Meat is back.
Not that it ever really went anywhere—but for a few years around the turn of the decade, the centrality of meat in the American diet came under real scrutiny. A slew of highly publicized academic papers detailed the massive environmental toll of animal agriculture, including its outsize contribution to climate change. Plant-based burgers popped up on menus around the country, and oat milk became a coffee-shop staple. Greta Thunberg extolled the virtues of veganism, while conservatives wrung their hands about the Green New Deal taking away their hamburgers. American meat consumption, which had been growing for decades, dipped ever so slightly.
What a difference a few years, and a change in administration, can make. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services and a proudly ravenous meat eater, has turned the principles of the growing Make America Healthy Again movement into government policy: The Trump administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, promoted to the public as “Eat Real Food,” enshrine a national obsession with consuming more protein and fewer processed foods. Meat (ideally red, usually beef) and milk (ideally whole fat, potentially raw) are now being lauded as saviors of the American diet.
It’s an expensive diet. Beef prices are skyrocketing as cattle herds have shrunk to their lowest level in 75 years, owing to drought, increased costs to ranchers, industry consolidation, and international competition. President Trump responded last week with a proclamation pausing tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of beef that will be sold to the U.S. at a 25 percent discount. Agricultural economists don’t expect the move to make a meaningful difference in the cost of a hamburger. Not that it matters. Americans are spending record amounts on meat and are projected to eat more meat than ever this year. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based meats and even plant-based milks are declining.
This is an unfortunate vibe shift. The case against meat has not weakened. It is still unhealthy to eat in excess, environmentally damaging to produce, and extremely profitable for the industrial farms and multinational conglomerates that make up Big Agriculture. Therein lies the contradiction at the heart of MAHA’s meat fixation: Eating more of it will only exacerbate the very problems that the movement purportedly wants to solve.
Meat is by far the most environmentally damaging part of the American diet. Most animals are raised on industrial farms, not on open pasture—and even still, livestock grazing accounts for about 85 percent of all American land. Livestock make up about half of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, or 5 percent of all national emissions, most of that coming from methane belched by cows and manure expelled by factory farms.
Now consider the damage caused by growing feed for livestock. Cropland for feed—mostly hay, corn, and soy—accounts for another 8 percent of all land, and more water is used to grow feed than for any other agricultural purpose. For instance, about a quarter of all water withdrawn from the Colorado River, which is facing historic lows, goes to alfalfa for cattle feed. Furthermore, growing vast amounts of feed crops requires the widespread use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers that often contaminate soil and drinking water.
Every year, close to 10 billion animals are slaughtered in the United States, most of them chickens. Ninety-nine percent of those chickens come from factory farms, as do close to 99 percent of pigs, and north of 75 percent of beef cattle are fattened for slaughter on industrial feedlots. This massive volume of production enables Americans to eat more meat per capita annually—about 225 pounds each, not counting seafood—than almost any other country on earth.
Given all of this, it’s odd to see meat arise as the dominant food choice of those ostensibly committed to improving our food system. The arguments in favor of meat tend to break down along three often overlapping appeals: purity, processing, and protein.
Proponents of meat, given pride of place in Health and Human Service’s new dietary guidelines and discussions of improving American agriculture, tend to trot out the idea that meat is as real as “real food” gets, associating it with small-scale ranching and “regenerative” grazing on bucolic farmscapes unsullied by agricultural industrialization. This is an old idea that has taken firm hold in food circles, from Michael Pollan through the Food Babe. Even food journalists get drawn into this frame, with The New York Times’ Kim Severson, writing about meat’s resurgence, casting it as a happy meeting between liberal farm-to-fork enthusiasts and the right-wing “‘don’t tread on me’ crowd, who prize family tradition and less-processed food—much of which they might grow or hunt themselves.”
But preindustrial meat is not what most Americans eat. It represents maybe 1 percent of the meat consumed in the country. And even if we were to somehow reorganize our food system to increase this sort of farming, there are hard limits to how much we could produce. A study that modeled land use requirements to meet our current demand for beef with entirely free-range cattle found that we would have the capacity to produce only 45 percent of our current supply. Meeting current demand for chicken with pasture-pecking birds would require 60 percent more land. In short, without factory farms there would be far less meat and it would be far more expensive.
If the MAHA movement were remotely coherent, it would push for this less-but-better meat vision. But simply calling for more meat inherently means calling for more factory farms. And that, in turn, runs directly counter to MAHA-aligned policies like taking on Big Ag and reducing agro-industrial pollution. Eating more meat means producing more meat, which in turn means more mass-produced cheap feed, factory farming, and industrialized slaughterhouses.
