonsor, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, told me. He runs the national Monthly Meat Demand Monitor, which asks survey respondents to self-declare their diets and then report what they ate the day before. “The number that tell me they’re vegan or vegetarian—the true number is about half that,” Tonsor said. In some years, the misalignment is even more glaring: In 2023, 7.9 percent of people who filled out the survey self-declared as vegan or vegetarian, but only 1.8 percent actually ate that way consistently. (The survey is partly funded by the meat industry.)

That dissonance is a function of how eating less meat has been wrapped in a conscientious and moral sheen. As I wrote last year, labeling items as “plant-based” has become so symbolic of health and goodness that it has been used to sell virtually anything, edible or not. 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. Sweetgreen, a chain that rose to prominence by serving salads that appealed to aspirationally plant-based eaters, now runs ads spotlighting its “protein plates” piled with steak, chicken, and salmon. Dried meat sticks—think Slim Jims—are the fastest-growing snack category nationwide. Fast-food chains including McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr. have ditched their alternative-meat options.

Read: Meat trimmings are a health food now

There are a lot of different reasons for this meat renaissance: America has become obsessed with consuming more protein, a fad boosted by the growing numbers of people on GLP-1 drugs seeking out protein-rich diets. 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.

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.”

Trump’s reelection has bolstered the cause. The rise of meat-eating is part of the larger wave of right-wing influence on American culture. “Woke”—DEI, caring about the climate, eating plant-based—is out. Tradition, at least one specific version of it, is in. Last week, The New Yorker announced the “Revenge of the American Steakhouse,” which, to some, signals a “restoration of the proper order.” Efforts on the right to reestablish conventional gender norms create an environment for gendered eating habits to thrive. Men have long eaten more meat than women; half the nation’s beef is consumed by just 12 percent of the population, most of them men. Research shows that men who subscribe to traditional gender norms tend to eat more beef and chicken.

Read: Americans stopped cooking with tallow for a reason

Some of the most vocal support for the meat-forward lifestyle emanates from the so-called manosphere, a right-leaning internet subculture best known for men promoting different ways to become manlier. It is popular among the young men who voted for Trump in large numbers. Meat’s ascendance “coincides with the rise of the masculine influencers,” Timothy Caulfield, a professor at the University of Alberta who studies male health trends, told me. Many of the manosphere’s main characters frame meat-eating as an antidote to the left’s “attack on masculinity,” a recurring right-wing talking point.

Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men calls on men to eat organ meat and raw eggs to boost their testosterone levels. (Little scientific evidence exists to support this.) Last year, Elon Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and suggested that the climate impacts of industrial meat are overblown: “You can totally eat as much meat as you want,” he said. Both Musk and Rogan have promoted the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Other influencers encourage more extreme behaviors, such as eating raw beef testicles for a testosterone boost.

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.

Read: The Jordan Peterson all-meat diet

Perhaps the decline of plant-based eating was inevitable. Awareness of meat-eating’s many consequences first entered the public consciousness in the late 2000s, after the release of documentaries such as Food, Inc. and books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But the backlash to meat may have taken off for a different reason, Bill Winders, a sociologist of food at Georgia Tech, told me: The Great Recession made meat more expensive. Nearly two decades later, the idea of a meatless future seems quaint. Knowing the reasons you should eat less meat goes only so far. I feel guilty eating steak tartare, but it’s still my favorite dish. The commonality of this experience can feel like a free pass. As Singer, the ethicist, puts it: “Most people can easily continue doing something they believe is wrong as long as they have plenty of company.” Now no one has to keep up the charade.