It seems that America is again healthy, begins with a double burger and fries. Earlier this month, the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The assembly was no accident: Kennedy praised the fast food chain for changing his oil kitchen oil, which he falsely states that he causes diseases, beef. “People have problems with these fries,” Kennedy said after eating -before they congratulate other restaurants that fry with the beef: Popeyes, Buffalo Wild Wings, Outback Steakhouse.
To say, otherwise, if you ask for fries in Steak ‘n Shake, cauliflower wings at Buffalo Wild Wings or on onions Bloomin’ in Outback, the food will be cooked in cow fats. For more than a decade, the reduction of meat and other animal products has been idealized as a healthier and ethical way to eat. Guidelines such as “eating food. Not too much. Mostly plants” may have disproportionately appealed to the liberals of large cities, but the reaction of the meat has been inevitable throughout the United States. Obama administration passed a law to limit meat to school lunches; More recently, meat alternatives such as Burger and Beyond Meat have flooded the grocery stores, and fast food giants even serve them in burgers and pepites. It all announced a future that seemed more temphe than the steak of Tomahawk: “Could this be the beginning of the end of the flesh?” write The New York Times In 2022.
Now the goal of eating less meat has lost its attractiveness. A convergence of cultural and nutritional changes, overlooking the return of the well-known President of the Hamburger Lover, Donald Trump, has pushed the meat again to the center of the American plate. They are not just the Maga Bros and Maha mothers who resist vegetable food. A wide strip of the United States seems to send a clear message: no one should feel bad to eat meat.
Many people are relieved to feel. Despite all the attention of the reason people should eat less meat: climate change, health, animal welfare, north -Americans have continued to consume more and more. From 2014 to 2024, the annual consumption of meat per capita increased almost 28 pounds, the equivalent of approximately 100 chicken breasts. A way to make sense of this “paradox of meat”, as the ethicist Peter Singer marked it The Atlantic In 2023, there is a desalineation between people want to eat and the way they really do. The thought of suffering cows that release methane bombs into the atmosphere is sorry for me, but I love a goalkeeper of rare.
In fact, many people who self -identify as plant canteens do not really eat that, Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economics teacher at Kansas State University, told me. He directs the National Monthly Meat Demand Monitor, who asks respondents to responds to their diets and then denounce what they ate the day earlier. “The number they tell me are vegans or vegetarians; the true number is about half,” said Tonsor. In some years, the desalineation is even more glittering: by 2023, 7.9 percent of the people who filled the survey became a vegan or vegetarian, but only 1.8 percent eaten consistently. (The survey is partially funded by the meat industry.)
This dissonance is a function of how less meat has been wrapped in a conscious and moral brightness. As I wrote last year, the labeling of articles as “plants” has become so symbolic of health and kindness that has been used to sell virtually anything, edible or not. The meat campaign does not disappear, of course. Go to any important grocery store and you will still see many impossible burgers wrapped.
But in the afternoon, the food landscape begins to look like a carnopia. Sweetgreen, a chain that increased the prominence of salads that they liked the dining rooms based on aspiration plants, now makes ads that establish their “protein plates” piled up with steak, chicken and salmon. Dry meat sticks, thinking of Jims, are the fastest refreshment category nationally. Fast food chains, including McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr., have diminished their alternative meat options.
There are many different reasons for this renaissance of meat: America has been obsessed with consuming more protein, a fashion driven by the increasing number of people in GPP-1 drugs seeking protein rich diets. Plant-based meat seemed to be on a way to become a staple of dinner, but its popularity is in the free fall due to its concern for its cost, taste and health.
The embrace of the meat is not only food but also about what meat represents: tradition, strength, domain, muscles—Rapans defended on the right. (There is a reason why “I’m Boy” is a common pejorative to describe insufficient masculine liberals.) Conservatives have tried to turn the flesh into a forehead in the wars of culture, even suggesting that Democrats “want to remove burgers.” Last year, Florida’s governor, Ron Desantis, published a preventive ban on the sale of grown in the laboratory in his state, describing it as part of the world elite plan to force the world to eat meat cultivated on a petri or insects dish. “
Trump’s re -election has strengthened the cause. Increasing meat food is part of the largest wave of right-wing influence on American culture. “WOKE” – then, take care of the weather, eat plants based on plants – is out. Tradition, at least one specific version, is found. Last week, The New Yorker He announced the “revenge of the American Steakhouse”, which, for some, points to a “proper order restoration”. Efforts on the right to reestablish conventional gender norms create an environment because gender eating habits prosper. Men have been eating more meat than women for some time; Half of the country’s beef is consumed by only 12 percent of the population, most men. Research shows that men who subscribe to traditional gender norms often eat more beef and chicken.
Some of the most vocal support for the lifestyle that are emanated from the so-called manosphere, a subculture on the Internet that is based on the right better known by men who promote different ways to become a Manlí. It is popular with young men who voted for Trump in large quantities. The ancestry of meat “coincides with the rise of male influential,” said Timothy Caulfield, a professor at the University of Alberta, who studies male health trends. Many of the main characters in the manosphere frame the meat as an antidote to the attack of the masculinity on the left, a recurring conversation point.
Tucker Carlson’s documentary The end of the men It calls men to eat raw organ meat and eggs to increase their testosterone levels. (There is little scientific evidence to support this.) Last year, Elon Musk appeared in the podcast of Joe Rogan and suggested that the climate impacts of industrial meat are overwhelmed: “You can eat as much as much meat as you like,” he said. Both Musk and Rogan have promoted the “carnivorous diet of all the meat”. Other influential foster more extreme behaviors, such as eating raw beef testicles for a testosterone impulse.
All this is happening in the midst of the confusion about what even means eating well. The predominant view between the medical and scientific community has not changed: reducing the consumption of red and processed meats is better for human and planetary health. But as pro-Carn figures like Kennedy and Trump challenge these opinions, not to mention the institutions that support them, the problems with meat food are no longer clear.
Perhaps the decrease in plant -based diet was inevitable. Awareness of the many consequences of meat meat first entered public consciousness in the late 2000’s, following the launch of documentaries such as Food, Inc. and books such as The dilemma of omnivore. But the reaction of the meat may have been removed for a different reason, Bill Winders, a food sociologist from Georgia Tech, said to me: The great recession made meat more expensive. Almost two decades later, the idea of a future without meat seems picturesque. Know the reasons why you have to eat less meat only goes so far. I feel guilty by eating steak tartars, but it is still my favorite dish. The community of this experience can feel like a free pass. As a singer, the ethicist says, “Most people can continue to do something they think is wrong whenever they have a lot of company.” No one now has to keep the parade.
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Image Source : www.theatlantic.com