Plant-Based Is Not a Trend—Yet
My talk from Women in Food 2025.
I blogged about my travel to this conference and thought I’d share my full talk today. I think of it and last week’s “On Food Media” as correctives to “A Brief Note on Beef,” published earlier this year, which didn’t meet my editorial standards—frankly! This becomes an even more significant notion as we’re being told that “‘plant-based’ was the mantra” for years… because I apparently missed those days in our culture, and believe me: I was paying attention!
There’s a pervasive idea that plant-based eating is a trend, but this idea ignores one significant fact: Veganism has never been “trendy,” because to be trendy, it would’ve had to at one time been popular.
It never has been: maybe 1 to 3 percent of the global population identifies as such, depending on the poll you’re looking at—22 percent might be vegetarian. While there have been people who don’t eat meat since at least the sixth century BCE, this has always constituted a minority opinion. That continues into today.
What the media has confused for “trendy” is simply the availability of plant-based food products: frozen burger patties and sausages, pea-protein eggs in squeezable bottles, and oil-based mayos. When Impossible Burgers, Beyond Meat, and other faux-meats became available and plant-based milks like Oatly were surging in latte popularity, the notion emerged that these options meant vegans and vegetarians were gaining ground in the name of sustainability and animal welfare.
But making “plant-based products” a stand-in for the popularity of veganism or vegetarianism was always an error—an overexcitement by a media that hoped for easy protein swaps that could become climate change solutions. These products were entries into the marketplace and often spearheaded by business people who didn’t believe collective or political change could ever drive down meat and dairy consumption. It was a cynical bit of green-washing rather than altruism, and sales of these products have been trending downwards in recent years.
Plant-based foods have been becoming increasingly unpopular just as decreased consumption of meat and dairy in affluent nations like the United States is an extremely important means of combating the effects of climate change. Meat and dairy are responsible for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is owed to how land is used to grow food for factory-farmed livestock: Indeed, 80 percent of global farmland is used to produce only 18 percent of calories. In the United States, the average person consumes around 200 pounds of meat per year.
While beef has decreased in popularity over time for health reasons, that hasn’t meant replacing it in meals with beans or tofu: Rather, it has caused an increase in the consumption of poultry. Chickens now outnumber people on the planet by a rate of 3 to 1, and factory farming operations that process what are called “broilers”—chickens for consumption—have seen alarming rates of bird flu among their flocks.
A lot of attention has been paid to the effects of this on egg prices rather than raising alarms about the conditions in which the chickens themselves are living. These meat processing facilities are also notoriously awful for human workers, as well, who are in close contact with animals and each other, heightening the risk for contagion. Usually, these workers are immigrants working for low pay, and thus they’re not a major concern for politicians or those who want to easily and cheaply put a meal on their tables for their family.
This proves plant-based eating isn’t a trend: The lives of chickens and of workers aren’t a concern during such a crisis, only the low cost and continued availability of meat and eggs matter—in media and to consumers.
In 2024, a study showed that 82 percent of the European Union’s agricultural subsidies go into the production of animal-based foods, which are associated with 84 percent of greenhouse gas emissions of EU food production, while supplying only 35 percent of EU calories and 65 percent of its proteins. Subsidies such as this influence what food is produced and how, and plant-based foods simply aren’t as encouraged as animal-based ones. Yet it’s necessary to flip these statistics on account of global warming that is causing extreme weather events all around the world, like the drought and heat waves that have been experienced here in Italy.
Plant-based eating can be defined as the deprioritization of animal products in individual diets, national cuisines, and lifestyle food media; this broad definition can make it easy and appealing.
I hope to be part of making sure that it actually becomes trendy and desirable, cool and accessible, because that would mean a prioritization of the well-being of the planet, the welfare of animals, and the conditions endured by workers. The present does not reflect the trendiness of such concerns, but the future is dependent on plant-based eating becoming the norm.