This is also the big blind spot for those who see meat as an alternative to so-called “ultra-processed food,” or UPF. Kennedy Jr. and many in MAHA-adjacent meatfluencer circles tout meat as an unprocessed alternative to the industrial slop they see as polluting American diets. The government’s new guidelines explicitly urge Americans away from processed food and toward meat. Lest this be dismissed as bro-science, this is also how Nova, the Brazilian food schema from which we get the idea of UPFs, classifies meat. Nova, which is shaping food policy from Brazil to Belgium to California, clusters foods into groups based on their level of processing, and deems any food that is produced using industrial processes or industrially produced additives as “ultra-processed.” The term creates an easy bogeyman and facile shorthands, such as RFK Jr.’s claim that products with ingredients “that I can’t pronounce” are dangerous (a lukewarm reheating of Pollan’s equally anti-intellectual suggestion, “If you can’t say it, don’t eat it”).
Putting aside the debate over the actual validity of the term and its applicability to adjudicating the healthfulness of food, Nova and other definitions of “ultra-processing” start at the farm gate, when harvested food begins its journey from field to fork. Thus, soy beans processed and mixed with other ingredients like methylcellulose to make an Impossible Burger, or even some types of tofu, are branded as ultra-processed, as if they were nutritionally equivalent to Doritos. Meat, meanwhile, escapes scrutiny because schemas like Nova have nothing to say about the process of commodity production itself. A pig or chicken genetically modified to grow extremely fast and fed a steady diet of soybean meal and industrially produced feed additives like phytase will, when slaughtered, become meat that is considered “unprocessed.” So the production process at factory farms, where most U.S. meat comes from, is made to disappear with a definitional sleight of hand—and meat, arguably the most industrial of America’s major foods, emerges as somehow anti-industrial. This, in turn, conceals not just meat’s provenance but the fact that it is both far more environmentally harmful and likely less healthy than an “ultra-processed” plant-based alternative.
It’s all the more troubling, then, to see meat being touted as a health food. HHS’s guidelines have almost doubled the recommended daily intake of protein over its predecessors, and nutritional advice online is increasingly pivoting to describing meat as a nutritionally dense superfood. And yet, protein deficiency is not a generalized health risk in the U.S. The USDA’s Healthy Eating Index shows that Americans are not eating enough fruit, vegetables, and whole grains. Meanwhile, the average American male already eats as much protein as the new guidelines suggest (or about twice as much as the old guidelines did).
Not only is there no health rationale for urging Americans to eat more meat, but there is extensive evidence suggesting that they should eat less of it. This was the conclusion of the original committee of nutrition and public health experts gathered by the Biden administration to advise the government on revising the dietary guidelines. But the Trump administration ignored this advice and sidelined the committee, replacing it with an ad hoc one created by Kennedy that included experts with direct ties to the meat industry (and one who co-authored a paper downplaying the climate impact of meat). No wonder the new guidelines ignore the vast evidence of meat’s health risks. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called them “simply wrong and dangerous to the health of Americans,” and they’re now being challenged by a lawsuit filed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
But if MAHA adherents’ arguments in favor of meat crumble under cross-examination, why have they proven so popular? The answer is politics—and more specifically, popularism. If there is one truly bipartisan activity in the United States, it’s eating meat. Doubling down on an existing practice but recasting it as healthy and socially responsible is a way to promise change without changing anything. It is also a way of subsuming the real hunger among the public for healthier eating by treating the status quo as desirable. When Michelle Obama urged Americans to eat more salad, conservatives raged against her and whined about government overreach because—if the Healthy Eating Index is to be believed—they probably weren’t eating much salad. When RFK Jr. tells them to eat meat, they cheer because they already are. This is the obvious political advantage of cheerleading for orthodoxy. It is extremely difficult and fraught to try to change Americans’ diets, and especially to reduce their meat consumption. It requires the building of permission structures, to use a term Barack Obama popularized: psychological scaffolds that allow people to change deeply ingrained beliefs and behaviors. MAHA’s push for meat doesn’t need permission structures; it just gives people permission to carry on.
And so we get fast food, one of the root causes of our dietary woes, being transformed by the right into a paragon of health—with a side of owning the libs. “MAHA meal,” conservative influencer Benny Johnson posted on X last week, along with a video of his family eating at Steak ’n Shake. “Seed oil free. Grass fed, grass finished beef. Beef tallow fries. Real milk milkshake.” As The Wall Street Journal noted this week, the restaurant chain has gone “full MAGA” by switching to grass-fed beef, cooking fries in beef tallow, and launching a “Protein Steakburger”—all spearheaded by its “chief MAHA officer,” who of course is a former HHS staffer under Trump.
But the bill will come due for all of us, in one way or another. If Kennedy and the MAHA movement are successful in convincing Americans to eat even more meat, it will not only cause more heart disease and diabetes, but necessarily lead to more factory farms, more cancer-causing pesticides, and more rivers polluted by runoff. That is the reality. The MAHA fantasy is just a road to the very future that MAHA claims to oppose, in which we’re all in poorer health and Big Ag is bigger than ever.
