For a recent virtual talk with Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners, I talked about the significance and complications of changing appetites—collectively and individually. I bookended this very current piece with a talk I gave at MIT in 2023 when No Meat Required came out and a reading from a chapter in On Eating titled “On Lamb.” I wrote it during a very politically charged week in which beef and milk came to the fore: When the world makes me feel like I’m losing my mind, I consider the meat.

The White House has declared “the war on protein is over,” changing nutrition guidelines to encourage the consumption of beef. Donald Trump is mandating, with a menacing glare, the consumption of whole milk. Industrial animal agriculture is the biggest food-based contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for 14.5 percent, and it uses roughly a third of global freshwater during a time of increasing water stress. What is the purpose of this message coming from the top of the country’s political apparatus? 

These photos show Health and Human Services secretary RFK Jr. in shadow; the president in black and white. They’re ridiculous and clearly aim to intimidate, but they’re funny—no reasonable person would be influenced by these images. Yet whose reasonability can we take for granted in 2026? We’ve just experienced the hottest three years on record in history, and what the White House wants is for Americans to consume more of what is actively contributing to this warming and the harm it causes, the disasters it exacerbates…

Never mind that protein has been such a focus of conversation for the last few years that companies have been putting it in popcorn, in coffee, in anything that could absorb some more of this nutrient. “Protein-maxxing,” they’ve called it, though Americans have never had any trouble consuming enough. The protein conversation has been so intense that we’ve anecdotally swung, finally, into a focus on fiber. [I found out late that apparently soy milk is the only non-dairy milk that fits into this protein-obsessed perspective; ironically, I’ve always advocated soy milk as the best option, for its protein and richness, and because when grown under the right conditions, it can restore soil health—but I don’t assume they care about this. The horseshoe theory…]

If it hadn’t been clear before, it should be clear now: To prioritize planet-killing foods in one’s diet is a part of a right-wing ideology that values profits over people and the earth, that sends a rogue police force into the streets to kidnap and kill, and that supports imperialism for oil. These are all part of the same nihilistic perspective.

Meat, especially beef, in the U.S. has always been aligned with masculinity, domination, and settler-colonialism; what MAGA is doing now is making that alignment explicit, attempting to turn it into a mandate. So what’s next for those who don’t want to believe in or support such an ideology?

My plan was to come on here to speak of abundance and the significance of our appetites in supporting regional food systems that exist in a reciprocal relationship to the earth, to local economies, and to human, animal, and planetary survival, and I have and will, because I consider it the antidote to this ideology of death espoused by the highest office in the land. 

In my first book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, which came out in 2023, I wrote about the last half century or so of vegetarian and vegan diets. I focused on the time since the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet in 1971 because it represented a mainstreaming of countercultural diets and marked a clear shift, too, toward a secular reasoning to consume less (or no) meat. In that first edition, Lappé was writing about how global hunger is a manmade problem of food distribution and land use rather than a problem of yield. If people were to eat less meat, especially in affluent nations like the U.S., those distribution and land use problems could be addressed.

From that initial secular moment came a lot of approaches. There was a punk-anarchist–aligned perspective on veganism that emerged in zines. The chefs of the counterculture moment continued to have success with cookbooks that promoted whole foods and ingredients, sans meat. Tofutti soy dairy and Tofurkey and pasteurized tempeh entered supermarket shelves. Eventually, chefs with traditional culinary training got into vegan cooking and transformed it into a recognizable cuisine. 

While the number of people who identify as vegan or vegetarian has remained rather steady over the past few decades, what did happen is that availability of plant-based foods had become more accessible. There were more options on menus; there was tofu and Miyoko’s cultured cashew butter on the shelves at big box stores. It was becoming another option, just another way of eating that one could dip in and dip out of; one needn’t take on the weight of a label in order to choose to eat less meat and less cow-derived dairy—it could just be a natural evolution.

Start-ups wanted to capitalize on this normalization by developing products like Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat, not realizing that most people who want to eat less meat don’t need the analogues to “bleed.” They enjoyed initial success and a quick come-down, as their prices remained high and more people questioned their nutritional basis. If one was going to eat a burger, people seemed to reason, why not the kind of burger they’d been eating for years? Whether it was made of beef or beans. 

I was writing No Meat Required to demonstrate that there has historically been some collective will to shift our diets toward more plants, and how culinary innovation by cookbook authors, chefs, and others has enabled this collective will. My hope was to say that we can harness it more, as it becomes more and more crucial for those in affluent nations to eat less meat. (With On Eating, I am talking about the role of the individual appetite within the food system, within cultures, within life.)

Instead, we’ve gotten more media narratives about the return of beef—though it never really went anywhere—and the White House saying there’s been “a war on protein.” This only makes it more important for those who can shift toward plants to remake their appetites to align with ecological limits and reality. I think this is important to discuss as a food writer, even if I feel like I am repeating myself over and over and I am alienating those who would prefer not to hear this. I think it is important to discuss because today, I don’t feel very hopeful about the future, and I need to remind myself that perhaps I can find power where I always have: in the kitchen, in the assertions and refusals of my appetite, and in recognizing my individual desires as tethered to the collective good.